“Have you ever gone scuba diving?” I asked.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” she said. “I would never. It’s extremely dangerous for one thing and, besides that, it’s terrifying.” Sure, go and swim across a pool or a lake, lovely; but swimming while under thousands of tons of water was nuts. If I had only known of Vic’s claustrophobic aversion, I wouldn’t have felt like such an outlier in Belize, such a terrible disappointment. Here was a college swim team champion, and she wanted nothing to do with scuba diving either, dammit.
But it was too late now, and oddly irrelevant. There was no longer any issue between Abe and me, not about scuba diving, not about Flashman, not about lightweight camping, not about us. There was no parting of the minds because there had never been a meeting of the minds, nor of the heart. Like a reader and character completely out of sync, we had zero empathy for each other. When we went our separate ways, both my heart and my Book of Books remained blessedly intact.
CHAPTER 17
The Master and Margarita
Recommendations
“You should read this book” almost never simply means you should read this book. It is usually far more fraught. Telling someone what to read, even asking politely, can feel more like an entreaty or an implied judgment or a there’s-something-you-should-know than a straightforward proposal. If you read this book, then you love me. If you read this book, then you respect my opinions. If you read this book, you will understand what it is I need you to understand and can’t explain to you myself.
What might be about shared enthusiasm and appreciation can even weirdly become a kind of threat. If you read this book, then you’d know better. If you’re smart, you’ll read this. Or you have to be smart to read this, and you’re a fool if you don’t. Everyone else is reading this. Everyone else already has.
There’s good reason to take book recommendations personally, even when they have more to do with the person doing the recommending than with the person on the receiving end of the suggestion. With my brother Roger, for example, book recommendations were imperatives that one needed to heed, and I wasn’t sure I’d be his sister anymore if I didn’t listen.
Roger had trained me to follow his lead early on. When we were little, he lorded over our younger brother Brian and me, and whenever we violated one of his codes, his right index finger would shoot high into the air in a brutal display of power.
“Suspennnnsion!” he’d announce, drawing out the second syllable as if to savor our anguish.
“What’s the suspension? What’s the suspension?” Brian and I would babble, frantic.
“One week, no Atari,” Roger would say with cool matter-of-factness, as if he’d just consulted the rule book. “One week, no Monster Manual.” “No comic books.” And later, O bitterness: “No Apple II Plus.” Whatever we had done wrong, we had to be punished. Taking out the garbage for a few days might get us out of it, but that was scary—it was dark, and there were raccoons.
As he got older, Roger’s laws transitioned from not letting me touch any of his books to foisting his books upon me. If I didn’t follow his bidding, there would be trouble. One weekend, we had to go to a bar mitzvah in Colorado. “Read this now,” he said when we got there, handing me a copy of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces. “I don’t want to speak to you until you’re done.”
I read it. There was no need to threaten; I trusted him. When Roger read The Red and the Black his freshman year at Bard, I read The Red and the Black my sophomore year in high school, ever desperate to follow his lead and to please him. The effort would invariably be rewarded. Roger knew a good book, which I knew because I’d been secretly swiping his books for a long time. I read his junior novelization of Jaws when I wasn’t allowed to see the movie. I extracted Go Ask Alice from under his bed when he wasn’t home. Though I was only supposed to touch the Monster Manual and Deities & Demigods, which had already been sullied by overuse, I would read the forbidden Dungeon Master’s Guide as well and then replace it in precisely the place where I’d found it, as if nothing had happened.
In the year 2000, to celebrate the new millennium, I made a deal with Roger, one in which I, for once, would dictate the book. If he read War and Peace, I would read War and Peace, and, as a reward, I would fly the two of us to Russia for a vacation. There, we would discuss the Bezukhovs and the Bolkonskys, the Rostovs and the Kuragins, the Drubetskoys and Napoleon and Waterloo and whether it was better than Anna Karenina (which he’d told me to read years earlier) while hurtling by train from Moscow to St. Petersburg.
Roger had long been my comrade in arms when it came to Russian literature. On a trip to Portland to visit our cousin Kirsten, he shoved into my hands Mikhail Bulgakov’s Soviet-era satire The Master and Margarita. “We’ll talk when you’re done,” he’d said. And because I respected his taste and possibly because I still feared his suspensions, I obeyed. After reading the love story of the imprisoned author the Master and his devoted, besotted Margarita, I passed it on to Kirsten, sealing the familial bond. In Russia, I would be able to repay Roger as we walked through Patriarch Ponds and checked out the graffiti on Bulgakov House, reimagining scenes in which the devil comes to Moscow.
I was really doing Roger a favor. Everyone intends to read War and Peace eventually, and the Russia trip gave us an excuse. Roger would read his copy in San Francisco, and I would read mine in New York. I’d tried reading it several years earlier and given up around page one hundred, lost. This time, I bought an edition with a crucial addition: a family tree. Aided by this handy patronymic road map, I could be swept into the narrative without forgetting who everyone was.
The secret that Russian literature aficionados somehow manage to keep from the rest of the world, daunted by names like Dostoyevsky and Turgenev, is that Russian novels are essentially soap operas. Sure, there’s the backdrop of the nineteenth century to contend with, but at heart Russian novels are stories of unrequited love, lusty affairs, and die-hard feuds. Even the long ones can feel too short. War and Peace would be no problem.
“I’m on it,” Roger told me every time I called to make sure he was keeping up his end of the bargain. Deep into the novel myself, I knew Roger would also love it. We both reveled in the darkly gleeful slapstick of Russian satire. I see myself in every lowly and illused clerk from Kovalyov to Golyadkin, and my brother does, too. Anything he laughs at, I laugh at, and vice versa.
I tore through War and Peace that month, and come March we set off for the motherland. Everything was going according to plan. I couldn’t wait to talk over our Tolstoy.