je lis trop: red
november issue on Heather Clark, Yukio Mishima, Magda Szabó, and others
A red carpet rolled out to the nightclub, like a lengthy tongue. I stumbled in redness: red thoughts, red shadows. The club was made of windowless lacquer rooms, and my eyes latched onto the exit sign. A snap decision, just like that. The sign was above our heads, pulsating in red. I ran.
I ran home. I have a red room of my own, and it opens with a rusty key. I took off my shoes and flung them on the ground. I was just like my childhood neighbor from upstairs. Coming home, she would toss her shoes, all her energy contained in that gesture. I would note heavy thuds—one and two for each night. She had a red guitar, too.
I lay on a bed. The candle burned, and red objects in the room were forced into even brighter reds. Hours later, a bell rang. I opened the doors to a hall of body-length mirrors. I felt a whiff of a familiar scent as if someone had just run by, as if someone was hiding in the crevices of red halls.
I looked around. I only saw my reflection in a red dress. It was multiplied a thousand times in those mirrors, this red movie of mine. I waited and waited. Then, I closed the door and came back to bed. And I looked at the books on the red shelves.
Heather Clark’s Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath is a fiery book teeming with Plath's ideas and legacy. 1000+ pages are not easy to hold in hand. I listened to a podcast when Red Comet had just come out, and Heather Clark commented on the book's size and how Plath's work can now physically take up that space on a shelf she deserves. Not only that—the cover and the design also draw the eye toward the book.
Plath did everything to "evade the life not lived, the poem not written, the love not realized." In her short life, there was much of everything. Lots of achievements, successes, splendid things. But the pendulum also often swung to the dark side. Certain parts were hard to stomach, especially the psychiatric treatment in America in the 1950s and the trauma that Plath endured at that time. Her frustrations with writing and marriage. The last months of Plath's life were painful to read about, too.
This book is about Plath, but Clark's presence is tangible as well. I only realized this fact when I was reading another biography after Red Comet (not on Plath and not written by Clark) and found it somewhat… lacking. I think I was missing Clark’s voice. Her writing is defined by empathy and responsibility. Sort of gentleness. I appreciated her attention to Plath's early work, her analysis of Plath's later poems (my favorite parts of the book), and her resolution in overcoming clichés surrounding Plath's life and art, so often reduced to her death.
Red Comet is the best biography I’ve read.
Never thought I’d be writing this sentence, but here goes: the book I’m reading now, the one lying on the red bedside table, is written by a bodybuilder. A legendary Japanese writer, Yukio Mishima, is a novelist, poet, playwright, nationalist, model, and, in one of my recent bookshop ventures, I saw him described as a bodybuilder. It was written so on the back cover of one of his books. So many labels attached to one person certainly make up for a vivid description.
I’m reading The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. It is a Zen Buddhist temple in Kyoto, and I got to see it in April. Coated in rich golden hues, surrounded by trees and a pond, it floats in the atmosphere of immortality and stillness.
The temple has an unshakeable grip on the protagonist, Mizoguchi. He’s possessed, intoxicated by it. He describes how it has “gloomy, cold darkness wrapped inside itself” and how the temple, “with its mysterious outline simply ignored the dazzling world that surrounded it.” The temple seems fragile and temporary as he considers the possibility of air raids (the action takes place during wartime). When the danger of the air raids has receded, the temple seems to him eternal and untouchable. Mizoguchi sometimes thinks he can escape the place and take the temple with him, like a thief who swallows a “precious jewel”. This fascination takes him on a red road of destruction.
Red continuously pops up throughout the story: red-hot ash, red carpet, red swelling, red pines, red surface of the flesh, flaming-red overcoat, shiny red aoki berries, red copper, red poisonous ink, red earth, bright-red noses, red embers, reddish hope, red brick wall, red thumbprint, red crayon, red petticoat, red glow, slightly red cobwebs, red smoky light… And ultimately—statues lit up in red, enveloped by flames.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion plunges the reader into dark undercurrents of the human psyche, shot through with moments of piercing beauty.
Magda Szabó’s La porte (The Door in English) got into this red room of mine from my friend’s hands, who had picked it up in a second-hand bookshop. I know little about this Hungarian writer, but I do know some of her books: Abigail and Katalin Street and The Door have been patiently waiting for their turn.
I imagine I will read La porte next. The New Yorker’s Cynthia Zarin described it as “a bone-shaking book”. I know little of the plot, but I do know that two characters are important: the narrator and the magical Emerence, who works for her. I also know that dreams have a defining role in this story. Dreams are sticky, red, magnetic visions, and they are witnesses to our alternative lives.
I will wrap La porte in delicate red paper—the kind of paper I used to cover books with when I had worked in a bookstore—to protect its cover from the fever of the days.
The clock nearly strikes midnight. Tomorrow, if you have some time for a red daydream, turn to Deborah Levy’s An Amorous Discourse in the Suburbs of Hell. It is a fleeting account of an amorous conversation between an angel and an accountant in the suburbs of London—a story washed with red hues through and through.
More reading
Another book that would fit perfectly into this newsletter, into this imaginary red room, is Norah Lange’s Notes from Childhood. This book is magnificent, but I barely see it anywhere. For this reason, I dedicated the whole September issue to it.
My short story “A Lithuanian Near Sainte-Victoire”. Last month, I set up a new page stories dedicated to my fiction, and this is the first story. It is inspired by my recent trip to Provence, writing in vignettes, atmospheric places, shifts between the light and the dark, and unsettled heroines.
My short story “A Minor Irritation” is in Issue 003 of Paloma Magazine! A young (perfectionist) writer is traveling to London to reclaim her award but is challenged by a string of minor irritations at the airport. Read it here.