At a party last night I was informed of the “Ten Most Influential Books” meme that has been flitting around the internet. I asked myself if I could really put together a succinct top-ten list. I’ve had little difficulty in the past putting together my ten favorite books, but influence is a little different. It’s a more personal exploration using your own craft as a lens. It took some thinking but I managed to put something together. I don’t stand by it with any great bravery or even certainty but I think it’s a reasonable shot in the dark.
These are not listed in order of magnitude or significance. Instead I’ve tried to organize them in terms of exposure—as chronological as possible. I’ve also decided to split them into two separate posts. The first five:
FALL 2003
J.T. LeRoy – The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things
Although today I hold absolutely no critical regard for this book it will always be of sentimental value, even if there is no J.T. LeRoy. Original billed as the true stories of a gifted and tortured teen writer, The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things came to me at what couldn’t have been a more perfect time. I had just started to get into reading. Throughout my childhood and teen years I really wasn’t much of a reader. Michael Crichton and Stephen King were more or less the only authors to which I was exposed and it took me a good three to six months to wade through one of their books. In my freshman year of college I started reading more regularly—everything Dune, as a matter of fact. I read a lot of sci-fi and a lot of Hubert Selby Jr., but it wasn’t until I read LeRoy that some switch was flipped within. It was a very tumultuous time for me and the rawness with which this fictional author portrayed his pain really touched me. It was the book that turned me on to writing. Laura Albert’s J.T. LeRoy was the first author I emulated and he helped form in both subject matter and prose style my earliest short stories (not counting the stuff I wrote for fun in high school and middle school). I include it on this list not because any trace of it can be found in my writing today but because it was the initial catalyst, the reason for me to write. No book virgin picks up Lolita or Moby-Dick and decides they love reading and want to be a writer. It’s always a slow introductory process because reading is of course an acquired skill. Just like any other addiction there is always a gateway.
I remember when I saw Peter Pan when I was little. After all the other kids wanted to reenact the battles of the lost boys, pirates, and Indians, all I could think about was the part where Peter Pan sits still while Wendy takes a sharp need and, with concern and maybe love, sews his shadow onto his feet. And I wonder if the pain excited him as much as it excited me to watch.
I hang there, the voices still bleeding in my ears. I watch my shadow, solid like a murdered body’s outline, and I pray. Maybe one more slice, just one more, will sever it forever.
SPRING 2006
Gabriel García Márquez – One Hundred Years of Solitude
This is the point at which my reading started to mature. Up until this point I’d mostly read LeRoy, Selby, Palahniuk (as much as I hate to admit it), etc., but in one of my literature classes in my junior year I was exposed to García Márquez and his masterpiece. It more or less changed the way I viewed writing and had a severe impact on my narrative voice, syntax, and subject matter. I’ve come to understand this book as a fugue and in that way I greatly admire its structure. All of the themes are introduced right away and then repeatedly in more and more beautiful ways throughout the novel. It’s a book you get lost in and that’s part of its charm.
The passion of the others woke up José Arcadio’s fervor. On the first contact the bones of the girl seemed to become disjointed with a disorderly crunch like the sound of a box of dominoes, and her skin broke out in a pale sweat and her eyes filled with tears as her whole body exhaled a lugubrious lament and a vague smell of mud. But she bore the impact with a firmness of character and a bravery that were admirable. José Arcadio felt himself lifted up into the air toward a state of seraphic inspiration, where his heart burst forth with an outpouring of tender obscenities that entered the girl through her ears and came out of her mouth translated into her language. It was Thursday. On Saturday night, José Arcadio wrapped a red cloth around his head and left with the gypsies.
José Saramago – The History of the Siege of Lisbon
Read for the same class in which I read One Hundred Years of Solitude, I hated this book on the first read. It was that insecure kind of hate that stems from one’s own shortcomings rather than those of the book. Why would anyone write like this? I asked myself—Changing tenses, no separation of dialogue, run-on sentences, usage of dead idioms. There must have been something, though, that brought me back to it—most likely my professor’s viewpoint that out of the six books we read for the class The History of the Siege of Lisbon was by far his favorite. I read it again and fell in love with it. What I missed on that first read was how playful it is, and how fearless. Saramago takes a cliché as old as literature itself—love is war—and reinvents it. This is probably the point at which I realized that one of my favorite things in writing is when a cliché is reinvented, when new life is breathed into dead metaphors.
With a rapid movement, surprising in someone not given to gestures, Raimundo Silva threw the window wide open, some of the drizzle sprinkled on his face, but got nowhere near the book since he had taken the necessary precautions, and the same impression of brimming vitality took possession of him, body and soul, this is the city that was besieged, the ramparts descend over there all the way down to the sea, a name worthy of a river as wide as this one, and then they rise sharply until lost from sight, this is the Lisbon of the Moors, were the atmosphere less grey than on this winter’s day we should have a better view of the olive-groves on the slope that goes down to the estuary, and also those on the other bank, at present invisible, as if covered by a cloud of smoke. Raimundo Silva looked and looked again, the universe murmuring beneath the rain, dear God, such sweet and gentle sorrow, may we never be without it, not even in moments of happiness.
Pablo Neruda – Residence on Earth
One of two poetry selections on my list, Residence on Earth was an entirely new experience. I was taking a poetry workshop at the time and out of all the texts we read it stood out—a kind of poetry I’d never before encountered. Needless to say it changed the way I wrote, both poetry and fiction. Neruda’s language has a density to it that’s intimidating but tempting to emulate. For a long time my sentences were incomprehensible labyrinths studded with commas and colons and words favoring the Latin side of English. I’ve toned it down since but it’s still something I turn back to when I’m looking for a rich inspiration.
Well now, what is it made of, that upsurge of doves
that exists between night and time, like a moist ravine?
That sound so prolonged now
that falls lining the roads with stones,
or rather, when only an hour
grows suddenly, stretching without pause.Within the ring of summer
the great calabash trees once listen,
stretching out their pity-laden plants,
it is made of that, of what with much wooing,
of the fullness, dark with heavy drops.
SUMMER 2006
Vladimir Nabokov – Pale Fire
I know I said I wouldn’t rank them on their level of influence, but I might single out Pale Fire as having the most significant impact on my style for the longest period of time. And how could it not? Here Nabokov opened my eyes to the endless possibilities in the realm of structure. A novel that takes the form of extensive and eccentric and delusional commentary on an intentionally mediocre poem—what’s not to love? On top of that Nabokov weaves in a delicate tapestry of homosexual anxiety—again, what’s not to love? It was at this point in my life that I went mad over structure, at times “emulating” (copying) and at times creative enough to come up with my own wacky creation. This was probably me at my most experimental and in truth I feel like I’ve lost that desire to take risks. Perhaps I need to read it again.
We crossed the lawn, we crossed the road. Clink-clank, came the horseshoe music from Mystery Lodge. In the large envelope I carried I could feel the hard-cornered rubberbanded batches of index cards. We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing. We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages, the history of the gradual elaboration of poetical description and construction, from the treeman to Browning, from the caveman to Keats. What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students). Although I am capable, through long dabbling in blue magic, of imitating any prose in the world (but singularly enough not verse—I am a miserable rhymester), I do not consider myself a true artist, save in one matter: I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things, see the web of the world, and the warp and the weft of that web. Solemnly I weight in my hand what I was carrying under my left armpit, and for a moment I found myself enriched with an indescribable amazement as if informed that fireflies were making decodable signals on behalf of stranded spirits, or that a bat was writing a legible tale of torture in the bruised and branded sky.
I will post the rest of the list shortly.
