On Being Stalked

Which is part of the reason, he admits, for writing the book. And yet, in spinning his tale, he ends up reaching for and achieving much more. He examines his own faults, the fluid ethics of one’s subconscious, and questions his use of another’s e-mails in his text. He looks at the faults of the Internet age…and pulls in the ancient story of Sir Gawain And The Green Knight as a means of understanding the tests he’s facing, along with the late works of D.H. Lawrence, Saul Bellow and other writers. He reaches out, in empathy, for his tormentor’s motivation.

“In the old East Germany a person who helped others escape over the Wall was called a Fluchthelfer — ‘flight helper,’” he writes. “If you read naively, as I mostly do, to make sense of your life, rather than for more sophisticated aesthetic or scholarly reasons, then certain writers inevitably become your own Fluchthelfer, helping you over your own walls, whether to escape reality or, as I prefer to see it, to find your way into it.”

Later, he asks himself, “Is there something about myself that I simply don’t see?”

Eventually, as if awakened by his personal terrorist’s attacks on his Jewishness, Lasdun embarks on an exploration that includes his father, an eminent British architect once charged with building a new temple in Jerusalem. He gets assigned a story on a newer version of what was never built, now finished, so he can visit the holy city…and presumably get at something else in the charges brought against him that he has started to internalize. He delves into the Israeli/Palestinian split, questions the way we react to each other over political issues, and ends up at the Wailing Wall, observing the many messages left there for God…as well as his own search for answers to all the questions that have arisen in his own terrible tale, which seems unending by this book’s end. And yet somehow reaches a point of resolution.

“What are they saying, those images, these balled-up texts here in the Western Wall? Nobody knows, but perhaps it isn’t so hard to imagine,” he finishes his book. “Send rain. Send love. I do love you and am in love with you. I’m sorry if I got screwy with you…You lack depth. You lack compassion. Say something…Give me everything you have.”

He makes the sort of equation one lives by: “Whether to be struck more by the conviction and energy of the effort, or by the tenacity of the silence surrounding it.”

This is a departure of a book…and yet both necessary, as a means of using one’s skills to face the sum of one’s challenges, and beautiful, in terms of the craftsmanship to use those skills in a human, non-personal fashion.

We can’t wait to see where this talented man goes from here.

James Lasdun reads from Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked (Farrar, Strausand Giroux) at 4 p.m. Saturday, February 16 at Golden Notebook, 29 Tinker Street. Call 679-8000 or visit www.goldennotebook.com for further information.