David Seruyange's Radio Weblog

Thursday, February 19, 2004

Fargo, vol I

You can’t see the highway that stretches out in front of you as the wind blows snow across the road. Each mile is hard fought as you press through each gust towards a destination hidden by natural elements. There is no point in looking around; the scope of visibility is tightened to perhaps 30 or 40 feet. If it isn’t snow, it’s darkness and if not darkness then it is the lone car passing in the opposite direction, blinding you with headlamps.

Fargo was an interesting place for me. I used to get frustrated with Dakotans because they resist imposing themselves onto visitors. No amount of coaxing produces something more profound than talk of weather. Being here has taught me to skip the idles of conversation and focus on observation. Look, listen and learn.

We didn’t really spend the night in Fargo. K has a friend in a place called Valley City so we spent Saturday night there. After I checked into my Motel 6 I felt alone. All I had was a letter from Jeri. How about Rome? I kept singing to myself: some R.E.M., some Morcheeba.

The next day revealed a small house so unique that I thought my eyes lied to me when I saw its twin in a different part of the town. It looked like a turtle. The protective shield was the roof which draped almost to the ground in what I assumed was an effort against wind. Kunstler believes good architecture is aware of its surroundings and this case is a perfect example: dead of winter or dreadful summer, the turtle shell blocks the outside.

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10:34:54 PM    comment []

Happy Three

Happy birthday Lexi, your uncle misses you terribly.

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6:40:38 AM    comment []

In The Image

Accidents of fate are rarely fatal accidents, but once in a while they are.

I finished the book over the weekend but ended slowly as I let a few chapters marinate rather than motor through for the sake of finishing. I wrote earlier that the story had much to do with the grapples of true faith, but made the mistake of only focusing on two characters. In truth there are a variety of characters that are used to give the story more layers.

Dara Horn is very gifted - one device she used that I particularly liked was chance encounters between major characters without them being aware of it. Towards the end of the book there is a meeting between Yehuda, a converted Hassidic Jew and Jake, a Jewish academic. As she shifts from the thoughts of one to the other there is this delightful exchange of assumption, stereotype and tension. Horn keeps away from the ambition of defining entire religious movements and focuses on individuals as they struggle to find an identity.

It was chapters like this that made me want to pace myself - make sure I chewed a lot rather than wolfing the whole thing down.

So many books I read either disdain religion (the modern ones) or make it a beautiful, useless thing (the postmodern ones). This book was different - it took faith in earnest. It dove to the bottom of the New York harbor looking for teffilin. It was an apt journey of reconciling a life with a belief structure - one which some characters embraced and others rejected, one which it seemed each character approached from a different angle.

"... as I opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of them, I shall put my spirit in you and you shall live... " - Ezekiel 37, v13-14

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6:22:39 AM    comment []