We go to the eastern coast north of Durban in this novel, to Richards Bay. Jade is meant to meet her lover David Patel there by the golden sands and iWe go to the eastern coast north of Durban in this novel, to Richards Bay. Jade is meant to meet her lover David Patel there by the golden sands and in preparation Jade takes scuba diving lessons. I found myself unnecessarily jealous of this fictional setup.
Shortly, as is usual for Ms. de Jong, people start dying. And not just dying, but being horribly slain and everyone is looking around for a culprit. In this particular novel, far-flung characters are somehow connected, though just how this is so does not become apparent until the very end.
{spoiler alert} (view spoiler)[ The third in the Jade de Jong series is my least favorite of this series. Mackenzie was stretched in this one, and just barely made it all come together at the end. Also, sorry to say, she told us early in the novel that animals and plants were not her forte, similarly to her father. She knew every brand and type of shooting instrument, but the natural world was not her area of expertise.
So Jade’s understanding of the destruction of the natural world in this novel about crimes to the environment might be perceived as ‘thin.’ We forgive her because she is perfectly willing to admit she knows nothing. Her real horror is reserved for the possibility that the golden sands might no longer be available to hard working cops and business owners rather than for the sea creatures including, ahem, reptiles like leatherback turtles. (hide spoiler)]
It is hard to retain any sense of superiority when Mackenzie writes a smackdown like this stunning description:
"Most of the cars had GP number plates and were also heading west, holiday over, back to Gauteng. Grim-faced at the prospect of returning to world, with their tank tops and shorts revealing deep sun tans and post-holiday flab. Arms as bloated and brown as cooked sausages, feet slapping along in flip-flop sandals. Kids trailing behind them, bored, restless and yelling."
Don’t know about you, but I feel like I am there.
I got a bit lost in the description of the central crime, and I kept losing track of who the bad guys were. But heck, I hope Mackenzie had fun researching this one because Richards Bay sounds gorgeous....more
The second of Jassy Mackenzie’s Jade de Jong series is a big book: she opens her narrative to several countries and many seemingly unrelated cases. ThThe second of Jassy Mackenzie’s Jade de Jong series is a big book: she opens her narrative to several countries and many seemingly unrelated cases. The focus is trafficking of women across borders and the story is a desperate one for many unfortunate characters.
Mackenzie manages to capture the work style of every one we meet, from the school principal to the small time bureaucrat and seller of false documents. Even the nicely-dressed and -spoken man who delivers ultimatums about getting fake documents on time is believable, partly because he backs up his threats with action.
There is a particularly memorable scene that shares the experience of minibus taxi-riding in South Africa:
"The taxi driver was busy peeling a banana with his knee propped against the wheel. While he ate the fruit, he conducted an animated conversation with the man in the passenger seat. Lots of unbroken eye contact, reminding Jade of the way David liked to drive.
When he had finished, the taxi driver flung the banana skin out of the window and, still steering with his knee, began to peel an orange.
The vehicle felt wallowy on the road, its uneven progress a testimony to ancient shocks, balding tires, brakes worn down to the rim."
This novel exhibits horrific violence against those who are thought to threaten the system but again, as in previous Mackenzie novels, the pace is blistering. We can’t stop reading even if we want to. This novel particularly had great impetus that led us to a shocking conclusion.
This novel raised my opinion of Mackenzie’s skills even higher and I am thoroughly hooked now and must finish the series. I have already checked to see if there are any more novels in her oeuvre and I am surprised and disheartened to see she may have gone back to her day job. Her character development and braided story lines are far more accomplished than most and I certainly hope she is well compensated for giving up novel writing, if indeed she has.
What she really needs is a film contract for a limited TV series. Her characters and themes rock out loud and are way suitable for a diverse audience....more
A tense and absorbing political thriller is not what I was expecting for this second book of a trilogy about the head of a Hong Kong triad establishinA tense and absorbing political thriller is not what I was expecting for this second book of a trilogy about the head of a Hong Kong triad establishing businesses in southern China. Ian Hamilton, creator of the Ava Lee series, does some of this best work here, recreating exactly how it is possible for corruption to take place in China’s Special Economic Zones.
If this story has any truth to it, real life in triads is long periods of calm: Uncle Chow Tung is young for a triad leader, in his forties, but for all the criminality of gang-life, his daily existence is remarkably staid. His only vice is playing the horses at Hong Kong’s Happy Valley Racecourse. Lesser leaders get up to more deviltry in their free time, perhaps, but the fact that Uncle provides a stable, low-drama income from betting shops, restaurants and massage parlors is what his triad and others in the area appreciate about him.
We get a course in foresight, the savvy business planning Chow engages in to supplement the triad’s falling income as a result of economic changes in Hong Kong. It’s the 1980s. Chow reads in the paper that Deng Xiao Ping is trying something new: socialism at the top of society and a loosened market-based environment at the individual level.
The circumstances in Shenzhen and the other special economic zones were unlike anywhere else on earth at that time and the Chinese government was making it up as they went along. If things started booming a little too wildly, they would clamp down with a blinding ferocity. Hamilton walks us through a mini-purge and it is terrifying. The individual is insignificant and rule of law is virtually unknown.
Despite the fact that there were only two women in this entire book, one being a restaurant owner selling congee and one showing up for one or two sentences in the last quarter of the story, I was surprised to find I did not really feel the lack. To me, learning the relative ease with which Uncle began his empire in China as well as concise details about the bribes he had to pay and the conditions of his continued investments was utterly absorbing. I was as stressed as Uncle through the twists and turns of his fortunes.
At the very end of the book, I was left pondering the dubious legality of all the foreign investment enterprises in those special zones and the odd criminality that comes out of political infighting in China. In politics as in business, there is hardly a safe place of truth and virtue. Is that something we just have to acknowledge and get on with the business of skimming, lying and personal advantage and to hell with everyone else? What a chump I am. I can’t make it in the real world, I’m afraid.
I love the work Hamilton did here. The tension is ratcheted up high in parts, and for Chow Tung and us both, it is pure torture. I can’t wait to read the next installment which should bring us our first glimpse of Ava Lee. This is terrific, addictive storytelling....more
This trilogy began as an aside to the long-running Ava Lee series by Ian Hamilton. Ava Lee, you will remember, was mentored by a much-older man calledThis trilogy began as an aside to the long-running Ava Lee series by Ian Hamilton. Ava Lee, you will remember, was mentored by a much-older man called Uncle who wasn’t a relative but who became closer than blood. Before he died, they worked together collecting debts around Asia. Later she learned he held the highest-ranking post in a Hong Kong triad, as Mountain Master.
