Observables #11
on the Neopolitan novels, homemade dumplings and the right kind of personal trainer
Katie Zdybel is guesting here on Observables this week. I hope you enjoy her take on what we’re reading, wearing and watching!
I am very late to this party, but just finished reading the Neopolitan novels by Elena Ferrante. If you are also late to this party, get over here now. This is one of those reading experiences that changed me, both as a writer and a person. The narrative entered my blood stream and infused me with the experience of being Lénu (the protagonist). It doesn’t feel so much like reading as it feels like absorbing the trauma and hard-won victories of the characters via osmosis. It is straightforward text, lots of telling with sudden, dagger-sharp scenes, a few fleeting moments of floating in the beauty of female friendship. The reversals occur rapidly: years pass in a couple paragraphs; marriages, affairs, careers begin and dissolve over the course of a few pages. But there are four novels in the series and each one, though it covers a lot of ground, also digs a very deep, jagged well. I think I’ll be processing the reverberations of these novels on my core for years to come.
Also reading: Japanese Home Cooking by Sonoko Sakai because everyone in my family simultaneously began talking dreamily about dumplings.
Can this be what I wish I was wearing? I wish I was wearing anything from Liya Kebede’s fashion brand, Lemlem. Everything is flowy and soft with colours that reflect what’s all around me during this glorious season between end of summer and beginning of fall. It’s a hot, bright, colourful, and windy time in southern Ontario right now and I want to wear this dress on a hill full of wildflowers with the rose-gold sun of late September behind me. (I’m not sure what I’d be doing there—frolicking? Gazing aloofly into the middle distance? More likely, running after squabbling children and feeling like I should get home and make our dental appointments.) Also, Kebede is a maternal-health advocate from Ethiopia who uses her company to celebrate traditional African weaving and advocate for better healthcare, education, and job opportunities. So, in other words, she’s a rad lady, of the kind I aspire to be.
I do have one teeny Lemlem piece—a scarf that cost about 1/17 the cost of her dresses, which I bought a long time ago, in the Yukon of all places. I hang it from a wooden hook in my bedroom on an otherwise bare white wall, all summer so that the breeze can catch it. We got a kitten this summer and, guess what, it doubles as a cat toy! So it’s a bit shredded now but still floaty and full of my favourite blues and whites. (And look! It’s hot and windy as I write this and there happens to be a field behind me so—bonus—you get to see the scarf. I’m not so good at looking aloof, but I do think I’ve captured in one pic my annoyance at myself for not yet having called the dentist.)
I’ve become one of those weird people who doesn’t watch tv at all. I haven’t been able to settle into a series and also I’ve been very absorbed by books (see Elena Ferrante novels above; they’ll consume you). The only thing I’ve been watching for months are the extremely butt-kicking and gratifying barre workouts on Alo, by Emily Sferra. I feel like she’s become my personal trainer and I even talk back to her when she tells me I can do “four more!” (“Maybe, Emily!”) I love hardcore online workouts but I don’t always love fitness instructors. Sferra is my kind of gal: encouraging but not perky, humorous but not sloppy, demanding but not superficial. Her workouts wring me out and then, I sit and stretch for a while and I guess here’s where I’m doing my only real watching—I youtube clips from my favourite comedians. This one makes me think that if Bill Hader and I had gone to high school together I would have had a total major crush on him, like, oh my god, he’s so funny. Watch all the way through, please, and let his impression of the dying tauntaun from Star Wars wash over you.
Katie’s book of short stories is available here. You can follow her on Twitter here.
Episode 6 of Sister On! comes out tomorrow. We discuss “thought wasps”—those nasty thoughts that we have to swat away on repeat, and the best ways to refute them. Join us for a listen!