I want to compare The Lovely Bones with a book that I was thinking of quite often while reading it, The Tibetan Book of the Dead. I feel as if the two books come from a similar intention: to explain what happens when we die and to comfort us.

The best way for me to quickly relate the relevance of the Book of the dead is to quote a documentary I recently watched,

‘Death is real it comes without warning and cannot be escaped’. (From the movie The Tibetan book of the Dead. The story about Ladakh is from this source as well. This is abridged) In what used to be Western Tibet, now Ladakh India, a man has died. His family cries as they await a Buddhist yogi to come to read the Tibetan Book of the dead.

The holy man will read the book every day for 49 days. According to Tibetan belief the consciousness of the man is able to hear and will linger for 49 days. The text’s message to the consciousness is, “that which is called death has now arrived… recognize the luminosity before you it the essence of your own mind, …both life and death are a flow of uncertain transitions … Now is the time for you to seek a path. You are not alone everyone who has come before you has died … now I will abandon clinging to this body to this world I will go forward and abandon fear and terror I will recognize whatever appears as a projection of my own mind.

At death we lose everything that is real. Unless we can let go of all the things we cherished in our life we are terrified.

Carl Jung called the Tibetan book of the Dead his life’s partner in whom he found the secrets of his own soul.

The Lovely Bones is a novel that also tries to answer for us what happens after death. It is the story of a girl who is murdered, and her first few years in the afterlife as she continues to follow the story of those in her family.

There are some basic assumptions about death that Lovely Bones makes. The first is that there is an afterlife. The dead person is able to travel anywhere on earth and can see and hear and cannot be seen or heard themselves; they can make themselves known by allowing their presence to be felt. There is a similarity to the Tibetan belief here.

In this afterlife there is a heaven. The book makes no mention of hell. The heaven that is mentioned consists of a first-stage heaven where the person who has recently died is able to construct their surroundings out of anything they can conceive and desire. They are not alone but instead have a couple of people who have intersecting conceptions of ideal environments and spend time together when and where these conceptions and environments intersect.

There is a second level of heaven described in the book as being one of more general comfort. It is a place the author describes as one where you could just enter a room and hold a stranger’s hand for and hour.

The process to move from one level to the next is the closure that happens in the dead person’s own heart as they come to terms with their own death and the closing of the gap left by the dead person as the people they knew on earth, their family and friends, finally are healed.

In the Tibetan Book of the dead the desire to hang on to the things we cherished in life, the people, places and possessions, is called attachment, as in Lovely Bones, it is an obstacle to moving on.

Stories about death have been around for as long as humans have had language.  I love comparative mythology, and though I am not an expert, I would like to thank you for indulging me on this Blog. I have always been fascinated by the work of Joseph Campbell and his study of the common parts of the stories we tell as humans and the most common, and in fact inescapable, of these is death.

I love reading white text on a black background.  Who knew?  As some of you may know I was assigned an apple ipad to use.  The ipad was loaded with a copy of Miriam Toews’ book A Complicated Kindness.  I think we are are somewhat familiar with the ipads touch interface from the extensive advertising that the company has put out there. I think that in a tactile sense the unit was as fun and easy to navigate as the adverts would have us believe.

I want to focus here on my experience of ‘reading’ on the ipad.  I found that I read faster right off the bat.  The way my eye scanned across the line and down to the next seemed faster to me.  I found the flick of a finger to turn the page to be not only quick and easy but for some reason satisfying.  I thought I would miss the touch and feel of a book, and if I read this way exclusively I think I would, but the ipad has touch and feel too.

Once I was about a third of the way into the book I found that I could experiment with the typography.  I think this is an essential part of reading a book that has never before been in the control of the reader.  These decisions have always been made for us by someone else.  Two simple variables, font size and font/background colour can have a huge impact on the reading experience.

Font size has traditionally offered readers two choices, regular and large.  The experience of reading on the ipad offers a much more fine gradation. There is a difference in reading at 10 pt and 14 pt.  I think the experience of certain books that bear a slower more considered reading could be reinforce by using a smaller font to cause the reader to linger on the page.  This kind of idea is taking reader response theory out of the mind of the reader and giving the reader concrete methods to construct the text for themselves, literally.  I am intrigued by this idea and would like to open it up to discussion in class at some point.  If the text’s meaning is created in the space between author and reader, what does it do to the dynamic to transfer the physical look of the text on the page from the author/creator side to the reader/creator side?

