Contrasts in a reading life

 
In a blogpost from last year, I touched upon the issue of contrasts that appear in the course of a reading life. Such contrasts are common in most reading lives, but when consciously seeking out books from every country of the world, some contrasts are perhaps bound to be particularly noticeable, particularly forceful. This Easter, I was struck by just such a contrast while staying in my native village, where I was finishing the novel Beka Lamb, written by Belizean author Zee Edgell, published in 1982 and recounting a turning point in the life of the teenage girl who is the novel's eponymous protagonist. The novel contains very vivid descriptions of the tropical life of what - at the time of the events in the novel - was a British colony on the edge of the Caribbean. Zee Edgell masterfully evokes the sweltering heat and the ways that the Belizeans deal with that heat, making it part of the backdrop for the psychological struggles that unite the universal aspects of being a teenager with the particulars of being a teenager in pre-independence Belize. 

The tropical climate of Belize was very far removed - both literally and figuratively - from my own situation as I was reading the novel. When I arrived from Oslo in the late afternoon of Palm Sunday, the snow had been falling, although not staying long on the ground, and while what snow had gathered in the valleys disappeared in the course of a few days, the mountaintops were still white and wintry, providing a backdrop as inescapable to me as the tropical heat was to the characters of Beka Lamb. The difference between the sweltering Caribbean greenery as described by Zee Edgell and occasional snow-chilled gusts of wind that met me whenever I would move out of doors served to fasten the tropical scenes in my mind, and I like to think that the contrast helped me immerse myself in the world of the novel in a way I might not otherwise have had. It is this function of contrasting surroundings that I have come to appreciate as an aide-mémoire when encountering an unknown or lesser known world through its literature. Since I, sadly, cannot travel and read every book in the location it describes, I sometimes have to find other ways of bringing those locations more clearly into focus. In part, this effort of vivifying the scenery of a distant land is helped by reading other books from the same culture or the same geography, making references to hallmarks of these regions more familiar, something that can quickly be connected to previous readings. However, sometimes this effort is helped by contrasts, such as the contrasts between sweltering Caribbean palm forests and the black-speckled mountains covered in a fiery white against the cloudless blue of a Norwegian April.