compartments.

a writer's life vs career & book review of compartment no. 6

My birthday was this past weekend and I kept waiting to have something insightful to write about being one year older, the wisdom I’ve gathered from publishing my first book in my thirty-fifth year, but found myself coming up short. I had asked my partner weeks in advance if we could do something quiet, just the two of us, so he surprised me with a weekend getaway to Monterey where we stayed in a beach motel with a vintage Pepsi machine and had a fancy seafood dinner inside a greenhouse dome and read books on the beach and sipped wine with a view of the bay. It was beyond lovely, and I felt overwhelmed with gratitude to be with someone who would take the time to plan such a thoughtful trip. So, that is what I have to say about turning thirty-six.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what it means to have a writing life versus a writing career. Someone recently encouraged me to start thinking about my writing in terms of a ‘career,’ and I suppose they meant some conglomeration of marketing and planning and projected growth. But my writing career still feels very accidental to me, despite working very hard at it, I often find myself at a loss when it comes to describing what I write or my future goals with my writing.

I did just finish editing Assemblage, which will come out November 11th with Alien Buddha Press, and am now in the process of asking for blurbs / reviews (terrifying!) — this feels very much like my ‘career,’ things I wouldn’t be doing if I didn’t want to publish and share my work.

Lan Samantha Chang wrote: “A writing life and a writing career are two separate things, and it’s crucial to keep the first. The single essential survival skill for anybody interested in creating art is to learn to defend this inner life from the world.”

I found Chang’s notion of the writer’s inner life resonated as I’ve been in my own fallow, observational period. I haven’t even been reading much, and much of what I have read lately I haven’t been moved by, or I’ve not finished it at all. I needed a lot of quiet time to go on walks and stare at walls after traveling to promote The Drowned Woman and putting myself out there at readings.

Yesterday’s new moon was in Leo (finally) and signified a reset of one’s energy and opened us all up to the possibility of a new reality — take risks, dream big, manifest! I feel like August will indeed be a productive month and I intend to make an effort to write every day, to work on my new project. I have spent these last few weeks moving slowly, nourishing that inner life Chang mentions, and now I must honor my writer’s life by setting aside the time necessary to create. Where that leaves me with the concept of career, I am not sure. I will certainly keep my day job.

I recently read Compartment No. 6 by Rosa Liksom (trans. from Finnish by Lola Rogers) which is the story of ‘the girl,’ she is given no other name, traveling across Siberia from Moscow, where she is a student, in the waning days of the Soviet Union. She is escaping a complicated relationship and undertaking a trip to Mongolia where she hopes to study some of the ancient sites. The train compartment she is given is shared with an ex-soldier who fills the small room with the stench of vodka, body odor, and his foul storytelling. The way Liksom writes, the conversation appears one-sided, he talks and talks and the girl is weighted down by his words. Though she does appear to respond, it’s never shared with the reader, and so the dialogue becomes a monologue.  

The constant juxtaposition of their somewhat decrepit train (it keeps having to stop to cool the engine) and the stark Siberian beauty seen from their window is masterfully done.

“A new day was before them. All of Siberia slowly brightened. The man in his blue tracksuit bottoms and white shirt did push-ups between the bunks, sleep in his eyes, his mouth dry and smelly, the mucousy smell of sleep in the compartment, no breath from the window, tea glasses quietly on the table, crumbs silent on the floor. A new day, Yellow, frosty birches, pine groves, animals busy in their branches, a fresh snow billowing over the plains.”

This book is tense due to the soldier’s mercurial and often menacing nature and Liksom forces the reader to stomach moments of intense discomfort. But it's also filled with an abundance of humanity and always punctuated by the brilliant backdrop of a Siberian landscape. The towns the train stops in often necessitate overnight accommodation, a re-stocking of supplies. In each supply line the mood is different, the conversations and arguments that happen while waiting for a copy of the newspaper, a pack of cigarettes, could be either convivial or brutal. There is something like nostalgia for the Soviet Union complete with its many contradictory parts.

“She went straight to the hotel restaurant. There were three signs on the restaurant door: CLOSED, CLOSED FOR DINNER, CLOSED FOR INVENTORY. The restaurant was full.”

Liksom herself lived as a squatter and in communes and one can assume some, if not most, of Compartment No. 6 is based on her own experiences. The book was also very recently made into a movie, available to rent on Amazon Prime, so I intend to watch that soon. Presently, I making progress on The Diary of a Provincial Lady by E.M. Delafield, a book I picked up in Notting Hill when we visited last month, and it is so delightful I want to read it as slowly as possible, and I probably shall.

(cover image is by Kazimir Malevich)