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Euphoria Deckle edge Lily King 9780802122551 Books

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Euphoria Deckle edge Lily King 9780802122551 Books

I usually finish a book, and write the review the next day, at the very latest. This time, I’ve been ruminating about and contemplating what to write, not agonizing, but definitely obsessing a little, for over a week. I needed this time, because I loved this story and these characters so much. Lily King is obviously a brilliant and inspired writer, and I felt the same way when I was reading Euphoria (inspired, not brilliant (I wish!)). It’s the fascinating and dramatic tale of a love triangle, set in 1930’s New Guinea. The three characters involved are anthropologists, two men and a woman. While they’re experiencing their own desire-fueled, jealous emotional turbulence, they’re exploring, and documenting the culture and customs of the Tam tribe, including the gender-bending roles and rituals between the men and women of the tribe. Nell Stone, the woman, is married to Schuyler Fenwick (Fen), and they’ve left the Mumbanyo tribe (“fierce warriors”) because Nell couldn’t relate to, or tolerate the tribe’s violent and aggressive nature. Fen, however, resents her because they left. He also resents her accomplishment. She has written a best seller, and is currently a famous anthropologist. She has kept her maiden name. He seems to feel like he’s merely regarded as Nell Stone’s husband. She wants to stay married to him. She wants very much to have a child. There have been some tragic and dark incidents involving babies, Nell’s own, and the babies of the Mumbanyo tribe. These incidents torture and haunt Nell.
Let’s get the one complaint out of the way (not enough to subtract a star, or even a fraction of a star – actually, I wish I could give this book more than five stars). Sometimes the author hints darkly at an event instead of clearly explaining. She infers. Now, some literary-type readers prefer the subtlety of inferences. I admire those who understand them. I do not consider them posers. I love the ambiguities and possibilities of an unanswered (or unanswerable) question. But, in this instance, and some others, I wish I knew more about what happened before the story opens, especially Fen’s dark past, as part of a huge family, living in isolation in the Australian outback. I’m pretty sure about the type of behaviors that this one, dark hint refers to, but not entirely sure. The resulting twist in Fen’s character, however, is more important than the particular, salacious details of his nefarious family history, and his acceptance and expectation of evil and violence in every civilization steers his actions as an adult anthropologist living with the tribes along the banks of the Sepik River (“flamboyantly serpentine, the Amazon of the South Pacific” – see? Isn’t she brilliant?).
Of the three main characters, Fen is the only one who doesn’t have a narrative voice. The reader only knows him through the first person narration of Andrew Bankson, and the third person limited narration of his wife, Nell Stone (loosely based on the real-life anthropologist Margaret Mead). We only get to hear his voice through dialogue and observe his actions. He’s the least sympathetic character throughout. Although I did not love him as a person, I loved the creation of him, the complexity of his sometimes-evil nature. And, I understood him, although I could never empathize with him. I’ve met him many times, here in the real world. He reminds me of so many men I’ve known well. He’s Australian, but in many ways, like an American man.
So, let’s get on with my love letter to Lily King. I plunged under, into the world she created with her words, and did not care to come up for air, ever. I once had a writing teacher who told us to create a list when we got “stuck”. Here’s the best list I’ve ever read (describing Andrew Bankson’s past): “The house I grew up in there, Hemsley House, had been in the possession of Bankson scientists for three generations, its every desktop, drawer, and wardrobe stuffed with scientist’s remnants: spyglasses, test tubes, finger scales, pocket magnifiers, loupes, compasses, and a brass telescope; boxes of glass slides, and ento pins, geodes, fossils, bones, teeth, petrified wood, framed beetles and butterflies, and thousands of loose insect carcasses that turned to powder upon contact.” A positively Dickensian list, but better, less preposterously wordy and more utilitarian. I wanted to walk through Hemsley House, and touch those things. In a way, I felt like I had.
I could go on and on. I underlined passages and made notations in the margins. I lived inside these pages. There are so many layers, and so many insights and ideas to explore and rethink. I keep going back. After all, anthropology is the study of humans and their lives, their relationships to each other and to their environment, their art, their chronicles. It’s everything. I keep going back to a diagram (a “grid”) that Fen, Andrew and Nell create together, categorizing personalities into the four main directions on a compass. You don’t have to be just North, South, East, or West, though, you can be a Northwest personality, or a Southeast personality. This novel is so complex and so deep. It asks so many beautifully unanswerable questions. Above all, this story leaves the reader with a way to look at, appreciate and observe cultures that are highly civilized, but considered to be primitive and inferior to traditional Western culture. These characters view anthropology through a wide, panoramic lens, a zoom lens, a microscopic lens, and just about any other lens you can think of, including no lens, just immersion. It’s also about how our ideas, like our children, take on a life of their own once they’re launched out into the world. You can take aim, but you have no control after they’re flying free. It’s about how we think and work as individuals and how we work collectively. It’s about everything that’s important in life.


