rab1953
Vancouver Public Library
rab1953's Completed Shelf
Filter your results by...
Format
rab1953's rating:
Added Aug 09, 2023
rab1953's rating:
Added Aug 09, 2023
Comment:
This novel presents an unflattering picture of Ireland in the 1950s as a conservative backwater, which is contrasted with Brooklyn where life, if not perfect, at least has the possibility of growth and change.
Written in Tóibín’s usual understated, observational style, it shows the limited options open to a young woman in a small Irish town (apparently, the same town in which Tóibín spent his childhood). The only viable option for Eilis seems to be working part-time in the small shop where everyone knows her and the owner does not respect her until she gets married to one of the local boys. When she gets a chance to start a new life in a faraway country where she doesn’t know what to expect, she knows it’s the best option she’ll ever see.
Eilis seems to fall into the events of her life rather than to choose them, although she does have ideas of her own. She doesn’t want to spend the rest of her life married in the village, even if she doesn’t see a way out until her sister arranges for her to move to America. She doesn’t quite want to fall into married life in America either, although she does choose marriage in the end. Perhaps Tóibín is pointing to an ambivalence among Irish (and other) emigrants – they don’t really want to leave the comfort of the familiar, however limited that may be, but economic or political factors push them to make choices that shape their future. Many immigrants continue to feel that ambivalence throughout their lives, particularly when they are faced with discrimination in their new home. Tóibín doesn’t go into the anti-Irish prejudice that many found in the Americas, and probably that had diminished significantly in the 1950s. In fact, the life he shows for Eilis is almost idealized. She is welcomed by her Italian boyfriend and her American employers, pursues an education and finds new job opportunities. It seems remarkably free from challenges except for her homesickness. Tóibín does give a concrete picture of the lives in the immigrant community – the close living conditions, poverty, the struggle to fit into an unknown society and constant homesickness. But they have time for dances, picnics at the beach, the occasional luxury, and they have hope for their future.
In her relatively comfortable material conditions, the struggles Eilis faces are mainly psychological. Should she marry the nice guy who cares for her and offers her a secure home? Should she hold out for something undefined but different? Should she make her independent way for a while longer? For Eilis, and perhaps for many women in the 1950s, these might be difficult choices. And in the changing social mores of the 1950s, they were probably difficult questions for many women to feel comfortable with. Tóibín presents them without leaning to any side, although readers might see them with less ambivalence today. (Come on, Eilis, just make a decision and get on with it!) She grows to become more confident in her job and her classes, even while she can’t decide what she wants emotionally. But of course, the emotional choices are the hardest ones. The psychological portrait reminds me of Henry James’ psychological probing, but in a much more contemporary and working class setting. With all the psychological pondering, the actual events that take place in the story seem curiously underplayed and anticlimactic.
In the end, Eilis sees Ireland as conservative and unchanging. She views her sister’s grave in a treeless, dead cemetery. She still feels ambivalent about it, but her final choice seems inevitable. She will go where the sees that she can grow. And this seems to reflect Tóibín’s own choices – growing up and leaving the small Irish village of Eniscorthy, leaving the country and settling down in the USA. In interviews, he says that he still feels drawn to Ireland, but he could no longer live there.This novel presents an unflattering picture of Ireland in the 1950s as a conservative backwater, which is contrasted with Brooklyn where life, if not perfect, at least has the possibility of growth and change.
Written in Tóibín’s usual understated,…
rab1953's rating:
Added Jul 21, 2023
Comment:
What a pleasure it was to read The Cider House Rules. I’m smiling as I look back on it.
The cider house rules, it turns out, are rules that are perfectly sensible in the abstract, but that have to be applied in a context where it may not be sensible to follow them – or at least, where people don’t follow them because they are too troublesome. This is the paradigm that shapes the key conflicts in the story – people who don’t want to do abortions but find that many women have a real need for an abortion. Surprisingly, for a story about abortion, orphans and repressed love, the story is great fun to read. It’s full of humour, delightful characters, imaginative situations and a plot that keeps moving and shifting so that although the overall story arc seems pre-ordained, a reader never knows what to expect.
The story’s protagonist, Homer Wells – like several of Dickens’ protagonists – seems quietly passive a lot of the time, letting things happen to him while others around him are driving the action of the plot. He’s attracted to Melony, who is charismatic in a negative way, but he lets her define their relationship initially. Even his ultimate fate is set up by others and after some resistance he finally decides to accept it. However, he does make the decisions that he has to at key points – to stand by his principles, and to re-evaluate them when he has to. Homer chooses to pursue his love even though it leads to unhappy compromises. It seems to me that this is how most of us get by, doing the best we can as long as we can, and adapting when we find that our thinking no longer matches our reality. Is this why the protagonist is named Homer? He’s adrift through his life, facing extraordinary challenges until he finally makes it home?
Dr Larch is another interesting character. A father figure to Homer, he is driven and rigidly committed to his objectives. He cares deeply for Homer, and recognizes that Homer will have to break away from him to make his own choices. But Dr Larch is a very thoughtful and kind man, both to the women that he provides medical services to and to the orphans in the St. Cloud’s home. His nightly reading of Dickens novels to the children, and his good-night to the boys – “Good night, you princes of Maine, you Kings of New England” – offers them a sense of pride and a future. His distressing early history sets a path for his life that is almost saintly in its selflessness and commitment, in spite of his addiction to mind-altering ether. So it’s appropriate that he lives in St. Cloud’s.
As I write this, I think that there’s a parallel to Greek drama as much as there is to Dickens’ novels. The characters struggle with morality and fate and with their own personal flaws. They have to made decisions where the choices are complex and the outcomes are unclear. They face the fundamental situations of human life: birth and death, love and longing, and ultimately the search for meaning. While telling the tale, Irving comments on their situation as a Greek chorus might. (His frequent asides about the lives and longings of orphans seem a bit questionable at times, while they show a compassionate way of thinking about people who face emotional and material challenges.) But of course Irving rolls out this story with humour and a lightness that has a very different tone from Greek drama.
I loved the big, complex plot line and Irving’s descriptions of rural Maine. I’m sure I’ll look back on the characters and the story with pleasure for some time. Although the debates around abortion will move on (I hope), Irving’s exploration of how the characters deal with life questions will remain relevant for the future.What a pleasure it was to read The Cider House Rules. I’m smiling as I look back on it.
The cider house rules, it turns out, are rules that are perfectly sensible in the abstract, but that have to be applied in a context where it may not be sensible…
Do Not Say We Have NothingDo Not Say We Have Nothing, BookA Novel
by Thien, MadeleineBook - 2016Book, 2016
rab1953's rating:
Added Jul 20, 2023
Comment:
Do Not Say We Have Nothing has such richness of language, theme and story that it’s hard to know where to begin. Connections between family and friends; music in one’s life and culture; stories and the recording of them; loss, grief and memory; the cost and the need of revolution – Madeleine Thien treats these with compassion, subtlety and ambiguity, but she leaves it for the reader to determine their significance.
Thien writes with emotional intensity that brings a reader into the character’s struggles, whether it’s in the nationalist war for the independence of China, a family victimized by politicized mobs in the “Cultural Revolution” or young people trying to correct the errors of the Communist Party at Tiananmen Square. In the context of these vast social movements, Thien also deals movingly with individuals trying to relate to each other as friends, family members and colleagues. And she explores the inner lives of her characters as they try to express themselves through stories, music, even mathematics.
For me, the themes about revolutionary change are among the most interesting, and unusual, in a novel. The great hardships of the war to free China from Japanese occupation, and then to install the Communist government, are the starting point of the novel’s histories. Music and stories help connect people and help them deal with the hardships. Skipping over the starvation of the “great leap forward,” the novel then takes up the “great proletarian cultural revolution.” We see this from the point of view of its victims, who are manipulated into destroying each other as political factions fight for control of the state. Here, revolution seems completely destructive down to the soul and psyche of those involved – much like the ultimate betrayal by Winston Smith in 1984. Music and stories are wiped out.
This gets reversed in the Tiananmen uprising, when we see the passion for change on the part of the students, and also of the residents of Beijing and throughout China. Again, this has extreme costs but Thien also brings the reader into the hopes and energies of those affected by the uprising, and shows the great creativity it unleashed in music and writing. (I found this section particularly fascinating, as it shows the involvement of ordinary people across China in supporting the students, something that I wasn’t aware of before. If it’s an accurate picture, it’s easy to see why the party bureaucracy repressed the Tiananmen revolt so viciously.)
