the story of edgar sawtelle: an ode to costa rica and silence · Apr 18, 07:42 AM by j.
Last week I was on a beach in Costa Rica, sipping cold cans of Imperial beneath an umbrella. I had been staying in Coco Beach for a wedding, but that morning we’d taken a shuttle an hour south to Tamarindo a.k.a. Tamagringo, a touristy beach full of ex-pats surfing. Some of my friends had opted for lessons, but I feigned exhaustion. “I really just want to lie on the beach,” I explained, though the truth was that I really just wanted to read my book.
I was only about a hundred pages in to The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, but already it had begun to seep into my mind and bones, blooming like the black spots that both Edgar, the protagonist—a mute farm boy who finds his own transcendent ways of communication—and Trudy, his mother, experience in varied forms. What I mean is: it was getting to me. Admittedly, it was sort of a terrible pick for a vacation read, mostly because it’s the kind of book you want to crawl into, and I found only snatches of reading time in which to immerse—early mornings with coffee on the pool-facing balcony, and later in the days, in the time spent out of water, often brief because of the constant temperature that hovered around one hundred. But here was a free afternoon! Most of my playmates were in the sea, and I was beneath an umbrella, shaded with my book and a cold can of beer bought from one of the many locals dressed in jeans who spend their hot days pulling coolers down the sand. Finally, I reopened my book and sank into a new chapter.
Not two minutes later, an unknown voice: “Hey!”
I looked up: one of those aforementioned ex-pats, female, fifties, friendly face, slicked back blond hair, body squarish and compact beneath her wetsuit bottoms and bikini top, surfboard tucked beneath one arm. “Hi,” I replied.
“I just finished reading that book!” she cried, grinning. “Oh, my gosh. Can I please tell you the end?”
“What? The end? Uh, no, well, I’d rather you didn’t. I’m only a hundred pages in.” (FYI: it’s nearly six hundred.)
“Oh, wow. Okay.” She inched closer, squeezing water from the tiny pointed ponytail at the nape of her neck. “Just tell me this: have you met Ida Paine yet?”
Ida Paine: a creepy character. A convenient store psychic or something. “I have.”
She shuddered. “She’s one of the witches from Hamlet.”
“You mean Macbeth?”
She shook her head and switched her surfboard from one arm to the other. Her grin expanded. “Nope.”
“Okay,” I said, trolling through the plot of Hamlet in my head: uncle kills brother, marries mother. Son broods, considers revenge. Ophelia drowns in grief. I half-knew that Edgar Sawtelle was based on Shakespeare, but I usually try and avoid other people’s readings and reviews until after I’ve read things myself. But frankly, witches in Hamlet? I just don’t think so. “Well, thanks.”
“It’s just so terrible,” she said.
“The book?”
“Oh, no! That’s wonderful. It’s just hard enough to find people that speak English, let alone people to discuss books with, and here you are, reading the very book I want to discuss.”
I smiled and shrugged. “Sorry,” I said. “As I said, I’m only on page a hundred.”
“Yeah.” She looked down at her feet, lingering. “Okay, well, enjoy.”
“Thanks.”
I returned to my book, read a handful of pages, but for some reason I couldn’t concentrate. I tucked my book away and spent the rest of the afternoon in the ocean, diving under and over waves; I spent dusk in a beach bar with friends and frozen cocktails, the evening on the bumpy bus ride back. That night a group of us cooked dinner with all the food left over in our refrigerators because we were all heading home in the following days. I didn’t revisit Edgar Sawtelle until the voyage home, where I read through two flights and a layover and finally finished a few mornings later, tucked up in my own bed on a rainy day. As soon as I was done, I thought of her, that surfing woman on the beach. Inexplicably, I felt guilty. How strange it must have been to immerse oneself on a farm in rural Wisconsin, a kingdom really, occupied by apple trees and a family with a long history of breeding and training dogs after their own namesake—Sawtelle—while living on a beach peppered with mango trees, monkeys, and coconuts. How solitary to read of a lonely, mute boy who sees his father’s ghost in the rain while spending your days balanced on a surfboard beneath the Central American sun. Because this book simply pulls you in, yanks you underwater like—forgive me—an undertow, and once the first tragedy hits, the tragedies just keep rolling on in, not unlike all of Shakespeare’s tragedies, not unlike—forgive me once more—the sea.
Unlike my surfing friend, however, I do not wish to tell you the end, though I will say it doesn’t aim to lighten anything up. In a way, I hesitate to directly discuss the book at all. I have no quotations to offer, no favorite lines or scenes to share, because I think discussing it in this manner might diminish the experience of its quiet world. Let me explain in a roundabout way. I like to begin my creative writing classes with a quote from one of Flannery O’Connor’s letters. In it, she ponders the thing that makes great fiction work: “I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity…It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.” Because Edgar cannot speak, he signs—he gestures, if you will—and it is only in the absence of words that he is able to truly communicate something much deeper than language. He is a character not of this world, and rather than a single event or gesture that indicates the heart of this story, I instead think that it is Edgar himself who works as the beating heart—Edgar with his invented sign language, his transcendent communication, his silence.
And so, my surfing friend, despite my guilt for brushing you off, for ignoring your desire to talk, for correcting your Shakespeare knowledge, I feel that in the fact that I have now finished this book and yet am unable to communicate with you in a traditional manner, I am finally able to do both you and this wonderful book justice. Pura vida!
my return from the infinite: week, ahem, sixteen? appointment in samarra: a call for sotted suggestions