The scene is very short, just a couple of lines long. It is completely irrelevant to the novel’s plot and yet, in its mundaneness I found magic.
When I read fiction, I seek entertainment but also affinity. I take the place of the main character or characters and buy into their life story. I immerse myself in their surroundings and partake of their conflicts. Along the way I enjoy the author’s prose, his or her use of metaphors and similes and the occasional or regular dollop of experimentation. But from time to time, I do also get carried away by a phenomenon I’ve come to label the “wonderful moments of real-life quotidianness”. These are sentences or phrases that strike me for their prosaicness and make me look up from the page. In the example quoted above, when I read the book, I remember thinking at the time that I’d done the same thing Suleiman had done on a few occasions before. In fact, my son did it a couple of weeks ago when we were watching a movie. He came into the lounge, sat down and made a funny noise. Straight away he shot up and said: “That wasn’t what you think it was, it was the sofa.” As if to convince us he sat back down and made the same noise and we all laughed about it.
I, too, laughed when I read the passage with nine-year-old Suleiman. In a novel about the Qaddafi regime and the brutality of it, you need these light-hearted moments. I don’t think Hisham Matar included that scene with a specific purpose in mind. That scene just happened. In the same way characters breathe, but we don’t notice their inhalation/exhalation processes until one of them “sighs with disappointment”. These mundane moments don’t exist for a particular reason. I even doubt they’re thought through properly. And yet, I notice them for their clarity, ubiquity and, above all, for a reality that mirrors mine. We’re so used to well-crafted and nuanced sentences and paragraphs. We can only hazard a guess at the lengths the writer has gone to in order to produce a fine specimen for us readers to devour. However, a novel or short story is also full of unguarded, non-transcendental moments.
For example, in Zadie Smith’s The Autograph Man, the main character, Alex-Li Tandem travels to New York from London looking for the autograph of erstwhile film star Kitty Alexander. In one passage in the novel Alex is about to cross a busy road in the Big Apple when he is pulled back before stepping off the kerb. The problem? He has looked right instead of looking left. Again, this moment has no significance within the book’s grand narratives: both the search for a father-like figure to fill up the gap left behind by Alex’s dad’s death and the nature of celebrity. Nevertheless, I remember this scene because the same (although the other way around) happened to me when I moved to the Big Smoke from Havana. Even if no one pulled me off the road at the last minute, I do recall feeling confused as to which way to look when crossing a street.
Well-written books trigger off chemical reactions in us through a mix of tropes and reality. Whilst he former continues to be the reason why I read fiction, it is the latter that occasionally gives me a satisfaction that no metaphor, no matter how well-placed, can beat. Even if this “wonderful moment of real-life quotidianness” arrives wrapped up in the sound of what could be (but isn’t) a fart.
© 2013
Next Post: “Sunday Mornings: Coffee, Reflections and Music”, to be published on Sunday 17th February at 10am (GMT)
