ترجمه ی .... داشت ( این روزها عناوین ترجمه شده زیاد شده اند ولی اکثرترجمه ها نا امید کننده هستند).
بعضی کتاب ها با وجود تمام تشویق ها و تقدیرها برای گروه مشخصی از مخاطبین نوشته شده اند و این کتاب به نظرم مشخصا برای آمریکایی های سفید پوستی نوشته شده بود که به جز گروه اجتماعی خودشون درکی از بقیه ی آدم ها از نژاد و فرهنگ دیگر ندارند، تلاشی برای آموزش با چاشنی مسئله ی هویت و وطن داشتن و نداشتن که نویسنده با آشفتگی که در روایت داستانش داشت از این نظر خیلی ضعیف عمل کرده بود که خب فکر کنم وقتی هدف اولیه از نوشتن تحت تاثیر قراردادن گروه خاصی باشد این مشکل هم پیش می آید

Can I just be Anne Tyler? She's exactly the kind of novelist I want to be.

I've read all of Anne Tyler's books, many of them more than once. What never ceases to amaze me is how much emotion there is between the lines. The proposal scene will break your heart. I confess after studying it that I still don't quite understand how its emotional impact is achieved. Understated, certainly. Unexpected, yes. Organic because nothing else could have happened here.

Ms. Tyler loves every one of her characters dearly. There are no ugly souls in her books, just ordinary people who make mistakes.

Gave up by pg.75. Way too much about the grown-ups, and not nearly enough about the two little adopted girls.

Truly enjoyed this novel by Anne Tyler, Digging to America (2006). The book tells the story of two families who meet by coincidence at the Baltimore airport where each family is awaiting the arrival of a baby girl adopted from Korea. The families become friends, one family from America and one from Iran. The blend of characters and culture (and coincidence) makes a wonderful story. I realize that it sounds clichéd, but Tyler's writing truly brings those characters to life for me. A wonderful book. The Audible.com edition that I read is beautifully narrated by the actress Blair Brown. I am looking forward to reading more by Tyler, who is perhaps best known for The Accidental Tourist (1985) and her 1988 Pulitzer Prize winning novel Breathing Lessons.

نقب زدن به آمریکا داستان فرزند خواندگی دو کودک کره ای در آمریکا است که یکی توسط یک خانواده ایرانی و دیگری توسط یک خانواده آمریکایی پذیرفته می شود، موضوع کلی داستان "آمریکایی نبودن" و بیگانه بودن در این مملکت است، با توجه به اینکه خانم تایلر همسری ایرانی داشت، اشارات فراوانی به فرهنگ و آداب رسوم ایرانی، بدون هیچ قضاوت و ترجیح یکی بر دیگری انجام شده است
در این داستآن از افکار و احساسات کسانی که بیش از سی سال در امریکا بوده و هنوزاحساس بیگانه بودن می کنند، سخن گفته شده است، تفاوت برخوردهای دو خانواده با فرزندان کره ای و حتی میزان پذیرش و دلبستگی کودکان به آمریکا نیز قابل توجه است
قسمتی از کتاب:
تو این دنیا صدمه زدن خیلی آسانتر از بهره رسوندنه، آسونتره که به بچه صدمه بزنی اما درست کردن بچه ای که مشکل داره خیلی سخته.

is novel Anne Tyler explores the American culture and what it means to be American. But more than that, she looks at how people from different cultural backgrounds can intermingle and reject each other at the same time. How a person can live in a country for more than 30 years, adopt its nationality and yet never really integrate. And by which process someone who has grown and lived in several cultures might build his own identity, torn between his origins, national culture and that of his friends, ultimately mixing it all up and (hopefully) keeping the best from each.

Each of her characters is legally American, and yet they all have different levels of foreignness. Maryam was born Iranian but migrated as an adult and now has the American nationality; Sami’s heredity is 100% Iranian but he was born and educated in America; Jin Ho is American by all rights, through adoption, but cant negate her foreign origin… And Susan combines a Korean biological origin, an American upbringing and nationality and the Iranian roots of her adoptive parents. Bitsy and Brad are the only rooted Americans.

Throughout the book they all struggle in their own way to fit in and define themselves. From Sami who alternates between being ‘more American than the americans’ and upholding proudly his Iranian heritage; through the Donaldson’s who fear being left out and adopt all the foreign traditions they encounter (adapting them along the way); to Susan who complains about not celebrating Christmas “the way other people do”, even though she had the tree, presents and carolling; each of them has his own tactics and fears.

All in all, this is an incredibly insightful look into cultural identity and intermingling, as well as a wonderful, very funny read. Highly recommended!