Earlier in the Ava Lee series we were treated to Uncle’s passing, replete with noisy, atonal bands playing discordantly at his funeral march. The detail in that description was lovingly crafted, introducing us to a lively, diverse triad scene that we sense has been something of a fascination for Hamilton. We revisit in greater detail here since this title begins with the death of the Mountain Master who preceded Uncle in the role.
For those readers who have despaired of office politics, this book may bring on a kind of PTSD. Triad life appears to be office politics with machetes and sub-machine guns. The leadership team all have very cool monikers, like White Paper Fan, Red Pole, and Straw Sandal, all of which operate under the Deputy Mountain Master, the Vanguard, and the Incense Master. They don’t sound scary.
This trilogy begins with Uncle Chow Tung leaving mainland China with his financée in 1959 and then jumps to 1969 where the action of this novel takes place. The action in the follow-on books appear to be spaced by a decade. Next up is Foresight....more
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.
Tim Alberta is a strange creature, a political nerd seemingly without a party. Reading him, he at times appears to have sympathies for old-time conserTim Alberta is a strange creature, a political nerd seemingly without a party. Reading him, he at times appears to have sympathies for old-time conservatives, libertarian outrage, and the broader liberal message. He is chief political correspondent for Politico but covered the 2016 election for the National Review and National Journal. He has reported for the conservative-leaning Wall Street Journal as well. He came to Washington, D.C. at the end of the 2nd Bush administration, and had a front row seat at the self-described “Republican civil war.”
The most stressful part of the book revisits the horror show of the past four years—those stomach-churning moments when you wonder how any of us will survive this headless, brainless dog-and-pony show. At points in the book we hear John Boehner say “There is no Republican Party” and Alberta himself conclude, “The party itself was contracting.”
Alberta quotes several people important at one time or another to the party, giving a lot of space to the man I once held responsible for the damage of the past twenty years: Paul Ryan. I don’t know the man, I just know the aura that surrounded him…’youngest’ ‘brightest’ ‘budget wonk’ slavishly flipping through a dogeared copy of von Hayek's The Road to Serfdom. It is enough to make you detest the folks so eager to pass on all effort (and blame) by declaring the hungriest should figure it all out while they watch. The Fall of Rome comes to mind.
One thing I appreciate is Ryan’s definition of a ‘paleocon’: isolationist, protectionist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant: “kind of what you have now.”
The end of the book has Karl Rove saying the party is forever, unchangeable by Trump. Kellyanne Conway insists the GOP is now a Trumpian party, which is absurd on its face since no one except Trump can pull off that particular sleight of hand—thank god—so it will die with him. Younger members of the diaspora of the destroyed center predict a third party. Of course there will be a third party, but just how and when it will manifest will be the struggle of the future. What I wonder is how many consequential parties there will be.
What struck me about the story of this internecine GOP battle is how the regular GOP was not supportive of the argumentative and politically insane Tea Partiers that preceded Trump, and they actually hated Trump. One had to suspect it—I mean the guy is a destructive loser—but given Republicans general intransigence and lack of coherence over the years, it was difficult for an outsider to discern.
Their unwillingness to deep six Trump’s candidacy—something they could have done with an iota of moral fortitude, makes me unwilling to give them much brain space. They deserve to participate in the funeral for their party in their own way. I am surprised at my disgust at how deep the rot goes. I suspected both parties were bankrupt, but it has been confirmed by those I blamed for the problem: Paul Ryan again.
Alberta tell us a principal reason that Ryan quit is the he found it impossible to set a good example:
”The incentive structures are too warped, the allure of money and fame and self-preservation too powerful, for individuals to change the system from within.”
We also get disturbing glimpses of the Democratic party, another example of the rot in the system. Eric Holder told a group of Georgia crowd that Michelle Obama’s “when they go low, we go high,” wasn’t right. “No,” Holder said. “When they go low, we kick them.” Cripes.
The Republicans were clever with the Red Map strategy in 2010. Too clever by half, perhaps, but they did figure out a way to win a huge proportion of seats legally, if unfairly. You mean to tell me we can’t do better than the team that is so full of their own crap they couldn’t win a race fairly if they tried? It’s not money, folks. Money makes you comfortable, so in a way, that makes it is a little harder. Get ready to be uncomfortable.
Justin Amash, the Michigan congressman elected in 2010 who defected from the Republican party is quoted in 2018 as saying
"The Tea Party is gone. It doesn’t exist anymore. There just aren’t that many Republicans now who are that concerned about spending, about debt, about big government."
If only that were true. They’re dead, they just don’t know it. The Undead.
So in the end I feel worse about both parties and our political future. I know it will all change and there will be the dysfunction of trying to operate a new party with the corruption of the old ones. One just has to be able to stand back and assess from a position of strength, and for that we need to be smarter. When they defund your schools, throw them out. Don’t be ignorant. You’re gonna need every edge you can get....more
This story of Peru’s civil war (1980-2000) is startling in what it reveals about humans—how thin the skin of our civilization and how remarkably base This story of Peru’s civil war (1980-2000) is startling in what it reveals about humans—how thin the skin of our civilization and how remarkably base our instincts. I would have plunked the whole story under the rubric ‘science-fiction’ except for the acknowledgements in which Alarcón cites debts from his long period of research.
After twenty years of war, teenagers are like newborns, having no institutional memory. Towns were designated by number, not name. Both sides so distrusted and despised the other they no longer ruminated on guilt. Each was sloppy in their reasoning and callous in their behaviors; they treated one another like a separate species needing extermination. Terrifyingly, it shows us what can come of broken political systems. It happened. Not long ago.
It shows us what comes when intellectuals are jailed and disappeared, when the people are kept in ignorance. They know only that their family members and townspeople are disappearing, they know not where they go. This particular novel focuses on a radio show that the entire country listened to: a golden-voiced newsreader sharing names sent to her by people trying to find individuals they knew and loved. If everyone listens, there is hope that some may eventually be reunited with their families.
What is so astounding about this novel is not only that it previews for anyone interested an outcome when a country follows a path of political warfare and division. Sometimes I think we can still fix our own broken system; after reading this I am sure we must, and sooner please. This novel is a debut by an author who was thirty years old at the time (2007). It doesn’t seem possible he would be capable of such depth and such understanding. But great stresses can force unusual talent.
