Tag Archives: quality

August 18, 2014 · 7:27 pm

China Mieville’s “Embassytown”–The mindbending adventure and danger of language

Though it may seem odd or simply untrue to say, there’s a good chance that at some point in our Terran history, self-expression and dialogue with others were among the most dangerous forms of activity possible.  Maybe it could justifiably be said that they still are.  This is not simply due to the possibility of being misunderstood, but also because of how language can cause us to go beyond our own limitations and into unknown, uncharted mental and emotional territory.  In China Miéville’s sci-fi masterpiece Embassytown, a whole way of life is riding on dialogues with the indigenes of the planet of Dagostin, the Ariekes, or the Hosts, as they are called by the humans who have come there to live, and as they are also referred to by the “exoterres” the Kedis and the Shur’asis as well.

This book is a challenge to read, not only because there is at least one new vocabulary term or concept to be mastered on each page, but because the author leaves one to put the pieces together himself or herself, with only a few subtle hints here and there.  Some of the new conceptual territory includes the notion that age is measured not in Terran days, months, weeks, or years, but in something called kilohours.  The children are not brought up by their birth parents and may never even see them, but instead are brought up by a series of “shiftparents,” who look after them in turn.  The buildings and devices?  Many of them are not built, but grown, to be called biorigging and other such terms, and they are largely produced by the Hosts, who trade them with the humans in exchange for favors and considerations I will get to in a moment.  The air in Embassytown is not breathable by humans, so a special atmosphere is created with the help of the Hosts for their guests.  One step outside with lungs open, and the humans begin to sicken and die.

Embassytown is technically an outpost of Bremen, which is officially in charge of what happens, yet is in fact a little out of touch, as it turns out, with some of the most dangerous events to its own supremacy.  Yet in the tale told by Avice Benner Cho, a female human born in Embassytown, who has been an immerser (a crew member of space ships), it’s neither the elements which seem strange to us in the science fiction nor the encounters per se with the Hosts, the Ariekes, which pose the danger.  It’s language itself which not only ends up being the real challenge to the humans, but which is also the “main character” of the story.  But you want things in an orderly fashion, don’t you?  So I’ll give a bit of how the story goes at the beginning.

Avice is remembering her childhood and past in sections called “Formerly,” and is telling things which have happened in a more recent time, the “middle distance” of the story, in the sections called “Latterday.” It’s only halfway through the book that the action becomes simply sequential.  One of the first things that happens early on is that a friend of her, Yohn, becomes ill because of a childish game the young humans play, which consists in seeing how far out of human bounds and into the Hosts’ section they can go to leave a mark and come back.  Yohn accidentally breathes the inimical natural atmosphere, and a strange “cleaved” human named “Bren,” a middle-aged man, who is an acquaintance of the Hosts, helps the Hosts retrieve him.  Avice is asked to comfort Yohn while he is ill.  Avice doesn’t know exactly what “cleaved” means until much later in the book, or why Bren is avoided by other humans, but the children giggle at him and are in awe of him as well.

Not long after this, the Hosts ask to “borrow” Avice to make a simile of her for their Language.  This is Language with a capital “L,” because to the Hosts, Language and thought are simultaneous, and they apparently cannot lie.  It simply is not in their nature, as it seems.  When they want to be able to say that something is “like” something else, or that someone did something “as” something or someone else did, they first have to have an actual instance of the person or event having been or happened as they describe, so that they can make the comparison.  In order that they can say “like the human girl who ate what was given her,” they first have to borrow Avice to construct the factual sentence “There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a long time.”  They therefore cause her a minimum of pain and give her something to eat in an old deserted restaurant; after that, she becomes a simile and is part of their Language rehearsals from time to time.  As it later turns out, there are humans who represent other tropes and parts of speech as well.  But first, before Avice becomes aware of them, or perhaps it’s only before the reader is told about them, she becomes an immerser, a crew member for space voyages, and is admired when she voyages and returns for the questionable activity of “floaking,” a sort of goofing off and hanging out which is a kind of glamour cast by immersers over the people who admire them for their piratical abilities.

The story progresses, and we learn that humans can only communicate with Hosts by using Ambassadors, two cloned humans who speak different words at the same exact instant, which is what the Hosts understand, and is how they speak.  But the Hosts initially perceive these two humans as one, and don’t have any conception of individuality.  In fact, they are unable to lie, and are simultaneously thrilled and fascinated by listening to humans construct lies, from simple lies such as telling them that something is red which is blue, or perhaps saying something ridiculous, innane, or poetical, such as that birds swim in the ocean.  But even though Avice is used to things which would seem strange to most real-life contemporary humans, such as marrying her husband Scile in a “nonconnubial love match,” or having for a best friend Ehrsul, a trid (tri-d projection of a woman), when she becomes involved in an intrigue caused by the dominant Bremen’s plot to circumvent Embassytown’s status by sending an Ambassador from its own ranks (an Ambassador of a variety described in advance, mysteriously, as “impossible”–but I won’t ruin the suspense), her glamour as a “floaker” can only help her own so far.  Instead, she must throw in her lot with those who are trying to save Embassytown by a very unusual means of dealing with the Hosts, and again, it’s spoiler alert time.

Suffice it to say that this is a grand sci-fi adventure with structuralist and deconstructionist theories of language acquisition and usage, yet it’s also a great read that anyone, versed in language theories or not, can enjoy.  In fact, the very difference between a simile and a metaphor, between “referring” and “signifying,” is at stake, and Embassytown itself revitalizes and casts it own glamour over how we speak and relate to each other every day.  I hope all my readers will have a chance to finish this book, and will enjoy it as much as I did.  What more could one ask for as a reader, after all, but a sci-fi adventure thriller which takes its venue of play in the fields of language themselves?

6 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews, Literary puzzles and arguments, What is literature for?

Tagged as , , ,

August 6, 2014 · 5:05 pm

Leslye Walton’s “The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender”–A Tour de Force of Magical Realism

If I wrote to tell you today that The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender is the tale of a young woman named Ava who becomes the victim of a crime, you’d probably yawn a bit, stretch and sigh, and say “There are lots of stories of that kind out there–why should I read one more?”  But if I were to tell you that she had previously been mistaken as an angel by a whole Seattle neighborhood, perhaps you’d be a little more interested.  And if I then told you that this is because she had wings, maybe I’d have you hooked.  You’d say, perhaps, “Okay, then, I’ll read your crime story, and we’ll see just what this is really all about.”

Well, what it’s really all about, in the author Leslye Walton’s words, is this:  the story is “inspired by a particularly long sulk in a particularly cold rainstorm spent pondering the logic, or rather, lack thereof, in love–the ways we coax ourselves to love, to continue loving, to leave love behind.”  That sounds ordinary enough, doesn’t it?  But then, Walton tells us that sulking in the rain is the general way she herself, like a daffodil, can achieve beauty, and our attention is drawn away from logic and towards the whimsical.