Самая милая книга, которую я читала за последние 10 лет. Легкая и добрая. Сначало, правда, она показалась мне примитивной, потом немного скучной, но, на последних страницах, к собственному удивлению, обнаружила слезы у себя на глазах. Это именно та книга, с которой, укутавшись в плед, можно замечательно провести ленивое воскресенье.

Tearing up thinking of the line written in this book: “We were girls together.”

n  n

n  n
* SPOILERY BOOK COMMENTARY: Digging to America by Anne Tyler*

“With Ziba there, she walked on tiptoe the way her own mother had tiptoed, she realized, the one time she had come to visit.”

I love this observantion

“Not American! Check your passport, Sami always told her.
She said, “You understand what I mean.”
She was a guest, was what she meant. Still and forever a guest, on her very best behavior.”

This was an interesting idea for me. I was born in Belgium but I moved abroad at ten years old. I lived abroad for ten years, only to then return to Belgium as a young adult. So I both remember how it feels to feel Belgian, simultaneously with this new experience of feeling like a foreigner. In hindsight, I realize I must’ve always felt like a foreigner in Belgium because I was a Jew in a country that had tried its best to rid itself of my people. And all those micro-agressions toward me weren’t because of my personality but because of my origin.

“Often when she reached home she would just vegetate awhile, slumped in her favorite armchair, free at last to relax and let herself be herself.”

I love getting into bed quoting this sound that blew up on tiktok: “My bed.”
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/odAO_8...

“Maryam hated being asked such questions, partly because she had answered them so many times before but also because she preferred to imagine (unreasonable though it was) that maybe she didn't always, instantly, come across as a foreigner. Where are you from? someone might ask just when she was priding herself on having navigated some particularly intricate and illogical piece of English. She longed to say, From Baltimore. Why? but lacked the nerve. Now she spoke so courteously that Lou could have had no inkling how she felt. I've been here thirty-nine years, she said, and, Yes, of course. I love it.”

This nails my hatred of when I try to speak the native language and they reply back in English.
It also reminds me of Taylor Swift in ​my tears ricochet, “And I can go anywhere I want. Anywhere I want, just not home.” How do they perfectly nail this personal experience into words?

“Even if she didn't have the slightest illusion that she could live this kind of life herself, she enjoyed getting a peek at it now and then.”

How did Anne Tyler manage to pinpoint the micro-aggressions that tear down your day?

“Maryam loved the little sounds that Susan made when she swallowed. Um, um, she said, with her eyes fixed on Ziba's face and one hand rhythmically clutching and releasing Ziba's sweater sleeve.”

I liked the commentaries mixed with the beauty of life found in little moments like this.

“And then at the airport when she was leaving there'd been a problem with her exit visa, something inconsequential that was settled fairly easily by a cousin with connections, but she had felt a sense of panic that was almost suffocating. She had felt like a bird beating its wings inside its cage. Let me out, let me out, let me out! And she'd never been back.”

This desperation so perfectly captured made me stop in my tracks and reread this passage.

“r countrymen to set a good example? But she counted to ten before she spoke (a tactic she had learned during his adolescence) and then decided not to speak at all. Instead she proceeded down the aisle in silence, dropping cellophane packets of herbs and dried fruits into the basket he was carrying for her. She paused before a bin of wheat kernels, and Sami said, Will there be time enough to sprout them? There was plenty of time, as he knew full well. He must be asking only to make amends. So she said, Well, I think there will be. What's your opinion? and after that they were all right again.”

This is why I read Anne Tyler. Her ability to give words to these specific moments in life that make you feel seen.

“Now she couldn't remember what either one of them had said. She had trouble reconstructing the whole conversation. All she knew was that once again, they must both have been too polite, too please-I-insist and whichever-you-prefer.”

I loved the phrase “trouble reconstructing the whole conversation.” This is why I hone in on this skill because I hate that feeling.

“There was something in his tone that hurt her feelings. Something amused; that was it. ”

When you feel them using you as a gimmick, a funny story…

“Aren't family gatherings wearing? she said. “All those people who know you so well, they think they can say just anything.”

“And Jin-Ho. Ah, there: the camera zoomed in on her face and held steady. She was so much smaller! Her features were so much closer together! “Look at you, Jin-Ho,” Brad murmured, but to Bitsy, the child asleep in Polly's lap bore almost no connection to the baby on the screen. The sudden ache she felt was very like grief, as if that first Jin-Ho had somehow passed out of existence.”

I loved how Anne Tyler pinpoints the grief you feel for versions of the children you raise.

