I have been living in a dream for the past hour...the delicious dream that is Rodrigo Fresan's Kensington Gardens. I don't know where to begin other than to tell you this: I'm only on page 33. That's right. You heard me. Thirty-three pages that I've re-read many times in the last hour. In only two short chapters, I've found more passages I want to commit to memory and more sentences I wish I'd written than I've ever found in only the first 33 pages of any book.
It's. Well. It's alarming. It's so good it feels almost...unjust. Like things this good shouldn't have a definite ending in sight, a clear stopping point that is held in the same hands that flips to the next page. I want to devour it while I also want to protect it. Read a word at a time. A page a day. I'm caught up in the wanting more but also knowing that if I plow ahead I'll eventually get to the end and where will that leave me? Although Fresan has written ten books, Kensington Gardens is the first one to be translated in English from his Argentinian Spanish. It's not as if I can just pick another of his books and dive back into his world, any world that has his stamp on it. I will have to wait...who knows how long...before another Fresan work is translated. Knowing that, feeling it acutely with every page I turn, slows me. I want to tread lightly, take my time, savor every new sentence, wonder where it will all lead. My face hurts from smiling. When was the last time you smiled that much while reading?
Here is where I should outline the plot & explain the premise and all that. Yet I don't want to break the spell. In the hopes of keeping the spell intact, I present The Believer's brief summary in lieu of my own words:
"Kensington Gardens, the Argentine novelist’s first book to be translated into English, is both a biography—occasionally true, often fictionalized, at times fantasized even within its own conjured truth—of Peter Pan scribe J. M. Barrie, and a personal history of its own narrator, modern-day children’s book author Peter Hook. Hook, an orphan of wealthy, acid-addled flower parents, created the Pan-like Jim Yang, a character played in film adaptations by the child actor Keiko Kai, who also plays the audience for Hook’s self-fable; Hook has kidnapped the youth, and the novel is a ream of apostrophes in his direction. "
Now. Having offered up the trifle of a description to pacify those who will wonder, I present a few of the delectable passages that I keep re-reading because: a) they are delectable, b) i wish i had written them, c) they so perfectly capture what it is i've always felt was true about the importance of writing and the power of books that their existence on the page makes me feel seen, known and understood. Isn't that the highest function of art -- art that reveals you to yourself and in doing so makes you realize that someone else gets you too? Art that confirms your own deeply held beliefs in a way that makes them seem shiny and new and authentically yours at the same time?
Delectable passage #1:
"There are nights Barrie could swear he hears the books talking among themselves, mingling, recounting their lives and works, recalling their plots, their best moments. Barrie thinks that reading is the making of memories and that writing is also the making of memories. The memories of the person who writes -- the only thing writers do is remember something they happened to think of, something that happened to them or never happened to them, but that's happening now as they write -- are incorporated into the memories of the person who reads, until it's impossible to say where the memories of one end and the other begin."
Delectable sentence:
"Barrie thinks about the subtle vibration of everything around us the first time we read a sentence we'll never forget."
Delectable passage #2:
"A book and me and the particular, distinctive silence that fills a room when there's someone reading in it. A different kind of silence, because the complex silence of reading has nothing to do with the simple silence of just being quiet. The silence that emanates from books and envelops us is a silence full of sounds, a silence that changes the coordinates of eternity, which means that you can spend hours reading in the bathroom without noticing it, trousers around your ankles, hypnotized by the secret scent of the letters and the intimate fragrance of your own bowels. Books are a point of escape, a place to let go, to let yourself fall and run into the forest with surprising ease and swiftness. It isn't a coincidence, I think, that books are made from the flesh of trees, and that libraries ultimately turn into petrified forests, into branches and roots that burrow into us and flower in our imagination."
And finally:
"We attach ourselves to stories like flies stuck to strips of sticky paper, and when the moment of our death arrives, we die happy, I guess: our life story ends up having as many heads as books we've read, because we've lived so many lives through reading..."
Perhaps now you can see why I wish to meditate on my thirty-three pages before moving on? Wow. I do hope I haven't overstated my case in a way that will force me back here a few days from now to tell you how much the book, in total, disappointed after such a strong opening. But if there are gems like these strewn about, I think I'll be fine. Just fine. Carry on.