This is where the title becomes clear – it seems to mean: Do not say we have nothing when we have our links to each other that keep us moving ahead, even when it seems we have nothing else.
Interweaving all of this makes for complex writing, so the book is a slow read. But Thien’s writing is so evocative, that I was happy to give it plenty of time. It’s both beautifully descriptive and allusive, so it’s worth a little contemplation to see what the writing reveals about the characters and the story. Like poetry, rushing through the text would miss its richness and meaning. Also, since it’s open to interpretation, I think every reader will take a different understanding of the story.
For example, the Book of Records is never explained, but it seems to represent both creativity and history, inspiring and connecting people, but repressed by the Party regime. Like the creativity of the musicians, its survival is the possibility of renewal in spite of censorship and repression.
Initially, I wasn’t sure I would like the book. But Thien’s storytelling is so engaging that she overcame my resistance, and I completely fell for the story.Do Not Say We Have Nothing has such richness of language, theme and story that it’s hard to know where to begin. Connections between family and friends; music in one’s life and culture; stories and the recording of them; loss, grief and memory; the…
The Mastersinger From MinskThe Mastersinger From Minsk, BookAn Inspector Hermann Preiss Mystery
by Torgov, MorleyBook - 2012Book, 2012
rab1953's rating:
Added Jan 16, 2023
Comment:
To start with the positive, this is a clever conception for a comic novel – Richard Wagner is preparing the premier of his opera, Der Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and someone is killing off his star performers. Torgov nicely shows both the megalomania of Wagner and the glorious style of his music. (And he describes the pleasures of other musical performances in a sensitive language, as well.) The over-the-top personality of Wagner deserves an over-the-top storyline that punctures the balloon of self-importance he lives on.
Sadly, the execution of this conception is pretty awful. I was well into the story before I asked myself, Is this supposed to be comical? And I decided that it couldn’t be. The story seemed so ridiculous that it couldn’t be serious, but it seemed too earnest and clumsy to be humour. Later, reading on the book cover that Torgov won the Leacock award for humour for another book, I concluded that I was wrong: it is supposed to be comical, although it’s still not funny.
Humour is a personal thing, so perhaps it’s humorous for other readers. But the characters are also stereotyped and unbelievable, the sex scenes are gratuitous, the conclusion is contrived. Torgov tells us the facts to move the plot along, but doesn’t show them in his writing. He sticks bits of background into the narrative as if he needed to pad the scenes, but doesn’t create the atmosphere to make them fit in. The characters are illogical puppets who act to suit the plot, but have nothing interesting about them.
It would be fun if someone were to write a comic novel about Wagner with realistic characters who weren’t just silly. Unfortunately, this isn’t that.To start with the positive, this is a clever conception for a comic novel – Richard Wagner is preparing the premier of his opera, Der Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and someone is killing off his star performers. Torgov nicely shows both the…
rab1953's rating:
Added Jan 16, 2023
Comment:
A comic novel that leads into all kinds of unexpected corners, this novel takes us into revolutionary politics and black exploitation films of the 1970s, the practice of midwifery in contemporary California, the tribulations of small business operators in Oakland, the second-hand jazz recording market, inter-racial relationships in the USA, fatherhood and the relations between two loner 14-year-olds. And it’s fun to read, with 500 pages of creative, apt prose.
I was completely drawn into the story because of the characters: although most of them are ordinary folks getting through life, they are trying to work out complex issues. I would not expect to be very interested in the story of two businessmen trying to keep Brokeland, their record shop, going, even when the story includes the threat of a mega music retailer planning to move into their neighbourhood. But Chabon gives them a history and culture that are quirky, comic and touching. The characters have their own complex lives, some outrageous and some fairly banal, so that I felt curious about all of them, wanting to understand more about them and how their stories would develop. Even the minor characters, like Mrs Jew the martial arts teacher, or Cochise Jones the musician, have surprising depths to their personalities.
One of the central themes that Chabon explores is fatherhood and masculinity – themes that are also important in his other recent books. The men are all a bit silly in their relations to their parents and sons – they are not very good at it because they have other, more important and typically male, preoccupations. Archie avoids and evades responsibility, while Nat is more responsible but petulant. Their sons meanwhile are exploring masculinity as they see it in stylized movies. This contrasts with the seriousness with which their wives treat birthing and motherhood. The men are stuck in a muddle – to some extent, a fantasyland – until they start to get serious about their own sons.
And their sons need that connection to get their own lives in order. The novel opens with a scene of the two boys, Titus and Julius, almost flying on skateboard and bike, and closes with them grounded in a solid but positive pathway to their futures. Julius has a gay crush on Titus, and Titus deals with it in a modern matter-of-fact way that is nice to see. Together they try to figure out the bizarre background of the adults in their lives.
The theme of friendship between Black and white Americans is also central. The leading characters do have a long and close relationship in spite of the fact that one family is white and Jewish and the other is Black. They also have a complex class background – Gwen is striving for an affluent middle-class life while Nat seems to have abandoned his comfortable middle-class life for a comfortable lower-middle-class one. Chabon describes Nat’s belief “that the real and ordinary friendship between Black people and white people is possible, at least here, in the streets of the minor kingdom of Brokeland, California.” But this may be an illusory foundation, as even this minor kingdom is undermined by the men themselves. The final outcome is about as reliable as the blimp that might carry them away.
What seems more real is how Gwen, a Black midwife, uses the fact of her racialization to turn around her situation and get what she really wants. (But I wonder how Black Americans see this scene – I suspect that it’s not quite so easy to overcome racialized prejudice and use it to your advantage, a trope that exists more in the imagination of racists. Gwen’s white partner says her policy is, “What do I know about being Black?” I’m not sure of Chabon’s answer to this question.)
Still, I enjoyed reading this book. It’s a warm-hearted, entertaining look at parts of American culture that I’m not exposed to, with complex and empathetic characters. It’s a complex, lengthy story line, and I enjoyed every page.A comic novel that leads into all kinds of unexpected corners, this novel takes us into revolutionary politics and black exploitation films of the 1970s, the practice of midwifery in contemporary California, the tribulations of small business…
rab1953's rating:
Added Dec 21, 2022
Comment:
Ishiguro poses profound questions by slowly revealing a painful reality through the limited perspective of one of his characters. The perspective here is that of an artificial consciousness, embodied in an organic robot but developed with a high level of sensitivity to human emotions. Naturally, this gives Klara, the robot, an unusual perspective on the human relationships that she sees, but with an imperfect ability to understand them.
In spite of the fact that Klara is a robot, or an Artificial Friend, an AF as she is called – and Ishiguro emphasizes this throughout – she is the most sympathetic character in the story. Perhaps it’s because she is telling the story and we see everything through her eyes, but she is also consistently warm, generous, uncomplaining and thoughtful. The human characters are mostly deeply flawed, showing selfishness, shallowness, fear and carelessness toward each other, together with more positive traits. I found that I was more interested in what was going to happen to Klara than to the human characters. And the ultimate resolution seemed quite sad, although also satisfying because it fulfilled Klara’s desires (or programing objectives).
The fact that Klara is content with her fate is a contrast with the human society that Ishiguro portrays. The humans seem never to accept their conditions, whether it relates to their health, their emotions or their economy. It’s never clear exactly why, but they seem to be living in some kind of social breakdown. It appears that technology, apparently related to genetic editing, is not only tied to economic collapse, but has also affected the health of young people. And this leads to a range of reactions: a new underclass rejects the technology at significant cost, while those with more assets attempt to overcome the problems with even more questionable technology. Ishiguro leaves us with the question of whether stasis like Klara’s might be a better outcome than a continuing, highly problematic struggle to advance.
Interestingly, each artificial personality learns from its own experience and builds its own picture of reality. (This is much like Oliver Sacks’ description of people building consciousness by mapping their individual experiences.) This means that each AF is different, and each has some similarity with human consciousness, although in distinct and unique ways. Thus, they model human consciousness. Klara, for example, while highly attuned to human emotions is very ignorant about the basics of life. She thinks of the sun as a godlike male because he gives her energy and spreads warmth. She makes basic human mistakes like thinking he can heal illness because she saw someone get better after sunlight fell on him. This seems like what a pre-scientific human might have understood about the gods, but it also illustrates how contemporary human thinking is subject to misperception and false logic. Like us, she can’t distinguish between reality and the perceptions caused by her sensors and processors. In this way, the story becomes an exploration of religious belief. Belief and prayer are very real to Klara.
