So recently, while I've been
reading, I've noticed a trend.
My book club memoir, The Glass
Castle talks quite a bit about the desert ("She loved the dry,
crackling heat, the way the sky at sunset looked like a sheet of fire, and the
overwhelming emptiness and severity of all that open land that had once been an
ocean bed.") and it also talks quite a bit about freedom idea,
carelessness, and neglect, whenever the desert comes up.
The same thing occurs in Donna
Tart's The Goldfinch. A large portion of the novel is devoted to Theo's
time in Vegas, where his father is a gambler, a drunk, and a good many other
things as well. His father's girlfriend Xandra isn't much good either, a
waitress at a cocktail bar with far too many pills for purely medicinal
purposes. Theo is left entirely on his own, with absolute freedom, and in
stumbles Boris and drug abuse and wayyyyy too much vodka ensues.
It's fairly obvious why the desert
represents freedom, or at least corresponds to it. Vast open skies, stretches
of land where you don't see anyone else for miles, that feeling of nature gone
a bit wild, as if it forgot to that it was supposed to be tilled in neat rows.
But the fact that it’s been used in a memoir, and not just a novel, is
something I find extremely intriguing.
In a novel, the use of the setting
influences the mood. The desert in The Goldfinch is supposed to
represent the change from the cozy, safe, life of New York, to the more terrifying
and neglectful world of Vegas. But the idea that the desert is the setting
someone chose not for a novel but for their life is something that I find hard
to get my head around.
In The Glass Castle the narrator’s
mother loves the desert. The mother is also more than a bit of a free spirit,
abhorring the idea of anything domestic, peaceful, or, gods forbid, normal. So
it makes perfect sense that she’d choose a place like the desert to live.
But why?
Why does it make perfect sense? Why
does the desert seem open, endless, free, to all of us? Is it intrinsic to
human nature, or a cultural notion, impressed into all of us at such a young
age that it is intrinsic to us?
I don’t know, as much as I’d like to. Maybe you do.
The "desert" metaphor seems like it adds interesting imagery to the memoir. Although I haven't read, I find it interesting that the description makes the desert seem "open" and "free", whereas usually we think of deserts as hot, humid, and even terrifying. It's a different way to think about something; a different point of view about the same thing. This book sounds very entertaining (and sad)! I would love to read it sometime!
ReplyDeleteI agree a lot with what Chace said. I love the way you worded how the desert must be like, and how you included what the author said about it. I also agree with what you noted about what the desert represents. I never even thought about like that when I was reading it.
ReplyDeleteI agree a lot with what Chace said. I love the way you worded how the desert must be like, and how you included what the author said about it. I also agree with what you noted about what the desert represents. I never even thought about like that when I was reading it.
ReplyDeleteI do not know any more than you do as I did not read the book...Or hear about it until just now. However, I like the knew way you (and the book) associated the desert with freedom becuase I associate the desert with camels, heat, and death. I never thought about it that way. It would be a kind of freedom as long as you know how to survive there. I can't help but notice the title is The Glass Castle and when you heat sand it makes glass...Maybe there is a hidden meaning in the text (I'm probably just reading to much into the title).
ReplyDeleteI do not know any more than you do as I did not read the book...Or hear about it until just now. However, I like the knew way you (and the book) associated the desert with freedom becuase I associate the desert with camels, heat, and death. I never thought about it that way. It would be a kind of freedom as long as you know how to survive there. I can't help but notice the title is The Glass Castle and when you heat sand it makes glass...Maybe there is a hidden meaning in the text (I'm probably just reading to much into the title).
ReplyDelete