Lit Crush: Gabrielle Zevin ‘s Tomorrow & Tomorrow & Tomorrow, The Storied Life of A.J.Fikry
The first book I read this year, which recognised me as the reader that I used to be, was ‘Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow‘ by Gabrielle Zevin. It felt like the warm hug of someone who loved me and had watched me struggle for years, helplessly and was welcoming me back to the world of living. My living, which has to do with deep intimacies, meaningful words and an unrelenting focus on some things that may seem unnecessary to other people.
Lucky accidents & ego strokes in reading
Since then, I have read several other books, with varying degrees of reviews. I can be egoistic and say I am skilled at picking books that range from mediocre to superlative so I don’t have to touch bad books again. Or I can acknowledge the luck I’ve been having with this, people and places that nudge me in the right directions. It’s great. Some of the milestone memories have been Butter, The Covenant of Water, Cleopatra & Frankenstein, The Secret Lives of Church Ladies, Ghachar Ghochar, No Presents Please, Magical Women. And of course, a good book spurs me on to write, opens up new dimensions to the already wonderful world I suddenly see.
Yet T&T&T (as I’ve come to think of it) holds a place of its own in my heart.
Maybe it’s just that it came to me at the right time, I’ve thought. I also think that about The Covenant of Water, given that I was recovering from a heat stroke while reading about the rain-drenched intricacies of Kerala. But a book is a subjective life experience. What does it matter whether a beautiful cover or a great title were part of what drew you to it? Why should it change things if it coincided perfectly with a time in your life when you needed to read/hear exactly those words? Coincidence and manufacture are no less important aspects of living. Both are just as special.
This week I’ve had some big, noisy experiences. This includes the soul bruising I have felt from being around other people in a very crowded, anxious world. I have been waiting to re-read T&T&T, hoarding it like a magic cure of which I have a very tiny quantity in a rapidly sickening world.
I played a little game of hide-and-seek with myself and added the author’s other books to my shelf. The risk with this is feeling disillusioned when another book doesn’t live up to the promise of the great one. It also spoils future re-reading of the first book and makes you wonder why you ever loved it in the first place. Still, I’m bolstered by the many other good books and people. So I began ‘The Storied Life of AJ Fikry‘. I finished it earlier this month. My review is further down this post.
But reading these two books made me realise I have built a parasocial relationship with Gabrielle Zevin. Because I can see the patterns of her writing across two books, it makes me feel like I can understand her. She does after all, write about emotions and relationships with such a searing gaze, it makes you feel naked. And to cope with that, one must believe that she is being naked in that writing too.
The sentence that stopped me in my tracks
But then, I remember her politics, so different from mine. It feels like a slap in the face. Suddenly I remember the one line in the book that made me seize up.
“You’ve had your head shaved, and you look like a terrorist.”
‘The storied life of aj fikry’, gabrielle zevin
This is said by a white person to an Indian man. Why Gabrielle, why? I rage in my mind, as if she is a close friend who I discovered hates people for the colour of their skin or their religion. There is not a single reason for this sentence to occur in the book. The Indianness or brownness of the character never features or impacts the storyline and could very well have not been in the book. It makes me wonder if that aspect was added as no more than a race flourish for token wokeness. This statement shows what the mind that the story came from actually thinks of brown people.
How can I ever separate the art from the artist? The artist themselves cannot do so, as the above sentence proves.
I stopped reading Marian Keyes after finding one too many racist sentences in an early chapter of one of her recent books. When I’m so mindful of what I put into my stomach, I have to be at least as careful about my mind. And Keyes’ sensitive ideas about addiction, parenting and womanhood also include a callous hatred of people who look like me.
I’ve closed the door firmly on Neil Gaiman. Oh, the heart, the heart, the heart is still shattering. I learnt to think about queerness with love in the universe of The Sandman. The one that was birthed in the mind of a person who has raped, brutalised and exploited people with no power.