“You know,” she said, turning back to Ziba, “when I was in that poetry group, I read about these two women poets who had so much they wanted to share with each other, they installed a separate telephone line and left their receivers off the hook at all times so as to keep in constant contact.”

Life moves too fast when you’re apart. You want to be present there in the moment, instead of catching up in hindsight.

“You know he's going to object. He's going to tell me he can take care of me himself. But he can't do it all, Bitsy. Not morning, noon, and night. And I want to be able to ask for things. I want to ask and not have to worry that I'm asking for too much.”

I loved this moment because they tried portraying Bitsy’s mom beforehand as something else, and I loved her showing up to say how wrong they were.

“They feel personally outraged by bad luck,” Sami would go on. “They have been lucky all their lives and they can't imagine that any misfortune should have the right to befall them.”

This captures the privilege behind first world problems.

“Or their claim to be so tolerant. “They say they're a culture without restrictions. An unconfined culture, a laissez-faire culture, a doyour-own-thing kind of culture. But all that means is, they keep their restrictions a secret. They wait until you violate one and then they get all faraway and chilly and unreadable, and you have no idea why. ”

Oh, yes. Those unspoken rules they were raised on but aren’t explicitly talked about.

“Speaking of which. It would be so obvious that we were not the true parents. There wouldn't be even a possibility of any physical resemblance.”
His mother said, “Ah, well. When your children resemble you, you tend to forget they're not you. Much better to be reminded they're not, every time you set eyes on them.”

I loved this take.

“When he sat among the relatives with her, she nestled against him trustfully and from time to time patted his wrist or twisted around to look up at him, her breath smelling sweetly of the trashy grape soft drink she liked.”

I like how Anne Tyler writes about childhood.

“More satisfying were the memories of past events that popped up out of nowhere, as vivid as home movies. The time soon after they married when she drove their VW Beetle into the driveway with smoke pouring from the back seat (something to do with the engine) and flung open the door and jumped out and threw herself into his arms; or the time she sent in his name for a local TV station's Hero of the Day award and he had been so gruff and ungracious when she told him (his heroism had involved carpooling three children at all hours of the day and night, not any rescues from burning buildings), although now his eyes filled with tears at her gesture.
He thought, Why, this is just unbearable.
He thought, I should have been allowed to practice on somebody less important first. I don't know how to do this.”

Anne Tyler writing about grief feels so intimate. It’s why I gravitate toward her books time and again.

“It was Bitsy who was his partner in mourning, much more so than her brothers. Remember your mother's silk pie? he would ask her, or Remember that song she used to sing about the widow with her baby? and he wouldn't have to offer any excuse for bringing it up. Bitsy fell in with him unquestioningly. Her tomato aspic, too, she would say, and Yes, of course, and what was that other song? The one about the lumberjack?”

It’s so important to have someone who shares the same memories and can fill in the details you’ve forgotten to create a full picture.

“Even if he'd had any interest, which he didn't, the effort of adjusting to a new person was beyond him. It had been hard enough the first time. ”

I thought about this line for days. It skewered my perspective on relationships.

“and there was a murmur of foreign phrases, a quick back-and-forth and a patter of soft laughter that made Dave realize how much went on inside these people's heads that he would never have guessed from their stunted, primitive English.
Wouldn't it feel like a permanent bereavement, to give up your native language?”

Yes.

“I thought, If only I could mourn the man I first knew!” she said. “But instead there were the more recent versions, the sick one and then the sicker one and then the one who was so cross and hated me for disturbing him with pills and food and fluids, and finally the faraway, sleepy one who in fact was not there at all. I thought, I wish I had been aware of the day he really died the day his real self died. That was the day when I should have grieved most deeply.”

Grief worsens when you think this has been the peak and there’s nothing better awaiting.

“People when they're sick begin to feel something is owed them. They get sort of imperious. In real life, Connie wasn't like that in the least. I knew that! I should have made allowances, but I didn't. I snapped at her, sometimes. I often lost my patience.”
“Well, of course,” Maryam said, and she set her cup back in her saucer without a sound. “It was fear,” she told him.
“Fear?”
“I remember when I was a child, if my mother showed any sign of weakness took to bed with a headache, even I always got so angry with her! I was frightened, was the reason.”

I cherish how Anne Tyler views the world.

“It isn't only her last days that I regret.”
Maryam raised her eyebrows slightly.
“It's her whole life. Our whole life together. Every thoughtless word I ever said, every instance of neglect. Do you ever do that? Think back on those things?”
…
“Ah, well, she said. If we had been different, would they have loved us?”

