02 September 2011
I can't remember if I have had a favorite book before, but I have one now and it is In Fond Remembrance of Me by Howard Norman. My favorite book ever. And I mean that in an, "I will pick this book up and read it again whenever I am feeling unwelcome on the planet," kind of way. It isn't grand, which is probably one reason I love it so much. It is not a novel, which is probably another. It gives me a feeling something like the one I get watching documentaries by Werner Herzog, especially Encounters at the End of the World, which might be his lightest and his wittiest one. (maybe? anyway it is the one I like best and the only film I find reliably and instantly comforting) Both these works are set in near-polar places, which I think is just a coincidence, though Glenn Gould's radio documentary, The Idea of North, is another work I find eerily relaxing, so maybe there's a frostiness deep within me that begs for companionship. ho ho ho.
I don't entirely want to say what the book is about for fear of making it sound too shabby. It mainly has to do with a friendship, and the emotions and events of that friendship are set out in a way that is modest and detailed in a way that seems rare. The two friends are both working with an Inuit man to write down and translate a collection of stories about when Noah arrived in their land. He came on an ark with all the animals and was very silly. The stories are mesmerizing. They all begin and end in basically the same way. Noah arrives. He refuses to give the people any pieces of his ark to burn for fuel. His giraffe runs away. He loses his daughter, wife, and son. He is last seen traveling south. Just the strangeness of the stories might be enough to make me love the book. But the way they are preserved inside this other story of a friendship told without bluster or exaggeration makes me very, very happy.
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