Audrey Niffenegger, author of The Time Traveler’s Wife and Her Fearful Symmetry, has for the moment taken up graphic novels. (She illustrates as well as writes them.) The first installment in a planned series of them, The Night Bookmobile, was published in September.
From a recent interview with Niffenegger at the Newsarama.com site (italics added):
The Night Bookmobile, a new release from Abrams ComicsArts, tells the story of a young woman named Alexandra who goes for a walk one night and comes upon a mysterious “bookmobile” that contains every book she’s ever read, igniting treasured memories of her past. The library eventually disappears, and Alexandra becomes obsessed with finding it again…
Niffenegger admitted that she has her own “bookmobile,” which is just the memory of everything she’s ever read and looked at.
“It’s stocked with novels, comics, various books I’ve read for research purposes, poetry, printmaking manuals, art history books, travel guides, plus all the ephemeral stuff like signage, soup labels, math tests and so forth,” she said. “I have been reading avidly since I was a child, so my daily life is partially real and partially literary. It makes my imaginary world stronger, to feed it on a diverse diet of books. Too much ordinary life is limiting to the mind.”
Got that? Not just everything she’s ever read; everything she’s ever looked at.
I was probably oversimplifying things back then, but it used to blow my mind that our brains (so I thought) stored everything they’d ever sensed. Imagine sitting in traffic at a near-standstill, approaching a toll booth on the New Jersey Turnpike, say. The AM radio in the dashboard of your Maroon AMC Pacer is playing Sheena Easton’s “Morning Train” (as it seems to at the same freaking time every freaking morning). You look to your left. The guy in the blue Chevy Impala which keeps rolling forward, stopping, falling behind, and catching up with you — over and over — he seems to be listening to the same station. His head is bobbing and his open hand is beating on the steering wheel in time with the music, and that can’t be coincidence, can it? Noxious fumes from a battered Dodge pickup on your right are filling the interior of your car, reminding you of a factory your Dad used to work at — the one with the gigantic double cooling/evaporation towers, from which smoke poured constantly (a smoke which never seemed to concern anyone who worked there). Alas, but you can’t roll your windows up because it is blazingly hot on this August day, and the Pacer’s a/c makes alarming wheezing noises and anyway, does not cool. Which is a problem, isn’t it?, in a car the total body weight of which is probably something like 60% glass. Behind you is a truck delivering ice — ice! people can still get ice delivered to their doors! — and its driver yawns, repeatedly. You yawn too. As you do, as the muscles in your cheeks and jaw and neck tighten, the passages of your ears momentarily constrict and Sheena Easton dwindles to a merciful dot on your attention. The yawn ends; Sheena Easton returns. At the wheel of a little old VW Beetle in front of you, the driver is smoking a cigarette, and faint smoke curls from the left window, but then you see it’s not a cigarette but a pipe: the driver has removed it from his mouth and is tapping it on the side of his car. The sharp, small, nock-nock-nock sound it makes somehow makes its way to your ears over the surrounding noise of a hundred engines and beeps and curses, and goddam Sheena Easton anyway. The passenger seat is hot to the touch, so you raise your right arm and drape it — awkwardly — over the high back of the passenger seat. (You don’t leave it there, though, because you can feel the eyes of the Impala driver watching you and, no doubt, he is wondering how the hell that pose can possibly be comfortable. It’s not, really. It was just something to do with your arm, so it didn’t look like a stupid mistake that you’d put your right hand flat on a blazingly hot jet-black vinyl seat.) A small gap opens between the Beetle and your Pacer; you take your foot off the brake pedal and roll forward; you re-apply the brake. An ad for Earl Scheib auto painting (“Any car, any color for TWENTY-NINE NINETY-FIVE!”) comes on the radio. You look down at the dial and wonder, not for the first time, why every number on the AM dial is a multiple of ten… except for the first, which reads 54. The Beetle’s New Jersey license plate number is PAJ-804. P-A-J, you think, and you imagine a blues song called “Papa Ain’t Justified” sung by somebody like Bessie Smith, and you have no real idea what the phrase “musical time signatures” means but you blunder on, imagining that “Papa Ain’t Justified” uses the rare 8/4 beat, which is the reason the song is a legend to this day — Sheena Easton butchered the thing when she tried it, no Bessie Smith she. A small sliver of silver crosses the sky, upper left to lower right of the windshield, a plane circling for clearance to land at Newark. The plane seems to intercept a small plane-sized cloud, and does not re-emerge. You think suddenly of a cinnamon-raisin bun you had, once, years ago, on a morning airplane flight from North Carolina to Philadelphia, and the powerful aroma and adhesive sweetness at the back of your throat come rushing back to you like you just bit into that bun a second ago…
I mean, jeezus. Over and over. Every moment, every day. A wonder we’re not — or not all — driven crazy by it.
