The e-edition of Hamilton’s latest in the Ava Lee series is out and you will want to take this trip with Ava as she hits several continents: AmsterdamThe e-edition of Hamilton’s latest in the Ava Lee series is out and you will want to take this trip with Ava as she hits several continents: Amsterdam and Antwerp in Europe, Singapore and mainland China in Asia, and back to Toronto in North America.
Ava’s collecting debts but for a friend, as she had in her early career. It brings back memories. This time it is not debts Ava is following but cold, hard investment theft wrapped up in a not-so-generous evangelical megachurch on the outskirts of Toronto. Hamilton creates the cruelest, most unambiguously unforgivable villains to walk the earth, and places them in a world we recognize. From there, the scandal just gets bigger…
Has anyone read the 14th-century Chinese novel called, variously, The Water Margin, Outlaws of the Marsh, and All Men Are Brothers? It is a rip-roaring 4-volume Song Dynasty yarn, a masterpiece of storytelling, packed with colorful characters whose names tell it all: Little Whirlwind, Blue-Faced Beast, Impatient Vanguard, etc. The epic story tells of 108 bandits who live by the margin of Liang Shan Marsh and pursue justice by unconventional means.
Hamilton’s story this time has elements of this ancient tale. He named his thieving church leaders Cunningham, Rogers, and Randy. Ava’s triad connection in Chengdu, Han, is blustery and loud, his crass manner and crude-but-effective methods modeled on characters in the ancient tale. Han uses his fists when words are not enough. He carries a large weapon to focus the attention of his opponents on their limited options.
I adored this tale for these elements, and for outlining and pointing to the real and acutely painful problem that Ava uncovers in the course of her investigations, something that has been plaguing the West, particularly the United States and Canada, for some years now. The problem has its source in China and concerned North Americans have wondered how on earth this is happening without and/or despite Chinese government oversight.
The answer to that question echoes what we hear when contemplating the indescribably painful political atmosphere in the United States: it is completely within the realm of the country’s leadership to stop the trouble. For some reason beyond our understanding, the leadership prefers chaos. God help us all.
Another fantastic addition to Hamilton’s box of jewels.
P.S. If you are going to pick up Outlaws of the Marsh, please choose Sidney Shapiro’s translation, the language of which made me fall in deeply love with Chinese culture, habits and humor. Shapiro’s word choices make the ancient book immediately relevant, laugh-out-loud funny, and the long read tireless.
Entering week eight of coronavirus, I deserve a break. And one of my favorite series of all time has to be Ian Hamilton's Ava Lee books. Canadian by bEntering week eight of coronavirus, I deserve a break. And one of my favorite series of all time has to be Ian Hamilton's Ava Lee books. Canadian by birth, Chinese by race, lesbian by choice, and accountant by vocation, Ava Lee is one special protagonist.
Now in her mid-thirties, she hasn't slowed down any. She has agreed to help out an old friend-of-a-friend and ends up collaborating with a government she hasn't worked with in the past. The whole experience looks like it will end badly, but the denouement shocks us utterly. Hamilton plot lines are unique. He doesn't copy anybody and he always talks about our culture now, highlighting personalities and events that look vaguely familiar from the headlines. This contemporaneity may be why I admire his style so much.
Author Hamilton writes in his Acknowledgements that this was a difficult book to write and indeed, was not originally part of this series. That statement raises all kinds of questions in my mind, but I can unequivocally say that this story is breathtaking in the leaps it takes in plot and character development. Remember what I say about 'familiar' figures and you will forever wonder what truth there is in this heartbreaking novel. In the very next book in the series, Ava says something about "one can never be too cynical," and one fears she learned that lesson from cases like this one.
We also learn that Hamilton had such deep disagreements with his long-time editor Janie Yoon over this book that they went their separate ways. I did notice that Ava is not quite as sure of her ability to solve every problem as she has been in earlier books. She's getting older, something I appreciate since I very much am, too.
This story takes place in the Philippines and yes, it is a departure from other efforts. During the action sections of the novel, Ava barely speaks to the folks who bring her the case. We follow her, hoping there is not an iota of truth to any of it, but suspecting a story like this doesn't get conceived in a vacuum.
As this sequel to Atwood’s worldwide bestseller and Hulu serialized drama, The Handmaid’s Tale was coming to a close I grew anxious. ‘There are’t enouAs this sequel to Atwood’s worldwide bestseller and Hulu serialized drama, The Handmaid’s Tale was coming to a close I grew anxious. ‘There are’t enough pages left to wrap this up,’ I thought, but I wasn’t giving Atwood and her editors enough credit.
The story is Atwood’s conversational response to readers who wanted to know what happened to characters left in extremis at the end of A Handmaid’s Tale. Atwood’s wonderful sense of humor brings the sharp-eyed, lumpy woman adorned in brown burlap and known as Aunt Lydia to life. Her diary is being composed as we read:
“Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and I took the one most travelled by. It was littered with corpses, as such roads are. But as you will have noticed, my own corpse is not among them.”
This turns out to be one page in Aunt Lydia’s apologia for misdeeds first forced upon her and then undertaken as a means to an end. Whose end we learn at the finish.
Two more points of view are given in short, discontinuous and not always parallel histories. A young girl growing up privileged in Gilead discovers at thirteen that she is considered marriageable. The horror of that notion stirs rebellion within her. An orphaned teen in Canada learns her guardians have been car bombed. She apparently has some debts to pay.
Atwood braids these three stories, giving each voice distinction and character. Our mind’s eye has each firmly in sight as they gradually find themselves within arm’s reach of one another. One of the girls tells the other that Aunt Lydia is the “scariest of all the Aunts…You get the feeling she wants you to be better than you are…She looks at you as if she really sees you.” Hmm, yes.
What was most interesting to me as I blazed through this big book—it is very easy to read, a straight-line adventure story—is how Atwood could see so clearly certain social and political trends that are evidenced in our society now. Her clarity and comprehensiveness of view reveals so much about her own personality. She’d be a wonderful friend.
Vermont and Maine get top billing as states on Gilead’s border where residents are known to be willing to transport ‘grey market’ goods like lemons or escaping girls. A New Englander myself, I was disappointed New Hampshire, the ‘Live Free Or Die’ state, was not similarly viewed until I considered the White Mountains would pose a significant barrier to anyone expecting to travel past them to the north.
In the end, I was gratified to discover Portsmouth, NH was chosen as a key location for by-sea person-smuggling from Gilead, just as it had been historically for black slaves of old seeking freedom in the north.
It is difficult to avoid Atwood’s premise that literature must be destroyed in a repressive state because new, creative notions about how to live are subversive. Atwood picked out for especial notice books that would be have an enormous impact on impressionable minds, like Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Paradise Lost, and Lives of Girls and Women.
I haven’t read the last but would like to, now. I might take issue with Paradise Lost. I read that a couple years ago to compare it to Jamaica’s Kincaid’s memoir See Now Then and I can honestly say that book is too dense, particularly for young girls who are just learning to read. But Atwood probably knows better. When one’s library is limited, sometimes one’s understanding becomes sharpened.
When the girls in Gilead were finally able to read, it came as a shock to them that the Aunts had lied to them about the Bible. The Aunts had told the girls that the dismemberment story of the concubine, while horrific, was an act of sacrifice, a noble and charitable act. Reading the words themselves the girls discovered there was only degradation and hatred in the killing of an innocent.
“I feared I might lose my faith. If you’ve never had a faith, you will not understand what that means. You feel as if your best friend is dying, that everything that defined you is being burned away; that you’ll be left all alone.”
We have to have some empathy, then, for those who will lose their faith, however weak it has become over the years, in a political party now called Republican. It is sad, this death of belief.
