Which books moved you most in the 20-teens?

Posted on by stanleyobando

I know. It’s a tough one.

Costa Rican: I’ve never been able to forget “Única mirando al mar,” the poignant tale of a lonely old man who literally puts himself into the trash and ends up living among the inhabitants of the Rio Azul trash dump not far from my home. It’s since been covered with unnaturally green grass, but the inequality Fernando Contreras Castro portrayed has grown fiercer and fiercer since the book was published.

Other: So, so many. I mean, this was the decade in which I finally read “El Quijote,” finishing it over a solo dinner in San Pedro, crying over the final chapter, eight months pregnant. Things trended much lighter and less challenging after my daughter’s birth; there have been a lot of mystery series, albeit very good ones. I hope to wade back into bigger waves in the 20s.

On this New Year’s Eve, as firecrackers pop all over the Central Valley, I’ll be vowing to read much more in the year ahead. May the coming decade be full of quiet page-turning, luscious browsing, and recommendations swapped among friends.

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter). 

Day 17: Words that knock down tyrants

Posted on by stanleyobando

On Sunday, a woman literally leapt over hurdles to make history. Today, I invite you to meet a group of artists who blazed their trail on the page. This year, they created an anthology written, edited and illustrated by women working in concert to tackle a single theme, the first anthology of its kind in Costa Rica. The result was “Mi desamor es una dulzura invaluable” (a title that actually started out in English as “My Sweet Unlove Remembered Such Wealth Brings,” inspired by Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29).

I got to hear some of the women behind this project talk about their book – which united rising stars in playwriting, poetry, fiction and journalism, along with illustrator Alejandra Montero Agüero – at a Librería Internacional over the weekend. As I listened, I felt myself filling with questions: how is it possible that this was the first all-female project of its kind in Costa Rica? Why on earth is it still so unusual for women to take up artistic space like this? What should we do about the enduring gap? When award-winning journalist Natalia Díaz Zeledón, the editor of the anthology, read her preface to close out the activity, she echoed some of those same thoughts. Here’s just a taste, with apologies for any errors in my translation:

Words are marvelous… in the correct order, they can dispel confusion, heal wounds and reveal new worlds.

…Knowledge, or so we’ve been told, defeats despots. Women who produce knowledge break down the walls that hold back the rest of us. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Virginia Woolf, Gabriela Mistral, Clarice Lispector, Maya Angelou, Margaret Atwood, Giaconda Belli, Ana Istarú, Valeria Luiselli… many western women have use their words to create openings to new worlds. Still, there are not enough of us: we can see this in bookstores, in the guests at literary festivals, and on the shelves of libraries.

…The #MeToo social movements and the testimonies of women don’t spring up from a sudden outpouring of dissent. It’s clear that those crimes have been hidden beneath a population that is unequal, that is educated to be that way… There is suffering that we still do not put into words because those who could use those words have not done so. That’s what true equality is about, in which gender ceases to be an obstacle to communication.

-Natalia Díaz Zeledón

As she finished her reading, I realized the answer to my questions had been sitting right in front of me all along. The answer is for individual women to raise their voices, and for more of us to do this in groups so that we can bring others along. What’s more, all of us have the power to help women reshape the shelves of our bookstores: by buying their books, by reading and sharing their creations. Every time we do this, we cast another vote for this kind of work. We pull up another seat at the table these writers shared on Saturday.

If you read Spanish, I highly recommend you check out this slender volume that covers so much ground and is beautifully illustrated by Alejandro Montero Agüero. Here’s to words that heal and words that reveal new worlds, all in the hands of brilliant new talents.

Who are your favorite women writers? I’d love to know.

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook! You can also find me churning out small, square poems on any topic under the sun (here on the site, on Instagram or Twitter).  

 

 

Day 9: An ode to my happy place

Posted on by stanleyobando

Though school starts in February in Costa Rica, I still think of September with that back-to-school fondness, aided by the fact that this cool, rainy month does give me some autumn vibes. And what better place to celebrate back to school than a cozy independent bookstore?

