A Feather on the Breath of God

Once again, I decide to write a short blurb for a book on Goodreads, rather than on my blog.  The novel is by the same author -- Sigrid Nunez -- as The Friend, which I discussed in my last post.  But my "blurb" kept growing longer, and became long enough for a blog entry.  Feather was Nunez's first novel.  I'm not sure I like it well enough to make it "bloggable," but I haven't written about anything else for several days, so here it is!

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A Feather on the Breath of God is generally described as the most autobiographical of Sigrid Nunez's novels. Is it even a novel, rather than a memoir? A question I asked a week ago, after reading The Friend, another of her novels.

Certainly, when an author who is the child of a Chinese-Panamanian father and a German mother, both immigrants, writes in the voice of a narrator who has identical parentage, it's natural to assume that what we are reading is essentially a memoir. Perhaps a fictionalized memoir. As far as my enjoyment was concerned, it really made little difference.

The book is divided into four chapters, describing her father, her mother, her period as a ballet student, and her later life as the lover of a Russian immigrant taxi driver. Some readers have complained that the first two chapters, at least, are merely descriptive and don't advance the "plot." I don't care. They give a fascinating picture of the lives and quirks of her two parents, and of their dysfunctional marriage; they are necessary background to understand her later life. (Regardless of whether "her" means only the narrator or Nunez herself.)

I needed to read and absorb those first two chapters -- the silent, hard-working Chinese-speaking father and the emotional, homesick, German mother, together with the bleakness of her childhood life in "the projects" of New York -- to appreciate the narrator's devotion to dance.

Everything about the world of ballet responds to the young girl looking to escape real life. ... I love it all -- the rules, the rituals, the intolerance of any slackness or leniency. Authoritarianism was, of course, in keeping with my upbringing, but now all the rules had a purpose. Ballet meant finally being taken seriously, meant being allowed to take yourself seriously.

The final chapter, in which the now-woman, living promiscuously while teaching English to immigrants, flows naturally, although hardly predictably or by necessity, out of the earlier chapters. Vadim, her English student, and then her Russian lover, is the male authoritarian she had been looking for, the opposite of her silent, withdrawn father.  

Vadim is tall, handsome, passionate, and cocky. He's complicated and simple, simultaneously. Back home in Odessa, he had been a druggie, a brawler, a gang member. He's a tender lover, but gives off an aura of potential violence, held tightly in reserve -- violence never shown overtly to the narrator. He misses the closeness of Russian friendship, and the ability of the Russian language to express depths of feeling better than does English. He cheats his taxi passengers, but is kind to the elderly and disabled, allowing them to ride for free.

Her friends hated and feared him, and begged her to ditch him. But she contemplates:

A cheat. A litterbug. A drowner of kittens. I don't want to condemn him. I want to understand everything, imagining that the more I understand, the less he will be guilty. That old fallacy.

The narrator is passionately in love with Vadim; Vadim loves and respects her, but he is not surprised or dismayed when she finally dumps him. "Lots of fish in the sea."

A doctor, presumably a therapist, asks her at the book's end:

"Why did you go with this man? What did you want?" The doctor sitting across from me now is a woman. A stout, shapeless, housemother-type, with a homely manner of speaking and an even homelier face. I look at that face and think: How can she possibly understand? This woman has never been ravished.

The question that puzzled even Freud: "What do women want?"