J.S. Porter

Kristjana Gunnars & The Book of Small

"She reads not because she wishes to, but because she has to. It is necessary. She either reads or dies."

           Kristjana Gunnars, The Rose Garden:
           Reading Marcel Proust

Kristjana Gunnars is a reader and a writer. She reads and then she writes. She writes about what she reads. In The Rose Garden she reads and writes about Marcel Proust and a chain of other writers. She "reads" a garden, a small German town, her lover and herself too, and maybe, through her satchel of writers, the world at large. She writes as she reads as if you can't write property without reading properly as well. As reader and writer, she swallows the world, brings it into her body, and spits it out in language.

That's what Gunnars does: she inhales the wor(l)ds around her like so many scents in a garden. She breathes the world in and then out in soft moods and gentle tones: a misty Turner crossed with a "thingy" Vermeer, a moody violin alongside the clarity of a trumpet. You don't so much read her as soak in her, bathe in her voices and moods. After a good soaking, you say to yourself, "Something strange has come into the world. Something different." Gunnars' world is book-lined, sentence-scaffolded, word-joisted.

In The Rose Garden Gunnars' reading self dominates her writing self. As Daphne Marlatt once remarked, to write is to tear, to cut, to incise. On the other hand, to read is to fit together. In The Rose Garden Gunnars fits many things together: thoughts with sensations, theories with moods, concepts with settings. She fits writing and reading together too, as if her reading mended the holes her writing made. She joins one writer to another to another and so on till her great chain of being becomes a great chain of literary beings.

It's easier to say what kind of reader Gunnars is than to say what kind of writer she is. She reads closely, carefully, connectively, leapingly. She wants you to read too. So she includes a bibliography at the end of her book so you can read a bouquet of writers and inhale their distinctive scents. She writes poems and stories and novels and what you might call unclassifiable books. These I like best. The unclassifiable ones, more library than a particular section in the library, are part memoir, part meditational essay, part narrative, part reflective reading. She writes intimately, economically, imagistically, moodily.

Her Rose Garden dissolves the Many into the One and dispels the One into the Many. Gunnars thinks and feels centrifugally and centripetally. Her book cross-pollinates the way journals sometimes do or the way love letters try to do. It's a book I wish I had written, one's own body melding into other bodies. It somehow combines clarity and mystery, embrace and penetration, mood and desire. It is at once scholarly and sensuous. Its prose technique reminds me a little of Peter Dale Scott's poetry where line and commentary (book reference) cohabit a common space. The self is extended through the grounding of others and the reach for others.

Gunnars in The Rose Garden chimes all the divergent voices into a single music. A pleasant sadness, an evaporating joy. She writes the way Vermeer's "Maid with the Milk Jug" pours: with strong hands and rapt attention. She's awake, alert, attentive in her narrative-descriptive-meditation. The poet and the storyteller braid with the philosopher, a little Kawabata stitched into a little Heidegger?

The book I'm holding in my hand takes place in a German rose garden. In the garden, Kristjana Gunnars (or, a voice Gunnars chooses to put on) is reading Proust. I too once read Proust languidly in a garden, not of roses, but of jacaranda and bougainvillea, on Makoma Road, a few miles from "the water that thunders" with hippos you had to dodge to reach your river-nightcap and the split-gold sunsets on the Zambezi. You always remember when a writer of Proust's stature falls into your life as you remember a bull elephant at sunset with a broken tusk, standing motionless on a hill.

The author whose book I'm holding is two years older than I am. She comes originally from Iceland, from snow and sleet instead of my birthright rain; she looks sad, a sad-eyed lady of the snowlands. Ireland and Iceland, rain and snow, ire and ice. The two countries are linked in my imagination, partly because the Irish poet Louis MacNeice wrote poems about each. Gunnars is a poet and a storyteller, a reader and a meditator on what she reads, a language tracer and a language caresser. I note affectionately, in another of her works, that she uses my mother's favourite poem "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" as epigraph and epilogue. Her Rose Garden is the size of an outstretched hand; all her books seem to fit comfortably in your hand. They feel like home.