Tags : Euphoria (Deckle edge) [Lily King] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <div>From New England Book Award winner Lily King comes a breathtaking novel about three young anthropologists of the ‘30’s caught in a passionate love triangle that threatens their bonds,Lily King,Euphoria (Deckle edge),Atlantic Monthly Press,0802122558,Historical,Anthropologists - New Guinea,Anthropologists;New Guinea;Fiction.,Man-woman relationships,Married people,Married people;Fiction.,New Guinea,Nineteen thirties,Nineteen thirties;Fiction.,Triangles (Interpersonal relations),AMERICAN HISTORICAL FICTION,Anthropologists,FICTION Historical General,FICTION Literary,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction-Literary,FictionHistorical - General,GENERAL,General Adult,Historical - General,Literary,Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945),United States

Euphoria Deckle edge Lily King 9780802122551 Books Reviews

Although the jacket will tell you that this book is inspired by the story of real people, leave that aside while you are reading. For King's novel is enthralling in its own terms, both about the early days of anthropological study in the 1930s, and as a hot-blooded tale about inspiration, rivalry, and desire. The setting in New Guinea. Australian ethnographer Schyler Fenwick and his wife Nell Stone have just come downriver after an unproductive stay with a tribe known as the Mumbanyo. At least it was unproductive for her; Fen, as he is called, would have liked to stay, but Nell is the decision-maker of the two, having just published a best-seller that has eclipsed her husband's dry academic monograph. They run into an English anthropologist called Andrew Bankson, the book's main narrator. He is lonely after spending two years with a tribe on the Sepik River, and urges Nell and Fen to transfer their study to another tribe a few hours away from him by boat, known as the Tam.

Although he tries to keep his distance, it is clear that Andrew has fallen for Nell, and she finds she can have conversations with him that she cannot with her husband. But the triangle of desire does not play out as simply as that. The Tam (and Andrew's tribe, the Kiona) appear to have different customs from most of their neighbors, with some striking reversals of the normal gender roles. Separately and together, the three scientists make important discoveries, including the sketch of a quasi-Cartesian classification system that could lead to a Unified Theory of Anthropology. But they are also aware of the biases brought by their own personalities; Andrew wonders at one point whether an anthropologist's field report says more about the people being studied or the author doing the writing. Almost everything they see around them reflects on the differences and affinities between them, not only sexually but intellectually too.

There is a passage later in the book when Andrew and Nell are typing up field notes side by side. He is factual, analytical "In light of this conversation with Chanta, and the proximity of his native Pinlau to the Kiona, one concludes that there were other tribes in the vicinity who also practiced some sort of transvestite ritual." Nell, however, pours out impressions in an unpunctuated stream of consciousness "Tavi sits still her eyes drooping nearly asleep body swaying and Mudama carefully pinching the lice flicking the bugs in the fire the zinging of her fingernails through the strands of hair, concentration tenderness love peace pieta." She says that if she can remember the FEELING of the afternoon, then she can recall all the details she didn't think important enough to write down. It is how a writer works, too -- at least a writer like Lily King. The accuracy of her imaginative recall is palpable throughout the entire novel, which convinced me easily as much as similar situations in Ann Patchett's STATE OF WONDER or Hanya Yanagihara's THE PEOPLE IN THE TREES.

Early in the novel, Nell talks about a moment about two months into any study, "when you think you've finally got a handle on the place [...], the briefest, purest euphoria." Lily King's greatest achievement here is to suspend almost her entire novel in that period of excited wonder. It makes for thrilling reading.

======

If you just want to read the novel as fiction, stop reading this now and go for it. Otherwise....

The back cover says the book was "inspired by events in the life of revolutionary anthropologist Margaret Mead." I would say more than inspired by; virtually all the back-story is taken from real life, with only the names changed. Nell Stone, of course, is Mead, and Nell's best-seller is a thinly-disguised version of the latter's COMING OF AGE IN SAMOA. Schyler Fenwick is Reo Fortune, Mead's second husband; although changed from a New Zealander to an Australian, his contributions to cultural anthropology are virtually identical to those of his fictional counterpart. Andrew Bankson is the fictional name of English Anthropologist Gregory Bateson, who played an even larger role in Mead's life than Andrew does here; the details of Bankson's early life, including his Cambridge upbringing, difficult relationship with his father, and the deaths of his two brothers, might come word for word from a biography of Bateson. The older anthropologist Ruth Benedict, who plays a significant background role, is actually a real person, and her lesbian affair with Margaret/Nell is also probably true.