Very very glad to hear from Margaret Atwood again. I miss her already....more
I finished Edugyan's third novel today in a fog, reading the last hundred pages completely engrossed in the strangely unreal world and story Edugyan hI finished Edugyan's third novel today in a fog, reading the last hundred pages completely engrossed in the strangely unreal world and story Edugyan had created, about a former slave, physically damaged from years in captivity but involved in the science of creating an indoor aquarium in London—something never done before.
If at first—and I have seen such criticism—the story seemed a little derivative of Jules Verne with wondrous and far-flung adventures, Edugyan pulled it off. There were wondrous adventures when naturalists and people of science began to turn their attention outside their own environments to the larger world. Anything they could conceive of was about to be tried…travel to the Arctic, say, or to the bottom of the ocean, or ballooning long distances. The story is an absolute feast of imagination.
Race is an important component of the story in that we have an abolitionist white scientist who chooses a young slave boy to be ballast for his balloon adventure. When the white master discovers his black ballast has exceptional drawing skills, the boy’s role changes. Though they are close, there is always a power differential in their relationship that keeps the friendship from meaning as much to the white man as it does to the black man.
Edugyan sketches this kind of unconscious racism so clearly, and points to it, that one can hardly walk away from the book with one’s vision unchanged, whichever side one is on. We can put words to a feeling of alienation we may have seen or felt before but weren’t able to express.
It turns out the history of the world’s first public aquarium is much as is described in this novel, though I was unable to discover whether a very young black man was the first to come up with the idea and design of the tanks for public display of sea creatures in the mid-nineteenth century. It seems perfectly likely, as does the fact that such a man would never be acknowledged, his history expunged as a matter of course.
Edugyan is Canadian, which is not obvious. She sets a portion of the novel in Newfoundland, but otherwise the characters travel far and wide on nearly every continent. She adds an intriguing love interest for George Washington Black, the main character and former slave from Barbados. We presume Black is originally from Dahoumey in west Africa because that place name is buried deep in his subconscious and is resurrected when his life is in danger.
Black’s love interest is a mixed-race island woman of great beauty and intelligence and a rounded sense of her own potential. Her father, also a scientist, did not encourage her to develop her physical charms. One day he allowed her to purchase a few small concessions to beauty that she craved: red lipstick, a diaphanous dress, an emerald clasp. She discovered that people noticed her more but saw her less. This lesson all women must learn and decide whether to exploit or not.
The start of the novel was not particularly convincing and had the feel of a young adult novel, but it began as it meant to go on, and by midway I was involved, suspending belief, rapt, and curious. There was something about the way the role of the one-time slave was progressing that held some hope that his potential would be developed. And the history of race is not yet finished being told, since we write it every day.
It's a wonderful novel. Edugyan has written two other critically-acclaimed novels and at least two collections of stories. She has taught creative writing and has won several international awards for her work....more
It used to be rare for me to read through a writer’s oeuvre at once. I was afraid I would show an author I admired to disadvantage. With Rachel Cusk, It used to be rare for me to read through a writer’s oeuvre at once. I was afraid I would show an author I admired to disadvantage. With Rachel Cusk, each book is another, deeper aspect of the same theme so one may move from one to another, gorging intemperately on the ideas there and stagger out like a bee drunk on honey.
Honesty, she says, is critical. If one is going to pay any attention to an author, honesty about the human experience, however coruscating, is key. Men write about war which tears the heart from the body. Women write about domestic issues which tear the soul from the heart. One day this may change. To date, thousands of years since the Greeks, it hasn’t yet.
Clytemnestra took over her husband’s work while he was away fighting the wars in Troy. Cusk calls her unisex, that she seeks equality, now that she’s seen men’s work and can handle it herself. But the ‘pure peace of equality’ does not engender children, or border expansion, or empires.
“It is all aftermath, predicated on the death of what was before…Clytemnestra wants no more begetting. She wants the peace of equality but to get it she will have to use violence. To reach the aftermath, first there has to be the event itself.”
Reading backwards through Cusk’s work, I realize this book is the third piece of a memoir in acts. It begs to read through in a sitting, her writing is so clear, so inescapable, so sharp, so quivering and naked. Her husband barely appears and yet we hear her silent wail, like reverberations impacting eardrums. The children are her Iphegenia, “the sacrifice that lies at the heart of all marriages.”
“Grief is not love but it is like love. This is romance’s estranged cousin, a cruel character, all sleeplessness and adrenalin unsweetened by hope.”
“I blame Christianity,” she says, lashing out. “The holy family, that pious unit…has a lot to answer for….The day feeble Joseph agreed to marry pregnant Mary the old passionate template was destroyed.” Honesty. Where was it then? Where is it now?
She doesn’t eat. In the chapter entitled “Aren’t You Having Any?” her children essentially beg their mother not to disappear, but “it is impossible to eat and stay vigilant.” Her daughter is invited to the party of a close friend, but when the time comes to pick her up, the narrator realizes the friend invited other people for a sleep-over, but not her daughter. She immediately attributes this to her divorce and considers it a calculated cruelty, but someone less involved would certainly make a different assessment. The daughter, perhaps ten years old, is the more adult in this case, urging her mother to drop it:
“They probably didn’t even think about it. That’s just how people are.”
Indeed they are. The chapter called “The Razor’s Edge” reminds us of Antigone, where sacred law meets state law. Creon is Antigone’s uncle who has ordered her not to bury her slain brother because of his alleged crimes against the state, of which Creon is in charge. Creon eventually retracts his threats, but too late. When Teiresias, the blind soothsayer, tells Creon to relent and forgive Antigone lest he perpetuate perversity, Creon first insults Teiresias, and then admits that he is frightened. This, Cusk tells us, is
“aftermath, the second harvest: life with knowledge of what has gone before…true responsibility is an act of self-destruction.”
Am I wrong in suggesting that the narrator is right? We will all go through these stages in our life. Cusk is so close to it here, and so invested in her own version of it, that she does not realize this is natural, normal, perhaps even healthy. None of us was ever perfect, so perhaps a little self-destruction (read: ego-destruction) is called for. It’s the rebuilding that makes true love, true generosity possible. It happens regularly in good marriages: the breaking and restitching. Doesn’t it?
She has a larger capacity for love than she ordinarily shares. It is clear in the narrator's story about the witch’s house: how she and her daughters rented a set of rooms in an old house but were kicked out by the proprietor before the agreed-upon time was up. She felt the wrong keenly and when she complained, she was deserted in a distant location by the proprietor. Cusk told her friends how she bravely got her own back, but she admits to us that a greater achievement would have been to acknowledge the lack of love and attention the place and the people needed. She sought safety for herself and her children, but sometimes safety is best found by opening up and letting go, rather than by holding on.
This astonishing end to a trilogy of memoirs only makes her writing all the more precious, knowing it was first written in blood, by her fingernails. It always amazes me that voices of such extraordinary power are not immediately recognized, nourished, protected. We need writers with skills and sensibilities like this, without which we’d have no standard to set the bar. Many thanks to this brave woman willing to share her innermost agonies in exquisite prose for our improvement.
It is strange, I suppose, for me to describe this trilogy of books as though they were thrillers, but they acted that way upon my consciousness. I reaIt is strange, I suppose, for me to describe this trilogy of books as though they were thrillers, but they acted that way upon my consciousness. I read them out of order, 3-1-2, so I will discuss the totality of them in recognition of their separateness. There was a propulsiveness to the story as told by Faye, writer and teacher, former wife and current mother, and narrator of these three slim volumes. These easily contain some of the best writing I have enjoyed for many years.
