Percival Everett is a Black man. And he does something very special in this book—his 1000th, I think, or something like that. He imagines what would hPercival Everett is a Black man. And he does something very special in this book—his 1000th, I think, or something like that. He imagines what would happen when time come for retribution. And it ain’t gonna look like Donald Trump imagines it. (view spoiler)[ The thing is, he’s so funny when he’s telling us what could happen. We’re snickering and really, it is pretty gruesome. But he’s got the whole security pyramid working on the case before they realize exactly what is happening, the FBI, the state police, the local cops…everybody is trying to figure out who is doing these killings.
The thing is, it isn’t just killings. It is mutilations, and inventive ways of killing that are each a little different across the country. To remind folks about Emmett Till, and to take their pound of flesh for what happened to him. But my goodness, to make that funny, one has to be some kind of writer. And Everett is that. (hide spoiler)]...more
When I first read Alarcón’s recent collection of stories, The King is Always Above the People, and realized I had discovered a hugely consequential wrWhen I first read Alarcón’s recent collection of stories, The King is Always Above the People, and realized I had discovered a hugely consequential writer, I tried to find other work by Alarcón. His debut novel, Lost City Radio, is spectacular, about the Peruvian civil war.
This second novel, published some six years later, was more diffuse and talky, harder for me to enter into. It has a wandering beginning, and appears to feint away from that to the larger subject of broken family and societal ties a little further in. An aimless teen on the cusp of manhood falls in with a band of actors and takes a lead role in a play satirizing a corrupt government. This setup has enormous comedic potential, but I was constantly playing catch-up. There did not seem to be any impetus.
It is possible some of the blame reflects on my distracted reading, and the pressure I put on the work by reading all of Alarcón’s work at once. It is conceivable I grew weary reading of a country unfamiliar to me, searching in the work to find touchstones. However, I still must conclude this is not as accessible a work as the other two mentioned above, and recommend those for a beginner. ...more
It won’t come as any surprise to anyone that this novel is about the war in Baghdad, the one which has gone on relentlessly since 2003. Saadawi won thIt won’t come as any surprise to anyone that this novel is about the war in Baghdad, the one which has gone on relentlessly since 2003. Saadawi won the 2014 International Prize for Arabic Fiction for this work about the people trying to—literally—piece their lives together amidst endless bombings and heavy doses of despair.
The diversity of Iraqi culture is one highlight in this novel, the first people we see in any depth being on of the large numbers of Christians, not Shi’ite, Sunni, Yazidis, Ahl-e Haqq, Mandeans, Shabak, and Bahá’í, or any other of the many religions that were commonly found in Baghdad before the war.
"I’ll tell you something. I don’t think my family were originally Arabs…I think [we] were Sabean who converted to Islam,” said Mahmoud.
Mahmoud is a journalist in a struggling newspaper. The owner doesn’t seem to care enough about news and is instead, like the rest of the city, looking for opportunities to make money. The city’s population has a large contingent of people who no longer trust in their god but have revived an interest in the astrology of their forbears.
Mahmoud gets a scoop, a digital audio archive of the man thought to be terrorizing the city’s citizens. The man, called Whatsitsname, had been created by a grieving junk man, Hadi, from the bits of people left after bombings. Whatsitsname was meant to be memorial to all the people who died but who have no bodies to bury. Hadi had meant no disrespect, and certainly never anticipated Whatsisname would come to life in the midst of a terrible electrical storm…
Lightly told, the story’s humor saves it from a reality too terrible to contemplate. Originally composed of body parts from ‘innocents,’ Whatsitsname gradually found himself replacing bits and pieces of those people he’d already avenged, eventually using parts from terrorists themselves, or criminals and crooks. This made his psychic paybacks much more fraught and complicated.
“…who’s to say how criminal someone is? That’s a question the Magician raised one day. ‘Each of us has a measure of criminality…’”
More importantly, we begin to question what it means to share destinies with others, some we do not like or do not trust, and even some people we barely know. If the coarse and criminal ‘get the girls,’ what does it mean to be chaste? As for the Frankenstein, Whatsitsname, “they have turned me into a criminal and a monster, equating me with those I seek to exact revenge on.” But he continues to exist, changing features and nature, reflecting those whose parts he attaches.
As an examination of the fragmentation that has taken place in a diverse but harmonious society when death is sown recklessly and nonsensically, this novel is a window. As a novel in the Western tradition, it manages to convey a complex psychological portrait of a city, not merely of individuals. Were it a painting, it would feature a lot of red and black. It is definitely an indication that life has not been extinguished yet, that confusion sowed is being digested, and the city may rise again....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
This book seems too small for all it accomplishes. The quiet watchfulness and introspection of the Prologue tamps down opinion before it develops. We This book seems too small for all it accomplishes. The quiet watchfulness and introspection of the Prologue tamps down opinion before it develops. We are here to listen, to understand. It is such a quiet read, immediately alert to the tension inherent in a grandson of immigrants policing the border.
This is a beautiful book, a beautiful physical object. Riverhead Books formatted the inside to be a kind of art, using gray pages to separate the sections and lines to guide our eye, delineate our thoughts. We recognize we are privileged to see what an American thinks of the border, an American with reason to care about the migrants, who shares our history and theirs.
The real terror that migrants bring or flee is not hidden; it is one of the first things the border guards encounter. A drug capture is a feather in one’s cap. The people ferrying the drugs are not as important; they are allowed to struggle back to where they came from, or continue onward if they dare. Not much thought is expended in their direction.
Before long, Cantú becomes aware of his own muted, muffled response to the hideousness of the choices facing his human captures. The job itself appears to be a reason why he cannot envision himself in their place. Then we discover Cantú’s stress is coming out by a grinding of his teeth when at rest. He dreams of captures—his response and theirs—and how it could be different.
He moves to a different job, a different state. He watches, in a computer lab, movements in the border area. He researches reasons for population movement, drug dealing, gang murders, a capture’s history. This knowledge does not abate his nighttime fears. He starts to try to imagine the humanity behind the statistics, quoting the historian Timothy Snyder, “Each record of death suggests, but cannot supply, a unique life….it is for humanists to turn these [deaths] back into people.”
He goes back to El Paso and the Rio Grande and finds himself more confused than ever. “…studying…and reading…international affairs…I had the idea that…the patrol…would somehow unlock the border for me…but…I have more questions than ever before.” Exposure to the violence of the border region gave him a kind of moral injury: “Moral injury is a learned behavior, learning to accept the things you know are wrong.”
In contemplating the migration of individuals from Mexico and Central America to North America, Cantú must examine the horror facing those migrants in their own countries. He gives us a taste of it, leading us to question our own understanding of government, laws, fairness, money, profit, coercion, protection. We realize we do not know the answers to the questions these migrants raise: How are we to live? What do we have to lose?
Cantú leaves the border patrol to think, write, read, study. In trying to make sense of his own history, his recent past, and his future, he takes a job in which he meets a man who becomes his friend. That man, it turns out, is what Americans call an illegal, though he has lived and worked more than thirty years in the United States. All the understanding Cantú learned at the border is put into practice now as he couples his sensitivity and sensibility with experience.
This gorgeous, thoughtful read is replete with references to poets and novelists, as well as to those who write history, philosophy, international affairs. Cantú took time and had the resources to assimilate his feelings about illegal border crossing—the indignity, the futility of it—and he is eloquent in his expression of it.
What I came away with, putting financially-motivated drug traffic aside, was that the movement of individuals is migration, something that is not going to stop because we disapprove. When things get bad enough, people move. Cantú’s title alludes to the water-like quality of the stream, and the possibilities for growth.
Flood. We, and the people of other great nations, should think about restructuring our attitudes to accept the reality of a world in crisis and how that affects us whether we want it to or not. We must look at ourselves and the world, ourselves in the world, to see what we need to do to keep ourselves from moral injury.
I have a hard time listening to DJT at the best of times, and listening to him at all now is a drain, nearly a year into the most bizarre presidency eI have a hard time listening to DJT at the best of times, and listening to him at all now is a drain, nearly a year into the most bizarre presidency ever. Therefore I almost didn’t bother with Alex Baldwin’s parody which would have been a pity. I later learned (via NYT Book Review editor Pamela Paul interviews Kurt Andersen) this book was written in collaboration with novelist Kurt Andersen, who knew Trump back in the day. Andersen and Baldwin manage to channel DJT to an extraordinary extent, using DJT's actual words, sentence constructions, and speech idiosyncrasies for reconstructions and deep dives into his psyche.
This is deeply funny and unsettling stuff. Racist, sexist, religionist attitudes leach into his writing ("talking is the new writing"), surely not intentionally—he seems so completely ignorant of it. He makes juvenile jokes about Japanese names and the extent of Japanese disquiet over the cancellation of T.P.P., and expresses a kind of shocked surprise at how much the African American security people earn to protect him, especially after that discrimination suit they won…He blissfully mispronounces Philippine proverbs throughout the work, rendering them in his version of Tagalog, and mangling the translations.
Actual DJT tweets and quotes run into plausible extensions which elaborate his thinking gut feelings. Constantly finding ways to plug his golf courses and properties, branded steaks, wine, and ties, Trump finds his new job is awash in business opportunities: one could use military jets, perhaps, to bring same-day Nebraska grass-fed beef direct to the tables of his hotels. Andersen and Baldwin pick out current themes in American masculinity, politics, art, and critical thought and introduce the rogue element that is DJT.
“The chapter you just read was written personally by me, Donald Trump…this entire book, the words and sentences and the larger sections…the paragraphs, the chapters, all mine…and it's the best...”
By the end of the book, DJT is willing to ship Melania back to Yugoslavia ("I didn’t realize she’d come in illegally…" and "she's 50 years old this year") and he poses himself in front of a camera waving at the departing plane carrying his third wife while, written into the script, a single tear falls silently in the closeup. Sad.
"The president has unlimited Presidential Pardon Power (PPP), which means I could even pardon myself…PPP…"
DJT seems only to love his now 11-year-old son, Barron. He’s "so smart,""he’s like an adult now." One of the riffs I enjoyed most was about Paul Ryan, who looks
"like a smiling vampire…always glances at himself in windows and mirrors…it’s kinda gay…that afternoon Paul Ryan definitely looked untrustworthy. When I have strong instincts, they always mean something."
When you get to the part on North Korea, you will understand the depth of his delusions.
"I’ve never been to North Korea, I never took a course…but discussing it strongly for ten minutes, not with some CIA analyst or some State Department know-it-all, I now totally, completely, absolutely understand…that’s how CEO’s do it."
And his conflation of vote tallies:
"I won sixty percent of the electoral vote which is the same as Reagan and FDR…won of the popular vote."
Arghh.
These two men take the time to make us see the absurdity in DJT’s utterances…they go through all of it…right through his hiring family for jobs hardened professionals have trouble handling, to our foreign relations, the collusion, the shallowness of businessmen’s understanding of cultural relations, the voting…"It Finally Felt Real Like a Movie" is a chapter title, but it does tend to put the whole thing in perspective.
I suggest we take every opportunity to laugh while we can, all the while building up energy to take this clown down. Even if you think you are tired of all things Trump, these men have done a brilliant job of it, so have a listen, or a peruse. Laugh with friends at enemies. The audio is produced by Penguin Audio, and this book has a Whispersync option, a good choice for this title. Published by Penguin Random House....more
I am not well-schooled in tragedies--the Greek tragedies, that is--but when I learned that one of the books I intended to read for the Man Booker awarI am not well-schooled in tragedies--the Greek tragedies, that is--but when I learned that one of the books I intended to read for the Man Booker award this year was based on the story of Antigone, I thought now was a good time to have a look.
This is the first I have encountered of the play, I loved it. It is filled with terrific emotion and common responses to tragedy, as well as wisdom unbound. The personalities are strong and salty...and act on their promises.
Those of you who know the story will still be thrilled by the Chorus at the end saying "Grand words of proud men are punished with great blows, and this, in old age, teaches wisdom." And "Wisdom is by far the foremost part of happiness..."
Oedipus's two sons kill one another, as decreed by fate, and his two daughters are forbidden by King Creon to bury the body of one of the sons because Creon thought him a traitor. Antigone decides she will bury him anyway because this is the custom of the city and is a courtesy to the gods. Terrible events ensue.
We never learn here why the two sons are unequally loved. Perhaps that backstory is given in another play.
This edition is printed left side with the Greek, right side with English. It has a detailed introduction in which the story and all the characters mentioned are described in their relationship to the main actors in this story. That was helpful. At the end are extensive notes and discussion about word choices and inferred meanings. I thought this was impressive....more
This book was originally published in 1960, and it made Goldwater a lightning rod for everyone’s opinions on the state of the nation. Looking at his tThis book was originally published in 1960, and it made Goldwater a lightning rod for everyone’s opinions on the state of the nation. Looking at his thinking from the distance of fifty-seven years, I think we can state unequivocally that he benefitted from the one-way megaphone a book provides. What astonishes me now is how Goldwater is looked at in some circles as the gold standard for rolling back government. His argument is completely specious, and what’s more, has been debunked in practice
If Goldwater was original then, he certainly is not now, and his method of citing statistics clearly fraudulent—no teenager today would allow him to get away with his discussion on education: “we had an increase of 38% student body in various educational institutions, but an increase of revenues for school use increased 124%!” which tells us…precisely nothing. What’s more, I expect he knew it told him nothing. Even back in the dark ages I doubt anyone would have allowed those statistics to stand without challenge.
“Federal intervention in education is unconstitutional,” he writes. “Note that I have not denied that many of our children are being inadequately educated, or that the problem is nation-wide. I have only denied that it is a kind of problem that requires a solution at the national level.”
Fifty-seven years later, mind you, we are still talking about these questions. It’s hardly credible. Though now I think we can understand in hindsight that inequities exist and are perpetuated if communities alone are responsible for their education systems. We have too many examples to feel comfortable allowing these inequities to continue. Goldwater may still argue it’s up to local citizens. I think he’d be about as popular now as he was then, when he lost the presidential race by the largest margins in history to that time.
Goldwater had a very restricted sense of federal rights and an expansive, and I would argue, unnatural and disturbing notion of states rights.
”Despite the recent holding of the Supreme Court, I am firmly convinced—not only that integrated schools are not required—but that the Constitution does not permit any interference whatsoever by the federal government in the field of education. It may be wise or expedient for negro children to attend the same schools as white children, but they do not have a civil right to do so which is protected by the federal constitution, or which is enforceable by the federal government.”
All this despite the Supreme Court telling him otherwise. He was not a humble man, and one could go further: Goldwater led those who wanted to maintain a fiction of superiority of one group over another putting at risk national unity, who refused to acknowledge their own privilege and sought to renew it indefinitely and for their own benefit.
Goldwater, it might be noted, appealed to a young Hillary Clinton. Somehow that doesn’t surprise me.
At the very start of his polemic Goldwater says “the conscience of a conservative is pricked by anyone who would debase the dignity of the individual human being.” He goes on to say that accepting government “handouts” when one is hungry is debasing. Today we ask, debasing for whom? There is no question that American society has become far more liberal today than it was in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
We are also more educated and able to examine the roots of our disparities in opportunities and education. What is surprising is not that Goldwater’s arguments can be heard today among Congressional Republicans, but that the reasons for hearing those same arguments have changed only slightly, despite attempts to change the conditions leading to those uneven outcomes. Now wage disparities and race discrimination are causing these same dislocations when before it was clear race and class discrimination.
I am almost amused when I read Goldwater had the temerity to suggest that
“Farm production, like any other production, is best controlled by the natural operation of the free market.”
Goldwater’s publisher italicized those words, as though they were to be taken as more important than the surrounding paragraphs and should be remembered. Ah, yes. How many years did that stay in effect? The notion today is so sensitive as to almost impossible to mention in civilized debate. While two sides have vehement positions, not a one advocates leaving food production up to natural markets.
The last part of the book is concerned with the Soviet threat (!) and national defense. It is appropriate here to remind conservatives hearkening back to the good old days that Russia has been our opponent a very long time, and has learned our ways. Nothing exceeded the Soviet threat in Goldwater’s mind: why, all those Communists! But what strikes me looking at his bellicose foreign policy is how little he seemed to understand or utilize the ancient Chinese Art of War. He was all about bristling attitude and weaponry without even understanding the essence of power and control.
For the foreign aid programs that rebuilt Europe and ushered in the longest pro-democracy period of peace the region has known in recent times, he said only that we should concentrate at home. Here is a man who is just a man, a man with nothing but his manhood in a world where at least one-half the population has a better idea.
I am not sad Goldwater never won the presidency. I wish his ideas had been buried with him....more
Doaa Al Zamel’s story of her rescue with two small children in her care after a ship rammed her boat filled with migrants fleeing Egypt fills us with Doaa Al Zamel’s story of her rescue with two small children in her care after a ship rammed her boat filled with migrants fleeing Egypt fills us with horror and disbelief. Of a boat holding 500 people, eleven survived.
Even before the cruelty of rival smugglers (I only assume that’s who they were), Doaa’s life was filled with harsh treatment and a constant threat of kidnapping or physical abuse at the hands of strangers. Forced to leave Syria as a seventeen-year-old when government forces started targeting rebellious youth in her hometown of Daraa and outright killing townspeople and dumping their bodies, Doaa was sympathetic to the rebellion. The rebellion, however, was diffuse and never allowed to develop widely before government forces came down hard.
The Al Zamel family fled first to Jordan and then to Egypt, where they were welcomed at first by the the local populace and by the Muslim Brotherhood, who were distributing food and blankets under the protection of the Morsi government. This Egypt piece of Doaa’s journey I didn’t want to skim over: I had so many questions about why young men were constantly asking for the girls hands in marriage, unless this was meant as a jibe, a joke, or a kind of harassment. Did Egyptians perceive Syrians as wealthier, more educated, or more sophisticated? If so, why? Why did I get the impression that Doaa looked down on the Egyptian locals? Was it just a cultural distance?
When another young Syrian expatriate, Bessem, decided upon seeing Doaa that he wanted to marry her, I started feeling that distance one does when viewing another country’s cultural norms. This is so far from acceptable in the United States, despite Bessem’s friendliness and gift-giving to the family, that I was uncomfortable with the inevitability of it all. I understand the family was under duress. That is really the only condition under which such a decision to marry that man could be acceptable. Sure enough, shortly after agitating constantly and finally getting his way, Bessem, then insisted the two of them depart Egypt for either Syria or Europe.
Doaa was emotionally coerced into accepting the decision to move, and I resent this, even from my distance of several years and many miles. That she later recalled this man as the great love of her life shows us how circumstances change perceptions. I resent that change in her emotional landscape, and can’t help but see it as a kind of dishonesty. However, placed next to all the other things in her experience, a kind of fake love is surely least awful. She had a horrific experience getting to Europe, and deserves all the support she can get. Or handle, really. When many countries combine their attention, it can be another kind of overwhelming horror.
Doaa’s story reminds us how fragile is our careful calm construction of a life, and how easily it can be disrupted through no fault of our own. I recognize Doaa’s insistence that her destination be Sweden, despite Greece offering her a stipend and citizenship. Sweden was the original goal, and the confusion she, all alone, must have felt when all her constraints suddenly fell away must have been monumental. Now that she has many choices, instead of one uncertain one, which should she choose? Fleming’s retelling of Doaa’s options allows us to feel those uncertainties along with her.
During all Doaa went through, she must have asked herself repeatedly if in fact she and Bessem really had “no choice” but to attempt a migrant illegal crossing. As sorry as I am for what their situation was in Egypt, I would have to conclude that in fact, it was their hope for a better, more prosperous existence with more opportunity that led them to attempt the crossing, not once but three times.
They had a choice. After all, their parents and family stayed in Egypt. I understand conditions were bad in Egypt. I understand they had limited understanding of what went on outside their circle of family, friends, and acquaintances. But I am not sure they have the right to attempt to move to another country just because they want what that country offers its citizens.
What reasonable people must ask themselves is how they can help communities torn apart by war or natural disaster. This kind of migration is humanity’s problem. It doesn’t have to be as deadly as it is at the moment. There may be solutions that address the root issues and do not require the kind of dangerous, deadly journey that Doaa passed through. In some ways her story tells of a kind of grim lottery. If one makes it through the gantlet of death, all kinds of benefits are bestowed upon one.
That viewpoint, however, doesn’t take into account Doaa’s personal bravery to engage the world in this critical conversation about the best way to pursue one’s dreams. I’m quite sure she would rather have not gone through that horror, but sometimes we have…no choice.
Doaa's story was translated twice, from Arabic to Greek and from Greek to English, before it became this book. This fact lends a little distance to the narrative that one must overcome to get at the real experience of this woman and millions like her. The really difficult task of organizing the material fell to Melissa Fleming, and of asking questions that readers like us wanted to know.
I was especially grateful for her including things someone speaking of their own experience may not have included, e.g., what was the composition of the migrants on the boat, their ages and country of origin, who were the ones who rammed the boat (we never learned who they were, but their manner and words were included), the manner the ship went down, and all her time in Egypt, information which was supplemented by interviews with Doaa's mother and sisters. Doaa probably couldn't have done that on her own so soon after her ordeal. ...more
This is an appropriate time to take another look at Jerusalem, and Guy Delisle’s book can explain to you the in and outs of what U.S. President Trump This is an appropriate time to take another look at Jerusalem, and Guy Delisle’s book can explain to you the in and outs of what U.S. President Trump is seeing while he is visiting.
Guy Delisle is a graphic artist who accompanies his wife, a Médecins Sans Frontières physician, to hotspots around the world. While in the past he has been able to work as an artist while overseas on assignment, every posting is different, and the one in Jerusalem did not lend itself as easily to sketching outside, teaching in universities, giving shows on his work, and concentrating on finishing his drawings in a systematic way.
The very thing that makes Delisle effective in his role as graphic artist and stay-at-home husband and dad also makes him a frustrating on-the-ground observer. He is almost resolutely non-partisan and non-political. When bombs start to fly in Operation Cast Lead over the holiday period Dec 27, 2008-January 16, 2009 he tells what he heard from his position at home, but he wasn’t interested in being an observer. He also wasn’t interested in interviewing settlers in Hebron when he was asked to do graphic reportage there.
By the end, however, I could see the value in his distanced, uninvolved view. He drew what he observed, without much editorializing. He drew the extreme care some security guards took in checkpoint and airport security work, the difficulties Palestinians had in getting around, working, living, and planning for the future, he drew the wall, and the odd situation of Palestinians being pushed of their homes by settlers in the West Bank. The denial from the Israeli state sounds like the U.S. finding ways around giving African Americans voting rights, or rights to decent education.
Delisle saw the sights Jerusalem had to offer, always on the lookout for interesting or peaceful places to bring his wife and children, or somewhere he could work uninterrupted. Eight months into a twelve-month tour the pastor of a Lutheran church Augusta Victoria, on the Mount of Olives, offered Delisle a room in which to work. It was quiet and the only distractions were Delisle’s own thoughts, and a large organ which sent vibrations through his space. He found that he’d accustomed himself to grabbing the in-between moments in his hectic daily life, and the peacefulness of the church paradoxically made it more difficult for him to complete his projects.
Delisle spent many frames drawing the wall: “It’s graphically interesting,” he would explain. The wall through Jerusalem cut Palestinians off, in some cases, from their school, from their work, from their own land. What I particularly liked was his dividing the chapters by months of the year. Some months had considerable drama, but others reflected his dawning understanding about the situation and his learning to make up his own mind about what might be excusable behavior and what seemed like taking advantage.
Throughout the black-and-white book, a map of Israel with the West Bank and Gaza drawn in chartreuse served to remind Delisle and readers that the amount of space allocated to Palestinians in Israel is very small, and Israeli settlers are pushing them away even still. The violent tactics and language the settlers use, the virulent criticism heaped upon the government and activists by the press, can be shocking to those of us who are not used to such extreme positions. “The vast majority of Israelis vigorously disapprove of the extreme behavior of the Hebron settlers.” It is hard not to respond with derision to statements like these, and it is hard to see that restraint is working to underline the urgency of the situation for Palestinians.
The currents of daily life are portrayed effectively by the end of this thick graphic novel (336 pages), and Delisle’s tone and lack of interest serve his purposes well. Despite his occasional missteps (when discussing Hasidic Jews, for instance), his intentional ignorance gives us and him the opportunity to look at the situation anew.
”And the truly surprising end of the story is this: Just six months after he escaped, André showed up at Doctors Without Borders and asked for a new assignment. He stayed on with them for another 20 years.”
The 2008 animated documentary of the same name by Ari Folman and David Polonsky took four years to complete. The frames of this graphic novel may haveThe 2008 animated documentary of the same name by Ari Folman and David Polonsky took four years to complete. The frames of this graphic novel may have come from the film itself, and the sense of the film is uncannily captured without the sound or movement. Both book and film are so powerful I could not make it through in one sitting. A tremendous sense of anxiety and foreboding is generated by white/brown/black monochrome washed with an acid, chemical yellow, the slavering wild dogs, and the dissociative reality of war on a beach.
For anyone who hasn’t seen this film or read the graphic novel, I urge you to put aside anything else you have on your plates the minute you obtain a copy of either. It probably won’t take more than an evening to read/watch this remarkable act of witnessing, and you will remember it for the rest of your lives. Folman was a nineteen-year old recruit in the Israeli army when he was sent to Lebanon in 1982 to stop PLO rocket attacks and to retaliate for an assassination attempt on the life of Israeli ambassador to the United Kingdom.
At the time, many displaced Palestinians were living in refugee camps in southern Lebanon in permanent structures like houses. Their lives did not look temporary, but there was always agitation because their refugee status did not change. In Lebanon, the sectarian Christian leader Bashir Gemayel aggressively challenged (some might say crushed) the rights of Palestinians and Muslims, and shortly after he became president-elect in the 1982 presidential election in Lebanon, he was assassinated.
Gemayel’s party, the Christian Phalangists, took their revenge on two refugee camps, Sabra and Shatila. Israeli forces were slow to recognize and respond to an unfolding massacre. It appears they simply did not recognize the evil for what it was--it was too monstrous. The scars of those days left many men unable to understand what had actually happened in September 1982 and their role in it. Forman and Polonsky managed to show us that paralysis that comes over someone, even a group, when something bad is happening. The men protested up to their leaders, but not loudly, confidently, definitively enough. This phenomenon is not unknown. It may even have happened to us.
Much of the story is about the elusive nature of memory, and what scars the trauma of war leaves. The authors decided not to try and give voice to the other participants in this extraordinary event, but to just focus on the point of view of someone who was there but not directly implicated in the killing and who retained no memory of the time. We can forget these times of trauma, which is why the Holocaust is constantly referred to and memorialized. One must remember in order to forestall similar atrocities in the future.
The art in the film and the book is exceptional for its originality. The drawings are a certain kind of primitive and for that reason are all that we can project onto them. It may be the horror is something we bring because objectively speaking, until real photographs appear at the very end, events are only hinted at: we have the blank stares of the affected soldiers and the bizarrely horrible sudden deaths of soldiers playing on a beach—and this all from the point of view of what might be called the Israeli bystanders.
They were part of the army, and they had ordnance, but they had little passion for battle, the Israeli participants. The Palestinians and the Phalangists were locked in what became a battle to the death, giving and receiving no quarter. The whole record of the movie and the book should go down with oral histories of ancient battles not at all heroic but horrible and instructive and something forever to be avoided.
After making this film, Ari Folman said he no longer has interest in simply shooting actors in traditional filmmaking. There was something even more exciting to him about the art of David Polonsky, who tried using his non-dominant hand to draw so that the smoothness of caricatures did not distract from the roughness of the subject matter. Animation was a relatively new industry in Israel when they began, and since they had no infrastructure, they made decisions that more practiced and wealthier studios may not have made.
Both the film and the graphic novel are for grown-ups, or for people who want to be grown-ups....more
Thomas Frank makes a good deal of sense if one can listen long enough to hear his thesis. But he is his own worst enemy, providing story after statistThomas Frank makes a good deal of sense if one can listen long enough to hear his thesis. But he is his own worst enemy, providing story after statistic to describe Kansas voting for conservatives against their own best interests. His arguments are extreme and unsettling. You’d think Kansas was the most unholy place on earth with pollution, unemployment, and immigrant slave labor, but actually conservatives have only slowly been crushing the lifeblood out of the state. This last election voted 60%-40% for Trump.
20% is a lot of votes, but there are still reasonable people in the state. After all, Kathryn Sibelius, Obama’s Secretary of Health and Human Services, was elected governor of Kansas in the year just before this book came out. I am reading this now because I was lately introduced to a YouTube clip of Frank talking about his new book Listen, Liberal. I had the same reaction to him in person as I did in print. This book could have been an excellent essay without all the pyrotechnics.
I note Frank said then
"Ask a liberal pundit what ails the red states, what has induced them to work so strenuously against their own economic interests, to vote Republican...and he will probably tell you it's all because of racism.
There are undeniably a great number of places where this...[is] true, but Kansas is not one of them."
Interesting. Where did that come from, more than halfway through his book-length argument, the first mention of race. Why raise it at all? I wonder what he would say now, knowing what we all do about Kansas and their not-race problem....more
Dream is the right word for what we think we observe in this novel. Something poisonous is going on involving two mothers, their children, and pollutaDream is the right word for what we think we observe in this novel. Something poisonous is going on involving two mothers, their children, and pollutants that have entered the soil and water in a countryside that should nourish farmers, ranchers, and vacationers. The cycle of life has been profoundly disrupted and neither residents nor visitors can or will speak of the horror in the vacation wonderland. It looks as though some kind of paranormal witchery is being considered a kind of cure.
Americans lived through a history of environmental pollution and subsequent corporate denial for years in the 1950s-1960s until regulations put a halt to the most egregious flaunting of public health. The public became savvy, protesting when agriculture, methane, coal, oil, gas or other byproducts left a mark on their communities. But we rarely saw what happened in other parts of the world where the legal infrastructure was not as developed and the public not as well-educated in the ways profits become manifest.
Schweblin has made an extraordinarily intimate small novel speak for a national catastrophe. She has captured the somewhat insular way a mother observes and protects her child—how intimately she is familiar with every gesture and each learned behavior, connected by some psychic string, or in Schweblin’s words, ‘the rescue distance.’
The story is told in a unique way. The action is all past; a woman, Amanda, is in the hospital. She has a young boy speaking to her in imagination if not in actuality. The young boy encourages her to remember…to remember the sequence of events that led to this moment. Amanda and her child are staying in a vacation home in the country; while waiting for her husband to come on the weekends, they invite an interesting-looking local woman, Clara, and her son over to talk, play, and drink maté.
The strangeness comes from the juxtaposition of the hospital setting with green fields waving in a warm breeze, a cool creek, the hot sun sparkling on an outdoor pool, the languid slap of a screen door, a gold bikini, a young daughter chortling and repeating to herself, “we adore this.” There is unspoken menace in everything recalled by the woman now lying in the hospital, and the young boy she speaks to makes it sound almost as though she still had a choice…a choice she could make to prevent her imminent death.
"This story could be set anywhere. In fact, the first time I heard about pesticides and their terrible consequences was through a documentary about this subject in France. But, mainly because of corruption, Latin America has the worst agrochemical regulations and agreements. And Argentina, in particular, is one of the biggest importers of soya—one of the products more related with pesticides. We spread this soya all over the world; it is the base of a lot of our food. Soya is in everything: cookies, frozen fish, cereal bars, soups, bread, all kinds of flour, even ice cream!"
The pollution already permeates the soil and water, is what Schweblin is telling us. It’s not like stopping now is going to change anything, but the tension in this novel may indicate there may be a way to forestall an inevitable end.
Originally from Buenos Aires, Argentina, Schweblin apparently now lives and writes from Berlin. Fever Dream is her first novel, originally published in 2015 and winner the Tigre Juan Prize which serves to draw attention to a worthy lesser-known author. She has three story collections besides this book....more
Religion, corruption, promiscuity, sodomy, violence, bloodshed, humor, terror, betrayal, redemption, salvation. These are the subjects of Marlon JamesReligion, corruption, promiscuity, sodomy, violence, bloodshed, humor, terror, betrayal, redemption, salvation. These are the subjects of Marlon James’ work, particularly this debut novel about a town in Jamaica in the midst of a preacher war. Go no further if reading about these things will affect your judgment of what is art and what is not. We all have our limits, and James is happy to play right to the edge.
There is no Table of Contents in this novel, and midway through, we may find we need a roadmap. Where is James going, and how did we get here? That is when I noticed he began this book, before Part I, with “The End,” three pages which confused and frightened and warned us what was to come. A “murder of crows” hangs around the yard of one Widow Greenfield until one day she discovers many of them lifeless and bloody on the grass in front of her house.
When author Kaylie Jones was contacted twenty minutes after Marlon James won the International Man Booker Prize for Literature in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings, she said that acceptance and affirmation for him was a long time coming. Jones is credited with “discovering” James, passing his first manuscript for John Crow’s Devil on to an agent and an editor back in 2003. She was sure of James’ talent from that first time they met. “His writing was so confident. There was not one word that wasn’t precise. That voice was already there.”
The manuscript that eventually became John Crow’s Devil had famously been rejected 78 times before Ms. Jones saw his potential. James was 35 years old when it was finally published in 2005, his first novel. That means James was in his twenties when he wrote it, and this is the thing that slays: a twenty-something with shuttercock eyes writing sentences like
"Her mother was on the dresser, her sweaty back greasing the mirror as the man rammed inside her. Lucinda imagined his cock as stubby as he was plunging in and out of her mother’s vagina that was as loose as she was. Then he shifted and she saw it for a second, his penis disappearing into her mother and his jerky balls bouncing like elastic."
There is more than a little aggression in that passage, and an exactitude one isn’t expecting. But the whole book has this level of keen observation and imagination, speaking of forbidden things, blasphemies, and essentially…reporting, judging, laughing. Some of the horror and anger and judgment manifest are probably even nonfiction authorial license.
Two preachers fight one another over the ‘godly’ leadership of a town. One man is an alcoholic, and the other appears possessed. Both of them struggle with sexual temptations; neither fits any usual definition of godly, or good men. The townspeople, filled with the superstitions of their culture as well as warm natures mixed with hard-eyed realism, carol an absurdist relief, making comment upon one another’s needs, or sometimes jettisoning their good sense altogether under religious influence.
In an interview, James tells Charlie Rose that at this time in Jamaica he hadn’t yet publicly acknowledged his homosexuality but considered himself “Christian celibate…and believing it.” Only when he subsequently moved to St. Paul, Minnesota to teach writing, and when he was forty-four years old, did he acknowledge his sexuality. There is a lot, a whole lot, of explicit language and description of sexual acts, only some consensual, in James’ novels, but he appears to capture something that we recognize as real, even if we prefer not to look at it. “Violence should be violent,” he tells us, “Sexuality should risk the pornographic. It’s a fine line.”
Marlon James writes conversation in dialect, perhaps one reason his first book was not accepted immediately. Now, of course, dialect seems the most basic effort one can make to represent a culture. But James also manages the difficult feat of keeping readers unsure if they know what exactly is happening without losing the thread altogether, or giving up. His storytelling definitely leads readers in the direction of some kind of reckoning for evil, thoughtless, or uncaring behaviors, no matter what the preachers, with their contrasting styles, have to say. The murder of crows and the flight of doves are both menacing, and vengeful. But the ending, in a two-page chapter called “The Beginning,” is reassuring. This novel feels like something brave, unflinching, and new.
If you are still unconvinced about James' creativity, read this about his new project and then tell me he isn't looking deeply into the myths we tell ourselves, and exposing all....more
The story Hens tells of his struggle with nicotine addiction sometimes makes us laugh, though of course addiction is anything but funny. And he had itThe story Hens tells of his struggle with nicotine addiction sometimes makes us laugh, though of course addiction is anything but funny. And he had it bad, real bad. The time he spends detailing his addiction is time he still indulges, for a little while, his obsession with nicotine, a drug which Will Self tells us in the Introduction is like taking an upper and downer at the same time:
"The first few drags after a period of abstinence induced head spin and dry mouth, while a drowsy numbness crept over my extremities. Soon enough this narcotics phase was succeeded by excitation: spit balled in my mouth, my palms itched, my heartbeat accelerated—in my own small and unsophisticated way, staring at the algal scurf on the duck pond, I believed I could achieve something."
Maybe only people that know what he is talking about can laugh at that. But Hens picks up where Self leaves off, his short history of relapses an opportunity to forgive himself and to try to understand what happened physically and psychologically—nicotine is psychoactive—to cause and stoke his need. And to laugh in the face of his addiction is him a kind of fierce refusal to submit: "I’ll write my way out of my addiction by telling its story."
Addiction stories tell us something about humans, plot points on a neuroscience graph. Mikhail Bulgakov wrote a moving monograph of a country doctor suffering from morphine addiction. And I will never forget reading Carolyn Knapp describe her addiction to alcohol, how just the sound of ice against glass would calm her down, as she pictured in her mind a glass, clouded with cold and beaded with condensation. It cheered her up, and took away brain strain. Hens’ addiction was something like that: he enjoyed running into groups of smokers huddled in doorways, imagining that they are smoking on his behalf, for his inner contentment. Sometimes he even nodded to them, until he realized they might think him predatory or odd.
There was a time when everyone seemed to smoke. Hens reminds us what it was like growing up with parents who smoked, in his case chain-smoked in a closed vehicle for hours while he and his brothers clustered in the back seat, wreathed in a dense, noxious cloud. When he reached his destination, he and his brothers would stumble, wooly-headed and thirsty, from the car, exhausted from their journey. Certainly his aunt, who was paid a monthly pension in cigarettes in lieu of cash but who smoked only occasionally, might have had something to do with his parents’, and subsequently his own, cigarette habit.
But his recognition that “my personality is a smoker’s personality” must have come from his early family life, when smoking in secret was a way to both defy his parents and earn their love. How confusing the roots of addiction become when examined closely, and how, ultimately, irrelevant. Whatever the reason, he had to break his love affair with tobacco. He was a connoisseur; tobacco was a hobby, a kind of art, something that gave him pleasure but which became as necessary as eating. He was obsessed, addicted, planning his consumption. His life, his passion for sports, and his lover were suffering.
Every person dealing with addiction experiences it in their own way, and Hens recalls for us several others writers who have explicitly chronicled their nicotine habits, among them Italo Svevo, for whom the last cigarette, which Hens begins to familiarly call “LC,” was always remembered with great intensity and affection, while the relapse cigarette was always the one Hens himself craved: “…the rush of relapsing is a very special gift… a kind of investment that would be paid back five or ten times over.”
Hens also recalls a heavy smoker friend of his who could get on an airplane for a flight of eight or more hours and suffer nary a twinge of desire for the length of the flight: “There’s no point in thinking about something that’s forbidden, he says.” That friend would do well in America, I think, while Hens himself, once forbidden to smoke, can think of nothing else.
Apparently studies done on rats at Duke University by Theodore Slotkin
"confirm that the consumption of nicotine during adolescence leads to permanent neurological and functional changes that cannot be reversed. The changed structures are still detectable even after the (addictive) behavior has been stopped, an effect that is especially pronounced in male animals."
Hens is philosophical about this, unable to say what he could have done even had he known as an adolescent. Hens reminds us every couple of paragraphs that he no longer smokes. It is a thought, a chant, a wish, a dream, an aspiration. It is a fact.
The book has a strangely old-fashioned feel, perhaps because smoking is so long out of fashion now in America, and because of an anecdote about Hens spending a summer in Chungking Mansions in Hong Kong, “filling a pile of notebooks...in just my underpants…which never became the great postcolonial novel I had intended…” Can Chungking Mansions still exist? But Hens’ writing is a little addictive, too, as when he veers delightfully off topic several times, once to relate a cycling accident which involved him waking up, bandaged, in the “reanimation” department of a strange hospital. It freaked him out, understandably.
For anyone who has ever considered writing about a psychological obstacle, addiction, or other obsession, to rid oneself of it, this is a fine example of how one man has managed to make his life larger, richer, and more meaningful than his scourge.
At the midway point in this graphic novel I was still smiling. It sort of clipped me upside the head as I read, and though it drew blood, I still thouAt the midway point in this graphic novel I was still smiling. It sort of clipped me upside the head as I read, and though it drew blood, I still thought it might be a little cute. I didn't reallylike the story--it seemed a bit grim--but... I thought it was going to come around.
The authors (it would have to be two, one couldn't bear that dark vision alone, for long) are making a comment on man's seemingly infinite capacity for evil--really banal, thoughtless evil. It hurts, this vision, because sometimes it looks like it could be interpreted: Hateful redheads (wearing the red caps) with virtual spears yelling their frustration into the startled faces of those without the scarcity--the scarcity of everything, including education & opportunity, but also love, generosity & kindness, warmth, food...you know...what those of us who have, call "basics."
I don't believe in this vision. It may be hurtful to even entertain a performance of it in art. But I personally am not threatened. I feel sure that there is more to us--stop chewing on my sneakers, kitty!--there is more to us than looking after our own needs...No! you may not have my last crust of bread...Arg...did you stab me for the crust? You can have half, but you know we should get more from...though we may have to fight them for it...
You know how bad it is when I have already thought of these scenarios. ...more
The best part of this book comes near the end, in Trump’s Atlantic City casino.
“Akio Kashiwagi was one of the world’s five biggest gamblers, literall
The best part of this book comes near the end, in Trump’s Atlantic City casino.
“Akio Kashiwagi was one of the world’s five biggest gamblers, literally a one-in-a billion customer, who…in May 1990 was sitting at a green-felt table at Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino calmly wagering $14 million an hour. He had been there for nearly a week.”
Johnston prepares us for nearly two hundred pages with Donald’s history of self-promotion, alignments with shady racketeers, tax dodges, questionable accounting practices, and the real sleaze of a man who’d reached his intellectual limit selling real estate. The reader literally becomes queasy imagining the damage this man could do when handed the keys to the country.
The story at the casino is told in minute detail, how $18.8 million in $5K chips are stacked on the table and floor beside Kashiwagi at the baccarat table as he reached the pinnacle of his win in the double-or-nothing wager he had with the house. He was still in the black by the middle of the next week, and Trump could not sleep.
It is in the middle of this story when I realize that this is one of Trump’s biggest moments…a game…for money. I can’t tell you how it turns out—the book is worth seeking out, Johnson tells the story so well—but it does have something to do with reputation and the real wealth of both men, not the heralded fake wealth bragged about. It is a fight to the death, considering mob-boss friends hold the velvet stage curtains behind which both men hide.
In the final pages Johnston's skill as an investigative journalist and writer come across clearly. He focuses the last part of the book on Trump’s little known mob connections, and criminal associates. Knowing bad folks, as Johnston points out, proves nothing. But Johnston goes on to show how Trump profited by his relationships with folks who commonly transgressed the law. Trump cared about money, and measured his worth by it. He measures other people's worth by their beauty or wealth...or power.
The ups and downs in the legal battle over Trump University alone should have given the American voting populace pause because it showed Trump’s desperation and his rhinestones-for-diamonds charlatanism. Johnston gives a good overview of the bribery, threats, lawsuits, misdirection, and outright lies involved with this case. Right after this section is one on supposed donations to charity that got all tied up in donations to and from his own foundation.
I wasn’t going to read anything about Trump right away because I was in a deep funk after the election, but a discussion with another Goodreader led me first to TrumpNation: The Art of Being The Donald by Timothy O’Brien, and before I finished that, to Johnston’s book. TrumpNation first came out in 2005, and was reissued in early June 2016 with a new introduction. O'Brien has a fascinating in-depth section on the Koch-Trump rivalry (Koch was mayor of NYC in the 1980's) and a hilarious description of Trump's purchase of New York's fabled Plaza Hotel.
O’Brien was an editor at the NYT before moving to become executive editor of Bloomberg View. He actually edited some of Johnston’s work when both worked at the NYT. Johnston is a specialist in tax law and reporting, earned a Pulitzer in 2001 for his reporting on taxation, and was able to see some of his suggestions adopted by Congress into tax law shortly afterward. The material in Johnston's book and O'Brien's overlaps: both are sobering assessments of the man they watch, and detailed in what they focus on specifically.
Johnston’s book came out in English and German in Aug 2016, but he’d been researching Donald Trump for almost thirty years. Johnston met Trump back in the 1980’s, when he was investigating money flows, taxes, and tax avoidance, and casinos. There were so many folks involved in Trump’s success that investigations into his financial reporting went nowhere. He was both too big and too inconsequential. Trump's net worth was nothing like he claimed, but there was so much money going in and out of his accounts. It was going somewhere.
Johnston makes an excellent observation early in the book, in his bio of Fred Trump, Donald’s father.
”When Fred Trump was under intense criticism for plans to destroy a popular Coney Island attraction…where he wanted to build the first apartment project bearing the family name, Fred Trump shifted the focus of news coverage by hiring a bevy of beauties in hard hats and polka-dot bikinis to hand out bricks to locals and city dignitaries…Decades later, of course, Donald Trump would surround himself with models to attract television cameras and would have his third wife pose nearly nude aboard his Boeing 757 jet for a men’s magazine while he looked on during a photo shoot.”
Hard to believe near-nakedness distracts anyone from hanging onto their pocketbooks anymore--isn't that the oldest con of all? But so it goes. Donald continues to point to sexy beauty and away from his own indiscretions.
Johnston starts Trump’s family history with the observation that the family name was once Drumpf, changed in 1648, too early to implicate Donald, but not too early to influence his sense of himself. Johnston points out various meanings of the word:
”Donald no doubt enjoys the bridge player’s definition of trump: a winning play by a card that outranks all others. But other definitions include ‘a thing of small value, a trifle’ and ‘to deceive or cheat’ as well as ‘to blow or sound a trumpet.’ As a verb, trump means to ‘devise in an unscrupulous way’ and ‘to forge, fabricate or invent,’ as in ‘trumped-up’ charges.”
Johnston has just the right amount of amused skepticism and new information to hold us in thrall rather than have us toss the book across the room in a rage. O’Brien’s book is liable to make us too angry to read more about the man. Johnston keeps us reading and thinking. It is absolutely unbelievable that Trump was victorious in November.
This wonderful short novel, Ge Fei’s first translated to English, has just been published by NYRB as a Classics Original. The cover copy calls it a “cThis wonderful short novel, Ge Fei’s first translated to English, has just been published by NYRB as a Classics Original. The cover copy calls it a “comic novel” and it is...in the sense of the straight man in a comic duo undergoing relationship trouble, family trouble, and job trouble in a fast modernizing Beijing. Our hero—we only ever learn his surname, Cui (pronounced Ts-wei)—plays the straight man role to the end, never quite losing his nerve, though he comes close, while we watch helplessly.
Cui is not completely destitute, except in terms of money, love, and friendship. He has skills. He can put together hi-fi sound systems that audiofiles want to buy. When forced to move from his sister’s unused apartment one winter, Cui develops a sound system that should qualify as “the best in the world,” for any discriminating buyer in China, in hopes that the profit will give him enough to buy a small courtyard for himself to live in.
What elevates this novel is the ordinary man quality, the sense we have of a human fleck bobbing on a wind-tossed sea over which he has no control. The bad things that happen are outside of his control, and though he makes plans and efforts to extricate himself, there is a certain inexorable flow to his outcomes.
This novel is not especially dark, though it has delicious elements of horror and mystery. We become genuinely terrified when a mysterious wealthy stranger offers to buy the "best sound system in the world," but who exudes a hard inflexibility and sense of ferocity when challenged...or when asked to pay. There is some evidence that he has done damage to those that oppose him.
Who wears the invisibility cloak in this novel? Cui tells us that
"In the 1990s, Mou Qishan, the celebrity tycoon, was a household name in Beijing. He liked calligraphy, climbing mountains, and hanging out with female movie stars—all an open secret. Other rumors, however, told of his eccentric and often unpredictable behavior. The wildest story I heard was that he could show up at any event unseen because he wore an invisibility cloak…"
When Mou died, Cui bought a pair of hexagonal Autograph speakers from Mou’s estate. He used them to construct the “best sound system in the world.” It could be the invisibility cloak passed from person to person with ownership of the speakers.
When Cui’s childhood friend Jiang Songping played a joke on Horsewhip Xu, an old man in his neighborhood, Cui had a personal revelation:
"...the best attributes of anyone or anything usually reside on the surface, which is where, in fact, all of us live out our lives. Everyone has an inner life, but it’s best if we leave it alone. For as soon as you poke a hole through that paper window, most of what’s inside simply won’t hold up to scrutiny."
What do we take from this? If you are wearing the invisibility cloak, you not only cannot be seen, there isn’t much worth seeing? It does seems as though once ownership of the Autograph speakers changed hands, the “freed man,” as it were, becomes once again visible, and able to express himself “on the surface,” without us having to look through “the hole in the paper window” to their inner thoughts.
One of the more intriguing things Ge does in this novel is debunk the integrity of Jiang Songping, Cui’s best and only friend, and he does it using a pomegranate. Jiang Songping was a clever boy, but Cui’s mother could see right away he was going to be the kind of person who owned people. Jiang had a way of sounding authoritative, even when he spoke rubbish. All of us come under his spell to some degree when he states categorically that all pomegranates, no matter how big or how long they've grown, contain the exact same number of seeds, 365 to be exact. Our eyes pop a bit with this news, for who has ever actually counted pomegranate seeds, and who could dispute this entrancing fact? Later, we learn with the chagrin we share with Cui’s sister that, in fact, Jiang lied on this occasion, and perhaps on many others.
One of the more poignant moments in the book was when Cui returned to the neighborhood where he grew up and discovered it much changed:
"Human memory really is unreliable. I could clearly remember this alley being long, wide, submerged in green shade or sprinkled with white locust flowers, and nowhere near as cramped and seedy as it looked that day…As I sat on the stoop and surveyed the cluttered street under the setting sun, I felt vaguely alienated from everything."
Not all change is good...but memory is unreliable.
This is a delightful addition to the canon coming out of China today, having none of the syrupy schmaltz that earlier, more severely censored works demonstrated. Terrific translation by Canaan Morse, and many thanks to NYRB for picking this one out to share with us. Kudos to all on this one....more
If exuberance were key to great literature, this book would rank. This manic deluge takes the Western notion of a novel and puts it on a train out of If exuberance were key to great literature, this book would rank. This manic deluge takes the Western notion of a novel and puts it on a train out of town. One day it may circle back, or we may catch up with it, but we will all be changed by the journey. This is literature self-consciously desperate to join the club but having no earthly way to reconcile a reality crazier than fiction.
The Democratic Republic of Congo has been sadly underrepresented when it comes to literature, but not because the outside world is not interested. What we see is how complicated it all is, how slim the chances are that anyone would be able to thrash through the thicket that is daily life in the Congo, and manage to capture the moment on paper. Whoever manages it will have a different kind of voice, with a different center of balance.
This is train literature, the protagonist Lucien exclaims,
“locomotive literature….my writing displays similarities with the railroads that depart from the station that is essentially an unfinished metal structure, gutted by artillery, train tracks and locomotives that call to mind the railroad built by Stanley….Anyway, I’ve had a weakness for railroads for a while now. I sought man, I found train. (Laughter)”
There is something to the random voices of the bar girls (“Do you have the time?”), the circular nature of daily routine, the powering through despite the distractions…a more unlikely place to find a serious writer of political plays can hardly be found. And yet, Lucien runs into a publisher in the bar who, over time, adds to the general hilarity and nonsense by asking Lucien for short pieces on random subjects unrelated to Lucien’s opus, a political stage-tale with the title: The Africa of Possibility: Lumumba, the Fall of an Angel, or the Pestle-Mortar Years.
“Characters include Che Guevara, Sékou Touré, Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Lumumba, Martin Luther King, Ceaușescu, not forgetting the dissident General.”
But the dissolution is not restricted to the government, as Lucien’s description of Tram 83 includes the panty-less baby-chicks, the single-mamas, the ageless-women, the wild, endless search for the conflict minerals of gold, diamonds, cobalt…”this dung elevated to a raw material,” the search continuing even under the floor of one’s own shack. Lust for the vast, unrivaled mineral wealth of the country affects everyone, but the return on those minerals is nowhere to be seen except in the nighttime exchanges in Tram 83 where everything is for sale. “Do you have the time?” Heart of Darkness, indeed.
The loco-motive nature of the novel at first runs us over. As we grab hold, it drags us behind it. It is only when we are able to climb aboard, for me after the second reading…the second drink, as it were….that the previously unimagined riches of this debut novel begin to reveal themselves. The translator is to be commended for keeping pace and not succumbing to despair or overload. The Democratic Republic of Congo. We’ve heard the stories; we've read the history. Now see the literature.
I was eleven or perhaps twelve years old when I learned that ignorance is no excuse for anything.
That revelation completely changed the way I viewed I was eleven or perhaps twelve years old when I learned that ignorance is no excuse for anything.
That revelation completely changed the way I viewed the world. I ran to my parents, separately, I remember, my eyes wide. I said to each of them, “Ignorance is no excuse!” It won’t save anyone from the repercussions of whatever they are ignorant of. You can die as a result of ignorance or you can participate in something evil as a result of ignorance.
As I remember it, my parents did not say anything. There is much I would think as a result of my eleven-year-old coming to me with such a revelation, and I am not sure I would know what to respond, either. But it was a big moment, and it came from reading a novel.
Now I wonder which novel gave me such an insight, but I cannot remember. I was an ordinary schoolgirl, with no special access to literature. I read too much, my sisters said, and most of them were bodice-rippers…
This book reminds me of that moment of realization. The insights into what man is and how he responds to national, political, and personal trauma come fast and hard in this work. Alexievich begins by recording voices from the Gorbachev years: “Those were wonderful, naïve years…” Both for and against Gorbachev, the voices record people’s naiveté. They had an excuse, the lack of reliable, comprehensive news coverage one of them, but it would not save them from their future nor their past.
There is simply nothing to compare with this fabulous reconstruction of the lives of people under communism and after. Alexievich records the stories of people under the dictatorship of the people, and there is so much nuance, so much pain, fear, crazy love, faith, and delusion tied in with people’s understanding of those years that it becomes as clear a record of what humanity is that we have.
“Changing the nature of man” was on the table. From the sounds of some voices, it succeeded on every measure. But if nature can be changed, we question again what "nature" is. Naomi Klein tells us man is not hopelessly greedy but it is hard to see that when greed is rewarded and protected. The Soviet Union, Russia, has gone through enormous social upheaval in the last one hundred years, and Alexievich manages to give us a window through which we can begin to see what happened to people.
Among the voices are ordinary folk, high Kremlin officials, members of the brigades who spent their days shooting “enemies of the people.” We see what they were thinking at the time and what they are thinking now. Because governance the world over has many similarities, constraints, and imperatives, everyone who can read should see how governance actually plays out, no matter what we believe.
These people are not so different from us. They are just people after all. All that they did, all they experienced, can happen to us. It is necessary to be vigilant, to be aware, so that we do not, inadvertently, give evil a chance to thrive. Alexievich has taken memory and made literature. For me, it will be one of the most meaningful books I have ever come across.
I want to point everyone to Ilse's review of this title. She does such a lovely job of articulating what Alexievich managed to accomplish....more
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