~a column by Colleen O’Brien
Edith Wharton said, “There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that receives it.”
I like this. It gives me an out from the terrible plague of my life — thinking I have to write novels. If I can spread the light by just reading novels and talking about them, hallelujah. I think I’m a natural at being a mirror of others’ words and thoughts, spreading the word by talking about a good book rather than trying to write one. Why keep sliding down the hill I’ve tried to breast a dozen times in chasing an endeavor I’ve never been able to sustain anyway, no matter how many times I’ve tried?
Following, a little bit of spreading the light about one of my favorite authors and a few of her dozen or so books.
Author Joanne Harris is French and English and since childhood a student of mythology – Norse mythology being her favorite. I think her early reading of wild tales based on gods’ behaviors influenced her mightily, and we are the beneficiaries. She captures me from the first page and never lets me go. From Blackberry Wine: “Wine talks; ask anyone. The oracle at the street corner; the uninvited guest at the wedding feast; the holy fool. It ventriloquizes. It has a million voices . . . the transformation of base matter into the stuff of dreams. Layman’s alchemy.”
Blackberry Wine once led to an all-nighter – not of wine but of reading. And Harris’s idea of our incorporating the normal things in our lives to realize our dreams is indeed each of us layman’s opportunity for alchemy.
The first Harris book I read was Chocolat, a fabulous (as in the word’s real meaning: “fable, myth, legend, barely credible, astonishing . . . and very pleasing”) tale. It was made into a movie as good as the book, partly because of Johnny Depp, the beautiful man with a sense of humor.
Harris says that in her stories the toughest question she tries to get her characters to answer truthfully is always “Who am I?” Her people search the conundrum in fantastical ways – a bit of magic in all her books, a reliance on a big imagination, a choice of characters who are often loners living lives a step apart from the rest of us – and like in real life, they often don’t get it right but end up able to live with the ambiguities.
Chocolat is the first book of hers I read, and it takes place in a bucolic French town called Lansquenet; Blackberry Wine, the second; The Lolllipop Shoes the third, and Peaches for Father Francis, Monsieur le Cure the last one…so far.
The stories are loosely connected by the town, by food and wine and now and then by the characters themselves. Reading about food, about wine, about gardens and herbs and medicines made from plants appeals to me, makes me hungry, thirsty, eager to plant basil and make a tincture of something to ease the hangnail, but I can’t take the time for any of it during Harris’s books.
Like Harris, I think we need magic, and like her I believe our magic is in the everyday things we do. She sees our association with magic as changing the world around us, one step at a time, as well as changing the way others see us, which is the kind of magic to whichwe all have access. I think the everyday magic is more about allowing us to be ourselves and appreciating how weird we might think we are and liking ourselves because of it.
Between the Lansquenet-connected books are many others, two of which I particularly liked: Five Quarters of the Orange and Holy Fools.
Do yourself a favor and look her up. Like in Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Isabel Allende, there is a bit of magical realism with Joanne Harris, but it’s so believable. I never once said “Are you kidding?” when I heard the wine bottles talking to one another.