Of late I've started to think about the places, mental and physical, where I feel at home. Most of the time I don't feel at home so it doesn't surprise me that I would want to count the times and the places when I do. Books generally feel like home to me; they're a kind of "homeland," in George Steiner's inspired wording. I've started to think about why certain images and sounds and books are satisfying to me. Why I feel as if I'm being called home when I see or hear or read certain things. At the moment I'm reading Kristjana Gunnar's The Rose Garden: Reading Marcel Proust and feeling very satisfied. I'm also eating bread (a plain bagel) and drinking Mexican brandy (a gift from my friend Dale) as I write (keystroke) on my fifteen year old computer screen. I'm wearing Cheryl's Jack Kerouac Tshirt.

A satisfying book for me seems to have something to do with size. When you read Gulliver's Travels you realize how size changes everything, charges everything. I used to think the perfect book size was something like a hundred pages, a little more, a little less. The size of Camus's Stranger or his Fall, the size of John Berger's And our faces, my heart, brief as photos. Short, almost perfect, books feel right to me. Books like Thomas Merton's Emblems of A Season of Fury, Joseph Brodsky's Watermark, and now the Icelandic-Canadian, Kristjana Gunnar's Rose Garden. Small is truly beautiful. A Paul Klee painting, Jean Arp's concretions and his painted forest, a Howard Hodgkin bay, a Barbara Hepworth maquette, a Mark Strand poetry assemblage are all very small and all very beautiful.

Big books can be satisfying too, of course. They are not cultivated gardens but overgrown yards. I love the natural sprawl of Moby Dick, a weed that doesn't know when to stop, roots that ramify everywhere. I love the girth of Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae and Harold Bloom's Western Canon. Big can be beautiful, as it often is in a large Henry Moore or in a massive Mark Rothko. That said, I seem to prefer small. There's something very satisfying in squeezing the Cyclopean into small, human portions. Maybe the magic of making the big small goes back to my childhood when I floated pieces of bark on shallow streams. The bark seemed then like an ocean liner; the water, fathomless.

Gunnars has written a "Book of Small," to steal Emily Carr's phrase and apply it to a physical object rather than a character. She is a poet of the small rather tfian a poet of the large. She is a master of the short sentence. Consider this on page II 0: "I wanted to look at the Rhine River in the moonlight. I found my way to the riverbank by taxi. It was past midnight. The town of Bonn was closed for the night. Streets were empty. I went past the main building of the university and into the adjacent park. There was the water, flowing softly like a silken ribbon. Not as large a river as I always imagined it to be." She, like Norman Levine, is a noun-and-verb writer: few adjectives, few adverbs, but when placed, significant.

She keeps her eye on a single object until it blends into other objects. She gives her voice to those things which might easily be passed over and not be heard. In The Rose Garden thought and feeling, self and Other, writer and reader, narrator and quoter link hands and voices. "Let us for once refrain from hurried thinking," Heidegger intones. "Let us be still and allow the scent of roses to penetrate," the narrator mimics. If Heidegger weren't in bold and the narrator in regular print, would you know where one voice left off and the other voice began?

Kristjana Gunnars' books are studies in the small. Studies of the small? Her mind turns to a word, a memory, a thought, an experience, a sensation. She shuns the grand, the theatrical, the ostentatious in concept just as she shuns the ornamental in style. If Vermeer's pictures could talk, they might sound like Gunnars' books: quiet, understated, restrained, memorable. She has written a small Garden filled, luminously, with small things. But doesn't the fragrance of a single rose sometimes linger longer than a bed of roses?

Her Rose Garden is satisfying in the way that Northrop Frye once said a certain scene was satisfying. It was winter. Snow was on the cedar boughs. And on one branch was a cardinal and on another was a blue jay. He felt that if his life suddenly ended all would be worthwhile. Why? Was it the balance, the wholeness, the colour co-ordination he felt vertiginous from? I don't know. He felt satisfied and sated. When I read Gunnars I feel sated too.

