Mark Salzman, _Lying Awake_
Oct. 16th, 2001 02:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
eubMark Salzman is apparently a well-known mainstream novelist, wrote a bestseller called Iron and Silk which I do remember hearing of. I just read The Laughing Sutra last week, and liked it, and picked this one up at Avenue Victor Hugo.
It's about a nun in a Carmelite cloister in contemporary Los Angeles, named Sister John, whose mystical experiences prove to be linked with temporal-lobe epilepsy caused by a meningioma; she must decide whether to have the disease treated. She went through a long spell of spiritual aridity, and can hardly bear the thought that its ending was an illusion.[1]
The book is wonderfully written, or it's written in a way that I like, which is that it has an effortless flow of telling details. "The real penance in cloistered life, most Sisters agreed, was not isolation; it was the impossibility of getting away from people one would not normally have chosen as friends."
Salzman almost executes a beautiful technical trick. How do you write a story that contains the ineffable? Sister John is a poet, and Salzman intercuts lines of her poetry (typeset in italics) with the body text; I thought at first that he was going to use this device strictly as a means of representing her experiences -- the text would be in these two streams, one narrative and the other timeless -- but it turned out he used it more broadly.
[1] This idea, that experiences of the Divine are of no value if they can be traced to physical causes [2], didn't seem to be fully worked through. This undercuts Sister John's past, in a way she is terribly aware of, no matter what she decides. By the end she has very little concern for this, and I do suppose I see how she has come by this lack of concern, but it still seems very quick, in a book that knows very well how many years a change of heart can take. One could argue that Salzman has allowed a miracle.
[2] which I profoundly disagree with. If the mystical experiences of `approved' Christian contemplants are ever understood at the neurobiological level, are they to be discarded too? I don't see why "explaining away" ever has to follow from explanation.
Though from the nuns' point of view, I'm one who has already explained away everything, everywhere. I don't see the necessity of any of the religious interpretations or beliefs they attach to these experiences.
It's about a nun in a Carmelite cloister in contemporary Los Angeles, named Sister John, whose mystical experiences prove to be linked with temporal-lobe epilepsy caused by a meningioma; she must decide whether to have the disease treated. She went through a long spell of spiritual aridity, and can hardly bear the thought that its ending was an illusion.[1]
The book is wonderfully written, or it's written in a way that I like, which is that it has an effortless flow of telling details. "The real penance in cloistered life, most Sisters agreed, was not isolation; it was the impossibility of getting away from people one would not normally have chosen as friends."
Salzman almost executes a beautiful technical trick. How do you write a story that contains the ineffable? Sister John is a poet, and Salzman intercuts lines of her poetry (typeset in italics) with the body text; I thought at first that he was going to use this device strictly as a means of representing her experiences -- the text would be in these two streams, one narrative and the other timeless -- but it turned out he used it more broadly.
[1] This idea, that experiences of the Divine are of no value if they can be traced to physical causes [2], didn't seem to be fully worked through. This undercuts Sister John's past, in a way she is terribly aware of, no matter what she decides. By the end she has very little concern for this, and I do suppose I see how she has come by this lack of concern, but it still seems very quick, in a book that knows very well how many years a change of heart can take. One could argue that Salzman has allowed a miracle.
[2] which I profoundly disagree with. If the mystical experiences of `approved' Christian contemplants are ever understood at the neurobiological level, are they to be discarded too? I don't see why "explaining away" ever has to follow from explanation.
Though from the nuns' point of view, I'm one who has already explained away everything, everywhere. I don't see the necessity of any of the religious interpretations or beliefs they attach to these experiences.
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Date: 2001-10-16 04:41 pm (UTC)And yeah, there are those practical questions of whether people will think you're just ill, of whether the end is as valuable as the way, etc.