As an extension of these thoughts I found myself experimenting with reading white text on a black background.  First let me say that I was reading faster.  I found the contrast of the letters on the background made it extremely fast for my eyes to track from word to word and line to line.  I think this makes sense given that our yes are drawn to light, and that we rarely look into light looking for the negative space.  It strikes me as I write this that of course we do this every day on our computers, but I would like to know if there is a greater visual acuity and accuracy in picking up light against a dark background? I would argue from my limited experience and unscientific reflection that there is.

Lastly I want to suggest the font/background option as a future source of symbolism.  How long before a book is released where instead of the author telling you that it is night, they simply switch to a black background.  How long before night darkness black evil ….. as symbols are evoked in this way.  I don’t think it will be long.

Here is another soldier in the white text black background revolution. This is from the Blackle project.

How is Blackle saving energy?

Blackle was created by Heap Media to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy. Blackle searches are powered by Google Custom Search.

Blackle saves energy because the screen is predominantly black. “Image displayed is primarily a function of the user’s color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen.” Roberson et al, 2002

In January 2007 a blog post titled Black Google Would Save 750 Megawatt-hours a Year proposed the theory that a black version of the Google search engine would save a fair bit of energy due to the popularity of the search engine. Since then there has been skepticism about the significance of the energy savings that can be achieved and the cost in terms of readability of black web pages.

We believe that there is value in the concept because even if the energy savings are small, they all add up. Secondly we feel that seeing Blackle every time we load our web browser reminds us that we need to keep taking small steps to save energy.

How can you help?

We encourage you to set Blackle as your home page. This way every time you load your Internet browser you will save a little bit of energy. Remember every bit counts! You will also be reminded about the need to save energy each time you see the Blackle page load.

In rereading the assembled information below I am aware that it is essentially a compilation of ‘background information’ on the novel.  I have purposely left out my analysis and interpretation, for the most part, because my sense of what the duties of the backgrounder entail is to provide information that can then be interpreted by the literature circle as a whole.  I don’t want to start doing the thinking and connecting for my group members.  I want to search out background information that I think will generate discussion, period.  I am aware that this reads like a bad lonely planet entry and I’m not thrilled with that.  I do think that this information will be of value in thinking critically about the novel and that is my only criteria.

Miriam Toews was born in Steinbach Manitoba and spent her youth there.  Her novel A Complicated Kindness is set in a fictional town called East Village. This Russian Mennonite town is generally thought to be a fictionalized version of Steinbach.  This begs the question, what is Steinbach Manitoba like?  We need this information before we can do any kind of meaningful comparison.

Steinbach, Manitoba.

Steinbach is a small city that has a current population of approximately 13,000. If we assume the novel is set in the late 70’s to early eighties (based on the Lou Reed references), then the population of Steinbach at that time would have been much smaller; figures for 1981 list the population at 6,676.

The town traces its origin to the settlement of Mennonite settlers in 1874.  These Mennonites were of two types, Kleine Germeinde, and Bergthal. The main difference between the two groups seems to be the reformist and more pious and discipline oriented nature of the Kleine Germeinde who were reacting to some general backsliding among the Mennonites in general.  In this way Miriam Toews story in A complicated kindness seems to be one that has been going on for a very long time, and similar experiences were likely had by youth in previous generations in Manitoba, and even before in Russia.

Steinbach does not seem to have been as Strictly 100% Mennonite as it appears in the novel.  Census figures seem to indicate in the 70’s there would have been about 80% of the population that were German speaking.  As of 2001 the rate of religious participation among the cities residents stood at over 90%.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_Toews and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinbach,_Manitoba)

For a more definitive answer to the question of how much of Steinbach is in the novel it is always prudent to use the author’s own words (from the Faber reader’s guide to the novel:

In writing A Complicated Kindness Miriam Toews has said that she wanted to ‘show how the fundamentalist interpretation of religion or Christianity was destructive in the Nickel family.’ Given her own back- ground of growing up in the small conservative Mennonite community of Steinbach, Manitoba it was inevitable that she would be asked to what degree her confused yet sharply intelligent narrator’s experience reflected her own. Replying that although the events in East Village were entirely fictitious she has explained ‘I was very conscious of making sure that my character’s relationships with the community were authentic. Mine were something else entirely. Obviously. But the emphasis in the town on punishment and shame, and joylessness, that degree of severity and intolerance – all those aspects I certainly experienced.’

