Evening Is The Whole Day

I had to pick up the baby early from daycare on Thursday for her 9 month pediatric check up.  For some reason (and my husband experienced this as well on the Brown line as he rode to Lincoln Park to meet us), the entire trip down to her daycare center at Wells and Division and back up to Diversey and Sheffield was pure bedlam.  I pulled my first of two illegal U-turns for the week (I am getting good at that now) and dodged a plethera of bikers, delivery vans, and pedestrians who just decided they would go ahead and cross the street where ever they wanted and that all cars around them would naturally give them the right of way.  Drives me nuts.  You know back in the days of traveling kiddie fairs and the Snow White ride at Disney World where all of these obstacles dart out at your little car as it clunks along a clickety track through the dark?  That is what driving in this city is like sometimes. 

While I was trying not to run anyone over by traveling up Lincoln Avenue, there was a very interesting show that came on NPR.  It was a man (didn't catch his name, of course) talking about word choices, and how so many words are cliché and inappropriate to describe the emotional intensity of a situation.  He cited words like "amazing" and "gorgeous" as falling into the category of being over-used and poor choices, and ever since then the only words I can think of to describe my daughter popping up to a stand or looking pretty in a dress are amazing and gorgeous.  I would really love to listen to the segment again but for the life of me cannot find it on the NPR website.  It was on at 1:45 pm, Thursday, August 11.  The more time that goes by between now and then, the less my chances are of finding it.  It is radio, after all. 

The segment came at a good time though, as I was nearing the end of what has been an amazing (damnit!) book- Evening Is The Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan.  This is a book of many gorgeous (damnit!) words.  Set in Malaysia in the late 70s and early 80s, the story follows a family and a servant that comes to take care of the aging matriarch of the family.  Only it is not just that primary storyline that grabs you, it is the way that Samarasan manages to paint their history leading up to those moments.  For every action of the main plotline, you understand the hidden feelings and pains that simmer beneath the surface for the characters.  Throughout the book you can feel and sense the smells and textures around them.  I found I stopped complaining about the summer heat while reading this :-)

 
I learned after reading it that Samarasan is a graduate of the University of Michigan (whoo hoo!) where she earned her MFA, and that she perfected her novel during her time there.  The way that Evening Is The Whole Day goes back and forth in time is truly breathtaking.  The tenses shift so slightly that they are easily missed, and we readers are taken two years ahead, twenty years back, and back to present day with such fluidity and ease that it is a truly amazing (damnit!) demonstration of her brilliance.  It would be a great book to study together in a writing or lit class, and if I ever have time in my life to reread this and to create a timeline as I go along, I think that allow me to gain even greater appreciation.

Which- as an aside- now that I own an ereader, I am torn sometimes as to the best way to experience a book.  I read this on my Kindle, but I think I'd want to read the actual paperback novel next time around to allow me greater ease in flipping back and forth.  It is difficult to do that with a Kindle.  However, the Kindle was fantastic for allowing me to quickly look up words that I didn't recognize, which was a vast collection.  The vocabulary in this book is unbelievable.  If I knew half of these delightful words, then I wouldn't be stuck using amazing to describe everything. 

Samarasan writes so beautifully.  Her sentences take you for such a ride, and her metaphors and similes are just perfect.  The family's culture transends so well through their mannerisms and dialogue.  Here are some excerpts that I highlighted:

"Aasha threw herself down on the marble floor and loosed a wordless series of ascending wails that floated like bright scarves- purple, fuchsia, puce- towards the ceiling, to be blown into the street by the fan as Amma set the chair down by the dustbin and shook her head."

"Oh, she's caught forty winks here and a catnap there, but the winks are carefully rationed, thirty-eight thirty-nine forty okay enough, and the catnaps are not the cozy indulgences of the happy housepet but the vigilant sleep of the one-eye-open one-ear-missing stray."

"At the front gate, Appa's voice is like a pair of scissors on smooth cloth, snip-snip-snip-snip, a voice he reserves for all the undesirables of this world, the theatrical tramps, the limping armies who offer unwanted parking assistance outside his office, the glib urchins who rush towards his already clean windscreen with wet rags."

If anyone else reads Evening Is The Whole Day and wishes to discuss it further, let me know!  I would love to hear others' thoughts. 

I also found this interview with Samarasan that looks interesting :-)

And next on the reading list, Midnight Riot by Ben Aaronovitch.