The perspective in these novels is female, but Cusk gives us a wide range of male personalities to consider. She is not cruel, though it may be true she leaves out that ‘divine spark’ that gives the male its essence, its truest expression. Her observations are deep enough to border on psychoanalysis, giving us the material with which to draw the conclusions. It is fortunate she is so funny because we recognize then that this is fiction. Real life is never so funny. Is it?
The final scene in this novel recalls the title of a memoir of hers, The Last Supper, which is definitive, even conclusive, in some way. I have no idea whether the two are related in subject matter, but somehow I am tempted to believe they are. One leaves the dinner party shattered, with only shreds of one’s understanding of what makes a good spouse, a good parent intact. Everything we understood about marriage and parenting has been challenged and we are distraught to realize the only thing left of our understanding is that love must be in the equation somewhere. Scratch that. Everywhere. In great abundance.
As a set-piece, this scene has no parallel that I know of in modern literature. The utter compulsion with which we listen to each new voice, each new revelation, gives the book its thriller aspect. What new terror is around the turn in the conversation? Parenting is something about which everyone has opinions. Even when we think we don’t, as soon as someone else acts, we realize that oh yes, we do indeed have opinions.
During the dinner party, and several times in the course of this series of novels, Faye takes calls from her own sons, who for one reason or another are on their own while she is away. We see how she reacts, and sometimes, though not always, we learn what she says. We form opinions about her in these moments. Can anyone disapprove of how she handles these intimacies? We have to ask ourselves why she includes these moments in her novels. Is she modeling how she thinks love manifests? I think it may be so.
This narrator, I should remind everyone, is practically invisible in these novels. She had a few opinions in the first novel, delivered to a man she met on an airplane and about whose life she really shouldn’t have had much to say, since he was essentially a stranger to her. Opinions like these gradually peter out over the course of the novels and when she is asked directly for her opinion on some topic, she may instead offer a memory of something that happened to her that could be construed as an answer.
She uses this technique in her writing classes as well. She is challenged when she is teaching writing sometimes that she does not actually teach, and her novels make no sense. What we learn is that her questions in class about classmates’ experiences are meant to expose those things worth writing about, and how to get to that kernel each time. I think we can assume the author Cusk interrogates herself and her experience in this way to get to stories, though that can never account for the alchemy that makes these books literature.
Struggling through her days as a single mother of two boys, Faye manages to engender rage in the residents below her second-floor flat. She determines to hire someone to soundproof the floor while updating the cabinets and finds the most expressive, articulate, introspective builder who reveals he would prefer to live “somewhere completely blank…where there’s nothing, no colors, no features, maybe not even any light…” Similarly, she finds a hairdresser who casually makes the deepest cuts: “To stay free you have to reject change.”
Later, Faye will tell an old friend, “Freedom is a home you leave once and can never go back to.” Does she mean freedom, or innocence? Are they the same? Still later yet Faye wll say to that same friend that desire and self-control are not the whole story when we speak of ourselves in the world. There is also something that happens that some call fate but others might call powerlessness. This phenomenon may be especially observable in relationships, when other have will, but not, perhaps, exclusively. It is existential, a reason there are gods.
Completely convinced of the potency and success of this trilogy, I am surprised to see how many of my fellows in literature did not share my opinion. She tried something unique in these novels that began as an answer to critics of her autobiographies. It worked. I am eager to discover all I can of her writing, and believe she should be close to the top of the list of our best for what she delivers and how she delivers it. Kudos indeed.
The third volume of the trilogy of which Outline is first is what introduced me to Cusk. I am kind of astonished I’ve not been badgered about her consThe third volume of the trilogy of which Outline is first is what introduced me to Cusk. I am kind of astonished I’ve not been badgered about her constantly—she is so funny, so illuminating, so exacting. My enthusiasm for Kudos prompted GR friends to insist I read the three-books-in-one so I picked up Outline.
I’m pleased I read the third book first. It is even better than the first by orders of magnitude, though I’d feared I’d begin to see the seams if I read all three books at once. Never mind. Cusk has talent enough to hold one’s attention easily, and I can see where the last scene in the trilogy comes from…not from nowhere as I’d imagined.
Cusk manages to carry the conceit through to the end—“what did you notice on your way here?”—though she places it in the hands of different actors as she carries on illuminating for us the nature of relationships and marriage, of meaningful work and children, of money and it’s opposite. Only the supremely confident could laugh at “those who have,” all the while exposing how little they in fact have.
So the notion of ‘outline’ in this story is not revealed until the end, when two people sitting next to one another on an international flight find themselves talking. One person is often doing the asking, the other…sometimes asks questions back, but only if they’ve been trained to do so as a result of their lives. The answers to questions about one’s life give the questioner the opportunity to occupy the ‘negative space’ as it were. That is, they did not have the experiences being related, so only an unfilled-in outline of who they are remains until someone asks something about them.
We learn in the last book in the trilogy that negative space, when properly illuminated, can look like it has more there than when it actually contains something. It is a notion, and Cusk may be saying that she is not trying to steer this thing, this novel…"not trying to convince anyone of anything"…because she is done feeling capable and competent and sure of her skill. But really, there is plenty she does know, and plenty her girlfriends know, about how they want to be treated, or not treated. They deserve to be carved in marble and dressed in soft-looking garments and set in an alcove, even if headless. Like goddesses at the Agora in Athens.
What strikes me is that the narrator has much more to say in this novel than she does by the end of the trilogy. In this novel she is commenting on the actions and decisions of her ‘neighbor,’ the man she met on the airplane, often enlightening him when she thinks he is being self-delusional. He understands her criticism to mean she cares. “What is fatal in that vision is its subjectivity…the two of them see different things.”
The three novels of the trilogy were published in a relatively short period of time, the first in 2014, the last in 2018. The outline of the main character is filled in gradually, illuminating what she is not…not a wife any longer, but a mother still, not a writer so much as a teacher (or the other way around?)....more
Ali Smith wrote this book fast, and I think that is how she intends us to read it, at least at first. We slow down when her images and meanings start Ali Smith wrote this book fast, and I think that is how she intends us to read it, at least at first. We slow down when her images and meanings start to coalesce on the page and we suspect there is much more to this than the twitter-like, depthless sentences that don’t seem like they are adding up to anything. Afterwards, an image emerges. What is more suited to tweeting than a Canada warbler?
The story, as such, is that a young man breaks up with his girlfriend Charlotte right before a Christmas he’d wanted to bring her to his mum’s house to introduce her to his mother. He finds a substitute girl, who happens to be waiting at a bus stop, rather than go through the humiliation of saying he no longer had a girlfriend. He pays her—Lux she is called, though he’d never asked—to stay the three days of the holiday.
Art grew in the course of this book into a grander vision of himself. He writes about nature, the churn of seasons, in a blog he calls Art in Nature. Though he rarely writes anything political, he is thinking about making his work a little more political, like the “natural unity in seeming disunity” of snow and wind, “the give and take of water molecules,” and “the communal nature of the snowflake.” He, Art, is not dead at all, though he is being crushed by his ex-girlfriend Charlotte on Twitter.
Charlotte is pretty clear-eyed:
The people in this country are in furious rages at each other after the last vote, she said, and the government we’ve got has done nothing to assuage it and instead is using people’s rage for its own political expediency. Which is a grand old fascist trick if ever I saw one…the people in power were self-servers who’d no idea about and felt no responsibility towards history…like plastic carrier bags…damaging to the environment for years and years after they’ve outgrown their use. Damage for generations.
Plastic carrier bags? This is where Smith shines, making her argument so clear and relatable and yet so absurd. She’s funny. She’s right and wrong at the same time, like most of us. Like Art. Smith draws environmental degradation, suggesting chemical drift in the air can settle like snow, like ash, like slow poison on our lives. She compares the influx of refugees fleeing for their lives in the Mediterranean to exhausted holidaymakers using their friends’ recommendations on the ‘best places to stay.’