I did feel that some aspects of the novel were odd – Klara’s stiff and unnatural use of language, for example, and her lack of knowledge about basic facts like what the sun is. Initially, this just seemed to reflect a weak understanding on Ishiguro’s part (and his editors’) about how programmed machines are likely to work in human culture. It’s partly explained by indicating that Klara is an early generation of her type and later generations are more advanced. Perhaps it’s also a trade-off for the processing power that her emotional analysis and empathy take. I grew more comfortable with it as the novel moves along, accepting it as a reflection of Klara’s imperfect learning and understanding. Human society is complicated and technology does not get it all right. And, we know, developers are apt to release early technology before all the bugs are worked out.Ishiguro poses profound questions by slowly revealing a painful reality through the limited perspective of one of his characters. The perspective here is that of an artificial consciousness, embodied in an organic robot but developed with a high…
rab1953's rating:
Added Dec 07, 2022
Comment:
What a horrific story! All of the central characters, and many others, suffer the most brutal cruelties from the first page, with only brief pauses to set up the next horror. While I do enjoy a good satire, this story made me want to quit reading.
The story might have been more enjoyable to read if the storyline were more nuanced, but the point is fully evident within the first ten pages and, in stringing it out, Voltaire merely inflicts the pain on his readers as well as his characters. Piling one misery on top of another makes Voltaire’s view of the nature of the world inescapable and affirms that there is neither reason nor consolation in philosophy. The only chance of wisdom and security seems to lie in staying home and cultivating one’s garden, although even this is far from secure.
Who would want to read a story of endless varieties of torture and misery if they did not lead to some outcome? This is like watching a horror movie with no resolution (and I’m not one who chooses to watch horror movies anyway). The satire might be justified if it took on a worthy target, but this storyline is not the true nature of the world. The philosophers Voltaire describes are thoughtless idiots, a false caricature that is not worth satirizing. And nor is Voltaire’s picture of the world any more realistic. While there is pain and misery in life for no purpose, most of us lead a good part of our lives in general comfort and even well-being. Even acknowledging the relative privilege I enjoy as a middle-class Canadian, I don’t think the people living in poverty or in underdeveloped countries or countries at war live lives of unrelenting pain.What a horrific story! All of the central characters, and many others, suffer the most brutal cruelties from the first page, with only brief pauses to set up the next horror. While I do enjoy a good satire, this story made me want to quit reading.…
rab1953's rating:
Added Dec 07, 2022
Comment:
I thought that the life of Oliver Sacks would be interesting, but I did not know that it would take me into weightlifting culture, motorcycling, the gay scene of the 1960s, and the philosophy of consciousness. Perhaps I could have guessed the latter, as his books that I know of (but haven’t read) are about consciousness and perception. But the incidents of his life – as selected and highlighted here – show him as an impetuous, obsessive and deeply thoughtful personality – the sort of person you would enjoy spending an evening with if he were not also rather shy and withdrawn.
Fortunately, though, like many shy people, when you get him going on his subject he can ramble on endlessly with fascinating details. He does ramble more or less chronologically through his life, stopping at various points to describe anecdotes of his experiences. He jumps around a bit, and over some chunks of his life, but the anecdotes he tells seem to be at key incidents that led to insights about himself or about the psychology of the mind. For example, his initial repressed homosexuality in London in 1959 contrasts with his jump into the lively gay sexuality of San Francisco in the 1960s and ’70s. He then seems to have become celibate until meeting his life partner Billy in 2008, completely skipping over the AIDS health crisis of the 1980s and ’90s. This spotty anecdotal approach makes this more of a selection of memoirs than an autobiography, although it does reveal a lot about how his thinking develops and how it affected his approach to psychology and neurology.
Sacks describes himself as a storyteller, a trait he says he picked up from his mother. Storytelling is the style he adopted for his professional writing, describing case histories of his patients rather than abstracting their stories to symptoms and outcomes. This in part may explain why his books have met resistance among other neurologists but have also been so popular among general readers. In seeing his patients as people with life stories, rather than as the abstractions common in conventional medical writing, he understands them more deeply than other researchers might. It appears that he takes his patients’ histories and ponders them extensively as he attempts to describe them, sometimes taking months to write each one. With this approach, it’s understandable that his patients grow deeply attached to him and many become long-time friends. It’s probably not possible to say that this is a better approach than the conventional one, but certainly it seems invaluable to have some researchers taking an in-depth holistic view while others take the focused examination.
Fascinatingly, later in his life, Sacks comes to the conclusion that perception, experience and consciousness are constructed phenomena, formed by each individual in a way similar to the way that learning and memory are individually constructed. Paraphrasing Gerald Edelman, he says “As we move about, our sense organs take samplings of the world, and from these, maps are created in the brain. There then occurs with experience a selective strengthening of those mappings that corresponds to successful perceptions – successful in that they prove the most useful and powerful for the building of ‘reality.’ ” This of course implies that each individual builds a unique picture of reality and a unique consciousness, although presumably with a coherence among other people with “successful” mappings. This radical understanding comes late in Sacks’ life, so he does not have time in this book to talk about its implications.
In a way, this book is a bit of a teaser leading a reader into Sacks’ other books. He touches on many of them in a tantalizing way without going into what he has already developed at book length. But he makes them so intriguing, and his storytelling is so engaging, that this book makes me want to pick up the others and find out what more he has to say.I thought that the life of Oliver Sacks would be interesting, but I did not know that it would take me into weightlifting culture, motorcycling, the gay scene of the 1960s, and the philosophy of consciousness. Perhaps I could have guessed the…
rab1953's rating:
Added Dec 07, 2022
Comment:
This story tells of the lives of a poor peasant family struggling through epic challenges to survive and get ahead in a mid-century Turkish village. The family makes an annual trek over a mountain pass to the cotton fields where they hope to have a good enough harvest to improve their lives. But everything seems to be against them: village families fight among each other for advantage; corrupt village leaders play them off to get a profitable deal from the landowners; different generations within the family fight for respect and attention; the land, the weather, even the spirits, seem to exist just to make things harder. And the final result from their labours is disappointment. (This book is the first of a trilogy, so maybe things will get better in the future.)
The story has the feel of an epic struggle against fate and the elements, but told within the personal details of peasant life. Ali is a heroic and sympathetic character. He tries to build up his family’s position by taking on enormous tasks and facing overwhelming risks. Inspired by his mother, he pushes on against a raging storm (his mother rages against her fate like Lear in the storm). He tries to help his village and the lying braggart Old Halil, although they don’t return his support. Ali is a good soul who would be a good friend, although he is beaten down by bad luck time after time.
While his story is unrelenting struggle, it is not unending misery. The family cares for each other, even while they play out their personal issues. Ali resents his mother, but over and over he risks his life and his family’s future to look after her. Ali’s wife makes his favourite foods even though she has only what she can carry on her back. His kids play and sing, but they also have their ideas about how they can support the family. Occasionally, it seems that things are going their way, and they can take a break. Then their life appears almost idyllic, loving and rich.
The concrete details of their environment and their lives make the story real and relatable. The smells in the wind, the sparkle of a stubble field, the offerings hanging from a holy tree seem to come from first-hand knowledge, and they place a reader in the scene. They give insight into what the characters are seeing and feeling, and help a Canadian urban reader empathize with them on their journey over the Turkish mountains.
This makes the struggle of a traditional family in the modern world more poignant. Things don’t work the way they used to, and a corrupt modern political and economic system undermines them as much as their struggles against nature. They face their epic struggle yearly, and the village leaders aligned with the modern Turkish state of the 1950s exploit them for their labour or send them off to the army. The villagers know they need to organize to protect themselves, but they are stuck in their atomized families, each one struggling alone to survive.
Perhaps this conflict is the key theme that Yashar Kemal wants to point to in the novel – the need for traditional Turkish peasantry to organize together instead of fighting alone among themselves. He shows that it will not be easy – their attempts flounder twice in the novel, and the village leader is shown trying to buy off each family individually – but it seems to be the only way that the families will get ahead in a market economy that does not support them.
Although set in a culture and place that I know nothing about, the story and the characters are interesting enough that I want to read the rest of the trilogy.This story tells of the lives of a poor peasant family struggling through epic challenges to survive and get ahead in a mid-century Turkish village. The family makes an annual trek over a mountain pass to the cotton fields where they hope to have a…
rab1953's rating:
Added Aug 03, 2022
rab1953's rating:
Added Jul 28, 2022
Comment:
“Furniture, like all living things, acquired marks and scars over the course of time,” Theo reflects, which could be a metaphor for his own life. We start with a bright, artistic youth who doesn’t see how he fits into the world around him. Things happen to him over which he has no control, leading him from one disaster to another. He survives them all, thanks to improbably good luck more than anything he does. In the end, he concludes that beauty and love make life worthwhile in a world without meaning.
