The Scent of Light by Kristjana Gunnars
This is a post that begins and ends by saying, “trust me.” This is a post written from a place of pure love. This is a post about how an author can change your life, about how books matter, and about how writers are simultaneously magical and utterly real. It’s also a post that references a line from Jane Austen about how if I loved this book less, I could talk about it more.
I will eventually talk about this book, but in a long post about Bruce Springsteen, which I wrote on March 8 of 2020, the moment really, before the pandemic hit in Canada I quote Bruce who says, “And you can change someone’s life in three minutes with the right song. I still believe that to this day. You can bend the course of their development, what they think is important, of how vital and alive they feel.”
I have blogged about Gunnars’s books from time to time, but it’s been a while. I’ve told you about my obsessions with Lispector and Cixous and Elizabeth Smart and C.D. Wright, Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge…so many others. But. It’s been a hot minute perhaps since I’ve told you how much KG means to me. The short answer: everything.
This book is actually a collection of five books and the publisher, Coach House Books, gives the outline here. All I will really say is that each of these books arrived in my life just when I needed them and they have stayed with me and changed my life, my writing, my being. Is there anything else that needs to be said? You will either read them, or not read them.
I wouldn’t have written my books without them, at least not in the same way, at all. If I have been enamoured and influenced by Clarice Lispector it is because of and through Kristjana Gunnars. Certainly my novels Rumi and the Red Handbag and Everything Affects Everyone would not be what they are without the influence of her work.
The introduction to this collection is by Kazim Ali, and it’s perfect. It ends, “These novels are meant to be experienced, not just in language, but in their rhythms, in their interruptions and silences, in their structures and patterns and shapes of thought.” Ali finds in them “a music daily as life.” Ali notes, “they are themselves alive. And in them a reader comes to life.”
A writer, too, will come to life.
I own these five books in their original form but many are falling apart from being read so often. You know my penchant for underlining and dog-earing and re-reading. They’ve been out of print, also, and so this new volume is a particular gift.
If you’re buying The Scent of Light, and I hope you will, you might like to pair it with Stranger at the Door: Writers and the Act of Writing also by Gunnars.
I was fortunate to take classes with Kristjana Gunnars in my undergraduate years including an Honours English seminar. In that seminar, I and two lovely young men met Gunnars weekly for a semester. We met most often at The Library, which was the name of a slightly musty and seedy basement pub on campus at the time. It felt a bit off the book, a bit clandestine. We weren’t breaking any rules or anything, but it did feel a bit quietly rebellious.
That seminar meant everything at the time. Meeting with a real author! Literary conversations!
The five books that compose this collection mean the world to me. The words in them are very real and yet they are magical — they cast a sort of spell that might change your thinking, shift it, even if only slightly. And isn’t that the best kind of magic?
So yes, trust me. I think you will love this book, these books all in one lovely volume.
May 27, 2022