Yet, these books brought me comfort in difficult times. They gave me hope and made me feel seen. This is why I still feel bruised inside me when I think of either of these authors.
So much love and trust happened when I let their words into my mind, when I let their stories shape my narratives of how I saw the world. This is a unique privilege that storytellers (especially to my mind, authors) enjoy. To discover their humannness includes prejudice against my kind is to find the betrayal of hidden hatred against me.
It’s quite possible that people who aren’t obsessed with gaming or books will be indifferent to T&T&T and Fikry respectively. The quality of literature (or poetry or cinema) should not matter. These are emotional matters. People move us for a range of reasons that defy definition and we love who and what we love. These books appeared as friends to me when I came across them. Friends from an enemy country, perhaps.
These are a lot of feelings to have about the writer of books whose fictions already bring up a lot of feelings. It’s a lot of feelings for someone who doesn’t know I exist. I guess it’s a lot like a crush. I suppose I should be grateful that the object of this toxic crush is an author and not a romantic interest. But in so many ways, that’s worse.
I do not like cancel culture. It feels like mob mentality, a weaponisation of social media and reducing the very emotional relationship between audience and artist into a transaction. But I live in the realm of words. So these are my words that I add to the ones of these hateful ones that I have loved.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I fell in love with this book. And with it, I fell back in love with reading, with reading paperbacks and with knowing and questing for love exactly the way I used to when I was younger.
I was recommended this by someone I met at a literary festival on our second meeting in a bookshop. I’m glad I followed the impulse to trust this stranger.
I actually did not like the look of the cover when I first saw the book. That the book was too large and hardcover, making it impossible to fit into my straining bookshelf was an excuse. But at our second bookshop stop (yes, it was a book hop), he picked out a smaller volume and said, “You can get this one.”
Happily it had a different cover. The background still shows the Kanagawa wave but the words appear in the corner and in the part of the print that has the sky. So the wave is visible and far more recognisable. The font too, unlike the 80s gaming arcade style one of the hardcover (which, okay I get why they did that), has a more epic saga vibe. Overall, it was just easier for me to like.
The book itself drew me in from page 1 with the kind of depth of emotion that I rarely find in more literary or seriously taken books. It made me realise that I really enjoy stories like these – about the minutiae of relationships, the mundane happenings as opposed to the grand gestures, the pebbles & ruts rather than the milestones. This book shows us every turn, every papercut in the friendship between Sadie and Sam.
It helped that I really liked Sadie. Many things about her felt relatable from the neglect faced by children who are related to a sick person to the vulnerability-greed of a woman in a bro space at a very misogynistic time. Even her poor choices, her messy decision-making felt sympathetic. And this is a big achievement in a book that includes a disabled person who as a child, saw a woman kill herself, then watched their parent die and clawed their way through poverty and racism.
Speaking of, I noticed a few reviews calling out the author’s attempt to be ‘too woke’. I usually like reading the negative reviews of books I enjoy, just to see if there are counter-opinions to mine. And I realised when something is called too woke, it’s because it makes people uncomfortable about their own privilege. I have felt this too, being a brown woman albeit in a privileged class in my country. I didn’t feel it in this book, perhaps because the issues it tackles are mine as well.
Another thing I noticed in this book is how male and female authors write strong woman characters. Even the best of male authors I’ve read, seem to imbue their powerful protagonists with a sense of guilt, in the name of making them ‘grey’. Women authors on the other hand (and Gabrielle Zevin does this so well with Sadie), give them a sense of shame. The difference is culpability.
We feel shame over things that we have no control over and which have been embedded in us very early in life. Every woman grapples with this and a woman trying to break through a male-dominated world will always be sabotaged by this. Guilt, on the other hand is a more adult emotion, to do with a logical acknowledgement of something one had a choice over and did something wrong.
Sadie has a very difficult life, made harder by the men that she aligns with. And they are men who serve and love her in a fashion. But these include predations, abuse, betrayal and narcissicm – things that are familiar to any woman who has had to navigate a world beyond her gender’s boundaries. Sadie does not actually have a choice to leave any of these men. She’s made to feel like she owes them the right to treat her badly because of the favours they extend her, namely allowing her into the world of gaming.
