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An Arrangement Of Light (2012)

by Nicole Krauss(Favorite Author)

3.31 of 5 Votes: 1

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Byliner, Inc.

review 1: I've noticed that the more I read, the harder it is to move me or impact me. Krauss' short story is beautifully written, a little mysterious in its unnamed totalitarian regime and like about ten thousand other short stories. What makes writing that lasts? This Sunday morning I'm feeling that the words we write are all too transient and unmoored from their creative process they float away into the ether. Maybe my mood is commiserate with Krauss' story and maybe that is why I'm left feeling less than uplifted.
review 2: Last night I laid in bed thinking of a story: Nicole Krauss’s An Arrangement of Light. I’d read it the day before and hadn’t thought much of it since. I’d like to say I was letting the words soak into my brain, so I could later deduce s... moreome kind of meaning from it, but that wasn’t my initial intention. In fact, I didn’t know what to think of the story after I closed my Kindle app and went on to check Twitter or my email or chat with a coworker or help a customer. I was fine brushing it off without another thought, ignoring the unsettled feeling in my stomach that I couldn’t do anything with what I’d just read.“I totally got this,” a Goodreads reviewer wrote of the story, but I didn’t understand what I got until I fell against my pillow the next day and started to think. Krauss wrote, “A garden is an arrangement of light.” It was something the secondary character, a famous landscape architect, said often, a phrase I turned over in my mind trying to divine what it meant. I studied the lightbulb exposed on my fan. A few weeks ago, I was pulling on the chain, fighting between it and the light switch trying to turn it on, when the shade fell and hit me on the head. Something about that memory made me think about the generals who came to the architect’s garden to lay bodies under the ground.That’s when I thought of the light as a prism, magnifying the gardens into something we use to manipulate what we see in front of us–a kaleidoscopic vision allowing us to change the way we perceive things out of convenience or an effort to avoid pain. I remembered how the architect told the main character, his personal secretary, not to be fooled by the beauty of nature. “The weak are killed,” he told him, “first tormented and then killed, and the strong are nourished by the rot and decay.” And I realized that the architect drew a parallel to himself and his relationship with his work, how he could allow the men to come and dig up his creations, dump in the bodies, and flourish from their forced fertilization.I wondered if the arrangement of light, the way he interpreted its reflection on the gardens, provoked a self-imposed expectation. We thrive on illumination, on food, on growth–those of us who can’t settle. We give ourselves expectations of greatness, and when these expectations come to light it is both hard to meet them and easy to let them fall. But now I have to wonder if the architect meant himself as the weak one. It is easy to undermine ourselves when we believe that we are weak. It is how we allow people to bury their waste in our land and feed off our vulnerabilities. So then the way the light arranges itself on the garden each day is how we are forced to see the things we try to hide underneath, because no matter how deeply they are buried, the light eventually arranges itself to reveal the truth.There was almost a Gatsby-esque feeling to this story. A young man records his observations of a troubled older gentlemen who appears a lesser version of himself on the surface, but who also bleeds his anxieties in the sweat on his brow, so that you know he is aware of all his misgivings but manages to deny them as well. Only Gatsby did a much better job of denial, whereas the architect wore a sense of acceptance, or at least a suppressed awareness, about his shoulders like a scarf. It is his defense mechanism, his way of acknowledging his faults without really acknowledging them. In some ways, looking at the architect through the narrator’s eyes was like looking at myself through a friend’s eyes. I saw how desperate I looked, how defeated I let myself become, how disappointing and pathetic I could be when there were people out there hoping better of me, but sadly expecting much less.In this way, I think an Arrangement of Light was less about the light in the garden and more about the way we arrange ourselves; at the very least it served as a parallel to the ways we manage and mismanage our demeanors, our words, our ideas and perceptions. With each light that is shed on someone or something else, we arrange the way we see that person or that thing until we get the best sense of them that we can and know what we can and cannot handle, what we can and cannot expect. In the end, what the story gives us is perspective. less

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