Book: Zazen
Author: Vanessa Veselka
Published: May 31, 2011 by Red Lemonade; 256 pages
Date Read: February 6, 2012
First Lines: ”I went to work and a guy I wait on said he was leaving. He said everyone he knew was pulling out.”
Genre: Literary fiction
Amy’s rating: 5/5 Buzz Lightyears lashed to miniature graveside crosses
Susie’s rating: 5/5 candy-colored rat phones
Vanessa Veselka describes herself as having been, at various times, a teenage runaway, a sex-worker, a union organizer, a student of paleontology, an expatriate, an independent record label owner, a train-hopper, a waitress, and a mother–is it any wonder that she is also a writer? She fills Zazen to the brim with life and it bubbles over in streams of achingly beautiful language. Zazen tells the story of Della, a geologist/waitress who wants to get away from everything. She hears bombs in her head and can’t escape the monuments to shiny plastic capitalism that keep going up where she lives. When she hooks up with a girl named Jimmy who is leaving the country, Della buys a ticket, too. But she doesn’t go–instead, she starts calling in bomb threats, mentally attacking the places that threaten her neighborhood. She finds herself in deeper than she ever imagined when the real bombs start going off in places she’s called.
Amy: We both loved, loved, loved it! Best book I’ve read so far this year, by far.
Susie: I’m also so glad that we read it. I was enchanted (as much as you can be enchanted by a book that is about terrorism and war and hippies).
Amy: Almost every line was a poem in itself. I’m going to try to find the one, early on, that hooked me.
Susie: I loved her use of imagery. During the “anniversary” scene she talked about Della’s mother in terms of a tsunami–ocean imagery is dicey because it can be so overdone, but hers was perfect.
“Grace rose from the table like a tsunami. With her breath she washed away the debris of the past until we were all floating in her massive sorrow and buoyed by her absolute conviction in life, vibrant and wild on the shores, she carried us forward and that’s how we landed, all of us on this strange beach.” –Zazen
Amy: Bah, I can’t find the specific line, annoying. One I did find: “I had been kissing the hems of ghosts.” *swoon* Gorgeous.
Amy: Her use of language and imagery is masterful. The recurring themes of the self-immolators, the pregnant rat, her sister, the ocean… so many common (and often ugly) things, but made beautiful with her language around them.
Susie: I identified a lot with this book because it is about how ugly things have gotten–and it is frustrating, even though there’s no actual war on in our real life America, I think that’s more down to luck than our own doing. We think about leaving all the time, like Della did. And it’s compelling to follow someone who is acting on her frustration, even though it got out of her control.
Susie: Veselka said in an interview that she was trying to capture a culture, I think in this case the revolutionary culture, but also contrasted against our mainstream consumerism.
”… what is this book? Hmm … another Buddhist geological thriller? A secular spiritual epic? You know, just the other day in a radio interview I actually failed to describe my own book. It was a low point. … One day I was listening to an English professor talk about encyclopedic fiction. He defined it as a work that attempts to encapsulate an entire culture. I immediately realized that’s what I was trying to do.” — Vanessa Veselka in an interview with Literary Kicks
Amy: That’s interesting. It did make me think of that – what the 60s protesters would be, were they around now. How they would use modern technology to their advantage, what they would protest against, how they would go about getting their point across.
Amy: It’s a frightening book, because it’s just vague enough that it could very much happen, and any day now, you know? No details for us to grab onto to say, “Oh, well, that couldn’t happen because THAT person wasn’t president,” etc. She purposely left everything vague so it could be us, in an indeterminate future. Chilling.
Susie: Yes, it was dystopian in that way–it could be anywhere, it could definitely be here.
Amy: I don’t have much in the way of criticism. I was just head-over-heels. Oh, the Walmart scene, where Della was saying goodbye (or so she thought) to the children?
“…but I didn’t want to leave the little liver hearts because you shouldn’t be afraid like that, not when someone needs you, you should be able to look them in the eye, even if they’re dying and you’re scared and you can’t do anything, you shouldn’t run even if they’re howling and bleeding, you should stay and sit with them while they go…”
Ugh, I was up in the light booth blinking away tears, trying so hard to pay attention to my next cue. So beautiful. So amazing.
Amy: I think my only “huh…I don’t know if I love that?” moment was when we realize that [spoiler redacted]. Not that I wanted death, or anything. It just seemed vaguely anticlimactic after all Della went through.
Susie: Yeah, I was actually a little confused by that. I wasn’t sure why [spoiler redacted], because they clearly went to a lot of trouble to plan it out. [Also, am totally glad that Amy felt the same way about this part because I thought it was just me not understanding what happened here.]
Amy: I think that’s why I didn’t love it. Because we don’t know why it didn’t happen. But maybe that’s the point – Della is in the dark about so many things throughout the book, so we’re in the dark about the motives there?
Susie: I feel like it might be a commentary on the fruitlessness of that kind of guerrilla revolution. Or the wastefulness of it. Because it’s only destructive. And I guess the important part wasn’t that [spoiler redacted] but that Della acted against it?
