on sunday, about saturday– love story validated

I could probably count on my fingers the number of fiction books I have read over the last decade.

There is a huge pile on my bedside table (which I recently got courtesy of D and her handsome husband. It’s been painted gray. The pile can go much higer now that I parted with my cardboard box! Thank you!) which I call a queue.

Books I intend to read hibernate in the queue for a year or so, until one day I decide to clean up my bedroom, and bring them to the “library” upstairs and start a new queue all over again.

There are a few fiction books in the queue right now, but I have a feeling they will probably travel upstairs some time before Christmas (to make room for new ones) and most of them will not have been read…

Saturday by Ian McEwan was a memorable exception. I got it as a present last year and it did not stay on my bedside table for more than a few days. I read it in the span of two or three nights.

I loved it.

One of the reasons why it resonated with me, was the setting. The story takes place in London on February 15th of 2003 – the day of a big peace rally in the wake of the Iraq war. I lived in London at the time, I was in the rally (which was huuuuuuge), and I remember that day very vividly.

I know the square where the main protagonist lives with his wife – my husband and I would sometimes meet for lunch in the nearby RIBA café. (By the way, this wonderful modernist building happens to be one of the best spots for lunch in central London. Food, given its price, is unusually good, at least for British standards. And the bookstore downstairs feels like heaven. Be careful about your credit card!).

It feels nice to read a fiction book which has so many non-fiction details that one finds familiar. In some ways you feel you were allowed to enter the pages and be part of the story.

The book had excellent reviews. Critics praised McEwan’s wonderful writing style. Rightly so. They raved about the composition. I couldn’t agree more. They loved the surgical precision and neurosurgical theme, which I also appreciated.

To me however – and I haven’t found a single review which shared the sentiment– Saturday is primarily a love story. It starts at dawn with two people waking in bed together and it ends late at night, when after a harrowing day, they both meet there again, like in a safe harbor.

Perhaps I read the novel in a way that was not necessarily intended by the author – I had thought -- after all, Observer critics and New York Times reviewers probably know better. Maybe these were my personal circumstances that made me look at this book in that way, I kept telling myself.

I went to see Ian McEwan earlier this week. He came to Princeton to promote his new book – Chesil Beach.

It was great to see an author whom I like.

Bad haircut, wrinkled linen shirt that used to be white and turned very off-white (I bet he wears it every day), wire spectacles that could perhaps find some use in the late 1970s, but that no self-respecting New Yorker would even consider donning today. I miss London so badly – I couldn’t stop thinking as he was reading fragments of the new novel (I even found his British accent to be charming!).

Chesil Beach (which I still haven’t read in full) treats about a couple on a failed wedding night -- seventy pages or so, about their inability to consume their newly formed marriage (both are virgins), struggles to find each other, express or understand what they feel and think. It's about love and patience, he reportedly said in a recent interview. “Does it reflect your own difficulties?” someone asked as he finished reading a few passages. Only on an American campus a question like that can be posed without a trace of hesitation. And only someone as British as McEwan can answer with such virtuosity – understatement, good humor, mixed with polite but firm “mind your own business” message.

For me, the most important thing during that meeting however, was him briefly mentioning Saturday – also in response to a question from the audience.

“I got in trouble with the reviewers for this book” he said. “It’s about two people, who are married and who love each other. As simple as that. Reviewers these days find it very troubling.”

Thank you Mr. McEwan!

about the difficult i-word

I dreamed of living in the U.S. ever since my teenage years. For a year or two or five. Temporarily. For a while. I came here on numerous occasions in the past: to visit relatives or to stay with friends; I spent two years as a student on a US-government fellowship. I always felt comfortable and welcome. I would always leave energized and inspired, hoping to come back some time soon.

I married an American and our first stop was London. We lived there for almost five years, enjoying this incredible city, but nevertheless always treating it as a temporary destination. Once our daughter was born (you never treat the place you live in the same way again) we decided it was time to settle closer to at least one set of grandparents. We moved to New York – the city that I had always wanted to live in. But again, the city of dreams and aspirations proved to be a temporary stop. Two more moves and we finally settled in Princeton, an old (please remember that we are trying to adopt American standards in this blog) university town, nice, charming and interesting, about an hour drive from Manhattan.

So far so good.

We bought a house. I felt relieved. By that time my daughter had just started walking and I was very tired of moving and living out of boxes located amid IKEA furniture. “I am not moving around the corner,” I told my husband after counting that in the span of the previous nine years I had “relocated”12 times. For the first time in about two decades we were in a position to buy some nicer furniture (in the past, it always seemed there was no point acquiring anything we would feel attached to -- it would only make subsequent moves more difficult).

I always avoided the word “permanently” – save for your spouse (one would hope), family, perhaps a few close friends, our modern world does not lend itself easily to permanence. But I thought we would stay here for longer. Perhaps I could even say “for good”. It felt pretty good.

Until one day someone used the i-word...

Anxious about going back to work, I wanted some advice about how to navigate in the brave new world. “Give yourself some time” – I heard from a former journalist and a respected New York publisher. We were having lunch in a midtown sushi restaurant and he (having himself grown in a family of “relocated” Poles) must have sensed some frustration on my part. “It’s not easy to be an immigrant.”

A chunk of sashimi stalled in my throat. What did he say? An immigrant?!!!!

It suddenly dawned on me. Yes, I came here with a one-way ticket. This last trans-Atlantic crossing was different – this time, having unpacked, I discarded several dozen cardboard boxes (well, most of them…). It feels nice but there is a price tag attached. I am not “staying” here. I am not visiting. I live here. Forget about continuous tense. It’s Simple Present. There is this piece of inauspicious plastic, a card -- contrary to popular belief it is not green -- which I keep in my drawer (I was told to carry it with me at all times, but whoever came up with this idea couldn’t have realized how many times I have lost my IDs). It states as a matter of fact: permanent resident.

Day to day, and I do not think about it too much. But there are moments when it makes me feel uneasy. What does it mean to be a resident? And what does it mean to be permanent? Where do I belong?

I had never given much thought to the issue of immigration. Or if I did, it definitely did not relate to myself. And if I did, it involved new exciting possibilities, crossing boundaries in the good sense of the word – going forward, rising, aspiring. Isn’t it what we were conditioned to think about generations of immigrants who came to the US to build a better future for themselves, for the children and grandchildren? Who enriched this country and made it so wonderful? I believed it was one success story after another, wasn’t it?

It is not easy to be an immigrant. What did he mean? That I need to scale down my expectations? Slow down? Think down? Step down?

I struggle with these questions.

I definitely have slowed down. Having longed for some permanence, I now hope this slowdown is not permanent. I would like to step up and think up and speed up. And forget about the i-word. But I know I can't.

So I am trying (continuous tense :>) to come to terms with it. Stay tuned.