Book Review #4: An Abundace of Katherines
Rating: 5/5
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Colin Singleton may appear prodigious (pretty good in eleven languages), but when it comes to Anagramming, a genius “I’m good with codes and stuff. And I’m good at, like, linguistic tricks like anagramming. That’s my favorite thing, really. I can anagram anything.”
His love to specificity and consistency of linguistic words is a bang! Imagine being faithful to this only nine letter girl:
“Colin Singleton’s type was not physical but linguistic: he liked Katherines. And not Katies or Kats or Kitties or Cathys or Rynns or Trinas or Kays or Kates or, God forbid, Catherines. K-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-E. He had dated nineteen girls. All of them had been named Katherine. And all of them—every single solitary one—had dumped him.”
“And yet, that’s what happened. It didn’t seem willful at first—it was just a series of odd coincidences. It
just kept happening: he’d meet a Katherine, and like her. She’d like him back. And then it would end. And then, after it ceased being mere coincidence, it just became two streaks—one (dating Katherines) he wished to keep, and one (getting dumped by them) he wished to break. But it proved impossible to divorce one cycle from the other. It just kept happening to him, and after a while it felt almost routine. Each time, he’d cycle through feelings of anger, regret, longing, hope, despair, longing, anger, regret. The thing about getting dumped generally, and getting dumped by Katherines in particular, was how utterly monotonous it was.”
And, guess what? Colin is a voracious reader:
“He liked all books, because he liked the mere act of reading, the magic of turning scratches on a page into words inside his head.”
“I’m behind on my reading,” Colin explained. “Behind on your reading? All you do is read,” Lindsey said. “I’ve been way behind because I’ve worked so hard on the Theorem and because of oral historianing. I try to read four hundred pages a day—eversince I was seven.” “Even on weekends?” “Particularly on weekends, because then I can really focus on pleasure reading.”
“But he always had books. Books are the ultimate Dumpees: put them down and they’ll wait for you forever; pay attention to them and they always love you back.”
His weirdness constitute a subtle joke:
“But his sociological being was never all that well. Colin didn’t excel at making friends. He and his classmates just didn’t enjoy similar activities. His favorite thing to do during recess, for instance, was to pretend to be a robot. He’d walk up to Robert Caseman with a knees-locked gait, his arms swinging stiffly. In a monotone voice, Colin would say, “I AM A ROBOT. I CAN ANSWER ANY QUESTION. DO YOU WANT TO KNOW WHO THE FOURTEENTH PRESIDENT WAS?””
Indeed, being prodigious is not everything.
He reveals how he cultivate the prodigiousness:
“The secret, in truth, was that he just spent more time studying, and paid more attention, than everyone else.”
“I remember things better than other people on account of how I pay very close attention and care very much.”
“I’ve worked at least ten hours a day, every day, since I was three, anything he takes up, he just works insanely hard.”
“But Colin finds everything intriguing. He reads a book about presidents and he remembers more of it because everything he reads clicks in his head as fugging interesting.”
On the other hand, his dad is a well-thought conservationist, who think first and deeply before saying his response “His dad paused. He always paused after a question, and then when he did speak, it was in complete sentences without ums or likes or uhs—as if he’d memorized his response.”
I love the character of Hassan here, who even how lazily he appeared, (tried to explain it with lawyerly wit), a deeply religious man, a “must” bestfriend to have, I love how they became friends:
“Look, Hassan said. “This is my ninth day at a school in my entire life, and yet somehow I have already grasped what you can and cannot say. And you cannot say anything about your own sphincter.” “It’s part of your eye,” Colin said defensively. “I was being clever.” “Listen, dude. You gotta know your audience. That bit would kill at an ophthalmologist convention, but in calculus class, everybody’s just wondering how the hell you got an eyelash there.” And so they were friends.
How they incorporate the coining of “swear”, is a fuggin brilliant!