If you’re reading this, you almost assuredly love bookstores. You might even own one, and if not, you’ve definitely imagined yourself owning one, probably in a picturesque fishing village where you would wear hand-knitted sweaters and gaze out at the storm-tossed sea in between customers (right? I’m not the only one, am I?). So I’m not convincing anyone here. But this is a love that had gotten away from me, and when I wandered into La Librería Andante for the first time in a long while – it’s a gorgeous, lovingly curated little bookstore in the university district near my house – I felt so many knots inside me come loose. In a world of noise, it’s a quiet place; in a fast world, it encourages you to move slowly and to browse, which is such a lovely, relaxing and somnolent word, browwwwse; in a world of technology, it is timeless; in a world of foolishness, it is an oasis of wisdom and beauty. As I wandered through its offerings, I set myself the second challenge of this year (the first being to get to know more artists): to visit all the local bookstores I can find, and to redirect as much of my shopping to them as I possibly can.

Why is the bookstore or the library more magical than being surrounded by our own bookshelves at home? I think it’s the sense of possibility. If books have altered the course of the life or the way you see the world in the past, then standing in a bookstore makes your nerves tingle, because you know that the next game-changer might be within your reach at this very moment. It could be behind that beautiful, glossy cover over there. It could be wedged into an undignified corner of the used book stacks. You might find it today – you might not. You might walk right past it, not knowing. But it’s there, and that’s such a comfort. As the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes put it (oh yeah, I’m just nerding all the way out today – it’s that bookstore air), there’s “something holy in the darkness… and as rich moonlight may be to the blind, unconsciously consoling.”

If you can, go to a bookstore or a library this week and bask in that consolation, that knowledge that whether you read them today or this year or not, there are wise words waiting for us. There’s something holy in the darkness. Tucked away, bound and covered but ready to break free at any moment – there is light.

(If you’re a sucker for an incredible library story, check out “The Gift of a Public Library” by Deborah Fallows in The Atlantic, featuring beautiful libraries doing the impossible to keep their doors open in small towns including my mother’s: Eastport, Maine.)

La Librería Andante, San Pedro, San José, Costa Rica.
Katherine Stanley Obando

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook!

Day 7: From Jorge, for Greta

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Poetry is the damndest thing.

Last night at dinner I said to my husband, “What do we do? How are we supposed to go on when we have world leaders who can listen to a speech like Greta’s and then not take action? Do we just revolt in every single country that’s not falling in line? Do we create some kind of a parallel leadership structure? Do we just take over? Do we just create a new, single nation of people who give a rat’s ass, and elect our own leaders and go from there?”

He shrugged, which I guess is a logical response to such questions, especially when you have a mouthful of soup.

And then I walked upstairs and took a book of Costa Rican poetry off the shelf on a WWJDS-ish whim (that’s What Would Jorge Debravo Say, of course), and the book fell open to “La Patria,” and there he was, telling me just about the same thing. “A homeland is just like fruit,” he says, “sometimes sweet and delicious, sometimes acidic and bitter.” He imagines a borderless planet where “we could work, serenely abandoned.”

Isn’t that what we need to do? To get to work, abandoned though we may be by many of the people who have the most power to create change? Don’t those of us who are committed to this have more in common than compatriots might? Should we be pledging allegiance and paying taxes, with our donation dollars and purchase power, to a new nation led by the scientists and CEOs and mayors and teenagers and whoever else has been stepping up to the plate? It sounds like a fantasy, but it may also be the only possible way to continue.

For the first time in a long time, a poem made me feel more energetic at night than I had in the the morning. I’m not sure how serene I’ll feel about our abandonment in the harsh light of day, but I won’t be alone. I’m a citizen of the unstoppable. Now, there is no other way to be.

Here’s the full poem, “La Patria” (my apologies for any late-night less-than-elegant or overly creative translation):

The homeland is like fruit:
sometimes sweet and delicious;
sometimes acidic and bitter.

As soon as we start school,
or even as soon as we’re born,
they place the homeland in our hands
and they make us love it.
They tell us that “homeland” is delicious.
They never tell us that sometimes it’s bitter.

Homeland is the bitterest invention
since the bad invention of our soul.

If we all inhabited the world
as one single homeland,
there would be no orphans, no widows,
not in the lands of drought, not in the pouring rain.

We would be able to work, serenely abandoned,
without killing each other for the homeland on the battlefield…

(From Vórtices, Editorial Costa Rica, Second Edition, 1999)

I’m a writer in San José, Costa Rica, on a year-long quest to share daily posts on inspiring people, places and ideas from my adopted home as a kind of tonic during a rough time in the world. Sign up (top right of this page) to receive a little dose of inspiration every weekday in your mailbox; tell a friend; check out past posts; and please connect with me on Instagram or Facebook!