This really gave me comfort for all those what-ifs carried around.

“A tree so large could adjust to that. This morning, though, the men had moved on to the larger branches, and perhaps that too could have been adjusted to even though the tree had become as stubby and short-armed as a saguaro cactus. But now they were setting their chain saws to work on the trunk itself, and all those earlier adjustments turned out to have been for nothing.”

There’s a limit to the adjustments one can bear.

“She imagined that her grandparents were cheering her on and guiding her through the hard parts, as well as the great-grandparents she had never known and the great-greats and so forth, all the way back. So why couldn't Connie herself be taking care of Dave? That this was a non sequitur occurred to him only belatedly. Connie wasn't his ancestor. They weren't even related. But he kept forgetting that. He thought of the medical consultation where, briefly and hypothetically, a doctor had mentioned a bone-marrow transplant. She can have my marrow! Dave had said, and only at the doctor's quizzical glance had he realized his mistake.”

His love for Connie reverberated off the page.

“He cocked his head to listen for a winding-up note in Connie's voice, but she wasn't speaking just then and he realized now that she had been silent for several minutes. Then he understood that the silence was real the silence in the actual bedroom and that Connie wouldn't be speaking ever again.”

When you snap into real life after maladaptive daydreaming.

“She thought she knew now why they hadn't told her. They were embarrassed to be observed copying the Donaldsons yet again. ”

Low-key hated Sami and Ziba.

“Will you stay and eat with us?”
Maryam had assumed all along that she would stay, but the fact that the question had been asked made her doubtful, suddenly.
She said, “Oh, well, I know you must have work to do.”

I hate the coldness from being held at arm’s length within a relationship

“Uttering the phrase Vigor-Vytes led Farah to change over to English, probably without meaning to. It was a phenomenon Maryam had often observed among Iranians. They'd be rattling along in Farsi and then some word borrowed from America, generally something technical like television or computer, would flip a switch in their brains and they would continue in English until a Farsi word flipped the switch back again.”

Acute observation.

“She had never asked her mother a single personal question, at least as far as she could remember; and now it was too late. The thought stirred up a gentle, almost pleasurable melancholy. She still mourned her mother's death, but she had traveled so far from her, into such a different kind of life. It no longer seemed they were related.”

This felt so sad, especially remembering what was said earlier upon visiting to her home country:

“Of course she had been told about their deaths as they occurred (her mother, her great-aunts, her aunts and some of her uncles, each loss reported one by one in roundabout, tactful terms on thin blue aerogram paper or, in later years, over the telephone). But underneath, it seemed, she had managed not to realize fully until there she was, back in the family compound, and where was her mother? Where was her cluster of aunts clucking and bustling and chortling like a flock of little gray hens? ”

Should’ve kept every grocery store receipt, as Taylor Swift sings in her song marjorie.

“And once while she was waiting in her doctor's office a nurse had called, Do we have a Zahedi here? and the receptionist had answered, No, but we have a Yazdan. As if they were interchangeable; as if one foreign patient would do as well as another. ”

The wear and tear of living in a foreign country

“Do you ever feel exposed because you're not half of a couple?”
Kari said, “Exposed?”
“I mean, oh, not threatened; I don't mean that, but vulnerable? Unprotected? Anyone can walk up to you and just ... invite you out on a date!”

Always having a rejection ready, just in case.

“I'm Iranian; he's American . . .”
“What difference does that make?”
“You should have been at Farah's with me,” Maryam told her. “Then you wouldn't ask. Such a point her husband makes about her foreignness! It seems she's not really Farah at all; she's Madame Iran.”

I laughed at this.

“At night she began to feel his presence in her dreams. He never physically appeared, but she caught a whiff of his nutmeg scent; she felt his looming height beside her as she walked; she was conscious of his particular grave, amused regard.”

This is when you know you’re down bad, the delusions start.

“The next evening, she left for America. Her mother held a Koran above Maryam's head as Maryam walked out the front door of the family compound, and all the women were crying. You would never guess that they had been praying for this to happen since the day she was arrested.”

Wanting them to marry but not wanting them to become a stranger.

“You act as if you think you're so right that you don't need to bother arguing,” he said.

Low-key a compliment.

“Oh, Lord, how long has it been since you lit up like that when a certain person walked into the room?”

Crush culture. The things you miss about having a crush.

“Ziba was reminded of how a child will tug at his mother's sleeve when she is on the phone, requiring cookies, milk, juice, complaining of a stomachache, desperate to reclaim her attention.”

This kind of connect with earlier how when the person you crave attention from is feeling under the weather, your fear kicks in. Because who will choose us now? Isn’t that what we all want, to be seen and chosen?

