Reading as a Sensory Experience
Join Atlantic editors Jane Yong Kim, Gal Beckerman, and Ellen Cushing in conversation with executive editor Adrienne LaFrance for a discussion of “The Great American Novels,” an ambitious new editorial project from The Atlantic. The conversation will take place at The Strand in New York (828 Broadway) on Wednesday, April 3, at 7 p.m. Tickets are available for purchase here.
When your senses feel numb, you’re likely to seek direct experiences: You might bite into a crisp slice of watermelon to taste the brightness of summer, or spend an evening enveloped in layers of rich sound at the symphony, or stick your nose in a bouquet of perfumed, blooming flowers. A book can deliver these satisfactions only secondhand—but the ones that do it well tap into one of literature’s great pleasures: A skilled writer, through words alone, can draw up scenes that awaken your perception and, in turn, your emotions.
First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic’s Books section:
- What comes after workism?
- “Nature That Cannot Be Driven To,” a poem by Diane Seuss
- Christine Blasey Ford testifies again.
This week, Celine Nguyen offers a list of six titles that might help us “cultivate a more open and receptive state of mind” in our fast-moving, screen-dominated world; they show how life can be enhanced by “sensory richness.” I loved the way Nguyen wrote about Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, a novel in which a young office worker “refuses to let his interest in the world become dulled” as he observes the mundane objects that surround him: escalators, straws, furniture. In Monique Truong’s novel The Book of Salt, meanwhile, Bình, a Vietnamese immigrant in Paris, works as a personal chef for Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. A letter from home brings with it, Truong writes, the “familiar sting of salt … kitchen, sweat, tears or the sea.”
One of my favorite books that doubles as a sensory experience is Amina Cain’s short novel, Indelicacy. The protagonist, Vitória, is a museum cleaner with writerly aspirations. She wants to write about art in particular, though she isn’t “seen as someone who could say something interesting about art.”
But she soon meets a wealthy man at the museum, and her subsequent marriage to him grants her the free time and money to write, go to plays, and luxuriate at the library. Cain makes clear that Vitória always had a keen eye for aesthetics. Early in the novel, when she’s still working at the museum, she stops to look at a painting. In it, she sees a pregnant Virgin Mary prostrate, though “she’s awake to something. She’s looking up, her eyes open just enough to see what’s in front of her, or perhaps what she’s seeing is inside her own mind … It must be cold outside. Inside too. She is lit not radiantly, but with a half radiance and shadows all around.”
When reading the passage, I felt no desire, as I sometimes do, to try to determine what painting Cain was referring to, to look it up and try to decipher what lies in the shadows myself. Instead, I let Cain’s writing spark my imagination, conjuring a vision of the work that takes off from the point where my mind and the text meet. In another passage, Cain’s narrator comments on a painting of Jesus, Mary, and two other figures, observing that “the shapes that are not meant to depict living things are much brighter than the ones meant to look alive. The figures of the living look just as dead as the man who is meant to have been killed.” This somewhat obscure description doesn’t tell us much about the scene she’s observing or the composition of the painting, but it offers something more interesting: the chance to see the art from her unique vantage. Reading a book like Indelicacy might inspire a trip to the museum—but seeing art through Vitória’s eyes might be just as satisfying.
Six Books That Will Jolt Your Senses Awake
By Celine Nguyen
Reading can help us cultivate a more patient, attentive state of mind by highlighting the beauty present in our day-to-day lives.
What to Read
Winter World, by Bernd Heinrich
In Winter World, Heinrich, a longtime University of Vermont biology professor, scrutinizes with unbridled, nerdy glee the ways animals survive the brutal New England winters in his own backyard. Heinrich is clear-eyed and a charming stickler for detail: He learns how many seeds a chipmunk can store in its cheek pouches by experimentally stuffing the cheeks of one he finds dead. His exactitude makes the book clear, not ponderous, and it’s full of juicy bits, such as how hibernating bears turn their urine into creatine, the compound favored by bodybuilders, so they stay in shape. Heinrich identifies patterns, similarities, and skills without anthropomorphizing. “Life is played out on the anvil of ice and under the hammer of deprivation,” he writes. “For those that endure until spring, existence is reduced to its elegant essentials.” It’s sort of a relief to remember that humans aren’t actually that well adapted to the cold, and that animals do things we never could—like cutting off blood supply to legs or toes, or sending antifreeze through their veins. As with Wintering, the beauty of this book lies in its attention to what shines amid all the gray. — Heather Hansman
From our list: Six books about winter as it once was
Out Next Week
???? There’s Always This Year: On Basketball and Ascension, by Hanif Abdurraqib
???? On Giving Up, by Adam Phillips
???? Worry, by Alexandra Tanner
Your Weekend Read
Even Oprah Doesn’t Know How to Talk About Weight Loss Now
By Hannah Giorgis
It would take much longer than one hour to seriously reckon with the complexity of Winfrey (the person) being a victim of diet culture, and Winfrey (the media phenomenon) being an accelerant of its ideals. But doing at least some of that work should be a prerequisite for any Winfrey-led special that focuses on the shame associated with body image among women—especially Black women, considering how racism and sexism inform people’s views of our bodies.
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