"Manau carried with him the shame of an exposed man who had imagined his mediocrity to be a secret."
and
"….it didn’t seem at this [early] hour to be a city but a museum of a city, a place she was viewing as if from some distant future, an artist’s model built to demonstrate how human beings once lived…"
Lately I reviewed the author’s latest collection of stories The King is Always Above the People, which led me to this novel and another of his, At Night We Walk in Circles, published in 2013. Alarcón hosts a podcast for Latin American voices, among other things. He is a critically important voice for North Americans at this time of our own political upheaval, and because he is extraordinary. We need to hear him. Get something of his right now....more
Published in 2016, this is Ocean Vuong’s first full collection of poetry. We will never know how a boy emerges, so young, with a talent so great. A poPublished in 2016, this is Ocean Vuong’s first full collection of poetry. We will never know how a boy emerges, so young, with a talent so great. A poem chosen at random lights deep, protected nodes in our brain and attaches to our viscera. We recognize his work as surely as we appreciate a painting, or a piece of music. He appears a conduit, not a creator.
One of the poems in this collection has a title referencing a Mark Rothko painting. Glancing at it, we know immediately why he pairs it with these words.
Untitled (Blue, Green, and Brown, 1952)
The TV said the planes have hit the buildings. & I said Yes because you asked me to stay. Maybe we pray on our knees because god only listens when we're this close to the devil. There is so much I want to tell you. How my greatest accolade was to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge & not think of flight. How we live like water: wetting a new tongue with no telling what we've been through. They say the sky is blue but I know it's black seen through too much distance. You will always remember what you were doing when it hurts the most. There is so much I need to tell you--but I only earned one life & I took nothing. Nothing. Like a pair of teeth at the end. The TV kept saying The planes... The planes... & I stood waiting in the room made of broken mockingbirds. Their wings throbbing into four blurred walls. & you were there. You were the window.
It was the phrase How we live like water: wetting a new tongue with no telling what we've been through. That phrase stopped me.
In an interview with The Guardian, Vuong says “life is always more complicated than the headlines allow; poetry comes in when the news is not enough.” Vuong won awards for this collection, and gained recognition. He now is an associate professor in the MFA program at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and writing a novel.
“I’m writing a novel composed of woven inter-genre fragments. To me, a book made entirely out of unbridged fractures feels most faithful to the physical and psychological displacement I experience as a human being. I’m interested in a novel that consciously rejects the notion that something has to be whole in order to tell a complete story. I also want to interrogate the arbitrary measurements of a “successful” literary work, particularly as it relates to canonical Western values. For example, we traditionally privilege congruency and balance in fiction, we want our themes linked, our conflicts “resolved,” and our plots “ironed out.” But when one arrives at the page through colonized, plundered, and erased histories and diasporas, to write a smooth and cohesive novel is to ultimately write a lie.”
Vuong brings with him the possibility of a vision that is articulate enough to share, brave enough to bolster. It's a kind of blessing, a grace note we don't really deserve, his voice.
Vuong’s poetry is available as an ebook from many libraries. He’s what we call a ‘literary light.’...more
The spectacular public service reporting Sam Quinones does in this nonfiction is so detailed and many-faceted that it left me feeling a little voyeuriThe spectacular public service reporting Sam Quinones does in this nonfiction is so detailed and many-faceted that it left me feeling a little voyeuristic, not having been visited by the scourge of opioid addiction myself. Good lord, I kept thinking, so this is what we are dealing with. I knew something was different, I just didn’t have any conception of the size, scope, method, and means of this problem.
Quinones starts his story in the early 1980s when the first rancho Xalisco marketers came up from Mexico with an innovative method for just-in-time drive-by selling of drugs to rich white kids in the suburbs. They explicitly avoided cities and black people because they admitted they were afraid of them, their violence and their gang activity. Besides, the thinking went, blacks never had any money. They’d just as soon steal from a dealer as pay him. The white kids had money and wanted convenience above all.
At almost the same time, and a cultural habitat away from small-time drug dealers of black tar heroin from Mexico, a drug company owned by the Sackler medical empire released an opiate derivative in pill form meant to alleviate pain. Early on, it is possible that creators, marketers, and prescribers of this plague did not know what they had unleashed. But within a couple of years, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that great numbers of people within and without the company sold the product in full knowledge of its wicked potency and addictive properties.
Quinones has been researching and reporting on this topic for a couple of decades, and lived in Mexico for ten years, observing the supply-side. Before having a comprehensive understanding of the subject, Quinones thought the heroin problem began with U.S. demand for drugs. After researching the situation in the heartland United States, he has decided that our problem now with heroin and fentanyl overdoses was caused paradoxically by a huge supply of opioid pills, prescribed by doctors in legal clinics, and condoned at every level of society and government in our country.
The story Quinones shares is un-put-down-able and truly remarkable, particularly his discussion of the marketing techniques for black tar heroin used by the small farmer-seller systems first set up by residents of Xalisco. Their method of growing-packaging-selling expansion into the heartland of America should make us sit up and pay attention. Ground zero for the meltdown of middle America is identified by Quinones as Portsmouth, Ohio, a middle class town at the center of a web of major cities like Cincinnati, Cleveland, Louisville, Indianapolis, Pittsburgh. The first known vector of the opioid infection was an unscrupulous doctor who overprescribed pills, knowing they were addicting his patients. Aided by ordinary well-meaning doctors who listened to marketing spiels by the drug makers, and who believed the pills to be non-addictive, the infection spread rapidly. Quinones tells the tale as it unfolded, involving Medicaid scams and cross-state purchases and sales.
What Quinones tells us gives us lessons for many other supply-side problems (marijuana? guns?) we may face in our society, now or in the future. When asked in an interview why restrictions on Class A prescription pills or opiates of any sort would produce the better outcomes, Quinones points out that when prohibited liquor was once again allowed to be sold openly, it was classified as to strength and sold differently. He warns that we are rushing to sales of marijuana with potency levels unknown fifty years ago and may wish we’d instituted some restrictions or controls before it becomes socially acceptable.
This nonfiction is dispassionate enough to allow us time to adjust our thinking around the problem of young people—entire families, really—losing their place in a productive society, with almost no way out. Now, with the recognition of the problem being forced upon our politicians, teachers, medical personnel, and law-enforcement officers, some changes are being instituted which may help after the fact of addiction, never a good time to try and solve a problem. With discussion and buy-in by ordinary citizens it may be possible to attack this problem before it begins.
