A nun in Iceland

Icelandic author Olaf Olafsson makes reading his novels a challenge, as in Touch, a book that wowed me a couple of years ago. In The Sacrament (2019), an earlier novel, there is more of the same. Time jumps around, so the reader is never sure what is happening now and what happened way back when. Quotation marks are used sparingly. Much of the narrative is obscure.

Yet Olafsson proves worth the trouble.

Sister Johanna Marie, a French nun, is sent back to Iceland for a second time, two decades after her first visit, to conduct another investigation. Her main qualification as an investigator seems to be that she learned the Icelandic languages from her Icelandic roommate, Halla, when she was in college.

Because Catholic priests and nuns are not allowed to marry, the priesthood sometimes draws homosexual men, partly the reason for the problem the church has had with priests and choir boys. And this is why Johanna is sent as an investigator to Iceland. But does a nun's life also attract lesbians? This is true in Johanna's case, and each time she visits Iceland she has Halla on her mind.

Will she and Halla reunite? That is but one of the novel's mysteries. Also, will misbehaving priests ever face justice? Why did a priest fall to his death from a bell tower during Johanna's first trip to Iceland? And what happened to the boy she rescued from a locked closet?

Olafsson's novels may be puzzles, but they are a joy to solve.

Why not rabbits?

In Version Control, Dexter Palmer wrote one of the most original time-travel novels you are likely to find. In Mary Toft: or, The Rabbit Queen (2019), his creative mind takes off in a very different direction.

Now it is 1726 in a small English village, where a woman seems to be giving birth to dead rabbits. The novel is based on a true story.

Zachary is a village boy who becomes an apprentice to John Howard, the village physician, after he shows interest in a traveling show of human oddities. If this boy has the stomach for this sort of thing, he must have what it takes to be a good doctor, Howard reasons. Mostly the story comes from Zachery's point of view.

But then comes the case of Mary Toft, who gives birth to dead, dissected rabbits every two or three days. At that time it was believed that women who give birth to odd, misshapen children — such as the two-headed woman who shows up late in the novel — must have had something traumatic happen to them during their pregnancy. So why not rabbits?

Soon this oddity attracts surgeons from London, each claiming to represent the king. They take turns delivering dead rabbits and finally take Mary to London to impress the king and others in the big city. Of course, Mary stops giving birth to rabbits once she is in London.

Although this story has comic potential, Palmer mostly plays it straight. He deftly explores the odd human desire to believe the impossible. Whenever we see a magic act, we want to believe the magic tricks are not tricks at all. So again, why not rabbits?

Minor writers

Larry McMurtry

Larry McMurtry, best known for Lonesome Dove, took satisfaction in being regarded as a "minor writer." Relatively few writers ever achieve that distinction, he noted.

Most writers make no splash at all. Minor writers are important in their own generation and perhaps for a few years afterward. Then they disappear. A very few major writers — like Dickens, Austen and Tolstoy — continue to be read a hundred years later and more.

McMurtry placed such respected 20th century writers as Norman Mailer, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow in the "minor" category. He didn't mention John Updike, but it is hard to imagine Updike still being read in the next century. Relatively few people read him now.

The only one of his contemporaries he mentioned as a major writer was Flannery O'Connor. "I think she was a true genius, painful genius," he said.

McMurtry also said, "It's fine if you're minor. I 'm glad I got that high. Not everybody does."

His comments reflect both humility and reality. True greatness in any field is rare, and should be. We think of the word minor as being insignificant or average, if not below average. And if we are thinking only of our own time, such descriptions may be true. McMurtry, however, was a bibliophile perhaps even more than he was a writer. He read great books from many centuries and many writers. He looked at literature on a big screen. In the big picture, the Mailers and the Roths and the Bellows, not to mention the McMurtrys, are truly minor. Even so, they made it to the screen.

McMurtry's life

Writers can come from anywhere, as is proven once again in Tracy Daugherty's fine 2023 biography Larry McMurtry: A Life.

McMurtry was born into a struggling Texas ranch family. Bookish even in a home without books, he was certainly not made to be a cowboy. Yet his experiences growing up in that environment allowed him to create an impressive library of western fiction, both contemporary such as The Last Picture Show and Terms of Endearment and of the Old West variety, such as Lonesome Dove.

Like his novels, where his characters always seem to be going somewhere, McMurtry lived his life mostly on the road. Archer City, Texas, may have been his home base, where he eventually brought thousands of books in hopes he could turn this nothing town into a literary haven, but mostly he traveled. He owned a bookstore in Washington, D.C. He  went often to Hollywood, where he wrote screenplays (like Brokeback Mountain) and built friendships with the likes of actresses Diane Keaton and Cybill Shepherd. He became pals with author Ken Kesey in California and the Pacific Northwest and eventually married Kesey's widow. He spent a lot of time in Tucson.