Theo loses his mother early in the story, but spends most of the 770 pages of the novel searching for a father. His own is absent, even when he’s present, and offers little stability or the connection that Theo needs. “Rotten luck” is his father’s explanation for the world. The father of his best friend, Boris, is also absent and violent, but he cares for his son in his damaged way. Theo is drawn to other father figures and finds one in Hobie, the antique restorer.
Like the furniture, Theo mainly sits around and lets the big events of his life happen to him. He initiates nothing and lets other people drag him from one catastrophe to another. Even the love of his life drifts in and out and he makes no serious move to hold on to her. (Although, she gives him no encouragement, and he tries to respect that.) This is the part of the novel that I found a bit off-putting. For long sections of the novel, Theo lives a passive and repetitive life, with nothing happening to advance the story, and little of interest in his internal rambling.
When I started the novel, it seemed to be a post-traumatic reflection of America’s reaction to the terrorist attacks of the early 21st century. The explosion that Theo survives marks him in ways that the author occasionally describes as a PTSD reaction. But if this is a reflection of America in PTSD, then it’s floundering passively. (Is that what it feels like to some people living in America? It it’s not what’s happening to people living in Iraq or Afghanistan, or to those in America living with the security response.) But if America’s PTSD is one way of looking at the story, then what does it mean that Theo’s best friend, and the person who resolves his crisis, is a Russian-speaking Ukrainian criminal? Boris is clearly the antithesis to Theo, dynamic, self-driven to excesses of food, alcohol and drugs, but the only character who succeeds in getting anything done. (Actually, I find him the most attractive and memorable character in the book.) The other Americans are decadent wasters who spend their lives throwing away the wealth they have access to or ripping off other people. Even lovable Hobie, the careful craftsman who makes the objects of the past perfect again, can’t run his own workshop without someone else keeping him from bankruptcy. And Theo’s love interest Pippa, who survives her childhood trauma to become a caring and skilled musician, leaves the country. She takes up with a Britisher who, in Theo’s eyes at least, is a bit of a loser as well. Perhaps by way of balance, the Europe that Theo sees seems to be equally corrupt, criminal and decadent.
As I reflect on the book, I’d call it a sad satire on contemporary America. It’s quite comic in places, pointing out the emptiness of high New York culture as well as the Las Vegas desert. The good dad Hobie, Theo’s real bad dad, and Theo’s nihilistic best friend, all observe that good and evil are mixed up in the world, and it’s hard to separate one from the other. The art and beauty that Theo says give life meaning come only from the remnants of a European past.
In spite of which, Theo’s story is an engaging one. I always felt that he was a flawed human being like the rest of us, and I hoped he’d pull through somehow. The length of the story means that a reader spends time getting to know him, and even the slow parts didn’t make me want to quit reading. The story is one that remains with me because it’s a vivid and detailed picture of anomie.“Furniture, like all living things, acquired marks and scars over the course of time,” Theo reflects, which could be a metaphor for his own life. We start with a bright, artistic youth who doesn’t see how he fits into the world around him. Things…
All the Light We Cannot SeeAll the Light We Cannot See, BookA Novel
by Doerr, AnthonyBook - 2014Book, 2014
rab1953's rating:
Added Jun 24, 2022
Comment:
Although this novel is well grounded in a detailed realism, it’s a bit too metaphysical for me.
Many things about it are very good. The pictures of the lives of two young people, one growing up under Nazi government in Germany and the other living under Nazi occupation of France, are real and illuminating. I get a picture of the paranoia and privation, and the compromises that people make to survive under terrible conditions. In this way, it reminds me of the conditions shown in Suite Française, and gives an idea of what conditions might be like in Ukraine under Russian attack. Werner’s impoverished life in the mining village, at the authoritarian and cruel Nazi youth school and then in the army is vivid, and I can understand the choices he makes. The scenes of the Russian soldiers when they occupy Berlin and threaten Werner’s sister are horrific – although they fall into a common stereotype of Russia with no attempt to get beyond it, unlike the picture of the German occupiers in Suite Française.
Marie-Laure’s more protected middle-class life is less harrowing, but still difficult. Even without being rich, she is protected in a way that Werner is not, as class has its privileges even in wartimes. The challenges of her blindness don’t compare with his poverty, and in some ways they seems to make life easier for her as people go out of their way to help her. Her blindness seems to me to parallel more with Werner’s indoctrination, which allows him only a limited view of the reality around him. The novel gives a picture of war that is empathetic and lyrical, even within the horrors of the situation.
In spite of the detail and realism, there are many details that I didn’t buy into, which made it difficult for me to completely accept the narrative. Marie-Laure, for example, is often shown seeing details that she can’t see. Even accepting that blind people can be highly aware of their environment, how can she know that a spider spins a new web over the stove every night? Or be aware of a reaction in someone’s face? She is a highly intelligent and capable blind person, which is great, but she can’t know some things that she cannot see. And Werner’s philosophical ruminations about the excesses of the Vienna Opera seem equally out of place for someone with his background. As these details accumulate, they start to seem contrived and make the story feel artificial.
So the metaphysical elements to me feel just as contrived and artificial. Werner and Marie-Laure are initially linked through the almost miraculous connections of the radio broadcasts. When they ultimately come together, I could perhaps see a link through Werner’s fascination with radio and Marie-Laure’s connection with her uncle, if it were not for the artificiality that I felt earlier. All the metaphysical language that Doerr uses to describe the scenes just draws attention to the contrived nature of the story. I can’t help comparing this with the metaphysical links that connect the lead characters in Doctor Zhivago, which are so understated, but real, that they make the novel a compelling classic that I look forward to re-reading.
The fateful story of the Sea of Flames gem foreshadows the mysterious connections across time and space. The electromagnetic radio waves connect everyone through modern technologies (magnified these days with internet communications), in a contemporary science-like way that is too metaphysical to be actual science. The theme of connectedness helps to make the characters feel better in tragic circumstances. They overcome the absence of those they love, and perhaps believe in something that isn’t war. This is something, but it doesn’t offer meaning or respite from the brutality of war.Although this novel is well grounded in a detailed realism, it’s a bit too metaphysical for me.
Many things about it are very good. The pictures of the lives of two young people, one growing up under Nazi government in Germany and the other living…
Billy Budd, Sailor ; And, Other StoriesBilly Budd, Sailor ; And, Other Stories, Book
by Melville, HermanBook - 1986Book, 1986
rab1953's rating:
Added Jun 02, 2022
Comment:
I haven’t read Melville since struggling through Moby Dick in university, and was quite pleasantly surprised to find an interesting collection of short stories with humour, extraordinary characters, exuberant language and psychological analysis.
The approach is certainly not modern, with leisurely and sometimes convoluted sentences that make me think of Henry James. But the irony and comic exaggerations take Melville beyond James to, in places, a style more like that of Charles Dickens. And the variety of tales in this collection was unexpected, from the metaphorical character studies in Billy Budd and Bartleby, to the horror of Benito Cereno, the Encantadas travelogue and then the comical Lightning-Rod Man.
With the great variety, the one relative constant is the joy that Melville seems to have in the written language and the pleasure it brought me as a reader. He plays with words and language, even in a somber story like Billy Budd, in a way that suggests he wants to entertain the reader on more than one level. A reader in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of course, with a smaller publishing output and fewer activities competing for entertainment time, could take the time for literary games. I won’t say that I stopped to work out the allusions in every sentence, but I did enjoy slowing down and reading the book of the pleasure of the prose. I don’t want it to sound like the stories are tediously dense; it is merely that they reward a slower contemplative read.
Melville brings an interesting variety of social themes into his stories. Billy Budd, for example, is an allegory of innocence destroyed by war. Billy is set up by a superior officer on a British ship that is technically in a war zone. Because of a stutter, he is unable to defend himself, and naval regulations require his hanging. Melville points out that he could have been saved, but the ship’s captain, while reluctant, feels he has to carry out the regulations to the letter to impose crew discipline. This is absurd and horrific as everyone can see, but Billy becomes an innocent victim of the logic of war. It’s also a touching story of a sympathetic character and Melville leaves the reader with a sense of loss.