“Do-on't cry-y,' he sang, and the don't went so low that he had to tuck in his chin to get down there.”

Anne Tyler excels at writing body language because I had to mirror the action to see if it’s really true.

“Jin-Ho's father told her not to trouble trouble till trouble troubled her. It was one of his favorite sayings.”

Now it’s one of mine.

“Wouldn't it be terrible if mothers could read people's minds.”

Especially the minds of teens.

“It wasn't just age that made the difference (although that helped, no doubt); it was more that she had winnowed out the people she wasn't at ease with. ”

Me but in my twenties.

“It was nothing like her marriage. This time around, she proceeded knowing that people died; that everything had an end; that even though she and Dave were spending every day together and every night, the moment would come when she would say, Tomorrow it will be two years since I last set eyes on him. Or else he would say it of her. They were letting themselves in for more than any young couple could possibly envision, and both of them were conscious of that.”

When you start from the end, the beginning is cherished more.

“But at the time she had resented his never-ending neediness. It hadn't yet occurred to her that a life where no one needed her would be a weak, dim, pathetic life.”

This made me think twice.

I'M DOING THAT WEIRD THING AGAIN.

It occurs more regularly at those points in life when your bookshelf is particularly bare. I should certainly know, because right now half my books are trying to flatten out a bunch of AMAZING (and yet equally horrible) 90's movie posters I found at a garage sale last month. I'm thinking about wallpapering our living room with the likes of "Heat", "Weird Creatures", "Dante's Peak", and, of course, my favorite, "Jingle All the Way" (never actually saw it, mind you, but the face Arnold Schwarzenegger is making on the front should be the one he makes in every campaign photo. california would be 20x cooler)

Anyway, you're really tired because you just came home from shooting a mexican infommercial for 14 hours and you need something to read to unwind while you cook your creamy-chicken-flavored-ramen-noodles. but, mysteriously, there's nothing to read around. so you go hunting for the "sex drugs and cocoa puffs" book you threw behind the couch when you got annoyed at chuck last month, but all you can find, all you can EVER seem to find lately, is "Digging to America", which you have already read and don't really care to restart. but you pick up anyway. because you are DOING THAT THING AGAIN.

doing that thing, you know, where you just pick up the book, choose a page, and start reading, only because it's the most convenient thing around, for days and days, until you notice you're starting to piece together the book again the way you first read it. and, whoa, you liked it the first time, because all of anne tyler's books are the kind of mellow slow build that draw you into the characters, not the story, but this time, jumping from place to place, reading chapters at a time, you start to notice things about people you hadn't before, which is why you love these books, because it's just like living with the people you're reading about.

which, of course, can be annoying. i find "annoyance" the most common reaction to anne tyler's books. you have to be patient with her characters the same way you're patient with an actual person. they're real. in all their traits and mannerisms and quirks and pitfalls, you have to look really hard to find what tyler may or may not be trying to tell you, (i imagine her to be much like her often absentminded characters, often forgetting what book she's even writing, and not that motivated in the first part to tell you anything in particular, anyway) through the memories and little moments she imparts sporadically throughout the telling.

so i'm doing that thing again, but it's turned out kind of nice. just, you know, like spending time with the extended fam.

if only doing "that thing" again with "sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs" had worked out quite so nice. chuck might still be around.

I really enjoyed this read. For light fiction Ann Tyler is my favorite choice. She throws out a snapshot of characters that are believable. This one explores a direction that I have not read from her before. Immigration and what it means to be American. I think that I may have found this more meaningful than some readers because I have read a few Iranian authors. The historical events referenced in this book offer little context and explanation but that is OK. With Tyler, a story is about the characters, their interactions and the depth of their personalities not history.

For info on the Iranian history that Maryam lived through read the graphic novel Persepolis or trudge through "Reading Lolita in Tehran”.

Tyler never disappoints, though this one's a little different than her usual. She usually introduces quirky characters that I know I wouldn't like in real life & makes me care about what happens to them. This book begins with two families--one mainstream suburban extended family; one couple & the man's mother, all Iranian immigrants--waiting at the Baltimore airport for the arrival of two Korean infants for adoption. We follow these families as they struggle to raise these girls & to develop an uneasy friendship through shared ritual occasions between the two extended families. Gradually, the story's focus shifts somewhat to the Iranian grandmother, who struggles with her "outsider" status in America, and her relationship with the widowed grandfather from the other family. Tyler is perhaps the most reliable writer I read regularly, & this book is no exception even though she's stretching herself.