 |
|
|
British Pbk Original - Arrow (2000) |
 |
The Knowledge of Water
| British Pbk Original - Arrow (2000) |
 |
The Vanished Child
| About The Author Sarah Smith has lived in Japan, London and Paris. A Harvard Ph.D., she has taught film and eighteenth-century literature, and she now writes and designs documentation for advanced computer products. She has written the hypertext science-fiction novel King of Space as well as several non-fiction books. A Quaker, Ms Smith lives near Boston with her husband and children and her twenty-two-pound Maine coon cat, Vicious. In her own words… Motherhood and housework are crafts—loving and respectable ones—to which one half the world has been traditionally supposed to be called. Women have been supposed to have their life’s satisfaction in motherhood, children, clean kitchen—in that, only that, nothing else. But then there are us others, us diffident others, women who love their work outside the home and who also are called to marry and have children. I know too many women who think the decision will be simple: who of course don’t marry, or of course marry and decide to defer having children, or of course will marry and have children and do their work and somehow manage to fit it all in. And they make decisions that disappoint them; they disappoint their children and their husbands and their employers and themselves; and they feel that they just aren’t managing it right, even as they perform prodigies of heroism. Neither housewives nor heroines, we either pretend we are or make other lives, embrace those values but not be defined by them, craft a life as well as a house, a family, a career. We must be either forgers or artists. In The Knowledge of Water, twenty-year-old Perdita, aspiring concert pianist, is fighting the issue. The Knowledge of Water is as full of forgers and artists as it is of the Great Paris Flood. The mystery—one of the mysteries—is about art forgery, and in a larger sense, the big question in the book is who is going to be content to be a forger, who is going to take the risk of being an artist. Forgery—living your life by someone else’s rules, for someone else’s eyes—is one of the ways to make sense of life. The other is giving way to the flood, to art, to passion, to everything that makes your life grand but that you can’t control, and somehow shaping it and using it. Of course the women who have become artists are the interesting ones to us who are trying. I’m thinking of my friend and former editor Clare, who somehow manages to do it all, and my friend Kathy, who with no husband and no experience of motherhood, and in her forties with a fulltime job, suddenly was called to adopt two South American orphans. I wanted to show a woman like that who had no context at all for feeling the way she did about work. No expectations that she should work, every idea that women should be only wives and mothers—and only the passionate need to be more. Perdita, the "talented and innocent" young woman, is a pianist and almost blind. She wants only two things in life, to be a traditional woman with a husband and family and to play the piano. She gets a lot of support for being a traditional dependent woman, and almost none for being a creative person. Since The Vanished Child, the first book in which she appeared, she’s made a strongly creative decision; she’s gone off to be trained as a concert pianist, a career in which she’ll have to tour and be away from family for months at a time. And then she’s faced with having a child. I didn’t want to talk about solutions (there are no solutions). I wanted to talk about the process of making these kinds of decisions, about the theories and ideas that men have about women and women have about women, about the lures, sex and domesticity and simplicity, that the choices seem to offer. I wanted to talk about the temptation to create forgeries of a relationship, which is a forgery of oneself, and the danger of failing at everything. So I knew that I had to talk in more than one voice. There had to be men’s voices in the book as well as women’s and more than one of each. Leonard is the extreme case; all men are gentlemen or villains, all women great ladies or whores; one is either all perfect or all vile. Reisden and Perdita are the lovers, attracted, unhappily conscious of their own defects, trying to cover them up or to ignore them, finally admitting them and building a relationship that includes themselves, their inadequacies, and their work. Milly Xico, the cynic, disappointed in love, finds something she prefers. And Roy Daugherty, the man who raised his children alone after his wife left, finds himself faced with the choices of a superannuated, retired man; the children are grown, the romance and the work are gone, now what to do with the rest of life? They all say things in quite different ways, and disagree with each other thoroughly, but at one magic moment they all point like magnetic needles in the same direction, towards an attitude about choices in life. And it was the attitude I wanted to dramatize. Reisden, bless his heart, says it well: the way one perceives one’s life becomes an esthetic, even a moral choice; one earns the life one has, partly through the chances one takes and the choices one makes, but partly through the choices one perceives one has. Or, as Perdita says, “If you can’t live up to your destiny, you can at least have one”—and know it—and be flooded with the uncontrollable, unstoppable passion to be alive. | Bibliography
Pbk Oct 00
|
The Knowledge of Water
WebPage: 