Russia, Sudan, Turkey

This is what it is like to make yourself a promise: To read a book from every country on earth; to read The Master and Margarita in Russian (I already own a copy with a plain cover); to read My Name is Red in Turkish; to read Season of Migration to the North in Arabic; and to think long and often about some of my favorite books. When you make that promise to yourself, you are full of so much excitement for life, and you open up your Arabic textbook and daydream about a nice, high quality guide to Turkish.

I’ve talked before on this blog about the fact that the aforementioned three books rank among my exclusive “favorite of all time” pile. They are the subject of my fanciest dreams and goals for myself as a novelist. But they are also three books that I have read from three different countries to tick off my boxes of the Reading Around the World Challenge. For the past few weeks, I’ve assembled a list of tomes from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe that I aim to pick up and read. I’ve read Jamaica. Ireland. France. Colombia. All to be discussed later, all to be gateways to a way of looking at the world that I had never considered.

Russia.

My first brushes of Russian came in my undergraduate years. It is no secret that I study foreign languages as though they were sustenance. I often grabbed my textbooks, went to eat with my dear friend Liz at the community kitchens, and discussed with her the scope of my academic and linguistic interests, and she did the same. The textbook for my introductory Russian course was among the most expensive that I had purchased in my undergraduate career, but it came with a dictionary that I still use to this day and once took with me into a rock concert. I realized rather quickly that, in my long history of gobbling down languages, Russian was the most difficult I had studied (it retains this title of most difficult to this day).

I can’t recall why I picked up The Master and Margarita, how it came into my life. I don’t believe anyone recommended it to me, but rather that I inched upon it like a soft body of water creeping up on the beach. Like everyone, my favorite character is Behemoth the black cat with a side of saucy witticisms.

Russian as a language sounds like the gears of an engine coming to life in the middle of the night. The declensions bash together like marbles in a pouch, but there is a gentleness at the bottom of all those palatal words. It was actually a surprise to me that Russian has proven more laborious than a language like Japanese, which is completely unrelated to English, but that is the reality of the situation. Even the names of the letters can twist my tongue such that it puckers in my mouth trying to capture the sounds correctly. My professor kindly told me that I had “excellent pronunciation” but it was certainly like being on a rollercoaster as it takes off, forces assaulting you from all angles.

Sudan.

My first experience with Season of Migration to the North was through a North African literature class I took in the spring of my freshman year. I was still alive with the thrill of my young adulthood, and I was ready to approach a book like this. I have read it a few times over the years, savoring the annotations that the book’s previous owner left in its margins. The next time I read it, I will add my own thoughts, like a prayer from one reader to another.

Reading from the Sudan was a…moving experience, for lack of a more potent word. Throughout my teen years, I read as much as I could on the conflict in Darfur, wondering what it would be like to be able to master the language of the region. Indeed, this was part of the reason that I studied Arabic in the first place, to improve my understanding of this world that had so gripped me. At some point, I recall doing a presentation on the Sudan in the Arab Spring for my classmates.

Arabic sounds like the sizzling of water in a pan before one is about to make the most divine recipe. Its words boil over, hot and fluid. I choke a bit on the plurals — there are a bouquet of different plural patterns. Nonetheless, it is a language with blood beating just below its surface. I do love it, I love floating around it and peeking in on its heavy might.

Turkey

My copy of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red is fragile. A section of tape holds one page together, and the cover is barely attached to the body of the book. Yet I can’t think of a work more deserving of this tattered state, even though I worry that it will tumble apart before I can annotate it.

Visiting Istanbul is on my “bucket list.” I want to traverse its streets and pretend that I am in a Pamuk novel (minus the murder and having my corpse tossed to the bottom of the well), soaking up the history of the city. I don’t know anyone who speaks Turkish, so I am a bit alone in my journey through this language and its homeland. But I have My Name is Red to guide me.

Turkish sounds like leather — leather snapping in strong hands, leather being worked around the back of a wooden chair. It is taut, powerful, and finely tuned to the skyscraper that it can make out of a collection of words and morphemes. I’m sort of in awe of a good agglutinative language, in its quirks and sharp corners darting down a mysterious alleyway.

This little ditty is the first of a number of blogs about my experience Reading Around the World. Even as I write this, I have an eye on my passport, ready to chase these books across oceans and masses of land and experience them for myself. In the meantime, it is cliched and unoriginal to say it, but it would appear that to travel, one needs a book to take her to places she has never been. Soon I will be on my first trip, to Scotland. My nerves about flying are washing out in the excitement of a new country of literature to explore. It is going to be a good summer.