Many images float around this book, inviting us to make connections: Iris-eye, art-Art, stone with a hole in it-eye, stone with the weight and curvature of a breast-Mother Nature…once we begin, we start looking for these parallels everywhere. Lux— she had some kind of luxurious brain, a luxurious education studying what she wanted (like Shakespeare, violin, human nature), and the luxury of floating through the world unencumbered and unafraid.
Lux is an out-of-body experience, an angel who appears and disappears; a Canada warbler. Lux is grace. Lux brings the two sisters together and reminds them of their shared history, of love, of the importance of struggling to create bonds. Lux tries to convince Art to stay after the three-day Christmas holiday to talk, late at night, to his mother. At first he refuses, but when Lux says she will help, he looks forward to it.
Soph, Art’s mother, is not crazy but prescient, depressed, and old. The word Sophia in ancient Greek and early Christian times meant wisdom, and clever, able, intelligent. Iris, the sister from whom Soph was estranged, is not a religious do-gooder but is targeting critical needs to save what’s best of the human race. She is named for Iris, the Wind-Footed Messenger of the Gods. Her presence signifies hope.
Smith is also concerned with truth, and at some point Lux points to the notion that the truth of a thing may be confused with what we believe to be true. Is there objective truth? This question has been argued since time immemorial. It is back with a vengeance, and must be adjudicated daily, moment-by-moment within each of us.
Art in Nature continues to exhibit itself throughout the novel: a female British MP is barked at by the grandson of Winston Churchill, who is also an MP. He says it was meant as a friendly greeting, she accepts the non-apology. Smith interprets this incident as snow melting on one side of furrowed ground in slanted winter sun. It turns out the stuff Art writes in his blog material is invented. Lies, one could say, but close enough to real to sound remembered. This novel has a lot to do with art and politics and what the difference is between them.
Iris writes
& th diff dear Neph is more betwn artist and politician—endlss enemies coz they both knw THE HUMAN will alwys srface in art no mtter its politics, & THE HUMAN wll hv t be absent or repressed in mst politics no mtter its art x Ire
Ali Smith—and this is only the second novel of hers I have read—seems a skilled interpreter of our lives. She is involved in the struggle, and has enough understanding to recognize #MeToo began with the Access Hollywood tape; the rest, on both sides of the Atlantic and around the globe, is fallout. She doesn’t want us to lose hope, but recognizes the route to betterment is long and arduous, which is why she occasionally blows a Canada warbler off course in the middle of winter to thrill us with what is possible....more
Teaching tools must be updated often now to keep pace with the chances in our awareness & social development. This geography book was published in 201Teaching tools must be updated often now to keep pace with the chances in our awareness & social development. This geography book was published in 2015, and seems to have taken into consideration most of the complaints about earlier cultural tourism. It looks like a fun book--teachers may find themselves skimming but getting caught in the interesting detail and in imagining how they would present the material in class. It is a colorful round-the-world tour of certain countries and parts of the world, e.g., A for Australia...
To my eye, it looked appropriate for 10-year-olds, but I have seen it listed for third-sixth graders, in the U.S., that would be 8-11. That seems about right.
It has a current feel. Women are shown, not all working in traditional jobs, and there is a sort of poem at the start of each new letter that can be put to a beat, if one wanted. Could be useful for class projects....more
The cavalcade of sexual harassment accusations beginning with the Weinstein revelations brought the writing of Stephen Marche to my attention. In an oThe cavalcade of sexual harassment accusations beginning with the Weinstein revelations brought the writing of Stephen Marche to my attention. In an op-ed piece published in the NYT (Nov 25, 2017), Marche asks us to confront “The Unexamined Brutality of the Male Libido.” “The men I know,” he writes, “don’t actively discuss changing sexual norms…Men just aren’t interested. They don’t know where to start.”
If anything were designed to intrigue me, it would be this conundrum: that men cannot or will not or are not interested in fruitfully engaging on anything about gender roles except where to stick it. Marche makes reference to the fact that of all the people who interviewed him about his new book this year, The Unmade Bed, only a minuscule number were men.
“A healthy sexual existence requires a continuing education,” he writes. I am remiss here, only discovering upon reading his work recent studies which determine that gender can only really be defined on a spectrum. I hadn’t realized this was accepted thought, or becoming so (though GR friends have told me before). I haven’t kept up with my continuing ed in this field, including the apparently widely quoted study result
“that men who do housework have less sex than men who don’t, and men who do more traditional ‘work around the house,’ like yard work, have more sex than men who don’t.”
That’s me not keeping up, though the results don’t particularly surprise me. Why it is so is what makes Marche’s work interesting.
Marche began his fascinating perspective on our changing gender relations with a chapter on mansplaining, a term inspired by an essay of Rebecca Solnit to describe someone who insists upon detailing a concept his listener knows more about. In “How Much Should a Man Speak?” Marche suggests that the mansplainer bore at a party or at work is probably the end result of years of cultural training to make men more willing to express their thoughts—a weird perversion of intimacy.
Maybe. I think we might have more examples of mansplaining as just straight-on sexist thought, though like he says, men also experience mansplaining. We’ll just have to agree that such behavior in conversation describes a deeply insecure personality and view each on a case-by-case basis.
This book came about when Marche left his teaching position in NYC to move to Toronto when his wife landed a high-powered, high-paying job as editor of a national magazine. His role as house husband became far more family-centric once his son and eventually his daughter were born. Never strong on the role of housekeeping (“my gonads shrink into my body a bit”), Marche describes how he came to think about his marriage, fatherhood, and sexuality.
There are many moments I would describe as deeply insightful, perfectly thoughtful continuing ed which actually includes notes from his wife, the editor, giving her perspective of his comments. But what if men are not interested in reading about what he has learned about changing gender roles?
Maybe now is the time to point out he has a chapter on pornography, including a description of the image that first electrified him. But there is also the notion that
“Masculine maturity is inherently a lonely thing to possess. That’s why maturity and despair go together for men. The splendid isolation of masculinity has emerged from so much iconography—the cowboy, the astronaut, the gangster—that almost every hero in the past fifty years has been a figure of loneliness. Current pop culture is even more extreme: it doesn’t merely celebrate the lonely man; it despises men in groups. That contempt runs counter to male biology. Men, every iota as much as women, are social creatures who live in a permanent state of interdependence and require connection for basic happiness. In periods of vulnerability the male suicide rates spike.”
The cover blurb on Stephen Marche describes him as a cultural commentator. He is that, every bit as much as the feminist writers he critiques. In his NYT piece, Marche suggests that some people think “men need to be better feminists,” but in this book he tells us “the world doesn’t need male feminists…It needs decent guys.” That sounds right by me.
Finally, I leave you with one of Marche’s paragraphs I know you will enjoy, given the exposure men like Louis C.K. have chosen as their contribution to the gender conversation.
“Diogenes the Cynic masturbated in the marketplace and called it philosophy. Of all the wisdom available in ancient Athens, his was the earthiest, the most practical. He refused to condemn the body out of social propriety. If he was built to ejaculate, he should ejaculate, and therefore he ejaculated where everyone could see him. The Athenians loved him for his frankness, which provoked laughter as much as disgust. When asked why he masturbated in public, he answered, “Would that by rubbing my belly I could get rid of hunger.” Diogenes offered the pagan view of masturbation: Why be ashamed of the easiest expression of masculine desire? Why fear the erasure of male sexual appetite by the lightest, the most harmless of gestures?”
Modern day Israel can sometimes feel like a recent bruise. It can hurt to brush up against it. Occasionally someone with experience in the region writModern day Israel can sometimes feel like a recent bruise. It can hurt to brush up against it. Occasionally someone with experience in the region writes a new melody that is both beautiful and plaintive, and perhaps the saddest sound ever heard, a sound from the other side of a wall.