The Encantadas series is also an interesting read, an exotic travelogue with atmospheric descriptions of the islands and the stories of its few inhabitants. It’s curious that Melville never went to the islands, but simply rewrote stories he found in other publications, although he writes very convincingly in the first person. It appears that he was less interested in inventing stories than in putting them to language and engaging the reader. As a meditation on the hard struggles to survive in the islands, Melville reflects that we are all in an existential struggle – a theme that remains relevant for modern readers.
Benito Cereno runs as a horror story of its time, like a movie about unsuspecting travellers checking into a murderous town. Set on a ship in an isolated cove, I imagine the story would be quite chilling for nineteenth century readers who could see themselves defenseless at sea and becoming increasingly fearful as they slowly come to realize that they are facing a vicious opponent. Unfortunately, for a modern reader, the grotesque racist characterizations of the African crew they are facing make it hard to empathize. In fact, my sympathies tended to be with the Africans, which I think is not what Melville intended.
Next to these, the smaller pieces, The Piazza, The Lightning-Rod Man and The Bell Tower, are a bit lighter although equally enjoyable. The Lightening Rod Man is quite funny, reminding me of a parody advertisement of a television huckster, had Melville known what such a thing is. All in all, this was an enjoyable collection, and a reminder to slow down and just enjoy the prose even if the story line itself is far from anything we would encounter in modern life.I haven’t read Melville since struggling through Moby Dick in university, and was quite pleasantly surprised to find an interesting collection of short stories with humour, extraordinary characters, exuberant language and psychological analysis.…
rab1953's rating:
Added Jun 02, 2022
Comment:
This is a love story between the Hindu Boonyi and the Muslim Shalimar, set in a magical Kashmiri mountain village. But a careless American (with European roots) and an evil English stepmother destroy the relationship, and with it centuries of relatively peaceful coexistence in the disputed mountains between India and Pakistan.
Often told in mythic, poetic language, the story stands in for the poisoned relationship between India and Pakistan, and illustrates how colonialism at many levels has affected the modern history of the two countries, particularly in the senseless, brutal violence in the valleys of Kashmir. Or at least, that’s how Rushdie sees it, although I’m sure there are different interpretations of the history.
Rushdie makes explicit parallels with the Nazi occupation of the Franco-German town of Strasbourg and with the urban riots in the USA. (We Westerners can’t claim any political or moral superiority on this.) And his depiction of the Muslim terrorists in Pakistan and the Philippines has an implicit parallel with his own persecution by religious fanatics intent on assassinating him.
Interestingly, these sections are written in a flat, almost neutral tone that contrasts with the mythic tone of the traditional village life and love story. Rushdie seems to be deliberately making the modern parts of the story into a black and white cartoon comic book in contrast to the richness of the traditional story. It’s a little disappointing, though, that the child at the centre of the story, named Kashmiri by her mother and India by her stepmother, is mainly described in the flatter style. By the end of the novel, however, her story becomes joined with Greek mythology that represents either a unity of Western and Eastern stories or an overcoming of the East by the West. (This is left unresolved.)
I liked the story of the politics, which makes the Kashmir dispute very concrete without going into the details of the history. Rushdie’s view of the brutality of both sides – the responsibility of the Indian government and army on the one side and the Muslim fighters supported by Pakistan on the other – is unforgettably clear. Even more, I liked Rushdie’s telling of the village history, the characters of Boonyi and Shalimar how they become caught in the events. The destruction of their relationship and its outcome become an evil inverse of their love. Rushdie reflects this in the references to twin planets that both exist and do not exist, and to the combined creation and destruction in Indian cosmology.
In fact, Rushdie’s story and his writing are so complex that it takes a while to process. He brings so much into it, history, myth, personalities, magic and very playful word work, that I find it hard to assess. Many sections feel very thin, and many characterizations are cartoonish stereotypes. But in spite of being a little mystified by these choices, I very much enjoy reading him. His writing is so creative that it’s a pleasure to spend time in his imagination. What I’ve read of his other novels seems to capture people at their worst and blackest periods, but nevertheless leads to an outcome that is if not quite positive at least hopeful.
I’m not sure that this is Rushdie’s best book. The neutral style of some of the prose left me less engaged than his more playful writing, although his depiction of modern Kashmir certainly has impact. But in spite of my hesitation, this is the only book in many years that I’ve read twice, so clearly I’m willing to spend my time with it. It’s complexity and unsettling character are what drew me back for a second and more thoughtful read. To use the metaphor of the dual planets, it both is and isn’t satisfying and that makes it really interesting.This is a love story between the Hindu Boonyi and the Muslim Shalimar, set in a magical Kashmiri mountain village. But a careless American (with European roots) and an evil English stepmother destroy the relationship, and with it centuries of…
rab1953's rating:
Added May 31, 2022
Comment:
My thoughts as I was reading this novel were, why is an Irish writer setting a gay coming out story in Argentina in the 1980s? And what, I asked myself, does the title mean? I came to see the setting as a metaphor for the storyline.
In the story, Richard grows up in Argentina with his British mother. We see him discover his interest in other men at an early age, although in the homophobic culture of Argentina, he allows his identity to be repressed, and expresses it only in secret. This parallels his coming to political consciousness, discovering but repressing his knowledge of the brutal dictatorship. As Argentina slowly opens to into a liberal democracy, he finds more room to express his sexuality, although both are distorted by links to the past and the corruption of the present. Richard and Argentina are challenged by an existential threat, which, in Richard’s case at least, he is able to face through the strength of his love. The future of Argentina is less clear.
“Argentina after the humiliation of the war and the disappearances would have done anything to please the outside world, and privatization was the price the outside world required. Everything the country had that was valuable would be sold and this would tie Argentina to outside interests so that it would never be able to behave badly again.”
Is this an illuminating metaphor? It describes a combined win and loss that the gay community took on in the 1980s, a longing for acceptance even at the cost of what made the community unique and valuable. It also works to clarify the situation that Richard finds himself in. Richard, like Argentina after the dictatorship, is very passive, which makes him somewhat unattractive as a protagonist. He hangs around in a dead-end job in his mother’s apartment until an Argentine politico and an American couple find his translation skills useful, and bring him into their world. He gets some money and contacts in a corrupt system, but they allow him to create a gay identity and find a loving partner.
Richard feels alienated and humiliated as a repressed gay men, and he lets other people tell him what to do. Later he becomes successful, but is sick at heart. He pays the price for letting other people control his life. I think this is what the story of the night refers to: the survival of gay men in the darkness of a hostile world where they cannot show themselves. The end feels like the coming of light, although it is a compromised future that Richard faces.
As a novel set in the gay milieu of the 1980s, the story reflects on the devastating impact of AIDS in the characters’ lives, but it’s interesting that it does not define them or their relationship. It’s a hurdle to overcome, but in spite of that the story ends on a positive note of hope.
I did quite like the depictions of Richard’s life, from his first sexual experiences to his callow youth and his later growth in maturity. The hopefulness and the alienation seem very true to the character and situation, and even though they were set in Argentina, I related to them as real stories. In fact, they appear so realistic that they made me think that Tóibín must have spent some time there, although his bio doesn’t refer to any time in Argentina. While wishing that Richard was not so passive, I also found his story offered insight into gay life in a certain time and place.
I also admire Tóibín’s writing. It’s very descriptive and creates an atmosphere that is easy to imagine. I come away with very clear pictures of Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and the other settings in the story. I’ve no idea how these images resonate with an actual Argentinian, but for me they make the story real and relatable.My thoughts as I was reading this novel were, why is an Irish writer setting a gay coming out story in Argentina in the 1980s? And what, I asked myself, does the title mean? I came to see the setting as a metaphor for the storyline.
In the story,…
rab1953's rating:
Added Nov 19, 2021
Comment:
What a fun way to think about humanity – by stepping outside of human consciousness and seeing what it might look like from outside. It’s also an interesting speculation about what dog consciousness might be if dogs had a human sort of consciousness (raising right there the question of what consciousness is, what part of it is based on intelligence and what is innate and if it’s innate what part might be universal, or at least cross-species — and then there are the hints of god-consciousness). This sounds like a heavy philosophical debate, which it is, but not in the sense of a dry treatise debated among specialists. Instead, André Alexis tackles it with humour and fun.
The combination of humour, empathy, art and deep thought make this book quite unique. It’s comic and entertaining in many ways, especially in how the dogs and the gods perceive the foibles of humanity. When Apollo says to Hermes, don’t insult me by arguing like a human, it’s a comic reflection that flips over human arrogance and puts it in its place. The humour lightens up a story that might be too sad without it, as does the artfulness of Alexis’ prose. When he describes how the dogs perceive the world through scents and doggy enthusiasms (“the excitement of biting on a new stick”), he offers a genuine insight into different ways of seeing and appreciating the world. And the dogs’ verbal jokes and poems are both fun and poetic. They get at a kind of consciousness that humans don’t appreciate, but can find some empathy with.