As you might guess, the crime is only in a minor way what the story is “about.”  It’s a novel of magical realism, and passes continually to and fro between realistic descriptions and events and magical ones, in a nearly seamless flow that keeps one reading to see what miracle or odd happening will occur next.  Some realistic odd happenings or conditions, such as Ava’s twin brother Henry’s not being willing to speak most of the time, are explained by his seer-like state; his main vision of doom and disaster turns out to be verified, not only in the attack upon his sister Ava, but also in the more realistic natural world’s symptoms of global warming, first a drought and then a flood of rains, connected in this story with magical happenings as well.

To begin at the beginning, however, the connection between Ava Lavender’s non-functional wings and her ancestry is quite clear:  for at least a third of the novel, before we ever even meet her mother, we are in the equally magical world of her immediate forebears, her maternal great-grandfather Beauregard Roux, who moves his family to the New World and into his beloved “Manhatine,” followed by her grandmother Emilienne and her siblings René, Margaux, and Pierette.  The connection with both birds and ghosts is fairly constant throughout the novel also:  great-aunt Pierette, upon having fallen in love with an older man who liked bird-watching, turned herself into a canary, we are told.  And Emilienne, after her husband Connor Lavender moves her to Seattle, her siblings all having died, continues to see and converse with their ghosts in her new home.  As well, she sees the ghost of the little girl who previously lived in the house, one Fatima Inês, appearing along with theirs, particularly at crucial times in the novel.  In this sense, Ava’s connection with birds is not only a matter of heredity, but also of environment, because in Fatima Inês’s room, there are a host of doves who have mated with crows, leaving feathers everywhere.  As well, after Jack Griffith, the young erring father of Ava and Henry deserts her mother Viviane for another woman, the handyman Gabe, who lives in the house, becomes a sort of foster father to the children even though Viviane remains for a long time emotionally remote due to her unrequited love for Jack; Gabe hangs a feather mobile over Ava’s crib before she is born, which is rather as if yet another line of “inspiration” has occurred to make her part human, part bird.  Yet, her fondest wish is to be treated simply as a girl, and before the end of the novel, a young man, Rowe, brother to her friend Cardigan, seems to be the solution to this problem.

There is also the obsessed young Nathaniel Sorrows, however, a strange kind of religious fanatic who poses a threat to Ava’s desire to be ordinary, as he has an idolatrous fixation with her.  Though I won’t give away the very end of the novel, I should say that he is key to the resolution of the plot, and is disposed of plot-wise as well, just as the other odd characters have sometimes been.

Among some of the minor characters there is Wilhelmina, a native American woman with mystical powers who helps Emilienne run the family bakery, and Penelope, who does so as well.  And though it may not be usual to include a bakery as a character, as a magical sort of personality, the bakery is responsible for all the superlative tastes and good smells and wonderful pastries and breads that finally lure the townspeople away from their belief that Emilienne and Wilhelmina are both witches, and draw them in to enthusiastic support of the business.

Times of the year, seasons, solstices and equinoxes, are symbolically important in this story too; the summer solstice, for example, is Fatima’s anniversary of her birthdate, and the people of the town celebrate it as much for the one reason as for the other.  Other odd happenings include things from the very first of the book, when Mama Roux, Beauregard’s wife, is said to become transparent and disappear after he has (actually) mysteriously disappeared; this is not simply a symbolic book, however, and it’s not just that she becomes “transparent” and so forth in terms of personality.  By the way the event is recounted, it’s clear that it’s meant to be “real.”  Then, there is the man in Seattle who, after his wife leaves him, begins to dream her dreams; once again, though there is a symbolic element to this statement, it is also meant to be real, as real as it ever is in a work of magical realism.

Walton does show her rhetorical hand in her fiction here and there of course, and in direct statements that occur alongside the plotline rhetoric.  For example, about three-fourths of the way through the book, she speaks of the “malformed cousins of love,” “lust, narcissism, self-interest.”  When the children Ava and Henry, now in their teens, finally venture outside of the protective surroundings of their house on solstice, Walton has her narrator comment:  “..[C]hildren betray[] their parents by being their own people.”  Near the end of the novel, when grandmother Emilienne is sitting by the bed of the wounded Ava, she is said to think of “all the scars love’s victims carry.”  Still, the main tendency of the novel is to be whimsical, mysterious, magical, and thoroughly engaging, without that emotional drop that the reader often feels when the ending is not unrelievedly happy (and that’s a hint but not a spoiler).  It is, however, a quite spell-binding book, from start to finish, and I would encourage everyone interested in this type of fiction (and even those for whom it would be a first encounter with magical realism) to read it.  Who knows, maybe if you read it, your canary or parakeet will begin giving you significant looks before dropping a feather on your page and initiating an intellectual or poetic conversation!  At the very least, you will have experienced a gifted new writer’s début novel, and may be a bit more mystical, philosophical, or wise about the departures or desertions of loved ones and other machinations of fate.

4 Comments

Filed under A prose flourish, Articles/reviews, What is literature for?

Tagged as ,

July 24, 2014 · 5:23 pm

“The personal is political”–Two stories of marriage gone awry, from Jane Smiley and Joan Didion

On the surface of the matter, the two novels I’m going to make some comment on today could not be more different.  The first, Jane Smiley’s novel Private Life, starts just after the Civil War, and traces the whole course (nearly) of a marriage, from the early days when there is still hope to the sad remainder, the ashes of hope, near the end of life.  The second novel, by contrast, Joan Didion’s Play It As It Lays, is a more recently set novel, taking place in the late 1960’s, almost contemporaneous with its date of publication in 1970.  The first novel shows a woman observing all marital proprieties, though chafing against them.  The second, a woman who regularly rebels not just in spirit, but who is no longer quite sure what marital proprieties are, or which ones pertain.  Smiley’s novel is set in the American Mid- and Southwest:  it starts in Missouri, and travels with its main characters to the area on the coast near San Francisco.  It always seems to have a local sense of place, if that makes sense to my readers.  Though Didion’s novel takes place in the Southwest too, and in fact is mainly set in Los Angeles, its surrounds, and Las Vegas, it has an international frame of reference which includes New York City.  Private Life describes both the mundane and intimate daily life of a wife and her Navy-background husband, Margaret Early and Andrew Jackson Jefferson Early, as they live together stolidly day-by-day and traces a gradual arc of development in Margaret’s knowledge of and feelings for her husband.  Play It As It Lays, by contrast, focuses on only a short span of time in the yearly life of the wife of a movie executive, her name being Maria and his Carter.  The first novel develops a sense of crisis gradually, and has its “big bang” at the very end; the second novel refers back elliptically to isolated former events, but subsists in a constant state of crisis, though the “answer,” the wife’s philosophical statement, and an expected crisis of sorts does emerge at the end.