There are at least seven interviews with Quinones available free on Soundcloud, ranging in length from 15 minutes or so to an hour and a half. You have to hear some of these stories. It's mind-blowing. I listened to audio version, very ably read by Neil Hellegers, and produced by Bloomsbury. It is a must-read, must-listen....more
The first time I read this book shortly after publication in 2009 I didn’t like anything about it. I didn’t understand Whitehead’s air of casual priviThe first time I read this book shortly after publication in 2009 I didn’t like anything about it. I didn’t understand Whitehead’s air of casual privilege. I reread it at the end of 2017 because a review by Brandon Harris in the New York Review of Books (Dec 7, 2017) about James McBride’s new collection of short stories, Five-Carat Soul, mentions Sag Harbor as “ravishing.” What did I miss?
The short answer is that I missed everything. But without going back to interrogate that 9-year-ago self, I can’t be sure I didn’t just miss, but dismiss this gorgeously-written growing-up summer reminiscent of Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine. Whitehead surely didn’t have a white girl in mind as his target audience: he spoke to other young boys in a dangerous world who are uncertain, black, and soon-to-be men. This white girl gets to listen in.
This second time I listened to Mirron Willis read the novel and he gave it the voice I needed for comprehension. And yes, I do get it now. That mid-1980’s summer on Long Island gave a look into a boy’s mind, how he thought, what concerned him most, the dangers that lurked at the edges of his testosterone-soaked consciousness. Even his obliviousness to moves made by the few age-appropriate girls in his cohort rang true. Often boys look poleaxed at that age—fifteen—they are thinking of other things while their body is reacting.
What jerked me aware of my whiteness this time was the jokey nature of the not-quite-ready-for-the-world half-man Benji talking about the radio spot his father listened to about the shootings happening regularly and constantly, the shootings of black men, or women, dropped into the news like yesterday’s weather. All of a sudden I was willing to concede that his reality had real, unreasonable, and unexpected death in it, not mine, and I should shut my mouth and listen up.
Once I gave him the reins, I could see and hear the way language was being used, see how capable that boy was of capturing a mood or the attitudes of his friends, his family. When BB guns crop up in the story, they immediately register as danger, despite the innocence all parties have exhibited to now. A group of teen boys testing the puncture power of BB shot from close range…it sets the blood pulsing and the mind reeling. A sense of danger is here to stay.
A short section near the end telling of Benji’s exciting and mysterious older sister Elena is filled with a barely acknowledged yearning for connection so poignant our hearts break asunder. Benji’s discussion of his parents’ marriage, and the father’s oppressive attitudes towards his wife and children, explains an avoidance in the family dynamic with an authenticity that can’t be faked. Benji’s mother “disappeared, word by word” when his father became verbally abusive, and the sense of propriety Benji had developed somewhere led him to close all the windows in the warm house in an attempt to keep the parents' raised voices hidden from the neighborhood. That sense of shame is a just a shuttercock instant in a boy's life: a few years earlier, the youngster would not feel he had the agency, a few years later, he would realize this happens in every marriage.
Some set scenes may challenge our credulousness, though anyone who has lived with a teenaged male may well be taken in: the pot of writhing maggots, the killing of houseflies with a rubber band, the first open-eyed open-mouthed kiss of a girl—all these elements of a parentless summer by the beach ring so true we feel the grit of wind-blown sand between our teeth. The beginning of the last chapter has some of the most beautiful writing I have seen anywhere, about the passage of time and reaching the end… of summer, of youth, of innocence, and somehow more than all that.
This wonderful fiction deserves all the accolades it got at the time, and it makes me curious to try another of Whitehead’s novels, especially the science fiction. I will look at Underground… again, for my own benefit, but I may owe him an apology for a review that did not acknowledge that however he wants to write about his understanding of slavery is a perspective that I have nothing to say about....more
People are on the move in Hamid’s latest book, south to north and east to west. This strange little novel definitely has the feel of a season of sensePeople are on the move in Hamid’s latest book, south to north and east to west. This strange little novel definitely has the feel of a season of sense8, the Netflix Original production about shifts in consciousness, space, and time. Hamid’s characters, Nadia and Saeed, experience the bending of time and place, as when they leave their own war-torn country on the Asian subcontinent, a “passage both like dying and like being born.”
Hamid’s female character Nadia, who insists on being draped in a black cloak, or abaya, is more risk-taking and forward-thinking than Saeed. Nadia, not religious, wears the abaya to deflect attention, and it works, usually. Sometimes she does draw the anger or ire of men, when she is riding a powerful motorcycle or working in a store, but she doesn't back down, staring at the men steadily, aware and awake but not showing fear.
Perceptions of the abaya change in the course of the novel. Once a means of conformity and of escaping notice, in the west and in the future the abaya becomes a statement of nonconformity and defiance. Nadia likes this gesture even better.
Saeed, on the other hand, is good, kind, compassionate, nonviolent: he does not enjoy a tangle and avoids rather than confronts. He’d learned to pray from his father, much as one is taught to think critically or handle difficulty. Praying became “a lament, a consolation…a hope” that steadied and centered him.
Throughout the novel these alternate approaches to life gently grate on the two young lovers who had not decided to spend their lives together until they found they had no option. The genuine love they feel for one another feels like displacement, since the families of each are lost.
The refugee life, landing on Mykonos and somehow being smuggled to London, is hazy in process, but not in content. The danger, the hunger, the uncertainty, the resistance from light-skinned natives…these feel some years in the future, despite our current history, because electricity is becoming scarce, and times are harsh. Time in this novel is intentionally fluid and hard to reckon.
One day when Nadia sees on her phone a woman in a black abaya reading something on her phone, “she wondered how this could be, how she could both read this news and be this news.” Time was bending around her: she might be from the past reading about the future or she might be from the future reading about the past. She might be two Nadias…going in different directions.
Hamid also dislocates the reader in space, in one paragraph describing Nadia and Saeed in London and in the next describing a family in Mexico, just miles from the Pacific on the U.S. border, facing a paradoxically dry environment so close to water. No explanation is given for this wild shift west, as far west as one can get before entering again the east.
What happens in the novel is that time moves away from us. Hamid imagines our future, folding time and location. Remember Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being in which time is folded? Ozeki makes a statement about physics, love, and life on earth, and I think Hamid might be pointing to this also. His characters love one another, but the stresses of their needs wear them out. They find sometimes that it is just easier to try to slide through the cracks alone, though sometimes one wouldn’t survive alone. Think electrons. Think quantum theory.
The lifetime Hamid describes in this novel feels like it could be now and also a long time in the future: a Muslim country torn apart, population movement via smugglers, a Greek island, Europe. But interspersed we are also getting news from Japan, South America, Northern Africa. Something big has happened. The policies of control at first are harsh and then loosen, so we suspect a big event. Borders are no more and groups of people try to decide the best way to govern, to protect, to provide.