Susie: I felt a whole current running through the book about the futility or maybe hypocrisy of the neo-hippie culture. Like how Mr. Tofu Scramble is a big ol’ cheese eater when his girlfriend isn’t there.
Amy: Yes, you’re right. And YES. There was a lot of Catcher-style “phoniness” going on. The Mr. Tofu Scramble thing. The boss at Rise Up Singing, who wanted everyone to think he was their co-worker, not their boss (and then sold out.) The revolutionaries seemed like children playing at war. A couple of them were even described with children’s barrettes in their hair – and then Della’s attraction to Tamara is related to her love for, and loss of, her sister, also a child, who was killed because of her childishness, sort of.
Susie: And Della’s parents, who would be “thrilled” that she was dating a woman, and were so happy when her brother married a black woman. It’s like convention turned on its head, but it still misses the point by a mile–it’s just the same as if her parents would have expected her to marry a well-to-do college grad and have babies, it just has a different flavor.
Amy: The only non-phony people in the book were Della, her bro & sister-in-law, and maybe a few of the Rise Up Singing co-workers? Everyone else had agendas behind their agendas.
Susie: I think her bro was kinda phony, too–her sister-in-law less so. They were all surprised when [the sister-in-law] got pregnant; breeding is such a normal thing to do . . . but it kind of connects them back with the rest of humanity, in a way. It’s something real that goes beyond culture.
Amy: I thought the brother maybe had been – he and Della both, maybe from growing up in that environment – but they’re both struggling to get free of it now. Della’s more successful, and I think her brother will be, ultimately. His wife is a good influence. And “bellyfish.” I loved that!
Susie: I loved the subtlety of her writing. Her humor was subtle–and she treated sex subtly, which I appreciated. She also doesn’t beat you over the head with anything; she doesn’t tell you what she’s getting at.
Amy: Absolutely. You don’t often see that anymore, and it’s refreshing when you do. The book didn’t hand you anything – it let you make up your own mind. I liked that. It treated me like an adult reader.
Susie: Something else I love about her writing–you can tell that she’s actually lived what she’s writing about. It’s not just some airy construct in her brain.
Amy: YES! I was so happy to see her list of jobs, and that she was writing from a place of knowledge with them. They were all so true.
Susie: You know what part I really got a kick out of? When she’s being interrogated by the FBI and she tells them the history of Earth. ”Starting at about 4.6 billion years ago and sweeping gracefully up to the present… I did it once when I was drunk at Davis and nobody talked to me for a week. But the FBI loved it. I could tell.” I also have another passage underlined that made me laugh out loud, after she has her first lesbian sexual experience with her brother’s ex: “He called my having sex with Jimmy unscrupulous dabbling. Apparently, his time with her made him some kind of gender cowboy while mine just made me irresponsible.”
Amy: I loved so many little things. Her paper-mache head made from all of her mail. The cell phones named after the planets for all the rat babies. The fortunes on her wall with the names of the people who immolated on them. The heartbreaking remembrance party for her sister. So many beautiful little moments throughout.
Susie: Oh, the remembrance party fucking killed me. It did. I lost my brother when we were both just babies . . . we obviously don’t do anything like that, but my mom never forgets when it’s his birthday or the anniversary of the day he died, she emotionally kills herself all day during those days even …. (mental math) 27 years later. I can see exactly how an extremely “progressive” family would fabricate that kind of ritual.
Amy: Oh, I’m so sorry to hear that. That must be devastating for her (and for you, too, to have lost your brother!) That whole section must have been painful.
Amy: I loved that Veselka had Jimmy there watching it, like an archaeologist, almost, observing a ritual – to help Della see it through a fresh set of eyes.
Susie: Yes, that was really good.
Amy: Did I miss the story behind the title? Or was there not one?
Susie: Sitting zazen is a Buddhist thing. It’s basically sitting meditation.
Amy: Oh! I didn’t know that, I’d never heard the word before! I thought of it more as a nonsense word – in my mind, it was the sound of bombs flying overhead. Which almost works too, even if it isn’t what she was going for.
Susie: It does kind of sound like that, I hadn’t thought about it. I used to have a Buddhist roomie so I know a smattering of things about Buddhism. (Well, he was supposedly Buddhist–I think he told himself that to make him feel better about being a dick, but that’s another story.)
Amy: This is probably a bad book for a lengthy discussion because I have all the love for it. 
Susie: I hope she writes more books and that they’re just as good as Zazen was. Totally would recommend it to anybody, and in fact I’m going to try to make my husband read it, ha.
Veselka and Zazen get two thumbs up from us. Each. So I guess that’s a total of four thumbs. So, you should probably read it, because that’s a lot of thumbs. As an added bonus, it’s available to read, for free, in its entirety, on the publisher’s website. Of course, this means reading on a screen, which kind of sucks, but it is free. (I have no doubt that the book will be winging its way to people soon, even if they start off reading it for free on the site. It’s just that good.)
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