“Have you ever read The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer?” “I don’t even know who that is.” “American novelist. Born in 1923. I was reading him when I first met Hassan. And then later Hassan ended up reading it because it’s all about war, and Hassan likes actiony books. Anyway, it’s 872 pages, and it uses the word fug or fugging or fugguer or whatever about thirty-seven thousand times. Every other word isa fug, pretty much. So anyway, after I read a novel, I like to read some literary criticism of it.
Right. Well, when Mailer wrote the book, he didn’t use ‘fug.’ But then he sent it to the publisher and they were like, ‘This is a really excellent book you’ve written, Mr. Mailer. But no one here in 1948 is going to buy it, because it contains even more F-bombs than it does Regular Bombs.’ So Norman Mailer, as a kind of fug-you to the publisher, went through his 872-page book and changed every last F-word to ‘fug.’ So I told Hassan the story while he was reading the book and then he decided to start saying fug as an homage to Mailer—and because you can say it in class without getting in trouble.”
On the one hand, Hassan’s response when his girlfriend was being laid by others was so appealing! He just went, like it doesn’t happen and seem to be unhurt. What a heart, Hassan!
He ended up, getting his ass off and finally realize to do some work:
“Hassan stood up, smiling through his busted lip. He rubbed the Jew-fro as he walked by, and then paused at the doorway and said, “Me and Thunderstick decided to take our show to college,” Hassan said, and Colin opened his mouth to talk, but Hassan said, “I only registered for two classes in the fall, so don’t start creaming yourself. I’ve got to ease my way into it. Don’t tell me how fugging happy you are. I know.”
The bonus epigraph made me love Green, as an author even more. The sound responses were just, brilliant!
It’s amazingly well-think plot of Katherine XIX, being the first girlfriend and the last of his suffering on loving a girl with such specific name and when he met this other girl, in the name of Lindsey, his boyfriend was Colin (the other man) also, what a coincidence!
I love how an out-going person Lindsey is, especially how he train Colin on the art of creating a good storytelling and her hide-out is a must-visit on dreams.
Interesting anecdote:
“Always has been, really. I saw the inside of the Carver County Jail a few times myself, you know. I was drunk in public in 1948; I was a public nuisance in 1956; and then I was in jail for two days on illegal discharging of a firearm when I killed Caroline Clayton’s rat snake in 1974. Mary wouldn’t bail me out after I kilt that God-forsaken snake, you know. But how on earth am I supposed to tell it’s a pet? I go into Caroline Clayton’s house looking for the hammer she borrowed from me six months before, and there’s a by-God rat snake slitherin’ across the kitchen. What would you do, son?” he asked Colin.
Anyway, you see a snake, you kill it. That’s just how I was raised up. So I shot it. Split it right in two. And that evening Caroline Clayton come over to my house—she’s passed on now, bless her heart—and she’s screaming and crying that I killed Jake, and I told her that someone else musta killed Jake, whoever the hell he was, ’cause all I did was shoot up a goddamned rat snake. But then turns out that Jake was the snake, and that she loved it like the child she never had. She never married, of course. Uglier than sin, bless her heart.”
Favorite highlighted passages:
•One of his general policies in life was never to do anything standing up that could just as easily be done lying down.
•Crying adds something: crying is you, plus tears. But the feeling Colin had was some horrible opposite of crying. It was you, minus something.
•As Colin had explained to Hassan countless times, there’s a stark difference between the words prodigy and genius. Prodigies can very quickly learn what other people have already figured out; geniuses discover that which no one has ever previously discovered. Prodigies learn; geniuses do. The vast majority of child prodigies don’t become adult geniuses. Colin was almost certain that he was among that unfortunate majority.
•Dumpers and Dumpees. A lot of people will claim to be both, but those people miss the point entirely: You are predisposed to either one fate or the other. Dumpers may not always be the heartbreakers, and the Dumpees may not always be the heartbroken. But everyone has a tendency.
•But of course the universe does not conspire to put you in one place rather than another.
•He thought of Democritus: “Everywhere man blames nature and fate, yet his fate is mostly but the echo of his character and passions, his mistakes and weaknesses.
