Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats

By Roger Rosenblatt

(Ecco)

A year after his only daughter died at age 38 of an asymptomatic heart condition, Roger Rosenblatt wrote an essay in The New Yorker titled, “Making Toast.” He describes how he and his wife moved into Amy’s house in Bethesda, Md., to help their son-in-law care for the couple’s three small children, and how the myriad, mundane activities of child-rearing provided a measure of solace for his inconsolable grief.

His latest book, “Kayak Morning: Reflections on Love, Grief, and Small Boats,” was written after the essay was turned into a best-selling book. What he has discovered in the more than 2½ years since her death is that just getting on with life ― captured in the closing image of the essay when his 23-month-old grandson asks for toast ― hasn’t worked. “What I failed to calculate is the pain that increases even as one gets on with it,” he writes.

Rosenblatt has taken up kayaking, spending hours exploring the shoreline and eddies of the inlet near his other home in Quogue, a resort town on the south shore of Long Island, where his two sons, son-in-law and their families still gather every summer.

The book reads as an exploration of his eddying consciousness as he sets out one June morning on Penniman Creek while the rest of the family is asleep. He thinks about his highflying career as a journalist, when he traveled the world writing about other people’s sadness. He meditates on the nature of water, wildlife and boats; recalls sorrowful passages of literature and poetry; and recounts conversations with a therapist friend trying to lift him out of his depression.

In one poignant passage, he simply imagines what it would have been like to be someone else, less lettered, less obviously successful, perhaps a high school teacher from a working-class town. Elsewhere, he converses with his daughter ― “See here, Amy,” he writes ― and with God. He conjures her from memory and photos: on her wedding day; when she was 5 years old and danced on his shoes.

Eventually, he drifts and paddles his way toward a resolution of his anguish, a perspective that offers some peace of mind and lets him, again, get on with life. I won’t reveal the epiphany that releases him from his torment. Suffice it to say, it won’t come as a big surprise to anyone who has lost a loved one. (AP)


Writer fails to bring ‘lago’ to life

Iago
By David Snodin
(Henry Holt) 

Forget about Aaron, Edmund and Richard. The greatest villain in all of Shakespeare is Iago, the willfully malevolent force who ruins careers and murders his wife while destroying Othello’s mind and marriage.

Why does Iago do it?

That’s the question on the table in David Snodin’s “Iago,” a novel that picks up where “Othello” ends, with a promise that torture will break Iago and his defiant vow of silence.

But while Snodin’s Iago gets acquainted with some of the 16th century’s most ingenious inquisitorial devices, it’s readers of this painfully bad book who will be screaming for mercy before they’re through.

There’s nothing wrong with Snodin’s premise.

Annibale Malipiero, Chief Inquisitor of the Serene Republic of Venice, had always “liked to go beyond the business of confession,” when interviewing killers. He wanted “to delve deeper into their dispositions, to understand what drove them.”

But Iago’s a tough nut. He escapes from the prison in Cyprus where he is first confined ― leading to a manhunt that meanders over the first quarter of the book. Finally apprehended, he is brought in secret to Venice, where he resumes his long-held silence.

To make him sing, the Inquisitor turns to Gentile Stornello, a smart but dreamy 15-year-old boy who, through a convoluted series of plot twists, is framed for a murder he didn’t commit.

Through a series of even more improbable plot twists, the Inquisitor arranges for Gentile and Iago to escape, launching them on a series of picaresque adventures during which they’re accompanied ― for reasons never made clear ― by Gentile’s aging tutor and impossibly beautiful love object.

The Inquisitor’s theory?

If he lets this merry gang of four roam freely, Iago eventually will open his heart to Gentile, satisfying the Inquisitor’s fervent desire to find out what makes Iago tick.

The Inquisitor is therefore never more than a few miles away ― conveniently allowing him to pluck the tutor’s hastily scrawled reports from the thickets in which they’re hidden. Gentile ― the lone character permitted to speak in the first person ― supplements the scholar’s missives with observations of his own.

They don’t learn or see much. Snodin’s constantly moving and increasingly preposterous plot ― in which a huge gallery of uniformly cardboard characters makes arbitrary entrances and exits ― doesn’t permit it.

Snodin’s tired and hackneyed writing doesn’t help. A few examples:

“Tears again coursed down her face.” Gentile has a “keen and watchful intelligence.” The beauty of Gentile’s beloved “is like a punch to the stomach.” When another character grieves, “her lower lip starts to quiver.” When Iago rages, “every muscle vibrated in his solid, sinewy body.”

Snodin makes matters worse by sprinkling his prose with hundreds of italicized Italian words; inserted to give his story local color, they read instead like a parody of the dialogue in a bad Hollywood movie.

One representative example:

“Madonna mia, what are we going to do with you? Forget her, figliolo bravo; there are other good-looking girls in Venice.”

As the novel limps toward its conclusion, we finally get to learn more about the titular character who inspired it. If there were anything in this novel to actually spoil, I’d need to alert you now that I’m about to spill the beans.

Iago’s sister died of malaria. He killed his abusive father. His mother then became a prostitute; Iago was often forced to watch. Desdemona reminds him of a fair-haired woman he once loved. He thinks that war is hell, God is dead, all women are strumpets and the rich exploit the poor.

Were the answer to Iago that obvious and overdetermined, he wouldn’t haunt us as he does.

Coleridge may have overstated the case in famously claiming that Iago must hunt for a motive because he is driven by “motive-less Malignity.” But while Snodin rightly recognizes that Iago is just a man, “Iago” never brings him to life. (MCT)