Englander’s new novel might be that new music, filled with regret for the wasted time and wasted lives, for what could have been, and what has not come to be. He points out that the time to settle state issues have come many times, and each time something more dangerous, deadly, and self-defeating was chosen. What is there to lose now? How can “even-ing the score” help in any way? Haven’t we been here before all the deaths?
The novel describes a twelve year period beginning in 2002, a year of enormous instability and fear throughout the Middle East, on every side a battle. Spies were everywhere, and some were looking not just for weaknesses but for opportunities. What Englander reminds us again and again in this novel is how close the Palestinians and Israelis are, how well they have studied each other. Their hate is more like love.
During eight of those twelve years 2002-2014, ‘the General’ Ariel Sharon lie in his bed, in a waking coma, able to hear, apparently, though perhaps unable to make sense of what he heard. While the General remained alive, hope for peace remained among his supporters because Sharon alone had shown willingness to withdraw from Gaza. Though Sharon led some of the most decisive attacks against Palestinian aggression anywhere, he understood that he was responsible for Israel’s future, which meant peace. Military ends had not brought the stability he’d sought. Every year he lay in bed, the hope dimmed further.
The story’s other individuals are connected in some way with a couple degrees of separation. All appear to have been spies at some time or other, so the tension starts strong and never really abates. One is continually aware when a conversation is intended to communicate far more than casual niceties about work, weather, or sports. In Berlin, a Palestinian operative gathers the money and resources he will need to make a difference. Approached by an American Jew working for Mossad, a connection is made.
In counterpoint to Sharon’s story and that of the American spy in Europe, is another story told some years later of a man, Prisoner Z, being held in an Israeli dark site in the desert, a disappeared man we initially assume to be Palestinian. But no, he is one of their own, which means a crime of treason. He's held twelve years already, by the same jailor. They have become friends, these two lonely disappeared men, and more perhaps. Brothers.
Englander’s characters are believable—they are not better nor more evil than anyone else in the world. That is his point, after all. It may be illegal, treasonous, monstrous to suggest that Israelis would be safer if they had less protection, less surety, but that may be what it will take to get where they claim they want to go. The Palestinians are going to want parity, so if parity is not what one is willing to give, then one will always be looking over one’s shoulder at what could have been.
A beautiful small novel that feels European, filled with hope and despair, possibility and its opposite. And love.
I listened to the Penguin Random House audio production of his novel read by Mark Bramhall. Bramhall does an Oscar-worthy Jewish mother talking on the telephone to her son, the spy. It can’t be beat, his impersonation. Listening is a fine way to enjoy this novel....more
More than once I have called this series of books about a Chinese-born Canadian my guilty pleasure, but now I wonder why I should feel guilty. Ava LeeMore than once I have called this series of books about a Chinese-born Canadian my guilty pleasure, but now I wonder why I should feel guilty. Ava Lee is a forensic accountant with deep ties to Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland. For several books in the series she investigated improprieties in international trade and business deals, but then she invested her earnings in new businesses on the mainland as a venture capitalist. Anyone with even a cursory interest in how the world turns is gong to be fascinated by the mysteries revealed in this series.
Ava Lee is smart, savvy, sexy, and…a lesbian…which is no big deal when she is residing in Toronto. In China, however, that lifestyle choice is not appreciated, nor even permitted. At the end of this installment of the series, the author puts a little pressure on those restrictions and I expect we will just see how far they bend.
One of Ava’s investments is in a clothing designer trying to break into the European market. The designer attracts the attention of a major Italian luxury goods provider who doesn’t take kindly to the smallish company rejecting his takeover bid. Ava calls on her friends in the Triads to push back, and the Mafia becomes involved.
What’s so fascinating in this installment is the discussion about sourcing and supply for luxury goods. We must all have had our suspicions about how luxury goods makers were able to survive in the era of Chinese low-cost production and competition, and here we get a few details that might help us to figure out for ourselves how much of those expensive products are actually “Made in Italy,” or perhaps just assembled in Italy.
There is no doubt that shipping plays an enormous part in costs, both time and money, for the materials are often shipped in and [mostly] finished goods shipped out—across the world. Besides the enormous marketing efforts, quality of the scarce materials, plus the real design genius behind some of the products…all of these things add to cost, but a little deep dive into the metrics and the kinds of markups on these products sort of takes away our enthusiasm for these ‘luxury' products: luxury for whom?
Hamilton imagines for us a meeting between the Mafia and the Triads in Macau, that city of casinos, where residents, curiously, live in one the most densely populated areas on earth and yet have the world’s longest life expectancy. He discusses along the way the changes in Macau’s landscape when foreign concessionaires were finally allowed to build, making a kind of Vegas on steroids. Millions of gamblers leave $45 billion there a year, compared to a take of $6 billion a year in Las Vegas.
There is no bloodshed in this novel, but I have to admit I was expecting it every second once everyone arrived at the Italian restaurant on Macau to talk an unreasonable and profane billionaire magnate into moderating his expectations. That man did not fit the mold I was expecting for someone “with everything.” He seemed too disbelieving that anyone would refuse his incentives, and too rude when he finally got the message. There was something authentic missing in his characterization.
After all this time, after 9 episodes of Ava’s experiences, I am still trying to come to grips with author Ian Hamilton, and why he does not seem prurient when describing the sex life of a woman. First, Ava is pretty restrained, and in all that time has had only one fling…a one-night stand with a hotel manageress in Iceland. Second, Ava has had a steady girlfriend in Toronto whom she barely ever saw, from readers’ point of view. And thirdly, it occurs to me that maybe the male Hamilton has an easier time writing about a gorgeous sexy woman than he does a man. That’s a bit of a challenge for him.
All in all, I always enjoy reading about Ava’s next challenge, where she’s been, and what she ate. There have to be some advantages to making millions of dollars after all, and it is a lot easier (and I argue even more fun) to read about it than it is to actually go out and do it. It looks like she’s off to the Philippines in the next installment and I have to admit a little danger does my heart good. This novel was a little more talky than usual, but a lot happened in a couple days. It takes time to explain.
Recent reporting in the New York Times discusses the case of a Chinese-born Canadian billionaire banker who has been thought to have been abducted from Hong Kong, North Korean-style, and kept under some kind of arrest in mainland China. Apparently some Chinese officials are purchasing large shares in national power companies for their own enrichment, like what happened in Russia when the Soviet Union dissolved, and they don’t want their machinations known. I wouldn't mind seeing Hamilton wading into this criminal circus and political controversy, just for fun. Many thanks to author Hamilton, editor Yoon, and publisher Anasi for the high-class entertainment....more
Delisle's Pyongyang experience is a little different from his other books because in the case of North Korea, Delisle is here to work on animation stuDelisle's Pyongyang experience is a little different from his other books because in the case of North Korea, Delisle is here to work on animation studies for a film. Apparently most major animation studios find animation devilishly expensive to produce in the home country and so go to lower-wage countries to do the in-between frames in a storyline so that the work is smooth and not herky-jerky.
Foreigners are asked to come for short periods of time to keep an eye on the project and get the work done on time and with the proper standards. While he was there, Delisle came across a not-insignificant number of people living in Pyongyang or passing through, on their way to remote outposts for different reasons. I'd always wondered about that, but wasn't sure if it actually happened. Must be pretty grim work, considering Delisle's experience ensconced in a big, empty, cold & impersonal hotel in the city...surely as comfortable a place as can be found.