But if you know such facts, or are tempted to look them up, do not imagine that King's novel will necessarily follow the paths taken by these figures in real life. It seems that King set herself a double goal to stay as true to history as possible in all the back-story, but in the time-frame of the novel itself to be guided only by the psychology of the three individuals. She describes what might have happened, not what actually did. But so acute are her powers of empathy that her fiction has all the compulsive reality of truth.
I'm not sure what to say about this book. First of all, there are no monkeys in New Guinea which makes me suspicious of other facts. As to the story, the characters needed far more fleshing out. Fen and the flute were never really adequately explained, and the ending felt as if it had suddenly dropped off a cliff. However, having said all of that, reading about the rituals and cultures of the various tribes was fascinating; and it does make one consider our lack of respect for those so different.
I usually finish a book, and write the review the next day, at the very latest. This time, I’ve been ruminating about and contemplating what to write, not agonizing, but definitely obsessing a little, for over a week. I needed this time, because I loved this story and these characters so much. Lily King is obviously a brilliant and inspired writer, and I felt the same way when I was reading Euphoria (inspired, not brilliant (I wish!)). It’s the fascinating and dramatic tale of a love triangle, set in 1930’s New Guinea. The three characters involved are anthropologists, two men and a woman. While they’re experiencing their own desire-fueled, jealous emotional turbulence, they’re exploring, and documenting the culture and customs of the Tam tribe, including the gender-bending roles and rituals between the men and women of the tribe. Nell Stone, the woman, is married to Schuyler Fenwick (Fen), and they’ve left the Mumbanyo tribe (“fierce warriors”) because Nell couldn’t relate to, or tolerate the tribe’s violent and aggressive nature. Fen, however, resents her because they left. He also resents her accomplishment. She has written a best seller, and is currently a famous anthropologist. She has kept her maiden name. He seems to feel like he’s merely regarded as Nell Stone’s husband. She wants to stay married to him. She wants very much to have a child. There have been some tragic and dark incidents involving babies, Nell’s own, and the babies of the Mumbanyo tribe. These incidents torture and haunt Nell.
Let’s get the one complaint out of the way (not enough to subtract a star, or even a fraction of a star – actually, I wish I could give this book more than five stars). Sometimes the author hints darkly at an event instead of clearly explaining. She infers. Now, some literary-type readers prefer the subtlety of inferences. I admire those who understand them. I do not consider them posers. I love the ambiguities and possibilities of an unanswered (or unanswerable) question. But, in this instance, and some others, I wish I knew more about what happened before the story opens, especially Fen’s dark past, as part of a huge family, living in isolation in the Australian outback. I’m pretty sure about the type of behaviors that this one, dark hint refers to, but not entirely sure. The resulting twist in Fen’s character, however, is more important than the particular, salacious details of his nefarious family history, and his acceptance and expectation of evil and violence in every civilization steers his actions as an adult anthropologist living with the tribes along the banks of the Sepik River (“flamboyantly serpentine, the of the South Pacific” – see? Isn’t she brilliant?).
Of the three main characters, Fen is the only one who doesn’t have a narrative voice. The reader only knows him through the first person narration of Andrew Bankson, and the third person limited narration of his wife, Nell Stone (loosely based on the real-life anthropologist Margaret Mead). We only get to hear his voice through dialogue and observe his actions. He’s the least sympathetic character throughout. Although I did not love him as a person, I loved the creation of him, the complexity of his sometimes-evil nature. And, I understood him, although I could never empathize with him. I’ve met him many times, here in the real world. He reminds me of so many men I’ve known well. He’s Australian, but in many ways, like an American man.
So, let’s get on with my love letter to Lily King. I plunged under, into the world she created with her words, and did not care to come up for air, ever. I once had a writing teacher who told us to create a list when we got “stuck”. Here’s the best list I’ve ever read (describing Andrew Bankson’s past) “The house I grew up in there, Hemsley House, had been in the possession of Bankson scientists for three generations, its every desktop, drawer, and wardrobe stuffed with scientist’s remnants spyglasses, test tubes, finger scales, pocket magnifiers, loupes, compasses, and a brass telescope; boxes of glass slides, and ento pins, geodes, fossils, bones, teeth, petrified wood, framed beetles and butterflies, and thousands of loose insect carcasses that turned to powder upon contact.” A positively Dickensian list, but better, less preposterously wordy and more utilitarian. I wanted to walk through Hemsley House, and touch those things. In a way, I felt like I had.
I could go on and on. I underlined passages and made notations in the margins. I lived inside these pages. There are so many layers, and so many insights and ideas to explore and rethink. I keep going back. After all, anthropology is the study of humans and their lives, their relationships to each other and to their environment, their art, their chronicles. It’s everything. I keep going back to a diagram (a “grid”) that Fen, Andrew and Nell create together, categorizing personalities into the four main directions on a compass. You don’t have to be just North, South, East, or West, though, you can be a Northwest personality, or a Southeast personality. This novel is so complex and so deep. It asks so many beautifully unanswerable questions. Above all, this story leaves the reader with a way to look at, appreciate and observe cultures that are highly civilized, but considered to be primitive and inferior to traditional Western culture. These characters view anthropology through a wide, panoramic lens, a zoom lens, a microscopic lens, and just about any other lens you can think of, including no lens, just immersion. It’s also about how our ideas, like our children, take on a life of their own once they’re launched out into the world. You can take aim, but you have no control after they’re flying free. It’s about how we think and work as individuals and how we work collectively. It’s about everything that’s important in life.