Other than books, what kind of stuff clutters your Night Bookmobile?
_______________________
Update, a little later: I don’t know where that whole Sheena Easton thing came from. I actually liked Sheena Easton — to the extent that the woman I was dating back then used to tease me about her, in ill-disguised jealousy. That said, ye gods did they ever play that damn song through the floor… And yes, it really did seem to come on at the same time every morning — waking me every morning with its grating perkiness, courtesy of an AM-radio alarm clock.
_______________________
P.S. The Night Bookmobile appeared in syndicated form at the Guardian Web site a couple years ago. (Episodes are listed there in reverse chronological order.)
Sherri says
Hahaha, this cracked me up. My night bookmobile is poorly lit and drives off with me still inside, browsing.
John says
Sherri: A great image — the bookmobile firing up its engine and moving on, rocking from side to side, while you stand there between the stacks bracing yourself against the movement and trying (and failing) to see anything but a gray blur in your hands.
You’d think a Night Bookmobile would come equipped with adequate lighting and comfy chairs. Evidently, though, yours is less into the Book- and more into the whole -mobile part. :)
Nance says
In my night bookmobile, the titles of the books are gradually disappearing. The author’s names, too. I pace up and down the short aisle, slowly running my hand along the spines of the books. Up this side with the right hand and down the other side with the left hand.
DarcKnyt says
My bookmobile has only one headlight, blows plumes of thick blue smoke, is missing on at least one cylinder and the left front tire is low, so it makes an interesting wobawobawoba sound when it’s rolling. The driver doesn’t pay much attention and has hit me more than once. Many things go flying out of the back when it hits a bump. The wind and rain ruin them before I can determine if they’re important or not.
Great post, bud.
marta says
Strange that I finally make it over here after several days gone, and I see the exact same story I was looking at three nights ago.
The Night Bookmobile. Brilliant idea. Mine is, of course, bigger on the inside.
John says
Nance: That makes you sound much, much more… um… well, vague than I’ve imagined you. But it’s a damned haunting image — as if by touching the books that way, you can halt or reverse their fading away.
cynth says
The post about the sitting in traffic made me thing of first, the movie, “Groundhog Day” where every day he wakes up to Sonny and Cher singing. Then I thought of the comment from Our Town, where Emily asks the Stage Manager if everyone can be aware of everything every minute of every day. He answers: “except for perhaps the “saints and poets, maybe.” A copy of that play would be in my Bookmobile.
I think it would look like the bus that Harry Potter takes in a couple of those books. It looks like a double decker on the outside, but inside it’s got room for beds and all kinds of things. And it would kind of resemble Darc’s too, not too beautiful on the outside, but full of treasure on the in.
Froog says
Nance reminded me of the movie Pleasantville, which I watched again recently. When Tobey Maguire magically enters the cosy smalltown world of his favourite ’50s TV show, he finds that all the details not sketched in by the writers are blank: most of the characters are two-dimensional cyphers with undeveloped inner lives, some of them unable to function outside of the narrow set routines they always perform on the show; and the books in the school library are all empty…. until Tobey sketches out the story of Tom Sawyer or Moby Dick for his intrigued fellow students, and then the blank pages start to fill up with text. Lovely image. We need to keep refreshing those memories, or they fade.
You’re coming over all Funes the Memorious on us, John. I worry.