Anyway, one gets a very good sense of what his days were like, what the city looked like, how fun was to be had, if it was to be had at all, but very little of the inner lives of residents, which is to be expected. Delisle's work again adds to the richness of our understanding of the world. ...more
Margaret Atwood has outdone herself in this re-staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. For those of you unsure whether or not you will grasp it, forget Margaret Atwood has outdone herself in this re-staging of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. For those of you unsure whether or not you will grasp it, forget that notion. The play, which is being performed scene by scene for film, is thoroughly explained by the director to the players who happen to be presently incarcerated...in the Fletcher Correctional Institute. Eventually, the screening of the play for an audience of government and prison officials is paralleled with a real-life enactment of the play featuring the inmates, a female dancer, and the play's director. Atwood kindly gives a short and snappy synopsis of Shakespeare’s original story after her own presentation to refresh our memories. If you have the book, you can read that first if you want.
The Director of the Fletcher Correctional Players, once a Duke who directed plays for Canada's prestigious Makeshiweg Theatre Festival, takes the role of Prospero himself. He loses his position at the theatre festival one year and is pushed out to sea in a small boat (rusty old car) where he washes up in a cave-like rental for some years before he decides to stage a comeback using the Fletcher Correctional Players.
The audio for this book is particularly good. Some of the Fletcher Players shorten and update Shakespeare into current rap rhyming lyrics. This seems so entirely appropriate since Shakespeare often did the same, not in such short meter, but to the same end. And as the Director/Duke points out, Shakespeare often appeared to modify and create character’s speeches on the spot in the theatre, depending on the skills of the person in the role.
The Director had a rule for inmates: they couldn’t swear at one another using the more commonplace four-letter words we are familiar with, but they were allowed to use Shakespeare’s own swear words, e.g., born to be hanged, whoreson, pied ninny, hag-seed, abhorred slave, red plague, etc. Caliban calls himself hag-seed, and though his role is central to this retelling, the real thrust of Shakespeare's story belongs to Prospero, who seeks revenge for his dismissal so late in life.
There is real tension in this re-telling, and readers are dying to know how it is going to work out. Prospero’s plan is an elaborate deception featuring magic, and in this case, eavesdropping and kidnapping within a prison environment. We are at the edge of our seats to know what Prospero has in mind and whether his chosen goblins can pull it off without losing the thread (or losing their parole).
The play is a big success, and after the production is all over, the Director/Duke/Prospero gives the players the opportunity to discuss the outcome of the play as they see it. This important part of Atwood’s presentation fills out our modern perception of the centuries-old play, as each of the main characters tries to explain what might have become of them after the action of the play as written has ended.
Perhaps not surprisingly, we get at least one unpleasant but realistic take on the journey back to power for Prospero. The Miranda role, in another’s telling, is a completely unexpected evolution along the lines of the action movie grande dames like Uma Thurman in Kill Bill or Zhang Ziyi in Crouching Tiger.
But the most rewarding of the after-stories is the one presented by Caliban, the Hag-Seed himself, who escapes the play altogether and creates a new one. And this is why this book is called Hag-Seed. In the end, the story is not about that old revenge play The Tempest at all, but about the rolling ball of creation, and how it is impossible to stop its onward journey.
I had access to the paper copy of this book while I listened, which allowed me to get every nuance. If one must choose one, I think I would go with the audio, which is beautifully read by R.H. Thomson, and who has a string of screen and theatre credits to his name. Produced by Penguin Random House Audio, the production is also available as Whisper-sync from Audible. Hogarth produces the paper copy. Choose your weapon and let the show begin....more
There is much to admire in what Thien tried to do in this 2016 Booker- shortlisted novel, and judging from the laudatory reviews, she must have succeeThere is much to admire in what Thien tried to do in this 2016 Booker- shortlisted novel, and judging from the laudatory reviews, she must have succeeded. Personally, I struggled against the style of this novel, which I found cloying, despite the fact that different members of one family each had pieces of the story to tell. I have yet to find the author who can tell me a Chinese fiction that I really enjoy, except for classics like the Outlaws of the Marsh (Water Margin) and Journey to the West, which have always held me in thrall.
The period of this novel, from the end of the revolution through the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen is almost impossible not to find interesting as straight history because of the wrenching societal upheavals, personal traumas, the hugeness of the country, and pace of change. What Thien did was to put a face and family history through that trauma and connect that history to the great Chinese migration east, to the West.
Her lens was a good choice for the story she chose to tell, musicians who played western instruments and music, for it is they who were targeted during the Cultural Revolution most harshly, along with other specialists in western thought or sciences. The part about getting “sent down” to the countryside was not as thoroughly fleshed out as it could have been, but she included details which placed many friends and colleagues in far reaches of China long after that decade passed. The dislocation and missed opportunities were apparent in the lives of those she spoke of who had returned, to some extent, to their old lives. The interpretation of western music by Chinese is a fascinating thread that could have been a story in itself, another frustration. Thien's story is both too big and too small.
The Book of Records was a strangely effective tool, if I understood it correctly, to tie together the lives of those past and future, and the samizdat quality of appearing and disappearing chapters had an authentic feel. Citizens had a real fear of the reach of the state. The scenes before and during the Tiananmen incident also had an immersive, completely authentic quality. When Thien talked about the buildup to June 4 on college campuses, the innocence of the students, the terror of the parents, the gradual buy-in by the factories and universities from around the country, and the euphoria, these details rang true.
So why was it difficult for me to listen to this novel? It could be the uncomfortable sense of listening to heartstrings, or perhaps it was the Western connection. This was a nation ripping itself to pieces. Pity is not an appropriate sensation, nor is any sense of a Western mindset. There is much that was pitiable about life in that period, but perhaps it was the lack of distance, or humor, or sense of historical moment that I missed. These small stories against the backdrop of fifty years in the life of a nation in revolution seemed too small, or too magnified. I never felt really engaged.
The last portion about Tiananmen filled in pieces in my understanding of that time and was detailed and involving for me in a way that the rest of the narrative wasn’t. But this is what I mean about the history being much more interesting than the individual stories. Her characters didn’t matter. We are looking at this spectacle of a nation struggling between revolt and control. The individuals are swept away, a distraction to the magnificence of something on the scale of a natural disaster. It seemed too much for her tiny story, though how else could such a thing be described, except in this way? One day we may find someone who has figured that out.
Thien deserves credit for the enormity of what she attempted, successful or not. It seems that those who didn’t already know this history intimately might have found much to interest them. Those who do know China more intimately might, like me, be waiting for a work that even comes close to encompassing even a piece of the inexpressible and unfathomable hugeness of China as we know it, with no inkling of the West. It is the East that interests us, not the West looking at the East.
I listened to the Recorded Books audio production of this novel, narrated by Angela Lin. Beautiful Mandarin pronunciations were dubbed in for place and people names. There were times when I wondered if the paper copy would help me to understand the form and function of the Book of Records, the form of which I only had a hazy idea about after listening for some twenty hours. And I wondered if the paper copy had ideographs copied out, which would add to the reading experience. If one wants the immersive experience and is unfamiliar with China’s recent history, I think I would recommend the Whisper-sync option, so that one could listen or read alternately, or one after the other, perhaps, to capture all the nuance in this big, ambitious novel.
Struggling between three and four stars: three for my personal experience, and four for what it probably deserves. You all split the difference....more
Hamilton never ceases to amaze me. He writes a fiction series about an unlikely heroine, Ava Lee, who does forensic accounting for a living. Throw awaHamilton never ceases to amaze me. He writes a fiction series about an unlikely heroine, Ava Lee, who does forensic accounting for a living. Throw away all those notions you had about accountants being boring. There is nothing even remotely ordinary about what Ms. Lee does, and the fact that her work has her traveling the world regularly adds to the mystique.
