Some books help to explain each other, and together elucidate something important in our lives. I recently came upon three of them.
1.
In 1998, the Portuguese novelist José Saramago published a modern fairy tale called The Tale of the Unknown Island. I found it in the library of the house we are renting in San Miguel de Allende. In the tale, a man goes to a king and requests a boat so he can sail off to discover an unknown island. The king gives him a large boat, a caravel, but no crew. However, he is joined by the king’s cleaning woman, who decides she would rather die at sea than from a lifetime of scrubbing floors. The couple fit up the caravel, enlist a dubious crew, and set off with the boat’s deck covered with plants they intend to establish on their new-found island. But the crew deserts at the first port of call, and the couple are forced to lay at anchor, unable to manage the ship by themselves.
Eventually, the plants take over the caravel. “The roots from the trees are now penetrating the frame of the ship itself.” The climbing plants entwine the masts and festoon the ship’s sides, and eventually the caravel becomes “a forest that sails and bobs upon the waves.” In other words, the ship has become the island the couple were seeking. Birds nest in the trees, flowers and wheat grow on the deck, the wind catches in the trees, and one day, “with the tide, the Unknown Island finally sets to sea, in search of itself.”
2.
By one of those magical coincidences that happen frequently to travellers, the day before we left for Mexico I bought a copy of Emily Urquhart’s Ordinary Wonder Tales to read on the plane. Emily Urquhart is a folklorist, with an interest in how ancient folk tales (she calls them wonder tales) have become threaded into our everyday lives. In the title essay, which is about her fieldwork in a Newfoundland outport, she writes that the Soviet folklorist Valdimir Propp “noted that there are thirty-one separate plot points…in a fairy tale. The first is that the protagonist leaves home.”
In other words, I’d left home reading that our lives are patterned like fairy stories, and that leaving home is the first plot point in a fairy story. Then I picked up The Tale of the Unknown Island, about a man who goes off in search of himself. At one point in Saramago’s tale, the man asks the woman what she is thinking. “That you have to leave the island in order to see the island,” she replies.
As Emily Urquhart points out, magic is another key plot point, or function, in wonder tales, and it follows that magic is also present in our everyday lives. And since novels stem from everyday life, there is magic in novels. In fact, when we read fiction we enter a magical realm, a state of suspended disbelief in which we give credit to things we know not to be true. What happens in novels becomes part of our own experience. As Emily writes, “We tell ordinary wonder tales every day,” and we become the stories we tell.
3.
After reading the Saramago, I took the next book off the library shelf: a novel by Henning Mankell called Italian Shoes. Mankell wrote the popular Kurt Wallander series of detective novels before turning to literary fiction. Italian Shoes is not a mystery novel in the ordinary sense: there are deaths, but they are not murders, As Emily writes, certain kinds of wonder tales often end in a death, which is the final mystery.
In Mankell’s novel, the narrator has been living on a remote island off the Swedish coast for twelve years when he is visited by a woman who was his lover in the distant past, and who is now dying of cancer. She wants him to fulfill a promise he made to her thirty years before, to take her to a certain pool of water in northern Sweden. She would rather die helping him keep his word than in a palliative care unit in Stockholm. The narrator agrees, and they set off on the long journey in an old car in the middle of winter. After many trials and diversions (including finding a dead body in a farmhouse – I imagine Mankell couldn’t help himself), they find the pool. Of course the man falls through the ice (for this is essentially a journey to the underworld), but he’s rescued by the woman, who is nonetheless not magically cured of her cancer. She does tell him, though, that he has a daughter, and brings him to her. The narrator’s life is thus transformed in complicated ways.
The three return to the remote island (I’m condensing and simplifying here, but wonder tales are usually condensed and simplified) where the man throws a midsummer-night party to celebrate the renewal of life. At the party’s end, when the guests have departed, when his former lover has been temporarily released from her pain, and his daughter is holding his hand, the man thinks: “These were powerful, magical moments.”
Such moments come when least expected. Just when Saramago’s sailor has given up hope of finding his unknown island, the wind fills the trees and the ship sets off. In the last, brilliant essay in her book, called “Years Thought Days,” Emily Urquhart’s father, who is dying of a form of dementia that seems to involve time travel, suddenly, like Mankell’s befuddled narrator, wakes up to the fact that the two women with him are his wife and daughter. He smiles beatifically and says: “No wonder I’m having such a wonderful time.”
Wayne, I’m in the affiliated process of translation - any opportunity for a collaboration?
Thank you. Perfect timing for me.
Magic is. (: