Thursday, February 12

Jane Mendelsohn’s I Was Amelia Earhart is one of those books that you would usually overlook. The book is thin, plain and basically what I called “stripped” (grey and lacks appeal). A book that you would routinely ignore everytime it sees you. Initially, that’s the effect it had on me. The name of the author didn’t tinkle my consciousness but the title did. Then I remembered the New Radicals’ Someday We’ll Know, which was later revived by Mandy Moore and Jonathan Foreman. Then, the book became visible to my senses.

I Was Amelia Earhart is Mendelsohn’s first book. It’s an imagined novel that recounts the life of Amelia Earhart, America’s first woman aviator after she and her navigator, Fred Noonan disappeared in the cost of New Guinea in 1937. The mysterious death of Earhart has prompted Mendelsohn to write this one-of-a-kind fiction. In 1992 she spotted an interesting article written by Richard Gillespie of The New York Times stipulating the discovery of a piece of plane that they believed to have been Earhart’s crashed Electra. Mendelsohn picked up a nice storyline about two people flying together in oblivion and started researching about Earhart’s life.

What makes this book deviant from those conventional mythic personage novels is how Mendelsohn merged reality with the subliminal. It amazes me how her mind weaves the instances as if she was a witness to such event. I love the subtlety and suave narration. It encourages your mind to wonder and see what the characters are feeling and what their subconscious minds probe into. It’s like you’re there but at the same time you feel that it’s non-existent. Then you’ll forget why the words are likely to reverberate in your mind even though you have passed by the lines a day after.

I couldn’t say it’s an addicting book but rather the kind that you would want to read piece by piece because you don’t want it to easily end. You’ll want to linger and stay. I Was Amelia Earhart for me is like watching Altman’s Streamers or Cronenberg’s Spider. There’s not much pacing in the story but you’ll crave for every detail. Your mind is exercised into some thinking and imagining. It’s like a wide horizon waiting to be explored and then at the middle of it you’ll forget how you get there in the first place.

I Was Amelia Earhart is poetic, lyrical and telegraphic in its vividness. It’s straight and honest but at the same time it could puzzle and tickle your mind. Earhart epitomizes women taking risks and challenges. She symbolizes women’s strength and power—the woman who went where no woman had dared go before and never came back.

Astonishing as it is, what makes this book different is how Mendelsohn is able to merge personas, a first-person narration and third blend. The book is charged with longing and passion transporting the readers to who was Earhart, what’s her childhood like, her marriage, her public life, and her eventual end. It is written unconventionally but strangely typical.

This “afterlife” meditation as the tense of the title speaks of is obviously playful of time. The concept of time is an essential aspect of this book as it merges the past, the present, the future and the “what ifs” of Earhart’s life.