The daughter of a liberal family, Toews still describes herself as a Mennonite (although she also declares herself an agnostic) and has retained a great affection for the positive aspects of the Mennonite way of life, such as the idea of the extended family, an affection echoed in Nomi’s feelings for East Village. She remembers ‘a very nur- turing, safe environment, everybody knew who I was, who my parents were, who my grandparents were, what part of Russia we were from originally. That was a really comforting feeling. Non-Mennonites, when they see that aspect of it, think it’s a beautiful thing, and it is, but there’s so much going on besides.’ Toews left Steinbach the day after her graduation and says that she could not go back to live there explaining that people who leave ‘have very complicated relationships with the places we grew up. We want to love them, and we do love them, but there’s so much of it that’s so harsh, so unforgiving.’

Source: http://www.faber.co.uk/site-media/reading-guides/complicated-kindness_reading-guide.pdf

Miriam Toews novels often contain absent mothers.  This is the case in both Summer of my Amazing Luck and A Complicated Kindness.  It raises questions for readers of here work about the nature of her relationship with her own mother; Toews addresses these issues in an interview she gave to Herizons magazine:

“The relationship I have with my mother is so strong and loving and fun, that maybe I had to, in order to have a character who was working through something difficult, have her gone – dead, or missing, or whatever, just absent – in order to create that conflict for my character. And, to get all psychoanalytical about it, I’ve been trying to understand my father for a long time now, and I think that in my own life, growing up, etcetera, my mother was sort of this buffer between him and me, in that she kind of protected me from his sadness and tried to make life fun and upbeat all the time. So maybe, in order for my character to understand her father better, and assuming that my characters are in some ways me, that particular buffer has to be removed.” (Source: http://www.randomhouse.ca/author/results.pperl?authorid=55356&view=full_sptlght )

The secret of Life of PI is in the narrator’s opening preamble.  The whole structure and even the ending is contained in the statement:

If we, citizens, do not support our artists, then we sacrifice our imaginations on the alter of crude reality and we end of believing in nothing and having worthless dreams.

I will argue in this response that this book is an extended metaphor; that it is a political allegory.  The contrived ending is not so contrived after all; it is an essential part of the story; it is Martel’s ‘crude reality’ and part of his political commentary.  You are not supposed to like the ending, the crude reality he imposes at the end of his story.  This negative reaction should make you ‘support your artists’, so that more endings don’t get sacrificed in this way.

When Pi Patel asks Mr. Okamoto, “So tell me, since it makes no factual difference to you and you can’t prove the question either way, which story do you prefer? Which is the better story, the story with the animals or the story without the animals?” isn’t he really asking him, ‘hey Okamoto, do you like Art or not.  What’s your thing, Novels or Newspapers?”

Pi Patel’s story has become a mythology with cultural power that a newspaper article could never have.  This is the point Yann Martel makes above when talking about funding for the Arts, and the point he makes again through the voices of his characters.

There is a concept in philosophy that states that if you have two possibilities in your life, and there is no proof for either one definitively, then you are free to choose the one you like, the one that makes you feel the best.  You as a human should choose the optimistic idea because it has the most utility for you, it makes you feel good instead of bad or indifferent.  It doesn’t have to be a belief in God.  I don’t personally believe in God.  I do however believe that on the whole humans are good.  I can’t prove it, but I feel better believing this than that all humans are murdering evil jerks at heart.

Martel offers two possibilities in his book and he presents a choice that costs us nothing to make.  Art or reality?

The origin of these ideas for those interested can be traced to Blaise Pascal (among others) who wrote that:

God is or He is not.  But to which side will we incline?  …  What will you wager?  … You must wager.  It is not optional … Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is.   …  If you win, you win everything, if you lose you lose nothing.  Do not hesitate then; wager that he does exist.