The story is, of course, sad, as it deals with life and death. Life is a struggle for the dogs, as it is even without consciousness, but it becomes quite poignant as they are able to contemplate what they want in their lives and the hardships they face. The deaths of the dogs, often occurring quite quickly but sometimes after a full life, is poignant because readers come to know them as sympathetic characters. Even the unsympathetic characters seem to deserve more than they get, and that too is a reflection on human life.
Given that the dogs are granted human intelligence, and in many ways think like humans, it’s disturbing how quickly the pack falls into something like fascism. Some are disturbed by the dogs who think for themselves, and especially by the artist in the pack, because it threatens the hierarchy and the established structure of their society. In this telling, all the dogs accept the hierarchical nature of pack society, but even so free thinkers are seen as a threat that has to be eliminated. If the dogs are an analogue for human society, the story illustrates the rise and the strength of fascism. It’s only through luck or divine intervention that the artists escape fascistic repression.
The real interest, of course, is in the lives of the artists and thinkers. Their conflict with the pack leads the philosophical Majnoun to life with a human who uses her intelligence to communicate. But it leads the poetic Prince to life as an outsider, who interacts with some sympathetic humans but can’t share his vision either with them or with other dogs. What the storyline suggests is that life is brutish and short for the unthinking, but it can have beauty, connection, even happiness, in spite of many challenges, for those who use their intelligence. This is the message we get from other stories set among humans, but setting it in a doggy consciousness simplifies it and gives it a satisfying conclusion. The storyline would probably seem trite if the characters were humans, but that’s the benefit of a fable – the author can take fundamental truths and give them a novel quality.
Some people compare this novel to dystopian stories like Animal Farm and Lord of the Flies, but I think it has little in common with them. It’s more about communication, like stories about first contact with alien species. Here, the dogs and the gods make contact with humans in a doomed struggle to connect that nevertheless is worth the effort.What a fun way to think about humanity – by stepping outside of human consciousness and seeing what it might look like from outside. It’s also an interesting speculation about what dog consciousness might be if dogs had a human sort of consciousness…
rab1953's rating:
Added Nov 18, 2021
Comment:
Martin Michaud tries too hard and accomplishes too little in this police thriller. It’s disappointing because I wanted to enjoy it. It’s set in Montreal and evokes many details of the city in a realistic way. It touches on contemporary issues, such as the corrosive effects of the repression of the Quebec independentist movement, political corruption and continuing interference by the RCMP. It even has an insider’s view of realistic police work. I would have been happy if it had handled any of these with reasonably plausible characters.
Instead, Michaud tries to hook readers with tortuous murders depicted from the victim’s point of view, and bizarre plot points like the bow and arrow shooting in a Montreal cemetery or the CIA’s brainwashing experiments carried out in Montreal in order to avoid legal scrutiny. This is catchy plotting that draws the action from high point to high point, as if following the advice in a manual for successful detective thrillers, but it feels artificial and manipulative.
Worse, Michaud creates thinly drawn characters who over-react to everything in their lives. With characters of greater depth, I might have been drawn into the rest of the story, which has its intrigue. But it seems that each of the central characters has one quirk that becomes a defining feature. The lead detective is dealing (badly) with a fatal error from his past and its repercussions in his personal and professional life. His partner is a junk food junkie. Another detective is gnomic while the chief is supportive as he struggles with his wife’s cancer. These could be colourful details if there were more to the characters, but there isn’t. The characters are uniformly flat cartoons.
Apparently, Michaud is a popular writer in Quebec and perhaps his characters have more depth in their original language. I can imagine that they may well have lost something in translation, particularly as a lot of the characterization comes from the dialogue. The plot conforms to the genre conventions, and Michaud has won fiction awards in both French and English. So perhaps I’d concede that personal taste is a factor here – except that those characters (in translation) just don’t have the substance of, say, a well-crafted English police drama. (Is it fair to compare a translated novel to a well written English drama? Perhaps not.)
Maybe I just don’t appreciate the modern detective genre, but it seems to me that the mid-century novels of Phillip Marlow or Dashiell Hammett are just better written, even with their exaggerated language and convoluted plots. And the genre fiction of John Le Carré never leaves me thinking that the characters are flat cartoons, even when they are predictable types from his repertoire. Ultimately, I’m just not drawn to spend any more time with Michaud’s characters, even if there are aspects of his novels that are intriguing.Martin Michaud tries too hard and accomplishes too little in this police thriller. It’s disappointing because I wanted to enjoy it. It’s set in Montreal and evokes many details of the city in a realistic way. It touches on contemporary issues, such…
rab1953's rating:
Added Oct 15, 2021
Comment:
Maggie O’Farrell is a poetic and empathetic writer, and yet there are a few things that hold me back from fully appreciating this book.
First the good stuff. O’Farrell writes such rich, descriptive prose that, as a reader, I could sense the scene and the characters in a very concrete way. When she describes the herbs or the birds or the room, in a few words she brings an image to mind that places the story in a setting that simply seems very real. I kept thinking that she must have been there to catch those details. Although in the credits at the end of the book she lists a lot of printed references and she describes visiting the sites in Stratford, she writes with such detail that it’s hard to imagine that she’s not writing from a lot of close personal experience.
Even with that skill, though, I sometimes felt that a few words from an editor would have helped. When she makes metaphors, they sometimes seem overdrawn, like “the dark maw of the ground, ripped open to accept the white wrapped body in the grave.” Does this have an emotional resonance for readers? Perhaps, but graves in my mind are very neatly dug and describing them as ripped open seems to stretch reality for the sake of an artistic expression. It’s jarring and distracting, not illuminating. Several times through the book, I found myself thinking that the artful language is getting in the way of the response that I imagine O’Farrell wanted.
O’Farrell conveys a deep sense of the emotions of her central character. Agnes’ feelings about her family, her husband, and her situation are complex, but clear and real. Her relationship with her taciturn brother, for example, is interesting in how well they understand each other, even with few words spoken. At the centre of the story is her grief at the death of her son, and I can understand the depth of her loss and how it overpowers her. It may seem extreme, but we already know from her relationship with her stepmother and her birth stories that Agnes is a person of unusual intensity and connectedness. An extreme reaction seems right in character.
O’Farrell gives a similar emotional sense to several other characters. Hamnet’s devotion to his twin sister and his sacrifice to save her, and later Judith’s searching for the spirit of the dead Hamnet seem a natural part of their character. Their father is one of the least known characters, initially a young man of little spirit, and later a business man with a close feeling for his family. Overall, however, we get little sense of his interior thinking. This is an interesting choice, to deliberately take the attention away from the most famous historical character and focus on the unknown background players.
But this empathic acuity leads to another issue for me. In many respects, these characters seem to be modern people in a 17th century society. The long picture of Agnes’ grief could be reset with equal impact in a contemporary family. While Agnes is an expert herbalist, she thinks and reacts in the way a 21st century person would, essentially individualized and material. She has no real community connections and no relationship to the Christian god. Of course, this involves broad generalizations, but could a post-medieval woman go through all that Agnes experiences without reference to community or church (beyond a perfunctory funeral and burial)? Ahistorical characterization often seems to be a problem in writing historical novels, although I think Hillary Mantel avoids it in her books about Thomas Cromwell. She is deliberately exploring the development of the modern mind in the same period, and for me she is more successful in creating a historical character than O’Farrell is. This leads me to ask, why put a modern character in a 400-year-old setting and write as if the character’s psyche is not part of that setting?
But all in all, there are so many things in her writing that I really like that I’d happily read more of her writing just to see how she does it.Maggie O’Farrell is a poetic and empathetic writer, and yet there are a few things that hold me back from fully appreciating this book.
First the good stuff. O’Farrell writes such rich, descriptive prose that, as a reader, I could sense the scene…
rab1953's rating:
Added Sep 30, 2021
Comment:
-- SPOILERS WITHIN --
We would now call this a book about toxic masculinity, although I don’t think that term was in vogue when Findley wrote it in 1996. Nevertheless, it explores one small story about the expectations placed on men, how some men respond and the impacts of those responses on the people around them.