McMurtry may not have looked like a ladies' man, but like a sailor he seemed to have a girl in every port. His relationships with women, from Susan Sontag to Diana Ossana, were extremely close, even when they were not sexual. As Daugherty puts it, "He gathered women as he gathered books, and for much the same reason: so as not to feel bereft." And so many of his best characters were women, many of them based on the women in his life.

Daugherty says that "loss was the major theme of his writing." The loss of the Old West, his father's and grandfather's generations, was certainly dominant in his work. But there are other kinds of loss, as well. So many of his main characters die in his books, reminding readers that life is fleeting. 

And now we have lost Larry McMurtry. Yet, at least for the time being, we still have his books.

Carried away by metaphors

We are moved by metaphors, carried away, transported by them. In its simplest form, metaphor sets side by side two things that are different and purposes to the mind that they are alike. Metaphor does not change things, it asks us to consider them in the light they shine on one another. Everything looks different  depending on the light in which we see it. The right metaphor educates and delights our sense of seeing."

Heather Cass White, Books Promiscuously Read

Metaphors have been on my mind lately. I am leading a series of discussions on the 23rd Psalm. The psalms are poetry, and poetry depends heavily on metaphors. "The Lord is my shepherd," like virtually every phrase in the psalm, is a metaphor. It "sets side by side two things that are different" — God and a shepherd — "and purposes to the mind that they are alike."

Heather Cass White

The metaphors in the psalm ask us "to consider them in the light they shine on one another." Metaphors can mean different things to different people, or even to the same person at different times. That's because, as Heather Cass White puts it, "Everything looks different depending on the light in which we see it."

Thus, I think our discussions on the 23rd Psalm could be very interesting.

But if poetry depends heavily on metaphors, the same is true of fiction. Moby-Dick is a great novel, in part, because the huge whale is a great metaphor. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a great novel, in part, because the raft and the river are great metaphors. The effective use of metaphors is essential to good writing.

But then metaphors are also essential to communication in general. The Big Bang metaphor makes it easier to explain the universe. Two apples plus two apples makes it easier to explain basic arithmetic.

As White puts it, "The right metaphor educates and delights our sense of seeing."

Message in a bottle

To write, publish, or distribute a book is like putting a message in a bottle and tossing it into the sea: its destination is uncertain.

Gabriel Zaid, So Many Books

Gabriel Zaid, above, is clearly not talking about the likes of James Patterson, Laura Lippman, Michael Connelly or any other author of popular books, although what he says may very well been true of these authors early in their careers.

For writers starting out, it can be a great challenge getting an agent, then finding a publisher and then, perhaps most challenging of all, attracting readers. The message in a bottle metaphor is actually spot on in most cases.

Writing a book takes hours upon hours of work. For writers who cannot yet get an advance from a publisher, this is unpaid labor. The labor includes research, especially in the case of nonfiction books, and countless hours spent writing and editing — usually spare time, because these writers often have full-time jobs or families to take care of. They must struggle with plots, sentences, grammar, clarity and, in some cases, trying to create art. All this must be done without ever knowing if anyone will actually pay money to read all those words.

The book publishing industry exists and succeeds because there are so many people in the world with something they want to say who are willing to take this great chance — to, in effect, put their message in a bottle with the hope that someone someday will actually find it and read it.

Relatively few of the books written are actually published, and few of those published actually sell a significant number of copies. 

Zaid concludes his thought on an optimistic note: "And yet again and again the miracle occurs: a book finds its reader, a reader finds his book."

How to apologize

Gary Chapman's five love languages have, over the years, become an essential tool for helping people understand how they both express and experience love. In 2022, with the help of Jennifer Thomas, he produced the book 5 Apology Languages, which does the same kind of thing with apology.

Just as we do not all think of love in the same way, so we do not all think of apology in the same way. Thus, what one person thinks of as an apology may seem totally insufficient to the person receiving the apology. The five languages are expressing regret, accepting responsibility, making restitution, planned change and requesting forgiveness.

The authors give us many case studies involving individuals who either cannot bring themselves to make an apology or, if they do, fail to do it in a way that is meaningful to the offended person. Simply saying you are sorry won't work for someone who expects change or restitution.

The authors touch on, but to my mind do not give enough attention to, the fact that in many, if not most, conflicts, both people share some guilt. One thing leads to another in so many disagreements, each causing escalation. Yet often it is just one person who is expected to make an apology.

Chapman and Thomas add helpful material to the end of their book. What should we avoid saying when we are trying to apologize? What things should we say? How can we determine what our own apology language might be?

Their book can be useful for anyone involved in a personal relationship — in other words, all of us.