She invokes two of my favourite philosophers, Kierkegaard and Heidegger. Her book is full of quotations; she quotes effortlessly as if she were quoting herself, as if there were no difference between herself and the quoted one. The breath of someone else's thought mingles with her own; her breath suffuses with ancestors and sisters. I read the Heidegger and don't recognize it, go back to the source, and find she has quoted accurately what I have shamefully forgotten. "Is there anything more exciting and more dangerous for the poet than his relation to words?" I think of Emily Dickinson and Dennis Lee when I read these words. Heidegger dresses the poet in Princely robes, and gives the poet Kingly responsibilities.

Gunnars quotes two diarists, AnaYs Nin (the conjuror of the longest diary of what it is to be a woman in the twentieth century) and Jean Cocteau, and two artists, Proust, and Artaud, and two critics, Frye and Fish, and two postmodemists, Hutcheon and Jameson, (Linda Hutcheon is my friend Lee's teacher, so, through him, I feel I know her) and two feminists, Cixous and Kristeva. Does Gunnars think in twos? Sometimes the personalities in thebookandtheirsayings clash; sometimes they harmonize. Artaudrages, forexample, andproustwhispers. Weight andcounterweight, balance is everywhere. Gunnars has a red bird and a blue bird on her green and white cedar bough.

Gunnars is a woman reading. I am a man reading. What you're reading now is me reading. My life amongst books. Sometimes I read other men reading too: Donald Hall's Life Work, Robert MacNeil's Wordstruck, Dennis Donaghue's Warrenpoint, Frank Lentricchia's The Edge of Night. And women reading: Adrienne Rich's What is Found There, Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, P.K. Page's Brazilian Journal, Elizabeth Hardwick's Bartleby in Manhattan. Women alone reading, men alone reading, a secret companionship with the world and each other. Gunnars is a woman alone reading in a garden, smelling roses, turning pages and dreaming, "Proustily."

I'm usually alone when reading but sometimes my wife reads with me. Sometimes my dog is near. Sometimes I have the good company of my friend, Royston, whose sensuous intelligence reads in full wakefulness. When I have no one reading with me, or near me, I invent companions. At such times, the old monks of Europe come to mind. "These men were readers," Kristiana Gunnars says. "Then they were writers of what they read." Roy reads more than he writes. I read more than I write. I would distrust any writer who read less than he wrote. If I could only declare one noun at the border, it would be "reader."

I feel at home in a book about reading, about readings. Kristjana Gunnars is my soulsister, Iceland to my Ireland, ice to my ire. I feel at home in her hundred and change book. I like the wind blowing between her sound takes, between her photographic stills, between her poetic meditations. So very Japanese. Mood and tone standing in for plot and character. I feel I'm in a Kawabata novel with Heideggerian footnotes. I feel I'm keeping company with Basho and his haiku, Basho on one of his Journeys to the north, the world as a grainy sand, the world as a rose garden in which she (the writer) and I (the reader) are Kings (or Queens) of infinite spaces. Am I falling in love? Cheryl says I fall in love too easily, much too easily.

When I read Kristjana Gunnars, I know why I love reading and why the book matters to me and why I couldn't live without it. I somehow reenact the pri'mal scene of my first lovemaking. I fell early, and keep on falling. You fall in love with words and books early, or you don't fall in love at all. Sadly, I've come to that view, though latecomers and late lovers make a fool of me and my sadness. With Gunnars, one word hides another word, one writer hides another writer, one book hides a hundred books so her little book is made from a vast library. That feels very satisfying: how the big resides within the little, how thejolts andjoys of the world are held in tense equipoise, how a cosmic reach distills itself into the scent of a garden.

There's another hypnotic pull to Gunnars' book. She knits well. Sometimes with a single thread, sometimes with many. The Prowler works with a single thread, The Rose Garden with many. She knits the thread of narrative with the thread of description with the thread of reflection and reading. The narrator, a female academic on leave, tells multiple stories, shows variegated pictures, displays bushels of thought, internalizes baskets of books. All in a single tone, a single mood. The way to enter the book is through tone and mood. You need to be on the narrator's wavelength before you play, and pray, with her thoughts.