The novels both show a mismatched couple, however, and both novels begin at a point in the end of the time arc and then flashback and work forward to that time again.  As well, the rallying slogan of students and feminists from the 1960’s and 1970’s, “The personal is political,” applies to both novels, both marriages, and is at the heart of our discussion today.  As some may recall and others may come to know, the slogan “The personal is political”  was popularized by feminist Carol Hanisch in her 1969 essay of the same name.  As one may discover by consulting Wikipedia, “It was a challenge to the nuclear family and family values.”  Whereas Jane Smiley’s novel makes the point directly, however, by showing how historically important events in the daily life of the nation affect a wife and her husband attempting to live together when it is clear almost from the beginning that they are not really compatible, Joan Didion’s novel makes the point in a more convoluted way, by showing another mismatched couple in which the wife is longing not for freedom of self-expression so much as for that very nuclear family life her husband disdains.  Both wives lose a baby in the respective stories, Margaret to early infant death and Maria to an abortion insisted on by her husband because he doubts the baby is his.  And both wives are far more affected by these deaths than the husbands, Andrew indifferently accepting the fact that his wife can never have another baby and that he must not engage in connubial relations with her, and Carter hardly able to feel properly about his wife as a partner at all, because he is (to give him some credit) as tortured as she is in their mutually hellish life of adultery, alcohol and drug abuse, and feverish party-going.

The most essential way in which these two heroines are alike is in the fact that both live their lives mainly as adjuncts to their husbands’ lives, and this is the part which ends up tripping them up.  Margaret is typing handmaid to Andrew, who fancies himself a great public man and a keen scientific mind, and who ends up becoming a bit delusional and given to fits of mistaken grandeur.  Her attention to his belief that everyone wants to hear everything he has to say, and that in print, is in addition to her dutiful practice of the tenets of housewifery of the time, the cooking, cleaning, and management of the household.  Maria’s way of being an adjunct to her husband’s life is to star in minor pictures he makes, to trail along after him through his life of partying and so forth, even though they are estranged and thinking of divorce and he cheats on her and she on him in a casual way, and allowing him to dominate her in the matter of their differences about how to deal with the daily life of a small child they already have, Kate, whom Carter put in a home because she suffers from some sort of developmental disability.

The two heroines are different in some respects.  Margaret is very practically oriented, and survives her life by taking care of ordinary matters, and using them as pegs upon which to hang her self-references.  Maria, on the other hand, takes sudden drives up and down the coast, to Las Vegas, and stays in bed all day on some days, or makes tiny and repeated futile attempts to reach out to someone among the disaffected and brazen denizens and hangers-on of her and Carter’s world.  Margaret makes purposeful friendships which help to see her through the days and nights, with Dora (a woman reporter who reads like a portrait of Willa Cather), Pete (a mysterious and charming Russian adventurer), and Naoko Kimura and her family, Japanese citizens of the United States who later suffer being sent to detention centers during WW II.  Furthermore, she maintains the socially expected contacts with her landlady at a boarding house she once stayed in during her confinement and with neighbors and friends of her husband’s.  Her revolution, though it comes at the end, is extremely slow in coming.  Maria, on the other hand, is often dismissive of her husband’s and her own friends, because actually she feels so taut and miserable all the time that they bring her no relief, though she does spend some time with them.  She is described by one reviewer, the blurb writer, as “catatonic,” and this, though not true in the technical sense, is true in the metaphorical sense:  she can’t seem to effect change in any measurable way until the end.

Perhaps the main difference in them, however, is that in the end Margaret sets aside all the anxiety and care and trouble she’s taken over her husband and his books, and decides to write her own book, whereas Maria makes a suicide attempt which results in Carter placing her too (like her daughter Kate) in some kind of facility.  But the difference isn’t perhaps as much as it might seem:  though Maria’s solution is seemingly more self-destructive, Margaret’s choice is also destructive of the self she has always maintained, the dutiful wife and friend.    When her friend Pete (and love interest) leaves town, she angrily does something she’s never done before and throws one of her husband’s thick and self-important letters into the back yard unread, to get wet in the rain and the dew.  And she thinks to herself, “I have…no reason to be alive.”  But far from actually causing her to kill herself, this thought gives her pleasure because it so contravenes what she knows are her husband’s beliefs.  The main similarity is that finally both choose not to continue to follow in their husbands’ wake, but to call attention to themselves and their own needs, apart from the expected course of having a nuclear family as it appears in Private Life and the disapppointed ideal of Maria’s of the nuclear family model as it occurs in Play It As It Lays.  Maria calls attention to herself by making an attempt on her own life, Margaret by electing to write a book of her own.  How many heroines in how many novels and stories have we seen driven towards one or other of these extremes in order to survive as a woman in society?  I don’t think I need to emphasize the point further.

What’s perhaps most intriguing is that near the end of both novels, the two heroines each state a sort of philosophy or guiding principle.  As Margaret finally realizes and says to herself with some bitterness (able at last to bring to recall a long-lost memory from her childhood because she can now face the truth), “There are so many things that I should have dared before this.”  In a similarly memory-oriented fashion, Maria thinks to herself near the end of Didion’s novel, “When I was ten years old my father taught me to assess quite rapidly the shifting probabilities on a craps layout:  I could trace a layout in my sleep….Always when I play back my father’s voice is it with a professional rasp, it goes as it lays, don’t do it the hard way.  My father advised me that life itself was a crap game:  it was one of the two lessons I learned as a child.  The other was that overturning a rock was apt to reveal a rattlesnake.  As lessons go those two seem to hold up, but not to apply.”  In a sense, though one woman is actively planning an overthrow of her husband’s dominance by imitating his way with the world (appearing in print), and the other is biding her time (perhaps delusively) in a care facility and planning sometime in the future to live alone with just her daughter, Kate, they each have plans.  And to each, the marriage she has endured with some difficulty has become a metaphor for all of life, which shows how overwhelming to each the experience has been.

To many people, even some well-intentioned and fervent feminists, now as in the earlier days of the women’s movement in the 1960’s and 1970’s, the slogan “The personal is political” has seemed a trifle humorless and grim, engendering nightmarish visions and imaginations of constant negotiations in the bedroom, the boardroom, and in all facets of daily life.  It is only when we un-demonize the word “political” (hard as that is sometimes, given the shenanigans we see career politicians getting up to) that we realize that human existence is a perpetual matter of negotiation and compromise anyway, and that to admit women into the ranks of those allowed to participate was never a matter of choice, but was always a matter of moral necessity, long though it took to happen.  But if you would sweeten the pill a little, then why not have a look at these two excellent novels, Jane Smiley’s a slow-developing long-reading picture of a lifetime lived with the “intimate enemy,” and Joan Didion’s a tough, glaring, burning endictment of a decadent lifestyle lived under the Western sun, without relief in sight?  You will perhaps find that even the portrayal of pain and frustration has its aesthetic parameters and pleasures in the hands of masters.

Leave a comment

Filed under Articles/reviews, What is literature for?

Tagged as ,

July 20, 2014 · 9:56 pm

The Learning Curve of Life and Death–Richard Gilbert’s fine memoir “Shepherd”

Today, I am sitting inside a comfortable beachside  condo, enjoying a precious tea that a Russian friend kindly provided me with, taking in both its nearly indescribable aroma and its delicate perfumed taste.  It’s a Basilur family tea imported from Sri Lanka, flavored with “natural cornflower, jasmine buds, blue malva, and flavor roasted almond.”  The whiff seems at first to be that of an expensive chocolate, and then one thinks “No, not chocolate exactly–what is that delicious smell?”  I have had the luxury of consuming the tea not only as a wonderful gift, but as something I didn’t have to question or think about much, except that I do sometimes after having a tea from Sri Lanka wonder about how they ever got their crops back in order after that frightful tsunami a number of years ago.