•What is the point of being alive if you don’t at least try to do something remarkable
•Eight minutes. I swear.” She ran off. It was not the way Curve smelled that Colin liked—not exactly. It was the way the air smelled just as Lindsey began to jog away from him. The smell the perfume left behind. There’s not a word for that in English, but Colin knew the French word: sillage. What Colin liked about Curve was not its smell on the skin but its sillage, the fruity sweet smell of its leaving.
•He would look and look for the keys to Satan’s Hearse and then finally he’d just give up and say, “Fine. I’ll take the fugging bus,” and on his way out the door, he’d see the keys. Keys show up when you reconcile yourself to the bus; Katherines appear when you start to disbelieve the world contains another Katherine; and, sure enough, the Eureka moment arrived just as he began to accept it would never come.
•Incidentally, did you know that the whole eight glasses a day thing is complete bullshit and has no scientific basis? So many things are like that. Everyone just assumes they’re true, because people are basically lazy and incurious, which incidentally is one of those words that sounds like it wouldn’t be a word but is.
•He liked the idea of coffee quite a lot—a warm drink that gave you energy and had been for centuries associated with sophisticates and intellectuals.
•The oldest pictures were faded and yellowing, and Colin thought about how even in pictures of their youth, old people look old.
•I just want to do something that matters. Or be something that matters. I just want to matter.
•The bigger a deal you are, the worse your life is. Look at, like, the miserable lives of famous people.
•“Schadenfreude,” Colin said. Finding pleasure in others’ pain.
•Here’s the thing about storytelling: you need a beginning, and a middle, and an end. Your stories have no plots. They’re like, here’s something I was thinking and then the next thing I was thinking and then et cetera. You can’t get away with rambling. You’re Colin Singleton, Beginning Storyteller, so you’ve got to stick to a straight plot. “And you need a good, strong moral. Or a theme or whatever.
•Do you know anything about Pythagoras?” And Colin said, “I know his Theorem.” And she said, “No, I mean the guy. He was weird. He thought everything could be expressed numerically, that—like—math could unlock the world. I mean, everything.” “What, like, even love?” Colin asked, only vaguely annoyed that she knew something he didn’t. “Particularly love”
•It’s just that I learned a while ago that the best way to get people to like you is not to like them too much.
It doesn’t take long for a thought to get from your brain to your vocal cords and out of your mouth, but it does take a moment.
•“ think I have to tell her,” he said, a trace of the philosophical in his tone. “She’s my friend. And if I were in her position, I’d expect her to tell me. It’s just basic Golden Rule stuff, really.”
•That’s why those tapes we made are going to be so great one day, because they’ll tell stories that time has swallowed up or distorted or whatever.”
• I remember stories. I connect the dots and then out of that comes a story. And the dots that don’t fit into the story just slide away, maybe. Like when you spot a constellation. You look up and you don’t see all the stars. All the stars just look like the big fugging random mess that they are. But you want to see shapes; you want to see stories, so you pick them out of the sky.
•And the moral of the story is that you don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened.
▪ I figured something out,” he said aloud. “The future is unpredictable.” There’s no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion. The infinite future makes that kind of mattering impossible.
•And he found himself thinking that maybe stories don’t just make us matter to each other—maybe they’re also the only way to the infinite mattering he’d been after for so long. I will get forgotten, but the stories will last. And so we all matter—maybe less than a lot, but always more than none.
•As the staggered lines rushed past him, he thought about the space between what we remember and what happened, the space between what we predict and what will happen. And in that space, Colin thought, there was room enough to reinvent himself—room enough to make himself into something other than a prodigy, to remake his story better and different—room enough to be reborn again and again. A snake killer, an Archduke, a slayer of TOCs—a genius, even. There was room enough to be anyone—anyone except whom he’d already been, for if Colin had learned one thing from Gutshot, it’s that you can’t stop the future from coming. And for the first time in his life, he smiled thinking about the always-coming infinite future stretching out before him.
