The little things you remember...

[Kell]

Out of the blue, this evening, I had a flashback to a moment in a book I read years and years ago, for no apparent reason, and I can't fathom why this particular moment has stuck in my head either.

 

As a child I read the Laura Ingalls Wilder "Little House" books, and I can't remember exactly which one it is from (it might actually have been The Little House on the Prairie), but the moment that suddenly popped into my head was when the kids are really crucifying the new teacher and singing a rhyme they've made up about her - "Lazy, lousy Lizey-Jane". If I remember correctly, the teacher was Almonzo Wilder's sister, Eliza-Jane (I could be wrong about it being his sister, but I know her name was Eliza-Jane). Almonzo, of course, went on to marry Laura Ingalls.

 

Is there a moment from a book you read years ago that really sticks in your head?

[Anika]

Though I read 'Little Women' eons ago, I always remember the part where Beth is given the chance to use the neighbors piano, but she's too shy to do it. Then one day Laurie's grandfather hears her in the house playing it. He's very moved, and later in the story Beth comes home to find he has given her the piano.

[Ben Mines]

The memorable moments for me are all moments that caused spine-tingles. There are too many to recall, so I'll just mention four--if you'll allow me to copy-paste myself.

 

From my blog:

 

Nabokov instructed his students to read with their spine. I believe I now understand what he means: As the insectile clicking of a Geiger counter indicates the presence of radiation, so the tingling of a reader's spine will indicate that he is in the presence of good literature. I can think of several such moments in my experience with books.

 

The first that comes to mind is a speciously incidental parenthesis in The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges. Describing the polysemous nature of the texts in the infinite library, the narrator notes that,

 

(an n number of possible languages use the same vocabulary; in some of them, the symbol library allows the correct definition a ubiquitous and lasting system of hexagonal galleries, but library is bread or pyramid or anything else, and these seven words which define it have another value. You who read me, are You sure of understanding my language?)

The effect of that question, at which I think I gave a slight gasp, was profound. I at once intuited, dizzyingly, a language analogous to a lenticular image or a Gestalt illusion capable of conveying two or three or perhaps innumerable meanings at once to different readers. I could not be certain that the text before me, or any text, for that matter, did not signify and radiate such a multiplicity of meanings. I could no longer be certain that the meaning I had access to was the correct or even the intended one. The book that I held in my hands was made suddenly alien. In terms of the queasy feeling of unreality that overcame me, it was much as if a hypnotist had clicked his fingers and revealed to me that the beautiful woman I was embracing was in fact a wooden hatrack.

 

The next tingle that comes to mind occurred while I was reading A Pale View of Hills. Readers should not be deceived by the pedestrian simplicity of Ishiguro's prose style. His entire novel is transformed by a single word in the last chapter, a slip of the tongue that collapses three characters into a one. The effect is startling, even more so than those paintings by Acimboldo and Dali where the details (fruit bowl, couch, doorway) pull together into a single face. Ishiguro achieves the effect, retroactively, with the addition of a single, tiny detail.

 

Borges describes a "teleology of words and episodes" that is the hallmark of good literature. A third moment on my list is at the end of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, where the subtle foreshadowing of Anna's tragic fate in the dreams and symbols that recur throughout the narrative (the shuddering train and the Russian peasant's mumbled words) prepares the way for a climax that is, to borrow a journalistic cliche, shattering; an unforgettable scene that closes spine-tinglingly in an aura of coal smoke, shrieking brakes and inexorable kismet.

 

Finally, in Nabokov's own novels there are many scenes to choose from, but one that stands out as being particularly spine-tingly is near the end of Look at the Harlequins! Anyone who has read it will remember Vadim's strange mental deficiency: He is unable, as he imagines himself walking down the street, to change directions; instead, he is required to rotate the world around the axis of his own point-of-view until where he wants to go is before him. Throughout the novel, I kept raising my eyebrows at his complicated descriptions of this mental foible and seriously wondering where he (Nabokov) was taking me. By the end of the book, I regreted mistrusting his auctorial guidance. The masterful way Nabokov sets up and then deploys this device to bring the theme of dementia to its climax (when Vadim, aphasic, probably suffering a stroke, grips with helplessly enfeebled hands a stile he is unable to climb, at the end of a country path he is unable to retrace, since, as the reader knows, doing so would require him to pick up and rotate the entire world 180 degrees) is one of the high points of the novel and of my reading.

 

There are, of course, countless other books and scenes that might be mentioned. Ulysses alone could supply us with eight or nine galvanic screenfuls of examples, from the silver-helmeted apparition of Rudy that appears to Bloom at the end of the Nighttown episode, to the tragic cheese sandwich that that lovable homo domesticus consumes alone, with one dark eye on the clock, knowing Boylan wends his unstoppable way toward 7 Eccles Street.

Edited November 27, 2009 by Ben Mines

[twinkle]

One of the most moving books I've ever read was The Outsiders by S.E.Hinton - probably because I was a hormonal teenager! For a period of two weeks at least one girl in my GCSE English class would be in tears because she'd got to the part

where Johnny dies

.

 

Every now and then that scene pops into my head.

Edited December 11, 2009 by Chrissy
Added spoiler cover - just in case!

[~Andrea~]

Chrissy - there's still no spoiler over that!

[Chrissy]

It worked this time! Thanks Andrea, I'd not have looked again otherwise!

[KW]

An unforgettable moment from Wages of Sin by Penn Williamson stuck with me: nailing the hero's hand to a cross while the bad guy ( a priest killer - this was waaaay before Dan Brown's time ) expounds on his crime.