I’ve usually had lamb in the same way, especially enjoying having it with my brother, because he appreciates the visceral element in eating meat from the bone, possibly a holdover from our more carnivorous forebears, but when you see the two of us nibbling along the bones held aloft at a private family dinner (one where our company can’t judge us savages), you know we must be kin.  And as I say, I’ve not usually given a thought to where the sheep come from, how they are raised, how deprived of life, not much in fact beyond what cut I’m eating and how much it costs.  A standard consumer, then.  And this in spite of the fact that we are only two generations away from Appalachian small-time farmers ourselves on our father’s side, though I don’t think they had sheep.

Since I’m trying to be as honest as the book I’m reviewing today is, I will confess that my word picture of the tea above is an attempt to make tea lovers (at least) salivate and want to know more.  And it’s the very word pictures of the Appalachian countryside, scattered from beginning to end of Richard Gilbert’s book Shepherd, the gorgeous imagery and word poetry which demonstrate not only his love itself of the land, his accomodation to its demands that change with where it’s located in the country, but which also in a literary manner justify that love and draw in the eager reader for more.  There is a price to be paid, of course, and that is the price of empathizing with both sheep and shepherd as they suffer as well as glory in life; still, the book itself is true as true can be to living especially in this sense:  despite the pain endured and the trials encountered, one can imagine few who would rather go without it.

A general statement from a little past the middle of the book itself which expresses the author’s feel for his subject is this home truth:  “Something is always going awry, getting out of control, and otherwise cheating one’s fantasies on a farm.”  This might almost be juxtaposed with the statement of a friendly elderly neighbor from another section of the memoir, from a time when the author lived in Bloomington, Indiana in a more residential community before the farm in Athens, Ohio was even thought of except as a remote dream:  “You’re happier than you know.”  Yet, as one reads forward in the book but back and forth in time in the memoir structure of past juxtaposed to present and then retroactively again, one sees a man and his family going through a much-desired learning experience.  One begins to appreciate that it’s the price in lives and lifetime which gives one the right to speak in tropes and epigrams, which are scattered throughout the book, both from the author’s own words and those of the many farmers and breeders whom he acknowledges as his teachers.

One famous epigram I can recall from our own neck of the Appalachian countryside, and which I also found when I went to college for the first time at a school that was located in the midst of an agrarian community, was this punning one:  one seems to praise someone by saying “He’s outstanding in his field,” but a sly grin changes this into “He’s out standing in his field,” idly, of course, not a desirable condition for a farmer or an academic.  And Richard Gilbert has worn many hats during his lifetime, among others those of both an academic and a sheep farmer, while keeping his sense of humor and his modesty intact as if he were constantly mindful of this very epigram.  I first encountered him as a blogger not too long after I signed onto my own site in summer of 2012, and I’ve read his many excellent posts on narrative, memoir and memoir writers, teaching creative non-fiction to students, music, featured guest bloggers, and more (see Richard Gilbert).  And this summer, I was finally able to read his memoir Shepherd, which I recommend not just for anyone who has an interest in farming or raising livestock, but for those with a sincere interest in memoir or even narrative fiction:  the whole aggravated question of pacing, whether of restraining oneself when one desperately wants to go ahead with a treasured project or of knowing how to pace a memoir or fiction and make it suspenseful and fulfilling and true-to-life is at stake, and Richard Gilbert satisfies, even though he himself is constantly questioning and re-evaluating his own motives.

Like Socrates, the wise man knows only that he knows not, and Gilbert allows us to follow him along in his path across the farming scene, and lets us watch him make mistakes, celebrate successes, and confront the long learning curve of life and death that attends upon even the canniest farmer.  He shows us himself in his most soul-searching, depressed, angry, and perhaps even unjust moments, a man willing to learn and seeking answers. He asks at one point, “Was I really just starting to see, so late, that having strong feelings didn’t make me special?  That they certainly didn’t make me good?”  Again and again, he evaluates himself (even to his genetic inheritance of a weak back) against his father’s plans, disabilities, desires, and accomplishments, and those of other farmers he knows.  He describes his struggle to fit into an agrarian community that has its own traditions, suspicions, and ways of doing things, the most innocuous of which perhaps is what he calls “Appalachian Zen”: his friend and employee Sam’s advice to get to work, “Let’s do something even if it is wrong.”  And of his imitation of his father, he finally concludes, after a visionary dream which comes to him near the end of his farming venture, “I’ve never seen that while I tried to emulate him, I also tried to outdo him.”

His farming wisdom and advice?  As he says, “Many of my breeding-stock customers had [a] broader perspective from the beginning.  They didn’t aim to make money.  They came to farming seeking aesthetic pleasure and solace from an angry world.  And a word had arisen to honor food produced with less control but more craft:  artisanal.  The goal wasn’t high production per acre, but food infused with love and time.  Like art….For the highest quality, nothing beats small, slow, and inefficient.”

His philosophy?  His philosophy is not of the cut-and-dried kind which can be communicated in one heartbeat, but of that learning curve, there is certainly at least one wise lesson to be taken in by all of us, and it can be found by tracing an arc from his first sentence (“Childhood dreams cast long shadows into a life”) through to the very last paragraph of his book, when he describes a “sacred moment” which comes back to him as he gets ready to depart his sheep farm for yet another home elsewhere.  He remembers his Georgia boyhood on a farm, when he was four or five and was surrounded on a hillside by butterflies which “infuse[d] me with wonder and joy.  Because I’m so young, I can’t name, but only receive, their gift:  a revelation of life’s unfolding daily abundance:  a miracle.”  And in that word “miracle” is after all the solution to the vexed question of the learning curve of life and death, given us by an articulate, gifted, and knowledgeable memoirist who, while not mincing words about the negatives, avers that they are only the other side of the positives we prefer to see.  But this is to anticipate the reader’s travels with Gilbert, which must be experienced as a whole and followed from beginning to end to fully appreciate such a grand American adventure, and to place the right value on such an inestimable gift to the reading community.  Though it may not lead you to adopt a lamb, it will certainly lead you to ponder, laugh, cry, and dream dreams with at least one academic who has earned his agrarian stripes, and that human shepherd is Richard Gilbert.

10 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews, What is literature for?

Tagged as , , , , ,

July 18, 2014 · 5:50 pm

The Dismantling and Reassembling of an Author’s Reputation–Karen Joy Fowler’s “The Jane Austen Book Club”

Once again, I had decided to read a book I was somewhat skeptical about because of all the hype it had received, and also because when a book has been made into a movie (as I understand this one has been) one has also the dual task, if possible, of being responsible for a comparison of the two, and I haven’t seen the movie.  But to forge on ahead–this book is not at all what I expected from what I had heard.  I had expected a sort of latter day imitation of Jane Austen’s world, in which (from what I had heard) the characters reading Jane Austen would begin to enact their own interior dramas and have relationships like those in an Austen novel, and would have happy or at least deserved endings, and then (as happens these days) there would be a reader’s guide to glance through for things I might want to think about, and then the book would be over.  A “good read,” but nothing spectacular, no fireworks, just a calm, if poignant, reminder of “our Jane” and her achievements.  A good read, be it understood, in the same way that Austen is a “good read,” requiring one’s wits for the piercing turn of phrase and one’s contemporary awareness that even Jane had her limits, mainly those of no longer achieving a sort of sexual politics we can nowadays feel comfortable with.  After all, marriage is no longer the only game in town.

But this book refused to cooperate with attempts to dismiss it (and I’m not sure now why I was trying to be so lazy), at the same time as it didn’t seem that well done, I couldn’t think why.  Perhaps it was because I was expecting a holistic experience, a standard “fourth wall realism” novel, in which (to borrow the term “fourth wall realism” from theater arts) the audience is allowed to maintain its fiction that it is looking at reality.  It’s not that The Jane Austen Book Club had any strange events, particularly, or departed from what we know of earth as described by basic biological tenets:  it was rather that the structure of the book itself bore a strange resemblance to something that had been dismantled and left on the floor or table in a partial state of reassembly.

True, there were six main characters in the book club, each of whom had a story in which they predominantly figured, and a book each which they were responsible for discussing of the six major works of Jane Austen featured in their discussions.  And, there were subsidiary characters who impinged upon their awareness and the plot itself.  But the six chapters of the months of the year during which they met, and the extra seventh chapter, and all the additional material included with the novel itself was a little confusing (the book had not a few odd pages of added random information stuck in here and there, and a strange editorial “we” narrative voice, apparently not representing any of the named characters, who spoke up now and then).  More and more as the novel went on, it bore the character not of a “fourth wall realistic” novel, which was what I had been expecting from the hype, but of a shattered experience known rather to the postmodern novel, with its characteristic disorientation of the reader and the reader’s presuppositions.

In truth, though I was a little bored with the novel proper, I found the overall tribute to Jane Austen to be quite valid and valuable and interesting.  And I don’t say I was bored because it was postmodern in its structure, but because the characters, along with the subsidiary characters who impinged upon their lives, added no real “flow” to the book.  It was largely a novel in which each character was briefly sketched, given some lines to say, and made to move toward some other character in the book.  The most significant sentence in the entire book occurs near the end of the novel:  it says, in the mysterious editorial voice (none of the named characters), “We’d let Austen into our lives, and now we were all either married or dating.”  This is presumably the “sop to Cereberus” of an Austen-like result that is meant to conclude the “business” of the tribute in the somewhat scattered pieces of the story line.  The after-material is another case, however.

I found that I was easily more interested in the editorial job Fowler had done with the Austen legacy and its documents than I was with the novel itself.  At the end of the novel, there is a “Reader’s Guide” (a brief and highly significant quoted paragraph); a quick run-down of the plots of Austen called “The Novels” (apparently intended to supply acquaintance and encouragement for those who haven’t read Austen yet); a section called “The Response,” which I easily found the most intriguing, composed of reactions from Austen’s contemporaries and family members and followed by those of famous writers and critics since; and then the inevitable “Questions for Discussion” and an index of “Acknowledgements.”  Once I had made my way through this material, I “saw [the book] steadily and saw [it] whole,” and this allowed a reassembling in my own mind of what I think Fowler’s purpose must have been:  I think it was largely an educational one, and though I don’t think the quality of the novel stands up to the quality of the overall project, I am glad I read the book, and can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, though I have expressed various reservations.

My suggestion to readers is this:  if you are a new reader of Jane Austen, read at least one Austen of your choice before you read this book.  Asking other Austen readers for a recommendation as to which one can be a frustrating task, because it seems that each novel has its own cadre of readers.  Maybe looking at Fowler’s section entitled “The Novels” will help you choose.  After reading the Austen novel, then read Fowler’s novel from beginning to end, for the purpose of comparing how a latter-day admirer of Austen may write, though I don’t think the two are comparable in quality (Fowler’s effort, though perhaps more familiar in its structure to our contemporary scene, seems a little thin and slapdash by comparison with Austen, and in having made her novel referential, Fowler has invited the comparison).  Lastly, and perhaps side-by-side with reading other Austen novels, read the rest of the whole of Fowler’s fine attempt to interest readers in the author whom she so obviously admires, and especially read “The Response” section:  everyone, it seems, has an opinion of Austen, and some differ widely (or wildly).  My guess is that all-in-all, you will come away with a similar affection for Jane Austen, and a debt of gratitude to Karen Joy Fowler, for having put your feet on the Austen reading path to start out with.

8 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews, Literary puzzles and arguments

Tagged as , ,

July 17, 2014 · 4:05 pm

Arturo Perez-Reverte’s “Purity of Blood”–A swashbuckling fiction romancing about a lie

After having read Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s exciting and tumultuous novel The Club Dumas some time ago (it is a free-standing novel at this point, not a part of a series), I made up my mind that his other novels, all apparently written in the great tradition of the adventurous Dumas, must certainly be worth a read too.  What with one thing and another, however, I got distracted by other books and literary endeavors, and until I found a copy of his second Captain Alatriste novel, Purity of Blood, on a free shelf at the library, I blush to confess that I had more or less put the great romancer Pérez-Reverte out of my mind.

At first, I hesitated to read the book right away, because usually I am a stickler for doing things in a certain order, and I felt that unless I had already acquired or at least read his first eponymous novel in the series, Captain Alatriste, that I should not go on to the second.  But then, a friend assured me that the novels were linked mainly by internal references back and forth to the adventures in each, and each book was still easily readable as a stand-alone experience.  So in I leapt.  At first, I felt that I was drowning in a sea of Spanish names as Pérez-Reverte built up his world of characters, and I do not know enough Spanish history to be sure, but I suspect that some of the characters in the novel are references to actual poets, con men, and adventurers (other than the king and queen, who appear in cameo fashion, and are of course meant to refer to the real people).

The story is handled very well, and is related by a thirteen-year-old ward of sorts of Captain Alatriste, Íñigo Balboa, in turn with an anonymous omniscient narrator who tells things that happen in Balboa’s absence which he could only know about by being told about them afterwards (which we are free to think is the case if we want).  The story flows easily, but the narrative waters are constantly perturbed by the concept of “blood,” both in the amount of it that is (or is in danger of being) shed in petty quarrels and scrapes, and in the troubled history of Spain’s Inquisition period, when the concept of “pure blood” (a descent unmarked by having Jewish or Moorish “blood”) was supreme.  I say the concept was supreme, because as the narrator relates from a later period than his thirteen-year-old perspective–and it’s a point made gracefully and well by the rhetoric of events as well as by any rhetoric of declamation, which is kept at a minimum–the concept was all there actually was.  As is reiterated by what the characters know already as well as by what they find out, there is no such thing in their world as “pure blood” of any group or category (and our world has already confronted this truth again and again in history, enough to be equally sure, though there are those slow to admit this, and even violently inclined to aver the opposite).  People are people, we are all related through Adam and Eve (or through whatever “Ur” figures one chooses to prefer), and any claim to the contrary is a lie.

Romancing about the confrontation of the lie, however, adds another dimension to the dialogue.  For example, Pérez-Reverte does not make his positive characters earnest and totally well-intentioned purveyors of the truth, but erstwhile adventurers, scandalous poets, and scoundrels, all of whom have their own reasons for seeking the truth.  They are pitted against the evil characters mainly because they are sickened by hypocrisy and have other axes to grind, old grudges and claims and quarrels, and they even have some prejudices of their own against disadvantaged groups, though they do not make victims of these groups.  The strongest rhetorical ploy they use which features the question of blood descent in fact comes about because a young nun of Jewish ancestry and the young man, Íñigo Balboa, are in the clutches of the Inquisition, and they must find a way to free them.  The very fact that they are not high-flown ministers of justice and the truth but only ordinary culprits and swashbuckling adventurers of men who make use of the truth and come to think the better of the truth in spite of their own prejudices is more convincing in some fictional ways than if they had had totally good intentions themselves to start with.

Finally, there is the rhetoric of the book which cleverly allows the reader not only to participate in a vigorous and page-turning tale of derring-do, but also to feel superior to those benighted characters who persist in their errors to their own undoing.  That not all can be saved who should be and not all adequately punished who deserve it is an element of realism which Pérez-Reverte allows to creep into the novel; still, this one realistic gesture makes the otherwise a little fantastic fiction breathe life, and reinforces our awareness of just how unreal the world can become in actual fact when people allow a corrupt idea to lead them into action, and when they make victims of their fellow human beings according to a notion of division and superiority.

I have, of course, written some very serious words about this novel, as I think it deserves, but of course, another good reason to read it is because, quite simply, it’s fun, gripping, and full of wit and wizardry of blade and dagger.  After all, it’s not every day our serious lessons about life are accompanied by a generous dose of fantasy and play with history and historical figures.  And who better to deliver this combination than Arturo Pérez-Reverte?

2 Comments

Filed under A prose flourish, Articles/reviews, What is literature for?

Tagged as , ,

June 21, 2014 · 4:31 pm

How much does God weigh?–Emily Dickinson and her quizzical answer

Today is a hot, sunny, beautiful day of summer, when the sky and the ocean are both full of blue ecstasy, and that makes it just right for a little ditty of a post on the natural world, so that I can return to it as soon as possible and leave the air conditioning and the computer to their own devices (yes, I’m getting lazy in the summer heat, you guessed it).  So, I chose a short three-stanza poem by Emily Dickinson, who is the perfect poet when images from nature come into question, as so many in her huge corpus of short poems have images and a figurative lexicon drawn from nature and its seasonal languages, even when the subject is death, or the departure from the world of nature.  This poem (#632 of her poems), however, includes some of her homey domestic images as well, the images of a woman used to keeping house and dealing with household implements.  But the real “kicker” about this poem is the way it goes along so very, very simply only to hit us with a real conundrum of an image at the very end.  Here is how it goes:

“The Brain–is wider than the Sky–/For–put them side by side–/The one the other will contain/With ease–and You–beside–/

The Brain is deeper than the sea–/For–hold them–Blue to Blue–/The one the other will absorb–/As Sponges–Buckets–do–/

The Brain is just the weight of God–/For–heft them–Pound for Pound–/And they will differ–if they do–As Syllable from Sound–”

There is something a bit sly and even coy about the way she leads us into her   transcendent world, which while using simple everyday images, sensations, and experiences makes such astounding transitions to experiences beyond this world.  She starts easily enough, by observing that the brain can contain both the image of the sky and the experience of seeing it, as well as the self.  “Well, okay, Emily D.,” one is bound to say, “I think we can accept that for starters.”  Then, she passes on to another apparently limitless thing the senses encounter, which curiously enough is less big than the sky, when it seems that it might otherwise be more poetically ordinary to start with the smaller of the two items (the sea) and build up in the next stanza to the larger (the sky).  But then, we find that her quirkiness or perhaps odd sense of humor has assigned a color to the brain (she says of the brain and the sea “hold them–Blue to Blue–” which means to compare the two “blue” items).  This makes us forget for the moment our previous quibble about relative sizes of infinite or quite large things, and leaves us, bemused, to go on to the last stanza.

Here, in the last stanza, Dickinson is asking us to perform another and even more daunting task, really quite impossible even for the believer in God, and certainly more than impossible for the questioner or doubter.  Not that it’s been easy up until now:  so far, we’ve put the brain and the sky side by side, we’ve held the brain and the sea up to each other for comparison, at least mentally, and been asked to imagine the brain soaking up the sea as a sponge would a bucket of liquid.  Now, we are being asked to “heft” the brain and God, to judge whether or not she is just when she suggests that they are of a similar “weight” and “differ–if they do–” and here the problem comes in.  Now, we are no longer being asked to judge of something which can at least be visualized with a great deal of imagination:  now we have to guess what the difference might be, if there is any, between “syllable” and “sound.”  The one is presumably the visual or physical or mental notation of the second, which proposes a more sophisticated relationship than between the items in the other two stanzas.  If one reads the items in order and assumes that the brain is the “syllable” and God the “sound” (and there is really no assurance that this is the correct “formula,” except that “sound” seems slightly more mysterious, as God would probably be thought to be), then the first, the brain, records or notates the second, God, and the second is the fulfillment of the first.  But it’s a stretch.

Perhaps the useful thing to end this post with is the observation that Dickinson, in many if not all of her poems (and yes, I do want to assure you that my curiosity was once pronounced enough to take me through the whole volume), likes to play “riddle me this” with images and concepts.  She finds in so many instances that the natural world speaks to her of what is beyond it, yet retains its own quiddity and essence, partaking of the “great beyond” without being any less literal and precious as what it is on earth.  Even the experiences of imagining death use homey and everyday images and pictures drawn from the natural world, because death is the great riddle of our existence, yet is a part of the natural world as well, and Dickinson was well acquainted with its appearance in nature.  And now that I have paid my tribute both to one of the greatest American poets of all time and to the lovely and perplexing world of nature that inspired her, I’ll quit writing, and go off to be inspired by the summer day myself (for so at least one always hopes to be).  Goodday to all my readers, and here’s hoping that even if you aren’t in the middle of summer where you are, that you find something in the natural world to make you happy today.

4 Comments

Filed under A prose flourish, Articles/reviews

Tagged as , , ,

June 6, 2014 · 10:19 pm

“Diana of the Crossways”: Not “The End of the Novel of Love,” but “The Beginning of the Novel of the Theory of Love”

Once again, as I look back in memory over the course of not-too-distant posts, I see that I have been inspired to write something by way of tribute to the erudite and talented blogger Caroline, who first supplied me with the information about a very interesting book which has provoked a lot of my recent thought.  That book is called The End of the Novel of Love, and in typical fashion I feel a need to discuss something from that book.  I can always discuss things with Caroline on her site, and she welcomes many and diverse points of view and responds with great verve and élan to them.  But I have chosen to recategorize one of the novels chosen by Vivian Gornick as her subject matter in The End of the Novel of Love, and therefore it is perhaps more proper to post on my own site than to monopolize Caroline’s site in a quibble about terminology with an author she chose who is a quite talented writer as well.  But let’s begin at the beginning.

This is Vivian Gornick’s thesis statement in the first pages of her book:  “In a thousand novels of love-in-the-Western-world the progress of feeling between a woman of intelligence and a man of will is charted through a struggle that concludes itself when the woman…melts into romantic longing and the deeper need for union.  There are, however, a handful of remarkable novels written late in the last century and early in this one [Gornick’s book was published in 1997] where, at the exact moment the woman should melt, her heart unexpectedly hardens.  Just at this place where give is required, some flat cold inner remove seems to overtake the female protagonist….The woman has taken a long look down the road of her future.  What she sees repels.  She cannot ‘imagine’ herself in what lies ahead.  Unable to imagine herself, she now thinks she cannot act the part….[I]n these novels this is the point at which the story begins.”

Now, the first book discussed by Gornick is a bit anomalous in one respect already, because whereas several of the earliest novels discussed are by women, just as early in time is this first book by a man, George Meredith.  It is his book Diana of the Crossways.  And because it is by George Meredith, it shares certain similarities with his other more well-known book The Egoist, in that it uses up an inordinate amount of time developing the theory of something:  in the case of The Egoist just what egoism really is along with a case history, in Diana of the Crossways the theory of just what true and genuine and unselfish love of a woman by a man is.  In the book describing Diana Warwick, née Merion, there are several case histories of the way men love women, but only one of them is worthy of Meredith’s golden scepter, so to speak.  And Meredith is quite straightforward even as to the way he structures his novel as to which of the forms of love is to be accounted the correct one.

For one thing, his entire lengthy first chapter is theory, all theory, a recounting not of characters and places and events, but of ideas relating to his overall topic.  When he finally positions Diana at the Irish ball for Lord Larrian in Dublin, where Diana shines as a belle and is made much of as a pronounced wit, her willing foil is her friend Lady Emma Dunstane, who praises her to others and is willing all through the book to come to her aid as much as her own ill health allows.  There are several main suitors in this initial setting, of whom one is the overly gallant Irishman Sullivan Smith, and another the steadier and more sedate Englishman Tom Redworth.  Two other male figures court Diana, the never-appearing but always in the background bad husband who makes her Diana Warwick, and the slightly younger politician Percy Dacier who almost persuades her away from her husband when they are having “irreconcilable differences.”

Of course, in the England of the time, a no-fault divorce was not even dreamed of, and Diana is in danger for quite some time of suffering lengthy legal proceedings set up by her jealous (without cause) husband.  It is in fact Diana’s wit, charm, intelligence, and dash which have caused her husband to be jealous of her, and which also cause a certain proportion of her society in the form of malicious gossips to bring much suffering and grief down upon her.  She attempts to make a living with her pen, which works at first because of her notoriety, but then tapers off.  The rest of the novel, I leave to other readers to pursue for themselves.  Suffice it to say, that this novel is not so much about the end of a loving career for a woman as it puts an emphasis on Gornick’s second point, that the woman is resistant to her potential future because she wants her freedom.  It is only when Diana sees a way clear to her freedom that she chooses happily for herself, and still emerges with a mated life.

My point, then, is not so much to contest Gornick’s overall theory as to point out that in the case of George Meredith, whose novels are heavy (some would say top-heavy) with theories and explanations and lengthy philosophizing about relationships, the novel of love is not so much ended as it “suffers a sea change” into the beginnings of the novel of the theory of genuine love.  And as in The Egoist, the female figure is the main protagonist, only in this case, there is more than one Sir Willoughby Patterne to be dealt with.  Thus, if you would see a positive “pattern” eventually work his way to the forefront of the fiction, this is the book for you to read, though you must wait for quite some time for him to work his way to the forefront of Diana’s imagination and to win her away from her reluctance.  Still, even George Meredith for all his serious thoughts on the issue provides the reader with a happy ending, and that is something that not all the authors whom Gornick writes about feel able to do.  It is a much-fraught issue, and one which will continue to bear serious thought for those who read Gornick’s provocative book.

8 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews, Literary puzzles and arguments, What is literature for?

Tagged as , , ,

April 23, 2014 · 2:52 pm

Edwidge Danticat’s “The Farming of Bones”–There’s no such thing as a small massacre

Ours is a time in which people of conscience are becoming more and more aware of the cruelties of wars and “police actions” which have been fought across the globe from times so far back we have lost count of them, and often it’s the “big” conflicts which have been memorialized, the battles which have resulted in more deaths in sheer numbers which are remembered and moralized on most.  In modern times, some of these are the French Revolution, the American Civil War, WWI, WWII, fighting in Korea, the Vietnam War, the wars in Sarajevo, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan.  Many of these wars are remembered at least in the North American continent because the United States has been involved, and the United States, to whatever degree right or wrong, sees itself as a “major player,” and often people in the United States either ignore or are not aware of conflicts in which they play mainly a passing role.  But in order to realize that there is no such thing as a “small” war or massacre, one has only to understand from the testimonies from writers around the world that cruelty is an absolute, not something of numbers and degrees, which when it is employed wreaks havoc and shock and causes a maximum of human suffering regardless of how many people exactly were persecuted or died.  One such writer who leaves vital and pertinent testimony is Edwidge Danticat, in her novel The Farming of Bones, a book about the 1937 “unrest” between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, in which Haitians were massacred and brutalized in their thousands by the Dominican Republican dictator Trujillo’s forces and also by civilians.  I call it “unrest” ironically, because it was much more than that, but the “Yankis” who are referred to only as a former interfering force in the book would have called it so, from their perspective of “big” wars and conflicts.  They are merely a shadow in this book, which is upclose and personal when it comes to the characters who are affected.

The book begins with a quote which is not only thematic, but also becomes part of the plot structure in a later incarnation of event.  The quote is from Judges 12:4-6, describing how in a war between the men of Gilead and the Ephraimites, the men of Gilead held the fords, and tested all passersby by their ability to say the word “Shibboleth.”  If instead they were unable to pronounce the word and said “Sibboleth,” they were killed.  The Bible records that 40,000 were killed in this manner, and though the number is not the issue, it shows the extent to which a by-word can be applied and misapplied in a world of danger and cruelty.

But for at least half the book The Farming of Bones, the setting is in the Dominican Republic, in which the French and Kreyol-speaking immigrants from Haiti are employed as house servants, workers in the cane fields, and otherwise “peasant” labor, while the Spanish-influenced Dominicans are the gentry and aristocracy of the area.  And at least half the book tells the story, both in the present and through flashbacks, of Amabelle Désir, a daughter of herb healers and an employee of the Duarte household, her daily life in the Dominican Republic as a second-class citizen, and her love for Sebastien Onius, her man, who comes to her at night sometimes.