Is this going to be the beginning of a regular series of posts with titles like 9/10/1985, 11.15am? Ooh, now there’s a thought….
John says
Darc: Your bookmobile may be limping along, but your imagination seems to be firing on all cylinders, thank you very much!
jules says
Weird. Just weird. I saw this on the shelf just a few days ago in my local library. I picked up a copy of Time Traveler’s Wife, as Eisha has recommended it, and I didn’t even pick this up. (I just thought, is she doing picture books now?) But now I need to go back. Sounds intriguing.
John says
cynth: I’d have the script and at least two performances of Our Town on a shelf in my Bookmobile, too. ;) Love that play for (among many other things) its respect for the moment.
That was a great bus in the HP world, wasn’t it?
John says
Froog: Pleasantville seems to have gone awfully under-appreciated. Here’s a… pleasant mash-up of great moments of “color leakage” into the black-and-white real world of the film, with a soundtrack (“Follow Through”) by indie band Hotel Lights:
I’m going to pretend I didn’t read that suggestion for the series of posts based on specifically remembered instants.
(And I hope you know that that sitting-in-traffic scene was pretty much invented, or let’s say stitched together from real scraps of real scenes. It’s much, much easier to do it that way than to take Funes‘s approach!)
John says
jules: I’ll be interested to hear what you think of Time Traveler’s Wife!
I’ve never seen a survey, but I bet well over half of the unpublished novelists I know (and I count myself among them, despite that pebble of a book which washed up on the beach 15+ years ago) would LOVE to claim Audrey Niffenegger’s career as their own.
s.o.m.e.one's brudder says
Here’s a shock – my head went to the same place as cynth – Groundhog Day for that “recall of every moment” notion. IMHO another woefully underestimated film. I believe it AND Pleasantville would be in my bookmobile in a special viewing parlor. Certain that the laws of physics (as we currently understand them) would not apply to my bookmobile as it would not be possible to move such a device under, much less to some place that it couldn’t be found. My long term memory is scary for this kind of stuff.
BTW: thinking that the turnpike snippet should somehow be turned into a white-boy stream of consciousness rap. Maybe you should reach out to Al Yankovic for that possibility. Jersey White Boy Hip Hop – a whole new genre.
Ashleigh Burroughs says
My bookmobile has every comfy chair and every book I’ve read or wanted to read while sitting therein. There are nooks and crannies and wonderful natural light with goose-neck lamps fitted with bright bulbs. The walls are floor-to-ceiling shelves and there are beautifully carved ‘enry ‘iggins mobile ladders so that none are out of reach. It’s well organized and quiet and has a view of Lake Cayuga out the window.
Ooooooo…. I want it! I want it now!
John says
brudder: I can pretty much guarantee, that is the very first (and likely the only) time in my life that my name has been associated with the rap and hip-hop genres.
With some of these very specific memories, we’re getting into territory related to “phantom limbs.” Even though we may not have the occasion to actually use a memory — of an image, say, or a conversation — the memory (because we’ve practiced it for so long) continues to flail against the inside of our heads.
John says
a/b: Good on practical you for thinking of the chairs and reading lamps and ladders. (That’s “the one” in operation. :)) The rest of us seem focused on all the fun parts!
Very interesting that you sited your bookmobile at Lake Cayuga, too, instead of in the Southwest…
deniz says
But why would you *want* to remember *everything*? For instance, I read the back, front and sides of the cereal box every time I eat cereal, but I sure don’t need that to stay in my brain…
John says
deniz: Oh, heck — I’d never WANT to remember EVERYTHING. But the Shop-Vac in my head doesn’t always listen to my stated preferences. :)
(More seriously, I cannot tell you how many times I have the experience of wanting to remember — to use your example — exactly how a particular cereal box looks, and am frustrated because I can’t remember it. I do a lot of wandering around Google Images and similar sites on just such missions.)
deniz says
I know what you mean! Sometimes I wish Google could see the image inside my mind, when I’m searching for something and can’t think of any keywords that might help.
marta says
I bought The Night Bookmobile with my Christmas Amazon gift card! (The book, not mobile itself.) Love having it in my collection.