While most series have a level of predictability after awhile, this series never does. We are treated in this episode to the most lovely charting of how corruption might work in China. You heard some time ago about Bo Xilai and his wife Gu Kailai, famous now for the murder of a British businessman. Bo was a “princeling” of Chinese politics, one of the Eight Elders of the Communist Party of China. He was also governor of Liaoning province and held an important role in the Northeast Area Revitalization Plan, giving him power over what is accomplished and who gets to do it. A result of all that power was a myriad family-owned businesses, dubious connections, graft, and coercion that allowed his family to acquire untold wealth.
Cut to Ava Lee, in Shanghai for a fashion show highlighting her fledgling company’s first collection. One of her backers is the head of the Triads, who comes under pressure from the “princeling” of Jiangsu province (the wealthiest in all China) to start up a synthetic drug operation. Well, Ava decides the best way to get this powerful, unreasonable man to back off is to expose his families dealings. And then Hamilton kindly gives us an education to exactly how graft and corruption can occur in China.
You may not be as impressed as I was, but let me tell you I have tried to figure out how this works for years…it always seemed just too blatant to be possible. But the hidden networks of power make it extraordinarily difficult to reveal the true source of the corruption. You will note that only last month the Panama Papers revealed that Chinese President Xi Jinping had extensive hidden overseas caches of money in the names of companies headed by close family members. Well, Hamilton shows how this might be possible.
In this episode there is relatively little exhibition of Ava Lee’s background in bak mei kungfu, a particularly lethal type of Chinese martial arts often used by palace bodyguards in centuries gone by, but there is a little, where Ava takes on two thugs sent to kidnap her into silence. What gives the story impetus is the short time frame in which Ava uncovers the links that made a provincial Chinese governor a billionaire, and the danger that lurks behind every phone call and meeting. In the United States I doubt we’d be using cell phones like Ava did in Shanghai and Nanjing, without regard to who might be listening, but there have to be some ways to bypass plot killers.
Ava is an avowed lesbian with a girlfriend in Toronto waiting for her return, but we sense Ava’s growing attachment to a powerful man in Shanghai and expect that one day that attraction might burst into flame. The unexplored sexual tension adds piquancy to their conversations around the breakfast table slurping congee with scallions. And that’s the other thing about this series that is so delightful: if you’ve ever wondered what to order at a Chinese restaurant, look no further. Hamilton details for us the most exquisite meals, whether at the Mandarin Oriental in Hong Kong or a hotpot restaurant in a side street there and gives us the manners and customs to go along with it. I defy anyone to turn up their noses at the menus items described.
Hamilton was an international businessman and diplomat before he turned to writing. How he came up with a Asian lesbian as a leading lady in his novels is one of the great mysteries of inspiration. His tightly wound and disciplined main character is perhaps a bit too cool to imagine as a friend, but she is someone to admire, certainly, from afar. Hamilton never disappoints in this series, so if you haven’t indulged yet, make sure to get a couple books in the series to get acclimatized. This very fine fiction is as intellectually stimulating as it is culturally rewarding....more
Israeli fiction has had the effect on me of a loud, rambunctious, youthful group thoughtlessly jostling me aside as they enter a crowded bus. I look aIsraeli fiction has had the effect on me of a loud, rambunctious, youthful group thoughtlessly jostling me aside as they enter a crowded bus. I look at it from under lowered eyes, trying without success not to judge. From my white middle-class American insulation I find the colorful opinions and actions of the Israeli diaspora “just too intense for me.” Gradually, I shuffle aside to accommodate the spirited group, listening without effort. When they eventually get off the bus before I do, there is a space where they were, and the silence feels empty.
I was looking forward to being seduced by this collection. The first story, “Tikkun,” threatened my resolve. It slapped me awake, moral nerve endings jangling. What people are these, I ask, reviving my indignity. I think now the story was put first to do just that: these stories are going to rock your world, it seems to be saying, so be prepared to realign your carpenter’s level.
All the stories seem to have a Yemeni connection, the characters descendants of Yemeni immigrants to Israel. Lili and Lana in “Say it Again, Say Something Else” are two bruised girls not really ready for the world but trying to act as though they are. In “Casualties” a young military officer plays at hardness, nonchalance, and devil-may-care until the reality in her life calls her cellphone.
Two stories in the middle of the collection seemed technically and tonally perfect, gathering the angst and confusion of the culture. “Invisible” features a Filipina caregiver overstaying her visa while caring for an aged grandmother not her own, her distant extended family, and a demobbed soldier who has seen action. In “A Sign of Harmony” a young Israeli in India tries to find a thread of a road that she wants to walk amidst the clamor of cultures.
“Below Sea Level” angles a selfish youth mentality to reflect into our eyes again, nearly blinding us to the whole human drama that comprises family. And “Borders” reminds us that family is what we make it, after all. These are stories about Israel’s youth, and as such, display youth’s tendencies toward self-absorption, lack of history or responsibility for the future. In each story Tsabari captures a moment in time that is so transitory the characters may never know how it changed them, or how it changed us.
If these stories accurately reflect a piece of Israeli experience and culture, they are a bombshell in the midst of more staid (placid?) values, religious or not. The pervasive atmosphere of “why worry about tomorrow” must be a release at the same time it cripples a wider understanding of a world building a future. What kind of future is never even hinted at in this collection, for these characters are not even part of the conversation. What kind of world is this, a place with as much history as the world has to offer, and a blank where future is meant to lie? It leaves us pondering the word “wonderful.” ...more
Somehow the word “novelist” doesn’t quite capture Yann Martel’s art. If I had to describe what he does, I might say he writes storybooks for adults. TSomehow the word “novelist” doesn’t quite capture Yann Martel’s art. If I had to describe what he does, I might say he writes storybooks for adults. They often have talking animals and a kind of magical realism. They can be extraordinarily effective in reflecting us back at ourselves. He questions the ordinary, celebrates the fantastic. “Stories benefit the human mind.” We understand through stories, and each of us interprets a story differently.
Martel’s new novel drops us into a strange and distant land, at a time before any of us can claim first-hand knowledge. While he presents the facts of the case, we wonder what knowledge we are meant to bring to aid understanding. We listen, feeling homeless, unsure. He then leads us homeward, and in the last third we find ourselves quite at home and at peace…with a chimpanzee…in Portugal.
Religious belief, the bond animals and humans share, and big questions (“That’s the great, enduring challenge of our modern times, is it not, to marry faith and reason?”) are enduring themes in Martel’s work. We move through a century in one family’s history, collecting wisdom, only to have to succeeding generations keep the form but not the reason for an added custom, like walking backward in a state of grief, or the name and circumstance of one they worship as a “saint.” In three parts we have three married couples, all of whom have lost one lifelong partner, searching for meaning in their grief.
“Grief is a disease. We were riddled with its pockmarks, tormented by its fevers, broken by its blows. It ate at us like maggots, attacked us like lice—we scratched ourselves to the edge of madness. In the process we became as withered as crickets, as tired as old dogs.”
Martel’s stories are always filled with symbolism, some sitting on the surface and easy to discover, and others discovered only after much contemplation. Real issues critical to our understanding of the world are treated with whimsy and humor, not scorn or disdain.
Martel makes the point that neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi makes in his memoir When Breath Becomes Air: that the goodness and blind faith required of us by religion is too hard to live up to on a daily basis. Reason is easier, both to comprehend and to use as a kind of measure of goodness. Neither faith nor reason is enough on its own: neither explains the world adequately. “Reason is blind. Reason, on its own, leads us nowhere, especially in the face of adversity.” And what of joy? Love? Reason doesn’t explain those, either.
