Ready, Set, Go and Jumping Right In
Ready, Set, Go by Inés Bortagaray (translated by Ana Patete) is about a family on a road trip. The narrator is a child who watches the scenery, squabbles with siblings over the window seat, and lets her mind wander just about everywhere.
Here's how it opens:
I see a pole that comes and goes until I see another pole that comes and goes but that never leaves entirely because in a departure, a wake remains. The wake is the pole in movement, the pole that's swept away, that continues in a line of phantom poles that stops in between pole and real pole. The real one continues through the various phantoms until another real pole announces that there is something real after all. It is dawn. Sometimes while there's an ovenbird's nest atop a pole, interrupting the chain assembled by the sequence of poles. There are wires between each (between pole and pole): electricity. Black wires that tauten above and draw a score of lines that rise and fall, like on an electrocardiography monitor.
I'm sure part of the reason I love this passage is the memory it evokes. I spent so many hours as a kid watching telephone poles and the swooping wire between them. And it's not lost on me that my connection to the novella is created through a metaphor of connection—those connected poles.
But not every reader will have that memory, and it's not the only reason I'm interested in it.
Though I eventually understand what is happening, my first experience of the passage is something else entirely, because the image is severely deconstructed. It's not stated that the narrator is in a car, and it could be any type of pole. We don't know its size or color or purpose. The idea of a wake evokes a shape but not much more. It's rather abstract, as is the concept of realness and the idea of phantoms.
Not only that, the pole is moving. Of course, stationary poles do seem to move when you're passing them, but we're not told the narrator is doing so, and so it's literally the pole moving instead of the viewer.
Eventually we get more tangible details: dawn, an ovenbird's nest, black wires. A jumble of impressions turns into a scene, and I can parse what I've been watching. I also had hints through the title and cover of the book. You probably figured it out through my plot synopsis. But the text itself does not situate us.
And I love the paradox of this reading experience. The moment is so inside a scene—so much a lived moment—that it doesn't introduce itself and thus becomes difficult to understand as a scene. Other books open with a quick moment of summary to introduce what is happening—often so quick you can miss it, but it's usually there. These short introductions give shape to scenes, twist the ongoing stream of life into distinct moments that might contain meaning. Writing instructors (not me!) say "show, don't tell," but without the telling it's all deconstructed. Without context, it's chaos.
And that's the point here. This unsettling experience is purposeful. We're already inside the scene, and this is how it feels.
I mentioned the way I connected to this opening through my memory of an experience. That happened, I believe, before I could name what the paragraph described. This seems impossible to me, until I go back to look at the words. The strange swirl of shapes without context is very like the experience of watching something repetitive. It loops until your mind falls away and so does all meaning. I think this helped me feel what was happening before I knew it. Additionally, the repetition of the word "pole" mimics the rhythm of the experience.
Reading a deconstructed image without context is like seeing a jigsaw puzzle in pieces. We catch bits of color but can't understand the scene. Until suddenly we do. The pieces assemble in the brain. And the picture is complete.
But is it? Or do we still see the seams? Maybe it's suddenly fragile, breakable. If the first thing we get is chaos, the chaos remains in our minds even as it turns into something else. The images take on meaning, but the pieces still hold their meaninglessness. When we look at them later, we remember how they came together, and we imagine them falling apart.
All of this work is further emphasized and made to last by the way the opening reaches forward and outward. The stringing of pole to pole establishes the pattern and structure of the book, which is thought to thought to thought. And the ideas it strings to are already all over the place: birds (nature), assembly chain (like a factory), electrocardiograph (heart, health, love), electricity. They establish an expansiveness that seems to encompass the whole world.
A carefully established mood is created through the opening deconstruction—the linked poles and this sense of the whole world connected but also fragile and with the cracks showing. This feeling of chaos inside order will necessarily infuse through the rest of the Ready, Set, Go. That really matters