In one of the narrative shifts, Hamid points to a woman of advanced years and Asian descent living in Palo Alto. The woman lives in the same house she’d lived in since childhood, the house having passed to her from her parents. She’d been married more than once, had children, all while living in the house and yet now she felt distant from her neighborhood. Everything had changed around her while she stayed still. She was a migrant, too, Hamid suggests, because time had made her own insular unchanging world anachronistic. "We are all migrants through time."
This was a difficult book to understand through listening. I had the Penguin Random House production read by the author (thank you PRH Audio). Hamid read the book as though it were poetry, with stylized stops and breaths and some distance from the material. At times I felt totally involved, understanding it cognitively, but his sudden shifts to different parts of the world seemed intentionally dislocating.
The final quarter of the novel really threw me. I listened to it five or more times and within a few sentences my mind was wandering each time. There must be something in there that sends me off, not computing. I downloaded a print copy (Thank you Riverhead & Edelweiss). This work is a good candidate for Audible's Whispersync option.
This novel breaks new ground for Hamid. You are going to find yourself mulling his meaning as you examine our recent past, live through our near term, and contemplate our future....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
This essay, read by Adichie on audio, concerns her upbringing in Nigeria and what she noticed in America after moving here to live and work. It strikeThis essay, read by Adichie on audio, concerns her upbringing in Nigeria and what she noticed in America after moving here to live and work. It strikes me as a perfect kind of essay to give American teens in school to read/listen to because they can then discuss her ideas in the context of "this American life."
She is clear that one doesn't have to hate men or wear un-sexy clothing to be a feminist. A feminist is someone who allows every person, whatever their sexuality, to use all parts of their personality and skill set. She was a wonderfully rich speaking voice and speaks slowly and clearly enough that even unfamiliar ideas have time to catch hold before the next sentence comes up.
Best of all, Adichie is a black woman explaining why we are not talking now about human rights, or black rights, or any other kind of rights. We are focussing today on women's rights, and she keeps eyes on the prize. Worthwhile.
Just realized Adichie had done a 30-minute TED talk of this in 2013, from which the audio script is drawn. She has remastered and smoothed the talk since this time, but the essence is here, and she is a lovely spokesperson for women's rights.
So glad this has caught fire. It goes without saying that around the world nations and cultures are yearning to hear this message.
I have posted a clip of the 45-minute remastered audio version of this talk on my blog....more
Jeffrey Sachs’ new book, which runs about 150 pages, has a Foreword by Bernie Sanders. Sachs directly addresses the new Trump administration, and makeJeffrey Sachs’ new book, which runs about 150 pages, has a Foreword by Bernie Sanders. Sachs directly addresses the new Trump administration, and makes suggestions about our nation’s priorities. Sachs wrote it fast, since the election, and it shows. He'd supported Bernie, but Sanders was not particularly explicit when it came to running the government. These are Sachs' ideas, but knowing he supports Sanders is helpful to our understanding of Sanders' positions as well.
Sachs allows that we might be able to comprehend priority spending of the government, so shares some national budget particulars:
“Federal taxes account for about 18 percent of GDP, mostly income and payroll taxes…Together with state and local taxes, the total tax collection of all levels of government amounts to around 32 percent of GDP.”
On the spending side, first is military spending at 5% of GDP. Next is what Sachs calls “mandatory spending” but what Republicans call “entitlements:” Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, income support programs, etc. This is a rising share of GDP, at 12.6%. The third category of spending is interest payments of government debt, which will rise when interest rates increase. Public debt to national income is about 75%, and average interest charges on that debt are at about 1.5% of GDP per annum. Finally, we have non security discretionary spending, or our investment in the future, which in the scenario Sachs talks about here, doesn’t even make it to the drawing board unless we take on further debt.
The reason Sachs gives us is that income taxes, etc are only 18% of GDP while military, mandatory spending, and interest payments alone are 19%. He is a smart guy, and he may be right, but if you are asking us to decide on which categories or programs to cut, I will need to see the whole budget, many thanks. [Unfortunately the graphs and charts are not reproduced in the ebook of this pre-publication galley.]
Anyway, Sachs suggests we cut military spending and increase discretionary spending commensurately, leaving the other categories to be adjusted in smaller ways. In theory, I don’t have a problem with this. I have lately weighed good and bad in American foreign policy in the past fifty years, and see lots of room for a reduced role, though one has to acknowledge the vacuum of leadership is going to be filled, perhaps by a country we don’t admire much, or at all.
When we abdicate as a superpower, we also jettison some of the trust and reliance of our allies, as some of their positions and spending were predicated on our own. It is a much more fragmented and divided world, a world that may not be so amenable to policies the U.S. supports. And Sachs’ proposals for the future are all about global cooperation. He suggests that we use our military spending instead on global development projects, which will keep some portion of goodwill headed our way.
Sachs also recommends a value-added tax like they have in Scandinavia which would raise another 3-4% of income. The huge discrepancies in income from top to bottom of the U.S. income ladder will still be there, they just won’t be as great, and more in line with the world’s other great democracies. Sachs is even willing to consider restructuring corporate taxes, like Trump has already proposed, but only “if combined with an end to corporate loopholes and foreign tax deferral provisions.” Definitely one of the main income disparities is who even pays taxes in the U.S.
Sachs looks not very far into the future and see some major changes in our economy: an end to internal combustion mobility and the beginning of a low-carbon lifestyle, regardless of government leadership. It would help if government was in front, using their think tanks and scientific offices to help direct some of the changes, but what we really have to guard against is allowing entrenched corporate interests to hijack our future and investment money. We can decide these things without government, though.
Trump has stated he wants states to make their own decisions on many things we have in the past asked the federal government to do. States with wealth, educated workforces, and well-funded universities (like Massachusetts, California, and New York) may make out very well, drawing more similarly-minded folks to them, and exacerbating the cross-talk divisiveness among the states. They’d have to capture taxes from individuals who wish to work, but not live in their states. But my feeling is, if we can’t work together within our own country, how can we expect to work across national boundaries on important issues like climate change, exploration, and energy supplies?
When Sachs discusses the changes in the workplace, I find my credibility meter reading low. I agree that even educated workers will be replaced in the modern economy as computers and machines get more capable. But Sachs is suggesting that older, experienced workers pay some part of their wages to younger people who cannot find jobs.
