Oh, Sweet Irony!

Revenge is sweet, but I don’t think people could possibly love it as much as they do irony. Is there anything more satisfying than seeing a self-important windbag fall prey to the same weakness that he excoriates in others (I’m thinking right now of Christian preachers who are closet homosexuals)?

But irony, while satisfying to recognize in the lives of others, is hard to acknowledge in oneself. I took a graduate class a few years ago in Romantic poetry. My teacher was a knowledgeable man and a good scholar. He was also a member of what I like to call the masturbatory school of literary criticism. He would sometimes read a line from Wordsworth or Keats, then sit back, gaze into the air, and say what a great line that was. That was it. He was usually right, but I didn’t think I needed a professor to tell me that.

As a writing teacher, I have become a card-carrying member of the same school of criticism. I’ll read from one of the essays my students were supposed to have read, and just comment on what a great passage it was. I don’t tell my students about that graduate class, though. There are some things that are just best left unsaid.

It is with this sense of irony in mind that I gather my thoughts and try to figure out what to say about Waiting for Snow in Havana by Carlos Eire. It’s this year’s “One Book, One Philadelphia” choice. Like The Things They Carried (last year’s selection, I think), this is a memoir written by someone who went through a deeply traumatic experience (Why do they have to be memoirs?). For Eire, it’s having to leave Cuba after the Revolution and becoming a refugee, then a foster child, in the States. While this is a good book, written with a self-deprecating, caustic humor and a bitterness and guilt of childhood, I can’t imagine it would go over very well at a book discussion in Philadelphia.

What I liked best about Eire was his tone. You should read the book yourself, and if you do, you’ll probably notice that my post “Portrait of the Artist” (see below) was a poor attempt to emulate Eire’s style.

So it turns out that there’s very little I can offer about the book, except saying, “What a good book that was!” If anyone ever decides to cover Alanis Morisette’s song, and wants to change the words to reflect things that are truly ironic and not merely unfortunate, this would fit well.