Palate Cleansers

In between amazing books I needed a breather—a palate cleanser, if you will. So this is what I read: Ghost World, a graphic novel by Daniel Clowes (“now a major motion picture”). It’s a subtle, complex portrayal of two recent high school graduates, Enid and Rebecca, as they try to figure out what to do next. It’s kind of just about growing pains—two longtime friends attempting to discover who they are, navigating the changes they each see occuring the other. It’s an insightful, funny, sad, engaging book. One of the things I most enjoyed about it was actually not the girls but the book's depiction of the poor souls trying to parent them. Mainly I was interested in Enid’s dad who hovers anxiously, trying to let his daughter be who she will be, make her own choices even when they’re clearly bad ones. My favorite part was a scene with a big fight between the two friends and then the dad digging up his daughter’s old record player and a record she listened to as a child. It’s a heartbreakingly sweet moment which I do not explain well at all—you'll have to see for yourself. I do recommend this book unless you are squeamish about four-letter words and some “adult” material. It captures so well the fragile adolescent ego, the vulnerability, angst, cruelty, and self-doubt. And the graphics are pretty amazing: done in ghostly pale colors, they speak volumes in facial expression and body language.

Palate cleanser #2: Letters to a Young Poet. This slender volume is comprised of 10 short letters written by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke to the student of one of his own former teachers. The letters are what one Amazon reviewer calls “a sublime, one-on-one equivalent of the modern writing workshop” in which the poet warmly encourages and instructs the student. But you don’t have to be a writer to appreciate these letters. What I loved about them (learned most from) is their generosity—they’re incredibly compassionate, empathetic and wise, written with the warmest regard and concern for the recipient while sharing beautiful truths that apply to all. Rilke is at once humble and authoritative, and his sentences are so graceful, so elegant—these letters are wonderful to read for the language alone. He does write about writing a lot, about the aloneness of the creative spirit, but also writes about reading, about how to judge literature, about the dangers of a too-ironic worldview, about how to love, how to find beauty in the smallest things, how to win oneself back from “the demands of the multiplicities that speak and chatter”—I loved that part of the 5th letter. This was a perfect palate cleanser for me—a small book, simple, beautiful and wise.