Hello! We’re already doing that! It’s called taxes, and it is a stupid idea. Older workers, whether they want to believe it or not, are going to die, and if they haven’t mentored young people to get experience and be able to take on the stress of creativity everyday, they may be surprised when the whole show goes tits up. [This was Hillary Clinton’s problem. She thought she needed to do everything herself.]
We cannot continue to have older workers stay in the workplace as long as they want—and continue to decline—keeping younger folk from earning and gaining experience, let alone spur creativity. May I suggest this is a real problem? People who have been working for forty or fifty years cannot keep up, no matter what they believe about themselves. And it is not good for the country.
Sachs has one idea towards the end that is kind of interesting: that Wall Street be tasked with earning and churning the financial investment monies for our infrastructure retooling. I actually really like that idea, and think the incentives could be restructured to focus on this. Once the wonky windfall profits not only on Wall Street, but everywhere in corporate America, are tempered with reasonable tax policy and closing of tax havens and loopholes, people might remember they must play well with others. We don’t have long, however: we should already be well into flood abatement.
There are lots of other things lightly touched on in this book, including a discussion of why “free trade” is not free for everyone. Sachs has a blog where he makes notes and posts articles and media accounts that he find interesting or thinks we need to discuss. In the summer of 2016, his important and informative discussion about the election, globalization, immigration, and Brexit was subsequently picked up by NPR and discussed on radio. He pointed to what is now called “populist” anger and explains the real substantive issues behind this. Jeffrey Sachs is professor of economics and sustainable development at Columbia University, and former director of the Earth Institute, special advisor to UN Secretary General Ban Kin-moon. He is the author of The End of Poverty....more
I really like dogs, maybe because they can be so loyal. They are so smart and so dumb at the same time that they are an unending source of intrigue. TI really like dogs, maybe because they can be so loyal. They are so smart and so dumb at the same time that they are an unending source of intrigue. They are one link to the animal world that doesn't seem so remote as other pets can be. And I am intrigued with highly trained dogs, either in agility or in searching. Somehow I get the feeling that they probably love exercising to the limits of their abilities. The ones that don’t like this stretching of their skills probably don’t make the cut for difficult jobs.
The Belgian Malinois breed is the most common dog used for Secret Service training. They look like German Shepherds but have shorter hair and tend to weigh less. It is the only breed of dog used for the Emergency Response Team (ERT). Some dogs that are part of the Explosive Detection Team (EDT) are also Personnel Screening Canines (PSC) (all PSC are EDT), a job which is used in public buildings like the White House to check visitors. Some dogs are trained to walk through crowds and must have a measure of sociability as part of their natures. These are called Personnel Screening Canines Open Area (PSCO), or Friendly Dogs, or Floppy-eared Dogs: dogs which do not inspire fear. These dogs are often not German Shepherds or Belgian Malinois.
Selection of officers and canines for the relatively few dog units is very competitive, and it is usual in the Secret Service that an officer retires when his dog does, allowing other interested candidates to take a turn within that group. A few unusual dog handlers have been exempted from this rule, but it is rare.
I have an advance e-book of this title, access granted through Netgalley, so I am not sure my reading experience will be the same as others who will purchase this title. There are lots of anecdotes and information in this book, too much really, and there is an unforgivable lack of organization that makes one feel as though one is wading through vast swathes of unedited and out-of-order interviews. Because I am interested in the material, I managed to get through it, but it was an exasperating struggle.
On the other hand, reading the manuscript is excellent practice for an aspiring editor to see what is involved in producing a decent piece of work from massive amounts of lightly-handled raw material. Whipping this manuscript into shape would require a huge investment of time and skills, but the end result could be worthwhile. It might even get you a job with a publisher, if you shared the before and after.
George’s massive, character-rich mysteries are unique in the annals of British mystery writing. George’s conclusion to the nineteenth in this series lGeorge’s massive, character-rich mysteries are unique in the annals of British mystery writing. George’s conclusion to the nineteenth in this series leaves us as anxious to hear the future for her characters as we ever were in the beginning. She throws in everything her characters encounter in a day, making the book dauntingly long, but as I pointed out in an earlier review, look how much story one gets for the investment of a few quid.
Inspector Lynley may indeed be the spine of these novels, but to my mind, Barbara Havers is the beating heart. Her incorrigible refusal to bend to societal expectations both frustrates and endears her to us. She and Lynley are perfectly paired: they accentuate one another’s strengths and weakness. They are more together than they ever would be apart.
In this novel we are treated to a new poison, one easily obtainable on the internet, apparently. It leaves no immediate trace and causes fibrillation of the heart, which can lead to heart failure. For someone to use this against an employer or a family member, one has to be extraordinarily careful since its effects are immediate and deadly to those who come in contact with it.
This novel is about sex. “Goodness, it’s what everyone else is always thinking about, Detective Inspector,” Dorothea, the administrative assistant to Detective Superintendent Isabelle Ardery, said to Detective Inspector Lynley on the subject of Detective Sergeant Barbara Havers’ apparent lack of interest in the subject. In other words, sex is “just the ticket” for getting Havers’ mind off her possible transfer to the outer reaches of prisondom for being too inventive, too edgy in the execution of her duties.
Britain’s foremost feminist author is collecting research for a new book about anonymous casual sexual encounters with married men. She’d troll internet dating sites and when the married men responded, she’d show up at the agreed-upon site and attempt to interview them about their thinking and rationale. George doesn’t crucify these blokes: when we finally meet a few they have quite rational and legitimate reasons for what they do, and one might even come to the conclusion that their marriages, and certainly their sexual satisfactions, are enhanced by their infidelities. However, the sudden death of the feminist author is initially thought by investigators to have been suicide or murder predicated on the fact that the author apparently found the wandering husbands more interesting than just for a chat.
To my mind, partaking of the purported infidelities seems perfectly within the feminist scope. No one has ever succeeded in proving that feminists are uninterested in men, or in sex. What feminists do successfully argue about are unequal constraints within the institution of marriage or that women don’t have the same sexual freedoms as men. Presumably George knew this seemed an insufficient motive for murder because she throws many more compelling motives into the investigation until we suspect practically everyone. In the end, George concludes the episode with the coppers putting away “the obvious suspect” but not the correct one. Divine justice being what it is, however, means even we are not going to agitate for a better solution.
At this point it is worth reminding readers that Elizabeth George is American. While she previously wrote from Huntington Beach, California she now writes from Whitby Island, Washington State, right up near the Canadian border. She claims she can write anywhere, but it is true she does extensive research in the British Isles to complete the set for her mysteries. The language of her characters are even written so that we can tell who is speaking without name identifiers, a skill to which screenwriters aspire.