The men at the centre of the story are children. Mi’s husband Graeme acts like he is still in school, afraid of his emotions, afraid of women. Ivan, a pilot trainer, plays with his toy Spitfire when Mi gives it to him and goes “Zoom” just like the boy in the story. Graeme is trying to live up to the impossible ideal of his dead hero brother, but he cannot in his office job, and he leaps at the chance to join the air force when World War II breaks out. When that doesn’t work, he falls back on alcohol. He directs his guilt at his wife, has affairs and shuts her out of his life, refusing even to talk to her. He is almost as cold to his son. The book’s title, You Went Away, describes Graeme’s emotional withdrawal from his family. While there are a few mature and caring men, they are background figures only.
The women in the story, by contrast, are empathetic and supportive. They talk to each other and look after each other when things go bad, lend each other clothes so that they can make the best impression on the men. They try to hold the family together, to make enough compromises that they, or at least their kids, can survive. At one point, Mi says to her husband, I’ve given up trying to make our marriage work, but I won’t give up on our son and I’ll make you stay for him. Reading this, I had to wonder if an angry, resentful father would be better than an absent one. But in the 1940s, divorce was not an acceptable option. Of course, the marriage does not work and the drama has a tragic end.
Matthew, the son, may be set to replicate his father’s pattern. He goes to his father’s boarding school, where he is miserable and has to see his family’s school achievements every day. He has no real friends and can’t talk to his mother. His closest male relationships are with the pilot who takes him for motorcycle rides, and a wealthy schoolmate who leaves for holidays and writes occasionally. His future is very uncertain at the end of the story as he retreats into himself. The story closes on a painting he receives of birds floating in the sky, with the label Heroes. He will have to fight to overcome the toxicity that destroyed his father, but he’s not much of a fighter.
This is a story of a family falling apart. Findley writes it with great sympathy, contrasting the outward expressions of the characters with the inner voices showing what they really want to say. This lets him look inside the minds and feelings of the characters. He conveys emotions that feel very apt – resentful, angry, jealous, and loving as well. His central characters are complex, pulled in different directions and trying to make sense of domestic circumstances that are not simple. The setting on the edge of World War II perhaps suggests that the domestic wars have their reflection in the big events of the world. Does toxic masculinity lead to military conflict, or are they both an expression of a pathological society?
Findley calls this a novella, perhaps because, with a straightforward plot in 218 pages, it doesn’t have the heft of his longer novels. Nevertheless, it’s emotional weight and substantial themes give it enough depth for a serious read.-- SPOILERS WITHIN --
We would now call this a book about toxic masculinity, although I don’t think that term was in vogue when Findley wrote it in 1996. Nevertheless, it explores one small story about the expectations placed on men, how some men…
rab1953's rating:
Added Aug 09, 2021
Comment:
It’s always interesting to read a book by Salman Rushdie because he so playfully ties so many distinct ideas together, and puts them in a novel light. And I like the fact that the light he chooses is not a conventional Euro-centric one. Using the expulsion of the Moors from Spain as a lens for viewing India’s post-colonial history may be an eccentric model, but it works at many levels.
I knew only the fact of the expulsion of the Moors, but Rushdie adds to that the poetry of loss from the last Moorish ruler’s point of view. Instead of the righteous victory of Christianity over Islam that we typically hear, it becomes a sad story of an artistic culture destroyed by violence. This turns the expulsion of the British from India upside down, and I wonder if that’s what Rushdie intended. But it’s also a metaphor for personal loss when the artistic side of the narrator’s family is destroyed by crime, violence and corruption. The family’s history is closely tied to the history of India – from its wealth as an exporter of exotic spices to its corrupt power in independent India. The family ultimately collapses in sectarian violence and expulsion back to a phony Alhambra in Spain. In this, Rushdie goes beyond the poetic to comic irony, and there’s plenty of that throughout the book, too.
Another key metaphor through the novel is the palimpsest – the underpainting that shows through when a canvas is re-used. Rushdie uses several literal palimpsests as the artists in the story paint over embarrassing or rejected earlier works. And other characters similarly cover up parts of their lives, which continue to show through in their work and which ultimately lead to their downfall. This comes back in another form in Rushdie’s repeated references to the invisible people who work behind the scenes in Bombay and make the show of wealth possible. And the novel itself is a kind of palimpsest, too, as the story of the Last Moor of Grenada keeps coming to the surface from beneath the lives of the characters. In this way, the story is a reflection of the way that contemporary life is always built on the past, and however modern we may wish to be, the past keeps coming through. This makes the bizarre story of passion and corruption in India relevant for us in Canada and elsewhere as we grapple with the present effects of our own colonial and racist history.
The story offers many parallels with modern life worldwide, and with Rushdie’s life, too. It was written while his life was under threat from the fundamentalist fatwa, and some of the extremes in the plot are driven by political and religious extremists. His one love turns out to be a death-seeking Christian, and his release from horrifying prison conditions comes at the hands of fundamentalist Hindus. It is an obsessive fundamentalist who destroys modern Bombay and the Moor’s family by blowing it all up.
The complexities of the storyline are reflected in Rushdie’s characteristically rich language of allusions, metaphors and playfulness. I’d need to know a lot more Indian history and world literature to know even half of his references, but it’s still a pleasure to read a creative writer who seems to be having such fun with his craft.
I found both the beginning and the end of the book to be less engaging than the main body that takes readers through the Moor’s life. The introduction lays out his prehistory and forebearers in colourful, but sketchy portraits. But looking at the first pages again, I love the way that the story starts at the end and then circles around to reconnect. It introduces the key themes and characters and lets us know that we are in for a bold storyline. In spite of the extremes of the Moor’s life, however, in the end all he wants is to rest and find a peaceful end to the divisions in the world. This is a nice ending, and likely true to Rushdie’s feelings at the time, but I’m not sure it lives up to the richness of the rest of the story.It’s always interesting to read a book by Salman Rushdie because he so playfully ties so many distinct ideas together, and puts them in a novel light. And I like the fact that the light he chooses is not a conventional Euro-centric one. Using the…
rab1953's rating:
Added Jul 28, 2021
Comment:
Michael Chabon writes with such engaging originality and imagination that I’d read anything he puts out. This novel combines a look at the complex relationships in his own family with some of the historical events of the 20th century. In writing about the people in his own family, he shows how world history affects generations in very personal ways, or how the personal often reflects profound social issues.
There’s a lot of beautiful writing here, with the moon and rocketry a symbol for the escape from the difficulties and horrors of life on earth. Similarly, a lot of Chabon’s images are so stark or unusual that they stick in the mind – the hermaphrodite in the trailer, for example, the conversations with the German priest, the dream of the horse, the snake hunt. These seem a lot of disparate images, but Chabon uses them to highlight the memorable story of his grandfather’s life.
Chabon’s grandfather wants to escape from the antisemitism and poverty of the USA in the 1920s and ’30s, and from the isolation that he seems to experience even within his own community. He joins the army, but is sent to join an intelligence unit. What he finds in searching for the U2 rocket construction sites leaves him unable to separate the aeronautical dream from the slave labour death camps overseen by rocketeer Wernher von Braun. This becomes even more complicated when he falls in love with a French refugee who is dealing with mental health issues that were compounded by – or maybe rose out of – her experiences in the war. Finally, he comes face to face with von Braun at an astronautics conference, and feels nothing for him but pity. In the end, Chabon concludes, his grandfather found love and outlived von Braun.
The role of storytelling is one of the themes in this novel, as it was in other books by Chabon. Storytelling offers a way to make sense of one’s life, as Chabon’s grandfather seems to be trying to do. It’s also a way to create a new life, as both his grandmother and von Braun have chosen to do. Chabon sees this as a house of cards: the stories his grandfather tells are pieces of some kind of building, although the building is unstable and prone to falling apart. Nevertheless, putting them together allows Chabon to find a kind of order in the bizarre series of events that he discovers make up his own family.
The links between fiction and reality is another theme in Chabon’s writing that comes out here. The book’s subtitle says that this is a novel, although it reads as a fairly straightforward retelling of his grandfather’s last days. Chabon’s gift as a writer is to make even the bizarre seem realistic. But perhaps the subtitle is merely meant to explain imagined lines of dialogue that Chabon wasn’t present for, or to provide a cover for the criminal events that he describes. (Family meetings might be difficult if he has to justify all the stories in the book.) But it made me wonder how much of this story is made up, as I did in Chabon’s Cavalier and Clay book. It also leads to the question of how much conventional history is a story. The whitewashed story of Werner von Braun and the American rocket program, for example, was clearly embellished to suit the needs and political objectives of the time.