The gentility with which the two treat each other is an indirect comment upon the harshness of Pico Duarte, Amabelle’s employer, and his relationship with his wife, Valencia, with whom Amabelle was raised after her parents died in a flood and she was left an orphan.  Sebastien lives at a distance from Amabelle, and one night he wants her to undress and they simply sit in the dark, for as he tells her, “It is good for you to learn and trust that I am near you even when you can’t place the balls of your eyes on me.”  By contrast, Pico leaves his wife in childbirth and goes to support the Generalissimo in various actions, returning to see the babies (twins), but leaving again after the boy baby dies, and not perhaps valuing the girl baby as much.  As Amabelle says of Sebastien, “When he’s not there, I’m afraid I know no one, and no one knows me.”  Again by contrast, Valencia, her “milk sister,” is supported by her whole family, her father “Papi” (Don Ignacio), his estate, the local doctor and priests, and the servants.

When word first comes that the Dominicans under Trujillo are killing Haitians (who have been employed by them and who are currently living in the Dominican Republic, where the first part of the story is set), Amabelle does not believe it to be true, and many around her also think of it as a rumor.  She finally makes plans to meet up with Sebastien in order to go back to Haiti by cart with the local priests and the doctor, all of whom are thinking of helping to get Haitians safely across the river and the mountains back to Haiti.  The sad results of the delay with which the original news was greeted by many, however, have their part to play, and it is in a company mostly of strangers that Amabelle finally leaves the place which has been her home for many years.

When the group Amabelle is escaping with reach a town nearer to their destination, where they are hoping to meet up with others, they are greeted by a rowdy and violent crowd of Dominicans, who “try” them by the verbal system with the word “perejil,” or “parsley,” a common herb to both parts of the island.  When they can only say “pesi,” they are brutalized, though in fact their tormenters already have made their minds up about them in advance.  Amabelle thinks that she could say the word the “right” way if she had time to gather her thoughts, but she isn’t given the chance.

The rest of the story deals with Amabelle’s life without Sebastien, on the Haitian side of the border, except for the end, some years later, when she bribes a driver to drive her back across the border.  She goes to visit Señora Valencia and hear about her daughter Rosalinda, who is now married, and also meets Sylvie, the current servant.  It is now that she mentally revisits the past and realizes that she and Valencia were really ever only strangers to each other, for all that they played together as children, their different parts and roles in the household of Papi holding them apart.  Finally, she goes to try and find a cave which she associates with Sebastien, but has no success in finding it for certain.  Much of this novel is in fact the mourning for people and things lost through wars, battles, conflicts, actions, hostilities, and quarrels.  As Edwidge Danticat writes on her last page, “And the very last words, last on the page but always first in my memory, must be offered to those who died in the massacre of 1937, to those who survived to testify, and to the constant struggle of those who still toil in the cane fields.”  Truly, there are no small massacres; numbers are not what we should be concentrating on when we discuss genocide and political murder, but the sheer inhumanity of the manner in which we often use other people, and the quick escalation of hatred which threatens to sink us all into obliquity, both victims and persecutors.

Danticat’s book is simultaneously a beautifully written testiment to human survival, which persists though the human spirit is insulted and damaged by its encounter with the dregs of harshness and meanness that inspire people to consider others less than themselves because of factors of birth and nationality, caste and class.  All of us can surely benefit by exposure to her marvelously supple prose and insight into what really constitutes a loving human situation, and her cues as to where the human equation needs to be re-configured.  Danticat writes with love even of the loveless, with compassion even of those who show they have none, and with certainty that in the moments of uncertainty we have our survival, when we hesitate to pronounce on someone else’s fate.  This book is one of the simplest and yet most complicated I think I have ever read, and is in my estimation one of the best books of its time.

13 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews, What is literature for?

Tagged as , ,

April 16, 2014 · 2:07 pm

Radclyffe Hall’s “The Unlit Lamp”–Anatomy of a Failure

I am imagining to myself as I begin this post that it will probably be one of the shortest I will write or have written, because I can think of very little to say about this book.  I didn’t enjoy reading it, but read it as a follow-up investigation of a book called The End of the Novel of Love, which was reviewed in a very interesting, informative, and vital post by Caroline on her site.  The theme of this novel is the living through of frustration and angst caused by the failure to achieve freedom of chosen lifestyle, and because it is the living through that is illustrated copiously, I call it an anatomy of a failure.  Once again, as occasionally happens, I feel the need to compare this book to Andy Warhol’s eight-hour movie on sleep, which is simply a movie of a person sleeping.  This book has no really strong climaxes or surprises, it’s simply a book about a woman’s failure to leave her mother and home and achieve a fresh life of her own, either with a man who wants to support her career and marry her, or another woman, who also wants to do much the same.  Instead, Joan Ogden (the main character) is too weak and indecisive to insist that her hypochondriacal mother release her to a life of independence, and the book instead traces every step of her failure to achieve a free life, and the consequences.

As Zoë Fairbairns says in her 1980 introduction to the Dial Press edition of the book, “It pre-dates by four years The Well of Loneliness, the lesbian love story for which [Radclyffe Hall] is best known and which was banned as obscene in 1928, but it is much better written:  both novels suffer, in their accounts of women’s love for each other, from purple passages, moments of overstatement, pedantry and authorial intrusion; but The Unlit Lamp is more powerful because more controlled.  It is also remarkable as a first novel for its management of three main characters as well as a number of important minor ones, only a few of whom degenerate into mouthpieces and devices.”  Frankly, the novel is so bad that a few more “purple passages” might even have made it more interesting; the “moments of overstatement” are ones about which the reader senses the writer nearly pulling her hair out in frustration with her own characters because there’s nothing else to be done with them, they simply won’t move and breathe on the page with any independence from the main theme; the “pedantry” is all of a piece with the turgidity and constipation of the prose; and the “authorial intrusion” isn’t nearly as obnoxious as the fact that the same message is being given over and over again, without variety or change.  It’s like being beaten over the head with a stick until one is dull and senseless.  In order to make it through the book, one has to remind oneself that the book was a new and different thing for its time, and thus the value in terms of which one is reading is that of pure historical interest in a form, a solely cerebral function which leaves the emotional catharsis of the reader unsatisfied with the torture the character goes through from beginning to end.

I guess I’m saying that it takes a certain amount of masochism on the reader’s part to get through this book, at least the kind of masochism which recites the mantra in the back of the reader’s head:  “My education won’t be complete unless I finish this book; my education won’t be complete unless I finish this book…” etc.  The best of authors sometimes torture their characters to make a point to the reader, and not every book can be a sunlit fantasy world of birds, trees, dappled clouds, and flowers, nor am I asking it to be.  But this book is like an unpleasant grimace or rictus on the author’s face as it is fronting the reader, and I have only limited patience for staring at a gargoyle.

Finally, this book is not an art work which flows as freely as song, hitting high notes, low notes, and some in-between:  rather it is like a long-drawn-out screech without variety, or a prolonged unpleasant discordant chord which won’t go away.  By all means, read it if you’re curious about Radclyffe Hall’s works or her first novel, if you’re interested in what used to be called “Boston marriages” between two women, if you are a psychologist in need of a case study of repression, manipulation, and misery:  but don’t say I didn’t warn you.

10 Comments

Filed under Articles/reviews

Tagged as , ,