Martel creates a character who suggests that an Agatha Christie murder mystery might combine the two: “the solution [is] stories that put reason on brilliant display while keeping one close to Jesus of Nazareth.” He compares the form of Agatha Christie novels to the gospels and hypothesizes that both are stories with a central murder mystery. The facts are laid out with great formality and ceremony, but no one ever seems to remember who the murderer is. Who killed Jesus? It is true that murder mysteries are compulsive reading material for adults, as are our bibles, whichever religion we examine.
Martel goes further. He takes the central imagic trope in the novel, an ancient carved wooden crucifix, and proposes us that the figure of Christ on the Cross might actually be a Chimp on the Cross--a crudely-carved naïve attempt at perspective, a statement on the development of man from ape, or a challenge that man was more pure, present, and godlike before he developed reason. That would be to say nothing of the literal: that humans have lorded over and crucified wild animals, even those so close in genealogy to ourselves, bringing us shame and not salvation.
Martel has no sacred cows. Reviewers have criticized him in the past for challenging the sanctity of well-protected myths and histories. I find Martel dazzling in his fearlessness, rigorous in his thinking, and deep in his conclusions. He is not dismissive of faith: he thinks it both interesting and necessary, providing a kind of useful moral structure. The formal ritual of organized religion does not impress him: “architectural modesty best suits the religious sentiment. Only song needs to soar in a church; anything fancier is human arrogance disguised as faith.”
There is something intoxicating and deeply reassuring about the final section of the book in which is recounted the story of Odo the chimp, rescued from the research lab in America’s southwest. Odo is old and wise enough to have developed a kind of culture and a rudimentary understanding of language. He can communicate, if not without misunderstandings. Odo seems to have no notion of past and future; he is all about the present. His human companion, Peter, discovers that he would prefer to become more Odo-like in his “profound simplicity of means and aims...members of [Peter’s] own species...are too noisy, too fractious, too arrogant, too unreliable. He much prefers the intense silence of Odo’s presence, his pensive slowness in whatever he does…”
A couple of last things: There is a profoundly affecting marriage consummation scene in this novel which gives readers a glimpse into what kind of man the author is, for who else could create such a scene? Both husband and wife are virgins; he twenty-one and she seventeen. Sex itself is all still a mystery, but they work it out together. The bride had never known desire, nor where hers lay, but her new husband searched for, and found, her hidden place and they lived and loved passionately ever after. Martel makes it beautiful, sexy, joyous, and absolutely right-sounding.
Was there ever an Iberian Rhinocerous? I doubt it, though he had me believing, just a little.
Canadian author Richard Wagamese manages to slow our heart rate down with this story of an Ojibwe Indian who lost his bearings, and about an old man aCanadian author Richard Wagamese manages to slow our heart rate down with this story of an Ojibwe Indian who lost his bearings, and about an old man and a boy living on a farm carved out of the wilderness. Stories told and listened to form the heart of this novel: one feels sure that if only there were enough stories, things might have turned out differently. But in the end, the larger story—the story of this novel—lets us know that life encompasses both the tragic and the magnificent and to know one, we must know the other.
"When you share stories, you change things."
The land is central to this novel: how it nourishes and refreshes the spirit, how it returns generosity shown it. The old man and the boy live in concert with the land and, having learned its lessons, treat one another with a gentleness and love that approaches the sacred. "Just get it done," is what the old man tells himself and teaches the boy, and throughout their lives together the two of them face difficulties or obstacles with the same quiet fortitude and firmness. They discover the pleasure in bending one’s back to difficult work, and in contemplating the end of a task well done, whether it be straight, square, strong fencing or burying a man, facing east, in stony ground.
The boy’s father, Eldon Starlight, had left his son with the old man because he couldn’t find the strength within him to care for another. When gradually the outlines of Eldon’s life come into focus, we discover his struggles are mostly internal, that despite the gifts of his physical health and strength, he hadn’t enough strength of spirit to see him through the inevitable twists and turns of an unexamined life. His addictions explain, but do not excuse, his inattention to the only things that really matter. Eldon realized, at the end, that he really wanted a connection with his heritage and with the land, and the boy, though he had reason to hate his father, showed just what kind of man he was becoming by honoring him, padding his grave with moss and boughs and sprinkling it over with tobacco. His upbringing and connection with the land developed reserves of generosity within himself that he could share when the world displayed too little. There is terrible pain in the world, but there is also grace.
The section of this novel that deals with Franklin bringing his father to his final resting place, finding his way in the woods, encountering a bear, fishing without line, hunting without a gun, the boy generates love. He is sixteen and a man in all the ways that matter.
The bare simplicity of the narrative, and the clarity of the language both hold a beauty that is rare in novels today and makes this a standout. The harsh reality of someone dying of drink is achingly real and truly described, as is the beauty and bounty of open forest. The relationship between the old man and the boy defines what sustains us in a world that too often feels outside our control. In the end, we are all is nourished, blessed even, by the strength their relationship.
"Feels good to miss things…it makes you know you’re living, that you touched something, that something touched you."
I listened to the audio production of this book, beautifully read by Tom Stechschulte, and published by Recorded Books. I highly recommend this book, this meditation, for centering oneself in a busy world and for reminding us of what is important.
In an interview with CBC Richard Wagamese says that this is his best novel, and that it may lead to another novel or two to flesh out the lives described within. To my thinking, the novel stands on its own, though I would love to see more of the folks and lives described in this work. ...more
Both the writer, Brian K. Vaughan, and the illustrator, Fiona Staples, are such profusely talented collaborators that their work must be outstanding eBoth the writer, Brian K. Vaughan, and the illustrator, Fiona Staples, are such profusely talented collaborators that their work must be outstanding examples of the genre. Perhaps best of all, in the final pages of the hardcover version of Volume I Vaughan lets us in on the magic of creating graphic novels. Since the writer and illustrator both have unmatched imaginative and artistic skills, their generosity in sharing the techniques of creation seem unlikely to infringe upon their respective positions at the pinnacle of graphic novels.
Residents of a world are war with the residents of their moon. Their fight has drawn in residents of other locales throughout the galaxy to fight proxy wars on their behalf, “waged mostly by unlucky draftees or conscripts from other worlds.” The original enmity remained and fighting had gone on so long that offspring of the surviving combatants knew only to hate “those with horns” or “those with wings.” When Marko finds himself an “enemy combatant” and falls in love with his jailor, special agent Alana, they escape but must live on the lam.
The explicit images and language at the beginning of this book strangely do not label it “not for teens” because the language and temperament are all about teens and youthful idealisms. But it can be satisfying fare for adults as well because of the exquisite portraitures and expressions we recognize, and the heavy doses of physicality and fornication elicit something more than morbid curiosity.
“The opposite of war is not peace.”
Both Marko and Alana are devotees of a particular self-deprecating author, D. Oswald Heist, who churns out volumes of sci-fi bodice-rippers from a lighthouse on the on the planet of Quietus “to pay the bills.” Heist has a major following because his books have a philosophy and a worldview that his readership find enthralling.
I take Vaughan’s point. I don’t agree with it necessarily since the idea is (literally) sketched and not fully developed as a concept, but I see what he is about. But perhaps we should just take Vaughan’s graphic novels as the starting points for discussion in or outside the classroom. Surely just the awesomeness of the paired writing and drawing should be a subject of study: the difficulty of culling physical and verbal communication to their essence without losing the particular personality of the speakers.
Personally I was more taken with the visual component of Saga Vol I rather than the arguments presented in support of the anti-war philosophy, but I think together they make a marvelous combination. And I appreciated the To Be Continued section of the book in which the finesse, attention to detail, and the agonizingly slow process of creation, correction, and distillation is highlighted. Vaughan claims to be quoting Twain when he says “Try to feature at least one hideously enlarged pair of testicles in every story you tell” and he’s right—it adds to the overall drama. ...more
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