Gunnars carefully orchestrates her music. Within the large symphonic music, she syncopates softer, quieter musics: a little Garbarek within Part. She blends inner and outer weathers, she conflates the distance between external mountains and internal rivers, she weaves magically in and out of sounds and scenes. She whispers, her book a book of whispers, wisps and whispers, the whispering of a middle-aged woman in full poetic breath. She blows gently in your ear.

The Rose Garden is a blissful book. Gunnars writes blissfully, and you read her blissfully. But not perfectly so. There are a few irritants, a few discordant notes. Sometimes Gunnars shouts. Thankfully, she shouts within her whispers. If the shouts subsumed the whispers, the noise would be unbearable. When you read Proust you hush because he hushes. Not to borrow his breath would do dishonour to the very one you are paying homage to. Thankfully, Gunnars book is not perfect. The perfect book is the end of reading. If you could get everything you needed from a single volume, and it travelled directly to your illness, in Clarissa Estella Estes' thought, and cured your illness, there would be no need to read another.

While not a perfect book, The Rose Garden houses perfectly rendered moments. As perfumes in a garden come and go, so the perfume of Proust in Gunnars' Garden wafts in, lingers and wafts away. The narrator seizes upon the right sense. Scent canopies, like a Christo covering over a building, but it does not do violence to what it accentuates. Sight may rape, touch may violate, smell may enrich what it infuses but it does not fundamentally alter what is there. Proust sprays the perfume of language over objects. The narrator sprays herself with his words, her words and the words of others. The Rose Garden is a book you inhale. All the scented words are windblown, all susceptible to change just as perfume in a garden is susceptible to change. Everything, the narrator says, is "a poetry of breathing."

A perfect moment occurs on page 52. First the narrator quotes Heidegger on the meaning of the word "site." "The site," he says and the narrator quotes, "gathers in and preserves all it has gathered, not like an encapsulating shell butratherby penetrating with its light all it has gathered, and only thus releasing it into its own nature." Then the narrator ingests Heidegger's words so personally that his "site" becomes her "garden." Like Heidegger's site, her garden "takes all things unto itself and keeps them ... and emits them again in the fragrance of the rose." The moment seems perfect to me because a dead thinker locks hands with a living poet, a site mutates to a garden, and what is first gathered up is later let go of. Gifts are kept for a time and then dispensed. The metaphor of the garden seems the perfect billet for a thought concerning gift exchange: storing and giving, storing so as to give.

Gunnars' way with prose strikes me a slightly different from anything else I've read. Nothing I know quite combines head and heart so magically, so musically. Nothing is quite so scholarly and so childlike in tone and texture. She owes something to Marguerite Duras and a dozen other sisters and grandmothers; she owes something, in my ear, to Hemingway and his garden, to the Hemingway of The Garden of Eden and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." She sees into the underlying sadness of things.

Her music is strings. A deep, sad cello. No, I'm wrong. Her instrument is closer to her mouth, her lips, her breath. It is perhaps a wooden flute, trembling as she blows. Emotion and thought. Emotional thought. Thinking emotions. Gunnars collapses the boundary between prose and poetry, between thought and emotion, the "thing" and the mood it's wrapped in. She's simultaneously a master of mood and a maestro of things. She clasps the "thinginess" of things, stony presence within liquid evanescence.

I revel in her mixedness of things, in her elegiac tones, and in her books which resemble nothing so much as small pots into which you can throw just about anything so long as the juices mingle. Her book about books, her book about reading, is a vessel for dreaming. The book takes you out of yourself, takes you away from whatever you happen to be stuck in. Your nostrils fill with foreign and familiar aromas. The book converts chronos into kairos, timeboundness into timelessness. Like a gentle and evocative wind, The Rose Garden tickles the senses and satisfies the mind.

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