"Fear of Flying" - Erica Jong (28 Aug - 9 Sep)

I've read this book between slippery moments. It so happens that during these two weeks, my mother has decided to turn our home into a kind of daycare for some of my older cousin's children. For the first few days it was two two-years old and one four-year old, and though lately it dwindled down to one of the two-years old, the little boy has grown very fond of me (or my childhood toys), and I admit it, I of him, but our relationship has given rise to many brief moments where I try to pick up the book and just think: no, I simply can't focus on Isadora Wing's musings while this ever-laughing kid keeps pulling my hand to play with some Lego or other.

Again, it took some getting used to, as I'm used to a straight-up plot (The Shadow Over Innsmouth was perhaps a snack, in that sense, while Fear of Flying required some more active engagement due to Isadora's interspersed narrative of present and hindsight), but I've enjoyed a lot getting to know a character so multi-layered and complex as her. Talking about characters, I've seen myself as many of them. When it comes to relationships, I've been Isadora; I've been Bennet for the most part; I've even tried to be Adrian once - but gave it up quickly, as it just didn't feel right. Isadora, though, she is surprising, and at first I sinned of pidgeon-holing her in the same way we do with real people. She's clever enough to warn us about these things, though. In one of her musings about writing as a means for surviving, she says that plots, verses and characters are only writers' way of tiding up the world around them, but never quite faithful to the complexities of the world, but she becomes clearly self-conscious when at one point, she asks the reader whether one thinks she's telling the literary truth as she speaks... She has clearly been through a couple of traumatic experiences - with or without the psychoanalytic thread of analysis that runs through the whole story - but some occurrences are only hinted at from the beginning, so just as a real person, it takes a long time to get to know her - down to her selectively xenophobic antics and other not-so-likeable features.

But oh, what is a book about... Good thing we didn't phrase the question that way for this blog, but rather "raw impressions". There are thoughtful and meta-literary discussions about the spiritual communion with books, escapism and the (seemingly mysanthropic) desire to give up our free will ("All natural disasters are comforting because they reaffirm our impotence, in which, otherwise, we might stop believing. At times it is strangely sedative to know the extent of your own powerlessness"), mingled with heart-in-hand conversations about repressed sexuality and power-struggles in a relationship, not to mention her allegoric fears - of flying, and of lying. But the driving force, I feel, or the theme that I enjoyed the most, was the ever-cycling contradiction of desire: an expanded "Tatt av Kvinnen" (Erlend Loe), where we get to know Marianne's side of the story and her ever-changing desires (and I can vow that that is not only a feminine hazard). It is also one of the things Milan Kundera elaborates on with "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", but while his (male) main character struggles namely between stability and carelessness, Jong's (female) main character additionally struggles between two men that seem to be, personally, opposing poles - which I think is funny because she mocks Hesse at some point as being a kind of adolescent writer, and this sort of polarized characters are almost solely the ones he writes about. More about her criticism on Hesse later, maybe, but let it be said I'm not offended, only growing aware of different ways of reading, I suppose.

I often fretted halfway through a chapter, thanks to Isadora's manic-depressive way of telling her life, but there are so many interesting conversations with others and with herself that I quickly left these things aside. Often I tried making a parallel between her predicaments and similar situations I've been in, and thought that they could all be wittily put to music in Conor Oberst's (Bright Eyes) self-deprecating tone. Or, again, quoting lyricisms, I guess "the wanting comes in waves!".