George had just completed all four of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels before beginning this nineteenth novel in the series of Lynley and Havers. What struck her was that one of Ferrante’s central characters was an unlikable character and yet we couldn’t get enough of her. That character invigorated readers because her reactions, her thinking was so unexpected. George’s creation was surprising, too, and more than a little disagreeable. She had Borderline Personality Disorder, her frantic, manic behaviors characterized by “a tendency towards unstable and inappropriately intense relationships that can be characterized by an inundation of the object necessary for need fulfillment and the sharing of intimate details early in a relationship.”
A short interview with Elizabeth George shares her thinking about the difficulties of writing a long-running series. “The themes of the individual characters’ stories have to mirror the themes of the novel, and that gets very tricky.” So, in this case, there is the discussion of sex, sexual love, and love. Many kinds of love are pointed to in this novel: the love of marriage partners, or of colleagues, or love for children, or love of self. Add to that the complicating need for sex, and you have George’s cornucopia of motives for murder.
My favorite scene in this novel may be the meal that Havers made for Winston Nkata while they worked together in the village of Shaftesbury in Dorset. Sergeant Nkata takes pride in keeping fit, running daily, and not indulging in any vices like drinking or smoking. When his work kept him from their shared accommodation until early evening, Barbara felt she “owed him a meal. He, after all, had been doing the honors with breakfast and lunch.” The starter was “savoury biscuits with orange marmalade accompanied by tuna-and-mayo paste…” I’m not going to tell you the rest, but it goes downhill rapidly from there.
When Nkata returned, he was carrying a shopping bag with fixings for homemade beef, mushroom, and lager pie with a side of sprouts with bacon, shallots, and hazelnuts.
““Shallots, eh?” Barbara wondered what the hell they were.” ...more
In the Introduction to this collection of essays by an impressive roster of writers known for thoughtful and articulate discussion of their experienceIn the Introduction to this collection of essays by an impressive roster of writers known for thoughtful and articulate discussion of their experience with race in America, Jesmyn Ward explains that she wanted something more than newspaper accounts or editorials when faced with the events of the past eighteen months in the USA. Her own book on the death of five young men of her acquaintance, Men We Reaped, meant that hearing of and seeing via public media further deaths of black men by white men was traumatic enough to want to gather friends, neighbors, and most of all, those she admires for their clarity of voice, to ask “How do we deal with this?” “How do we think about this?” “How can we stop this?”
This collection references James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time which is a work that addresses the future in a letter to Baldwin’s nephew, and the past and present in an essay about religion. Ward mentions that she intended to gather the commissioned essays in three parts - Past, Present, and Future—but found that most of the essays dealt with the past because the past explains the present and impacts the future. Unless the past is acknowledged and consciously dealt with in the present, the future will always be a question mark. The essays gave Ward hope because words matter. Words help us to cope. I agree with her.
The names of the writers in this collection you will recognize, and if you don’t at first, you will in the future. One name I’d never seen before wrote my favorite essay in the collection, called “Black and Blue.” Garnette Cadogan quotes Fats Waller at the start
"My skin is only my skin. What did I do, to be so black and blue?"
Cadogan relates his experience as a Jamaican man in the United States—how he had to learn how to dress (cop-proof and IV league), how to speak, how not to run, or make sudden movements, or wait on the streets for friends…you get the picture. His personality and behaviors had to be twisted to fit the circumstances. In a sense, this happens to all of us, wherever we move, if we want to fit in, but not like that. Not like that. And he said something I’d never heard before when considering a black man’s experience:
”I always felt safer being stopped in front of white witnesses than black witnesses.”
Apparently the cops have greater regard for the concern and entreaties of white witnesses than they do for black witnesses. I recall the old chant “White Silence is Violence.” Cadogan also said that “my woman friends are those who best understand my plight,” due to the fact that women are often targeted on the street by men simply because of their sex. And he said that having to be hyperaware of one’s environment before speaking, moving, acting is what children do when they are learning, returning adult males (and females) to childhood status, even in cities where they live. My brain fizzes.
Claudia Rankine, poet and author of Citizen, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry in 2015, has an essay which begins
"A friend recently told me that when she gave birth to her son, before naming him, before even nursing him, her first thought was, I have to get him out of this country."
I totally see where that friend of Rankine’s is coming from, and have had that same thought while reading Jill Leovy’s Ghettoside. Black men in the United States do not have enough of a childhood and they can grow, if they live long enough, gnarly and twisted by society’s expectations. This can’t be right. I’d get my son out also.
All the essays were ravishing and brought me something important, like Wendy Walters’ description of the slave graves discovered under a street intersection in Portsmouth, NH. My excitement quickened to see an essay by Mitchell S. Jackson, whose first novel The Residue Years was a finalist for the Hemingway/PEN Award, the Center for Fiction’s Flaherty-Duncan First Novel Prize, and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. In his essay called “Composite Pops”, Jackson talks about male role models in a way that recalled to me Iceberg Slim. Slim was a con-man, a pimp, and a miscreant, but he had self-confidence, the push to succeed, wisdom, and love and he spread all of these around generously. I can think of a far worse father figure than he.
You will recognize the names Natasha Trethewey, Poet Laureate, Isabel Wilkerson, Pulitzer winner in Journalism, Edwidge Danticat, Haitian novelist and MacArthur Fellow, all of whom have essays in this collection. But there will be names new to you in this remarkable collection which will open worlds you have not yet dreamed of. Once again we recognize that the work and thoughts—the words—of Jesmyn Ward bring us along, sometimes kicking and screaming in horror, to a new place of understanding. Many thanks.
Thanks to Netgalley and Simon & Schuster/Scribner for a chance to read the advance galley of this title which is due in bookstores August 2, 2016. Order it early and often....more
The form of this novel is what readers will notice first. It begins as a series of quotes from reporters’ notebooks, eyewitness accounts, historians uThe form of this novel is what readers will notice first. It begins as a series of quotes from reporters’ notebooks, eyewitness accounts, historians using original sources, and we must assume, Civil War-era gossip rags, describing an 1862 White House party which a thousand or more people attended. To say the affair was elaborate understates the case. Apparently when a thousand hungry guests descended on the tables of food, the quantity was such that it looked untouched after the assault.
Some of the reports mention that this lavish dinner party was going on during the war between the states (1862), and while Lincoln’s favorite son, Willie, lay dying upstairs, probably of typhoid. Some accounts criticize rather than report. Some are clearly inaccurate: “There was a large moon”; or “there was no moon.” Surely there can be no argument about these truths; one of the accounts must be untrue.
