My family has a subscription to TIME magazine and a few months ago I read a book review in its Culture section. The review was about the late David Rakoff's last novel, Love Dishonor Marry Die Cherish Perish. It is a different sort of novel, written in rhyming couplets instead of prose, a story told from different perspectives and characters.
It's beautiful. That's the most prominent thought that comes to mind when I think about this book. It is rich with vocabulary (so many words I had to look up) and rich with imagery, reproducing life on paper with words as it's medium. Rakoff writes in such a way that every emotion that a character feels is vividly defined, in such a way that a reader can connect and possibly imagine themselves as the character. It's a book with layers that I think are only visible with multiple readings, just as life is a layered tapestry made up of everyone's unique experience.
While the book features the grim fates of several characters it still, somehow, maintains some sort of tenacious, witty optimism. In a way, I think this reflects Rakoff's outlook on life, which makes the novel resonate with me even more. Rakoff died in 2012 of cancer at the age of 47. Love was his last work and in knowing Rakoff's background, it is easy to see how he infused aspects of his life within this last labor of love. Most, if not all, of the characters possess some part of Rakoff's life or attitude; I guess in this way Rakoff lives on even if his body doesn't.
But what struck me the most is that Rakoff, even while struggling through "a touch of cancer," never relinquished himself to the life sapping force in him. He was a prominent figure on the series This American Life, and one of the most popular segments he did for that series was an essay: "The Invisible Made Visible." He read it in front of an audience, a piece that explored the battle and effects of his cancer. Throughout it all, he maintained a sharp wit and self effacing humor. His cancer was his reality but he didn't view it with a defeatist, nor even a positive attitude. I think the best way I can put it is that he accepted his fate and made the best of what he had, choosing to live instead of to stay on a bed and wait to die, to let his fate crush him with it's weight. Rakoff, like a character in the book whose husband was paralyzed by a stroke, approached life with wit and whimsy. I have yet to read more of his essays, which I definitely plan on but it's the last line of Love that will stick with me: "She's standing and squinting, eyes half-closed from the sun / And laughing, delighted at what's still to come."