It goes back to her childhood and having adults neglect her while tending to her older sister and then inadvertently signalling to her that she will be cherished if she is of service (the Bat Mitzvah volunteer service episode). The story skillfully weaves very relatable instances of conflict.
To help Sam or not? To take credit for it or not? To sleep with Dov or not? To tolerate his abuse or not? To make the game she wants or not? To let the men take credit for it or not? To be a cool girl or not? To fall in love or not? To work hard or not? It’s relentless.
I ended the book with the kind of soul-satisfaction that one has after being consumed by the kind of love one has waited for one’s whole life. All in a paperback.
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry by Gabrielle Zevin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars
First, the things I didn’t like about this book. If you’re like me and go seeking negative reviews to fortify your heart from nasty surprises, here’s that review for you.
The title is awful. I think Gabrielle Zevin does not know how to write good titles. I mean, I almost never read Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow because what is that? It’s so unwieldy, says nothing at all about the story and seems almost designed to put you off.
The good part is that she does know how to write a book. Well, a certain kind of book which brings me to the next negative. She has very recognisable patterns and conceits. This is an earlier book than T&T&T so these are much rawer and less disguised in charm & story.
Zevin particularly likes creating helpless but sympathetic male characters and female characters who serve their journey despite being way out of their league. It was better camouflaged in T&T&T where the female character gets a more complex backstory and the male characters are given some traits that don’t make us sniff at their entitlement. But these are the same people at their core.
The pacing is also similarly a bit jerky. It’s as if the author got into a pace that she felt comfortable with, loving exploring the motivations and emotions of her characters with patience. And suddenly around 70% way through the story, as if she has been jolted out of her reverie, feels the need to inject sudden plot points. These plot points feel needlessly dramatic and harsh, leaving the characters to behave not at their best.
There was just one line in the book that really troubled me. That line is “You’ve had your head shaved, and you look like a terrorist.” and it is said by a white person to a brown person. It was completely unnecessary in the story, was not explained before or after and didn’t feel true to the characters in that conversation. It does however point to the politics of the author.
If you’re able to look past these, then this story is pretty engaging. Every chapter begins with a comment about a famous short story. Initially, they start off as tiny seller’s notes and over time, grow into the basis of loving letters. The characters are compelling. And if you are already an avid reader, this will feel like a conversation with an old friend who also enjoys books.
Book Garden, Mumbai
As with my last book post, I’ll leave you with a recommendation to yet another book-lovers paradise.
Book Garden is a reading room that also sells books. This description says so little about the place. Nestled in a bylane of Vileparle East (though just around the corner from the railway station), one of the galas in a row of shops is Book Garden. It is run by Tanu, an enthusiastic reader who wants to give other booklovers a space that welcomes and nurtures them.
Book Garden is furnished with a squashy sofa, a luxurious chair and a pouffe. You can bring your own book and settle in to read for a fee of Rs.99 a day. You can also pick from any of Tanu’s carefully curated collection of books to enjoy the space. There is also a selection of new books that you can buy. If you do, Tanu will giftwrap them for you, tie up the gift with a ribbon and stamp it with with your name. Because I visited in April, which was Poetry month, I was also offered a jar of poems that I could pick from.
And just in case you find yourself overwhelmed by the world of books, speak to Tanu. She’s great at matching people with books that they will enjoy. This was her suggestion to me. In the ROI-centric mayhem of this city, there are tiny oases of care and books. If you feel the cracks in our concrete prison as well, please help nurture these oases.
Book Garden: Instagram, Google Maps.
I too struggle greatly with problematic people who make great things. As a child Bill Cosby brought YEARS of joy to my family. Finding out he was a terrible person was worse than finding out he’d died. Sadly there are too many of these people to count. What to do with them? Like you I’ve severed my life from the works of many people. Such a loss.