The excellent new film Jane Eyre, with Mia Wasikowska in the title role, is one of more than a dozen cinematic versions of the classic novel by Charlotte Bronte. That’s a lot of visual interpretation, and the great Gothic romance has been the subject of much more literary criticism. But perhaps no treatment of the old story has shone as much light on its origins as has another novel, Sheila Kohler’s Becoming Jane Eyre.
     The joy of reading Becoming Jane Eyre runs much deeper than the simple game of discovering to what degree the novel’s events and characters are thinly disguised recreations from Charlotte’s brief life. Rather, Kohler’s genius lies in the illuminating way in which she imagines Charlotte using her considerable skills to make art out of her many disappointments. Tim O’Brien has written that stories come from the place where memory and imagination converge. Kohler vividly depicts Charlotte discovering that place, and in so doing she puts the creative process at the center of the action.
     Charlotte herself states the central theme of Kohler’s book, late in the story, when Jane Eyre has become an instant bestseller and its author the toast of London literary society. “People want to find out who she really is,” thinks Charlotte. “What they really want to know is whether she has written her own story into her novel; how much of it is true? How could she answer such a question? She doesn’t know the answer herself.”

   I was camping with a friend in the Canadian Rockies, back in 1995, beside Berg Lake, at the foot of Mount Robson. One day, we decided to hike from base camp up to the spot where Robson Glacier reaches it lowest point and melts into the snow field. As we walked up the valley toward the foot of the glacier, the rock walls on either side of us seemed to become more and more imposing, growing higher, looming bigger and bigger, the subtle color in the rock coming into sharper focus, the quiet becoming ever more quiet with every step we took. We could hear the hum of the glacier moving all the time, maybe we even felt the rumbling through the soles of our boots, and there was the constant, though intermittent, thunder of avalanches on the higher slopes of Mount Robson. It was a generally clear day, with blue sky and strong sun, although big fluffy white clouds were floating through the sky, but with enough space between them so as not to obscure the sunshine for more than several moments at a time.
   We were probably within 500 yards of the glacier when I had to stop and sit down beside the trail. My friend kept on, his goal being to reach the top of the narrow valley and touch the glacier itself, as though it was a trophy to be collected upon completing the hike. I simply could not continue. I was in awe, in shock, actually. My senses, indeed, my soul, could not take in any more of such beauty. I felt that I might burst if I continued to collect any more of this wild landscape without taking the time to absorb it, to respect it, really. I sat there on the rock, shaking, nearly in tears, knowing that I was seeing god and understanding, not intellectually but viscerally, what wilderness is. I knew, not in a metaphoric way but with certainty, that this place was real, and that the city, and the life, I'd left behind were not.

    When the Blizzard of 2010 shut down London’s Heathrow Airport during the Christmas rush, the resulting criticism caused the executive who runs the place to forego his annual bonus. But that storm has passed, and for frequent fliers who want to learn more about what goes on behind the scenes at Terminal 5, one of Europe’s biggest passenger terminals, a recent paperback from Vintage Books is just the ticket.
   The arrival any book by Alain de Botton is welcome in my library, so I was pleased to find A Week at the Airport shortly after the holidays. De Botton, the bestselling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life and The Architecture of Happiness, was an inspired choice as Heathrow's writer-in-residence. He’s an elegant stylist and an original thinker, with a particular knack for interpreting the mundane predicaments of modern life in ways that illuminate their underlying meanings and their importance to the individual. One suspects, in fact, that he’s describing his own works when he tells a bookseller at the airport, “I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange.”
   A Week at the Airport is illustrated with a series of subtle, yet revealing, color photos by Richard Baker. Together, the writer and photographer expose both the public face of T5, which cost $7.6 billion and took nearly six years to build, and it’s backstage geography.

    While on Christmas vacation I read The Stone Raft, my first encounter with the unusual style of Jose Saramago, the Portuguese novelist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1998. The stone raft of the title refers to the Iberian peninsula, which is set adrift in the Atlantic Ocean after the Pyrenees mountains split down the middle. The novel focuses on a journey across Iberia taken by five people, all of whom have had experiences that, like the sudden crackup of the Pyrenees, defy the laws of the physical universe.
    More intriguing to me, however, than this fantastic plot is the style in which Saramago writes. He pays little heed to the conventions of usage and punctuation, and the run-on sentence structure he employs takes some getting used to. But his ideas, imagery, and affection for his characters were all very attractive to me. Here's just one example of his style, a sentence I particularly like ("Deux Chevaux" is the Citroen car in which the characters travel):
   "And what I'd like to know is what moves inside us and where does it go, no, I'm not talking about worms, microbes, bacteria, those living creatures that inhabit us, I'm referring to something else, something that moves and perhaps moves us at the same time, just as constellation, galaxy, solar system, sun, earth, sea, peninsula, and Deux Chevaux move and move us with them, what is the name, finally, of the thing that moves all the rest, from one end of the chain to the other, or perhaps there is no chain and the universe is a ring at once so thin that apparently only we and what is inside us fit into it and so thick that it can accommodate the maximum dimension of the universe, which is the ring itself, what is the name of what follows after us."
   Wow.