As the novel progresses, it changes form. The reportage becomes a chorus, as voices of the bardo—that state of existence between death and rebirth—declaim and consider the suffering of Lincoln as he contemplates his son’s death. Father and son (who’d been but a child!) had been intimates, together at every opportunity, heads often canted towards one another in deep conversation. The voices of the bardo are bawdy, rowdy, yet weirdly profound in their discussion of how fleeting life and how final death and what we learn in the course of a life and what we learn only when we’ve lost it all.
A bardo implies rebirth, but these characters appear to be looking only to escape everlasting nothingness, and enjoy discussing and dissecting the lives of others. Occasionally one of the dead will enjoy a peek at their future (best) selves, which they hadn’t the time or the opportunity to attain. It can be quite moving as each considers his or her life. And here, amidst the humor and tragedy and regret and outright joy—the stuff of life—resides the talent of George Saunders, as he tries to reach his best self, whether in love, work, or understanding.
It’s difficult to believe this is Saunders’ first published novel, and yet that is its designation. It doesn’t even seem like a novel, but immediately brings to mind a radio show, something meant to be spoken aloud, in its many and varied voices. The thread of the novel is not difficult to follow like some avant-garde works, though one may wonder if Lincoln’s sorrow at the death of Willie is all Saunders meant to convey. I think not.
I think there is another step that Saunders wants us to take: that the spirits of the bardo (how it begins to sound like bordello, the more we know of it!) influenced Lincoln when his son died, giving him insight, empathy, and the strength to carry on with his responsibilities, and to bear his personal sorrow, but also the sorrows of a nation at war. We have yet to meet the man who could have stood it alone.
"His mind was freshly inclined toward sorrow; toward the fact that the world was full of sorrow; that everyone labored under some burden of sorrow; that all were suffering; that whatever way one took in this world, one must try to remember that all were suffering (none content; all wronged, neglected, overlooked, misunderstood), and therefore one must do what one could to lighten the load of those with whom one came into contact…We must try to see one another in this way…As suffering, limited beings…Perennially outmatched by circumstance, inadequately endowed with compensatory graces…And yet…Our grief must be defeated; it must not become our master, and make us ineffective…We must, to do the maximum good, bring the thing to its swiftest halt and…Kill more efficiently…Must end suffering by causing more suffering…His heart dropped at the thought of the killing…"
So, we must fight, if fighting is required, to defeat wherever oppression exists. We must work together, and we’ll need all the help we can get from those who have glimpsed truth, and the value of kindness.
In a radio podcast with David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, Saunders tells us that in his research he discovers that Lincoln could have negotiated an end to the war in 1862 when the casualty levels were terrifically high. He must have wanted to end the slaughter so desperately, but one requirement of the agreement would have been to return the slaves to the South, and Lincoln simply refused. The black people who make an appearance in this novel live cruelly unfair and insecure lives.
One could make the case that a novel of this kind is not unprecedented. Think of the ancient Greeks with their choruses of wise and not-so-wise men; Italy’s Dante with his examination of the good or bad we do in life affecting our placement in the afterlife; England’s Shakespeare with his oft-found articulate spirits remarking on the action; Ireland’s Beckett (and his influence Joyce) for language and the insight wrapped in foolishness; America’s Barth and Mamet for exactitude and a deep, abiding humor when rationality might suggest despair.
The rich variety of voices in this novel are captured in the audio production of this book. In an interview published in time.com, Saunders explains how the Penguin Random House team worked with him (kudos, everyone) to get the requisite 166 voices, including famous stage and screen actors like David Sedaris, Ben Stiller, Lena Dunham, among others, to speak the parts so that it sounds like the “American chorale” Saunders was trying to convey.
At the same time, I found it helpful to have a written text to clarify Saunders’ experimental form which uses footnotes interspersed with conversation among ghosts. I adored what Saunders was able to tell us from his advanced age of 58 years—the stuff about not doing anything you can’t adequately explain to heaven’s gatekeepers, and how “it wasn’t my fault” actually isn’t much of a defense when one has been lingering in the afterworld for more than fifty years, unable to convince even a bleeding-heart saint that one wasn’t a douche that time.
Orthofer lives in New York currently and was founder in 1999 of the complete review, a website dedicated to reviews of recent literature from around tOrthofer lives in New York currently and was founder in 1999 of the complete review, a website dedicated to reviews of recent literature from around the world. In 2002 Orthofer included a blog, The Literary Saloon, which carries news from interviews, reviews, and notes on awards, publication, items of interest from around the internet. Orthofer has been updating it nearly every day.
The reach of Orthofer’s interests is nothing short of astounding. In this compendium of contemporary world literature he tries to include short mention of the work of leading litterateurs around the world and includes dates of publication and translation when a work is mentioned. This is an indispensable guide for those interested in world literature for it introduces readers to new authors and commonalities among authors either in genre or style that allow us to find what suits our own voracious reading habits.
This work can be read for itself, but it is more likely to be used as a reference text for readers interested in contemporary world literature. It can be downloaded as an ebook or referenced from the hardcopy. Continents are broken into constituent parts and each countries’ authors are mentioned with reference to their major works. While I have always thought myself interested in “world literature,” the range of this work makes me realize how parochial my reading has been, mostly limited to the overseas imaginings of writers of English. I note a recent entry in The Literary Saloon claims there has been a huge outpouring of translations of contemporary Arabic literature, a trend surely long awaited.
North American literature is not included in this work because the author is pointing to the need for American readers to vary their diet and expand their horizons:
”Because American authors provide an enormous amount and variety of work, American readers are arguably spoiled for choice even without resorting to fiction from abroad…In almost every other country, foreign literature occupies a central and prominent position, but in the United States it seems to sit far more precariously on the fringes…foreign literature can offer entirely new dimension and perspectives…great literature knows no borders.
When I founded the Complete Review (complete-review.com) in 1999, one of my goals to to take advantage of the Internet’s tremendous reach and connectivity…Ironically, though, one of the shortcomings of this and most other Internet resources is its tremendous scope…[This book] provides an entry point and more general overview various nations’ literatures, as well as a foundation to help readers navigate what is available on the Internet.” —from the Introduction
Orthofer has attempted something most of us might consider impossible, and he has done a convincing job of it. If it lacks anything, it is up to us to help straighten it out. I highly recommend everyone have a look at this book to see what you are missing. If it seems overwhelming, I sympathize. Imagine how Orthofer felt when he began....more
Loading...
