It has often been my experience that rereading a book that was important to me at earlier times in my life is something like lying on the analyst’s couch. The narrative I have had by heart for years is suddenly being called into alarming question. It seems that I’ve misremembered quite a lot about this or that character or this or that plot turn—they met here in New York, I was so sure it was Rome; the time was 1870, I thought it was 1900; and the mother did what to the protagonist? Yet the world still drops away while I’m reading and I can’t help marveling, If I got this wrong, and this and this wrong, how come the book still has me in its grip?
Although he prefers the caffeinated life, Pollan is not sure where he stands on whether coffee and tea have been good for humans in general. And even if he were clear, he probably wouldn’t tell us, he says.
“Caffeine makes us work harder. Is that good for us or not? What is good for a species?” Pollan says. “The kind of person caffeine made us, someone more likely to be striving and ambitious and highly productive, does that necessarily make us happier?”
“The benefits are clear on the civilization ledger,” he adds. “On the species ledger, it really depends if you see civilization as a plus or minus for the species. It does a lot for us, but it also has an enormous cost.”
Early in “The Awakening” — Kate Chopin’s great feminist novel of identity and self-consciousness, which still throbs with relevance more than 120 years after its publication — the heroine’s husband picks a fight. He has spent the evening at a casino and now it’s approaching midnight, but the card game has left Léonce “in high spirits, and very talkative.” He wakes his wife to gossip but she answers him sleepily, “with little half utterances.” Spurned, and still intent on rousing her, Léonce manufactures a fever for their sleeping son. When Edna dares doubt this, Léonce calls her a bad mother. She springs out of bed to check, while Léonce — no longer worried, if he ever actually was — enjoys his cigar. Soon, Mr. Pontellier is fast asleep, but “Mrs. Pontellier was by that time thoroughly awake.”
Awake to what? After the fight, Edna moves out to the balcony and weeps profusely: “An indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish.”
Adana Moreau — a young, orphaned, Dominican woman who emigrates to New Orleans in the 1910s — experiences this realization early in Michael Zapata's debut, The Lost Book of Adana Moreau. It's an epiphany that will echo throughout the novel in multiple dimensions. Smart and heart-piercing, Lost Book is a story of displacement, erasure, identity, mythology, and the ability of literature to simultaneously express and transcend our lives — not to mention reality.
Cloud bound but proud
the dim February sun
survives above the snow.