Not long ago, I read The Way the Crow Flies by Ann-Marie Macdonald, which has surprising parallels to this novel. Both seem to use elements of the authors’ family lives to explore the compromised history of the rocket programs of Germany and the United States, within a complex social context that includes family lies, racism, sexual abuse and criminality. Both are powerful reflections on the ideals of the space race coming into conflict with personal and political ends, and by extension with the idealistic stories we tell ourselves and the reality they hide.Michael Chabon writes with such engaging originality and imagination that I’d read anything he puts out. This novel combines a look at the complex relationships in his own family with some of the historical events of the 20th century. In writing…
rab1953's rating:
Added May 11, 2021
Comment:
This book explores the complications of freedom in a hostile world. Freedom from slavery and oppression are obviously highly desirable, and Edugyan shows how destructive plantation slavery was. The everyday fear of brutal punishment for not working well enough or for talking back undermines the slaves’ consciousness and sense of identity. They are treated as objects and don’t even know their parents. When Washington is brought into the owner’s house, he spends his first days fearful because he doesn’t know what is expected of him or how to avoid punishment.
But Edugyan’s characters find that escaping from slavery brings complications of a different kind. First is the fear of being re-taken. The escaped slave, Washington, and his white liberator, Titch, imaginatively escape to Virginia, a slave-owning state where they have to pretend to be master and servant to avoid bounty hunters. They find a very sketchy escape route to Canada, but Washington chooses to sail north with Titch to find Titch’s eccentric father in the Arctic. He prefers the risk of staying with his friend over the potential of an unknown freedom in Canada. Eventually he ends up in Nova Scotia, where he finds the Black community surviving in poverty almost as marginal as on the slave farm. When he is able to return to his interest in art and science, he comes to realize that Titch and his patron in science don’t really appreciate him for himself, but more as an instrument who can advance their own projects. He even comes to question his relationship to the woman he loves when she allows her father to take credit for his work. Finally, he finds, he has to go out into a stormy world entirely on his own in order to be free of the limitations of friendship and emotion.
This is a difficult path, and Edugyan does not intend to say that the challenges of freedom are in any way parallel to the horrific conditions of slavery that she depicts. Only when Washington is free is he able to express himself and his own interests. But freedom does not rid the world of racism, poverty and exploitation. In fact, when the slaves are freed on the British island of Barbados, they don’t have any economic options except to continue working on the plantations in near-starvation conditions.
In a kind of reversal, Edugyan shows the complications of slave ownership as well. Titch and his brother hate managing a slave plantation. They don’t seem to be brutal in themselves, but they think that brutality is the only tool they have to manage their slaves. Titch says that he would abandon the plantation, but his brother says that they have no choice because without the plantation their family would be reduced to poverty. And they are right – without fear, the slaves would revolt or simply walk away, and the family would lose its wealth and privilege. As Hegel wrote, the slaveowner becomes a slave to the institution, and without revolution neither slave nor owner can be free.
It’s interesting that Washington’s interest is in the science of marine biology. The scene describing his experience with an early diving suit is amazing, especially when he has a kind of underwater dance with an octopus. The octopus is able to change colour to match its environment, but Washington has to go to extraordinary and dangerous lengths to survive in a foreign environment. It’s a memorable image, and an apt metaphor for Washington’s survival in the world. Washington has to create a new state of being, a world of creativity and freedom, but this will be a difficult and painful task.This book explores the complications of freedom in a hostile world. Freedom from slavery and oppression are obviously highly desirable, and Edugyan shows how destructive plantation slavery was. The everyday fear of brutal punishment for not working…
Tell Me How Long the Train's Been GoneTell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone, eBook
by Baldwin, JameseBook - 1998eBook, 1998
All copies in use
rab1953's rating:
Added May 11, 2021
Comment:
This is a dense and fascinating story, as much a reflection on racism in America as it is the story of a man’s life and illusions. The title phrase does not seem to appear in the text, and when I began I wondered what it’s meaning was. By the end, it seems to me that it’s a comment on the life of the central character, who works through his life to overcome the racist society he lives in, but finally finds that the success train has left before he ever got to the station. He was never going to be on it, no matter how much he rose in his art.
The scenes of Leo’s young life in Harlem show the impact of racism on his family, especially on his father. The threat of violence from the police and the fear of violence from white people shapes Leo’s existence. This becomes even more intense when he spends a summer at a small-town theatre camp together with a white woman friend. Nevertheless, he wants to fight against the racism and make his own future.
In some ways, Leo’s character could be a stand-in for Baldwin, a successful Black man who challenges racism and has to continually defend his choices. He has friends and allies, but being a public figure calling for justice is stressful and leads to the heart attack that makes him pause and re-examine his life. The apparent futility of his life work eventually draws him toward armed resistance. I’m not sure if that was the conclusion that Baldwin came to personally, but it is where he leaves his central character.
The story is also about Leo’s relationship with his older brother, Caleb. Leo loves and admires Caleb, a natural leader who responds with rage to the racism they grew up with in Harlem. Leo is devastated when Caleb is wrongly imprisoned for theft by racist police (and corrupted Black criminals). Caleb later becomes a preacher, swallows his rage and challenges Leo’s anger and radicalism. Is this a suggestion that Black leaders can work within the church to create a separate world? Or that the church provides a haven for defeated Black men? Leo wants to kill the white people who have damaged his brother, but he has to painfully reject his brother’s reactionary passivity and fight the racism that dominates all of their lives. By succeeding in the theatre, Leo wants to inspire other black people to overcome the racism they face. At one point, though, he sees a parallel between the church and the theatre, and by the end his success seems as limited as his brother's. In a scene near the end of the novel, he has lunch with the family of his closest friend, a white woman from Tennessee. In her family, he finds just a thin layer of politeness and liberalism covering a deep racism.
In some respects, this could be a depressing story, given the way that racism remains in contemporary society since Baldwin wrote it over 50 years ago. Somehow it isn’t depressing, at least not to me. Baldwin’s characters fight a terrible, devastating struggle, but they continue to fight, and they are ready to escalate if they have to. Baldwin suggests that they won’t stop until they succeed. The alternative is to succumb to insubstantial beliefs that are deadening. Baldwin portrays Leo’ rage and the social conditions that drive it, and makes the reader feel it too, along with the fear and despair that go along with it.
And perhaps the tone is also raised by the beautiful prose that Baldwin writes with. In every paragraph I could hear the cultured voice that he used in his public debates and talks. It’s such a pleasure to hear the language that it made me slow down to read each sentence in my head. This is not a book that I wanted to to skim through quickly.This is a dense and fascinating story, as much a reflection on racism in America as it is the story of a man’s life and illusions. The title phrase does not seem to appear in the text, and when I began I wondered what it’s meaning was. By the end,…
rab1953's rating:
Added May 10, 2021
Comment:
This was an entertaining light read, with some links to a traditional detective story and some distinctions.
I enjoyed the narrator’s wry observations on small-town life and his quirky voice. It’s exactly the voice I remember from King’s CBC radio series, The Dead Dog Café. This is both good and bad. It’s familiar and comfortable. But it suggests that King has not developed much in the many years since the radio show.
The characters in the story are a broad collection of stereotypes, from the sheriff who just wants to keep things quiet in town, to the hard LA television producer who will do anything to get a show done.
King’s detective, Thumps DreadfulWater, wants to avoid getting involved in the investigation, and pushes away from it every chance he gets. He seems bemused, observing life from outside with an ironic detachment, but staying away from it as much as he can. But he doesn’t change either, in spite of a new diagnosis of diabetes and an ultimatum of sorts from his life partner. Nevertheless, he’s an intelligent observer. He not only sees connections that others have missed, partly because they have not tried to see them, but he also seems to intuit strategies for getting the criminals to confess their crimes.
His detachment, presumably, comes from his position as an Indigenous person living in white society. He clearly does not identify with the small Montana town of Chinook, although he has many friends there. He relates more deeply to the Indigenous characters, but he’s not close to them either, and he seems to want to stay away from reserve life. This may be a reflection of King’s mixed Cherokee and Greek heritage, not fully one or the other even though he identifies as Indigenous. DreadfulWater certainly seems to embody King’s voice, so I take him as some sort of stand-in for the author’s way of thinking.
While this has some elements of the western detective novel – the ironic, detached detective, the exaggerated characters, the improbable murder – it avoids the casual violence and replaces it with humour. This is a welcome turn, making the book an enjoyable read, even if lightweight.This was an entertaining light read, with some links to a traditional detective story and some distinctions.
I enjoyed the narrator’s wry observations on small-town life and his quirky voice. It’s exactly the voice I remember from King’s CBC radio…
Comment: