Linda29007's reading for 2012 - Part 3

This will certainly be my last thread for the year and since it will be active for only about a month, I am going to keep the setup simple.

Books Read 2012

1. Brothers of Gwynedd Quartet by Edith Pargeter – Book 2
2. Ghost: A Novel by Alan Lightman
3. The Sweet Hereafter by Russell Banks
4. The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst
5. Slavery By Another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon
6. Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent by Ruth Gruber
7. The Broken Word by Adam Foulds
8. Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse
9. The Orphan Master's Son by Adam Johnson
10. The Writer as Migrant by Ha Jin
11. The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West
12. Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! by Kenzaburo Oe
13. Troubles by J. G. Farrell
14. The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant
15. Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks
16. Human Chain by Seamus Heaney
17. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney by Dennis O'Driscoll
18. To A Mountain In Tibet by Colin Thubron
19. Fishing the Sloe-Black River by Colum McCann
20. The Sadness of the Samurai: A Novel by Victor del Arbol
21. The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
22. Eternity on Hold by Mario Susko (poetry)
23. The War Works Hard by Dunya Mikhail (poetry)
24. The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist by Orhan Pamuk
25. Mentors, Muses & Monsters by Elizabeth Benedict
26. blue has no south by Alex Epstein
27. The Hunger Angel by Herta Muller
28. The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid
29. The Earth in the Attic by Fady Joudah (poetry)
30. Arabian Nights and Days by Naguib Mahfouz
31. The Round & Other Cold Hard Facts by J.M.G. Le Clézio
32. Like A Straw Bird It Follows Me, And Other Poems by Ghassan Zaqtan (poetry)
33. Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz
34. Gillespie and I by Jane Harris
35. The Grass Is Singing by Doris Lessing
36. Tenth of December: Stories by George Saunders
37. The Skull Mantra by Eliot Pattison
38, 39, 40. Kristin Lavransdatter Trilogy by Sigrid Undset: The Wreath, The Wife & The Cross
41. A Time to Keep Silence by Patrick Leigh Fermor
42. Beauty and Sadness by Yasunari Kawabata
43. The Marsh Arabs by Wilfred Thesiger
44. The Blue Sky by Galsan Tschinag
45. Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street by Herman Melville
46. The Vivisector by Patrick White
47. Absolution by Patrick Flanery
48. The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner
49. Notes on Chopin by Andre Gide
50. The Boy in the Suitcase by Lene Kaaberbol
51. Blood of the Sun: Poems by Salgado Maranhao
52. Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce by Robert Penn Warren

I am determined before the year ends to catch up with my reviews, as well as with some comments on author talks and seminars that I attended this Fall.

Over the course of two days in October, J.M. Coetzee and his partner, Dorothy Driver were each featured at the NYS Writers Institute, Coetzee being joined also by the author, Paul Auster.

Dorothy Driver – NYS Writers Institute - 10/11/12

Dorothy Driver is a recognized scholar of South African literature, with a special expertise in women writers. Her presentation was a prepared lecture, with an academic style that was interesting but difficult to follow, given its technical nature and my lack of knowledge of the authors she discussed. She read quickly and with enough of an accent that I often struggled to catch her words.

The promotional flyer for Driver’s talk described its focus as follows.

Driver’s major research interests have been in the constructions and reconstructions of gender and race both under Apartheid and after Apartheid, and in writing by women. Her lecture “The Work of Dreaming: Race, Feminism, and New South African Nationhood” will examine literary texts as sites of dreaming in which unrealized visions of social harmony and individual autonomy – primarily in women’s writing - serve as antidotes to the historical forces that have produced South Africa’s nexus of race-class-gender oppressions….Driver will examine how South African feminist thinking sometimes reproduces a Western feminism but sometimes also inscribes into the South African imaginary new forms of social interaction, thereby opening a route into Julia Kristeva’s revolutionary “women’s time”. Dreaming and writing thus become a powerful basis for change.

My much more simplistic understanding of Driver’s basic premise was that South African fiction writing falls within two modes: social realism, where fiction stays close to reality; and discursive writing, where the writer “lures the reader to another world”. In the context of the latter, she focused specifically on the use of semiotics and dreaming in literature to explore issues of race, class and gender that could not be addressed more directly under Apartheid, providing examples from the works of three female writers: Olive Schreiner, a white, 19th century author, early feminist and anti-racist; Bessie Head, a black South African by birth who did most of her writing after moving to Botswana as an adult; and Zoë Wicomb, a modern day, black South African writer who currently lives in Scotland.

The question period that followed focused primarily on issues of feminism, a word that Driver indicated as only now seeing common usage by young South African women, having previously been negatively associated with European, white feminism. Previously, if a white South African were to call herself a feminist, it was felt to be at the cost of those blacks working in her household. Black women who called themselves feminist were derided by their peers as being “white”. Feminism was also viewed as running counter to the importance of encouraging, rather than further diminishing, black men.

The complex social and political issues associated with language in South Africa were also briefly raised. Driver indicated that she thought it unlikely there would be a language movement and that what seems to be occurring is a "reinvention" of English with the entry of African words.

I left this lecture with far less than a full understanding of Driver's ideas, the names of three South African authors that were new to me, and the anthology, Women Writing Africa: The Southern Region, for which Driver was one of seven editors. I am currently reading Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm, which is quite unusual, and will follow this with books by both Head and Wicomb.

J.M. Coetzee and Paul Auster - NYS Writers Institute, 10/12/12

I had looked forward to Coetzee’s visit with great anticipation and was frankly disappointed that neither of the presentations I attended was anywhere near equal to my expectations. So my comments will be brief.

The talks by Coetzee and Auster took place in two sessions. Instead of the usual Q&A seminar, the afternoon consisted of a “master class” on Herman Melville’s short story/novella, Bartleby, the Scribener: A Story of Wall Street, involving the authors and a panel of students. While some audience participation was allowed, it was focused exclusively on Bartelby. I was very disappointed at this odd choice of format, as it did not provide any insight into the authors’ own works or writing processes, nor was the discussion particularly interesting, although I had read the work in advance. Being aware that Coetzee has the reputation of being a very private individual who rarely makes public appearances, I assume that it was a deliberate strategy to avoid interaction with the audience.

The evening event was a reading from Here and Now, a compilation of the written correspondence between Coetzee and Auster from 2008-2011, to be published March 2013. The selections they chose to read covered a diverse range of topics, including serving on a Cannes jury, chess and the pleasures of competition, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, electronic versus paper books, and the American mid-term elections. Both displayed a dry sense of humor, with Coetzee’s demeanor and letters being slightly more reserved and serious than Auster's. There was no allowance for questions and neither Auster nor Coetzee engaged in much extemporaneous talk. However, the letters were entertaining and revealing of the authors, and I am very much looking forward to their publication.

I'm sorry the talks weren't more lively and interactive. I am rather surprised at Auster's reticence to engage, but I imagine it was at Coetzee's request.

Pity that the events with Coetzee and Auster were a disappointment. I imagine the frustration all around.

Interesting reviews of both talks - too bad about the difficulties with both of them. I don't think I'd heard that Coetzee had problems with publicity - a shame as I imagine there must have been a lot of interest in that series.

Also a great review of Kristin Lavransdatter on the previous thread - I love that one as well. The other books I've read by Undset were very good also - Gunnar's Daughter and Jenny.

Interesting reports on the Author's sessions.

Yes, very interesting report. Thanks for posting about the talks.

Thanks all. Why should I assume that all writers are just waiting to pour their hearts out to an audience? It's just not every day that a Nobel Laureate comes to town. Coetzee appears to be a quite, reserved, almost dignified man who is apparently an avid bike rider and even rode while here. His visit to Albany actually started as returning a favor to a professor who had loaned him his bike while at a conference in the US. I think they said he and Auster were only giving one other reading while on this trip.

Just found your part 3. Good luck catching up on your own reviews. I have the same problem, nine reviews behind...33 days to catch up. :)

Too bad about Coetzee, although interesting in its own way.

Oh, those pesky reviews, Dan. I actually enjoy working on them, but they weigh on me like an assignment. Good luck with yours also!

Funny how hard it is to simply post a quick, brief review...

Absolution by Patrick Flanery

“Accidents were always happening,” Sam thinks of his past. “He had come from a country of accidents. He tried to understand what this meant. It seemed to mean that no one was ever responsible for anything if only you could tell the truth and most of all if you could say you were sorry.”

Clare Wald is a celebrated author, living in post-apartheid South Africa, who has authorized the relatively unknown Sam Leroux to write her official biography. Aging, irascible and living in self-imposed isolation, she has made it clear that she will not make this process easy, with many aspects of her personal life being off-limits. Yet Clare and Sam share an unacknowledged past acquaintance and a connection through Clare’s activist daughter, Laura.

The novel unfolds in four threads, each of which offers a version of events –the past as perceived by Sam; the past as reflected in Clare’s fictionalized memoir; Clare’s imaginings of the fate of her daughter; and an account of events presented in an unascribed third-person voice. Clare struggles with feelings of responsibility for the death of her sister and brother-in-law, prominent supporters of the apartheid government. Haunted also by the guilt of being an emotionally distant parent, she is consumed by questions of Laura’s fate and envisions her having suffered a horrific death that would be unimaginable to most mothers. Sam is troubled by his own guilt for an act committed as a young child, after being orphaned and left to the care of a brutal and neglectful uncle. Laura, known to him as a close friend of his parents, was then the serendipitous agent of his rescue and is now his enduring link to Clare Wald. Laura is the most unreliable of characters, given voice only through her journals and the memories of others, and it is her very ambiguity that pulls the storyline forward to its uncertain conclusion.

Flanery explores themes of truth, responsibility and absolution suitable to post-apartheid South Africa, but adds a further dimension by applying them to deeds that are more personal than political. However, this distinction becomes confused at times and the narrative is diverted by scenes of testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that seem largely gratuitous. Flanery is highly skillful at entering the minds of his protagonists and lending a sense of intimacy to the narrative, particularly in his portrayal of Clare Wald's imagined discourse with her daughter. The repeated juxtaposition of the various threads adds tension and suspense. However, some key elements with the potential to add greater depth were only briefly mentioned and then left unexplored, such as the question of Laura’s true allegiances. I was also disappointed that an early sidebar on censorship was not further pursued as an aspect of the story, and that little was shown of present-day conditions beyond the constant threat of personal danger and inferences of pervasive poverty. The result was a setting that felt somewhat one-dimensional, when I had hoped for a more complex portrayal of post-apartheid South Africa.

This is Patrick Flanery’s first novel and overall, an impressive debut that succeeded in telling an interesting story while posing universal questions related to the nature of truth and reconciliation. What is truth, how is it determined, and to whom is it owed? Do memory and emotion make us all unreliable narrators of our own pasts? Do we seek absolution as a means of penitence or as a way of mitigating the guilt of our own culpability?

" ... If you refuse to absolve me, will you also refuse to judge me, or does judgment belong to a different order of ethics?"

3 ½ Stars

Excellent review Linda, Absolution sounds pretty assured for a first novel.

What is truth, how is it determined, and to whom is it owed? Do memory and emotion make us all unreliable narrators of our own pasts?

Wonderful questions. I asked myself similar ones when reading The Garden of Evening Mists. Interesting how these questions don't seem so pressing until a disaster, war, etc. suddenly bring these questions to the fore, and then everyone gets busy accessing truth, justice vs retribution, guilt, and responsibility. It's a theme that I'm fascinated by. I've never read about it in the context of South Africa before though. Thanks for introducing me to this book.

>14 baswood: Thanks Barry. The book was short or long-listed for six different awards, winning one. Flanery is clearly very talented and I am looking forward to seeing what comes next from him.

>15 labfs39: Lisa, the other thing Flanery had me thinking about was whether we tell the truth because we actually want to acknowledge our responsibility or blame, or because by doing by so it somehow makes us less guilty. Having been raised Catholic with the whole confession and absolution deal, I have often wondered about that.

I saw a photographic exhibition on Apartheid this summer that made me interested in learning more about South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission and its effort to apply concepts of restorative justice on such a massive scale. I have a book on the topic that I am anxious to read, but which seems to have momentarily disappeared.

Hmm, that's another good question. Okay, I'm heading over to the library to see if they have it.

ETA: I am now fifth on the hold list with eight copies.

Ghassan Zaqtan and Fady Joudah
NYS Writers Institute – 10/15/12

This event was rescheduled from last Spring, when Ghassan Zaqtan, a Palestinian poet, encountered visa problems, and his Palestinian-American translator, Fady Joudah, had travel difficulties. Although a prolific writer and poet, Zaqtan’s sole collection translated to English is Like A Straw Bird It Follows Me, and Other Poems. Joudah, an emergency room physician and member of Doctors Without Borders, is himself a poet and won the Yale Young Poet’s Prize for The Earth in the Attic. He has also translated several collections of poems by Mahmoud Darwish, and was a finalist for the PEN Award for Poetry in Translation for The Butterfly’s Burden.

The afternoon question-answer seminar began with a discussion of language and the importance of syntax as “the key to the riddle of poetry”. Joudah shared someone’s apt comparison of syntax to algebraic equations. Algebra does not appear awkward if you keep “flipping” the equation to ask the question of what is unknown. Writing is the same, as the poet must determine the sentence structure that best presents the knowns and unknowns to the reader.

Zaqtan noted that in the Arab world, geography affects language at the level of diction. The Arabic language has not over time undergone fundamental changes in the way that many European romantic languages have. The Quran serves as a major linguistic reference for the Arab writer, in a cultural rather than a religious sense, as a well-wrought book that is handled and exchanged on a daily basis. For that reason, you find Arab poets from past periods whose works are still very accessible today and read side by side with contemporary poets.

Joudah spoke of the process of translation as a form of close reading, perhaps the closest, and of how having studied science texts helped him in developing this skill. He considers Arabic to be his language of exile and lives more in English, but noted that his ability to identify the various geographic groups adds a sense to the translation that he would otherwise not be able to capture.

Joudah portrayed the translator as having a major influence on the work: “Translation inhabits another spirit in addition to that of the poet.” Although they certainly had prior communications, Zaqtan and Joudah had met in person only a few days before this talk. I was surprised to learn the extent to which a translator can decide which poems are to be included in a collection. Joudah spoke of carefully selecting the poems that he translates, approaching the Zaqtan and Darwish collections differently but both as very private and deliberate projects, with artistic considerations being foremost.

I wonder how different this process is for Joudah, being not only a translator but also an award-winning poet. He spoke briefly of how the translation process impacts his own poetry, noting that he is sometimes conscious of using phrases of the poet he is translating and views the challenge as how to be influenced without being the same. Joudah’s sense of his translation projects as private was mirrored also in his response to the question of why he writes poetry - speaking of it as a very private compulsion that has stayed with him since childhood, reflecting his love of song and the music of language.

The question of how both Zaqtan and Joudah’s poetry reflect politics was repeatedly raised. In the role of translator, Joudah indicated that politics does not change the text and shows mostly in his selection process. In Like A Straw Bird It Follows Me, he did not include many early poems whose sensibility would be too odd in English. He felt some to be too specialized and selected those that he felt would read in a continuous flow as one book.

Zaqtan noted that he does not think of the reader, critic or translator when writing, as they exist only after the work is done and if you think too much about them, they will infiltrate the work. The entry point to any poem is a personal one and when he writes, he thinks only of the view or angle from which he can enter the scene. He sees his role as conversing with the audience, not responding to them. The poet should not clean up a poem from a political perspective, the only thing of importance being how the poet addresses these issues in the verse.

As a lead-in to reading the poem “Four Sisters from Zakariyya”, Zaqtan noted that each text has a story behind it, but that “going after the detail of the event places the poem in a very small box and prevents the multiplicity of significations that the text carries.” But he told the story behind his poem anyway. After fifty years away, his mother and her sisters, all widowed, had secured a permit to leave Jordan and cross the West Bank into Zakariyya , to visit the town they had come from before it was occupied and razed. Zaqtan had taken a picture of them as they conversed and pointed at things, a picture that he keeps in his office still. It was noted that returning to their homeland is an immense experience for exiled Palestinians and there is “an immense absent space” in this poem: “Four sisters from Zakariyya / by the hill/alone / in black clothes“ (14-17).

I was fascinated by these two poets and after attending the afternoon seminar, decided to stay for the evening reading. I had read both collections of poetry prior to this event, but had struggled with feeling that I did not understand much of Zaqtan’s imagery. I have since re-read both again and have somehow found them to be more accessible. Perhaps I have gained a better understanding of their context and authors. Maybe I am learning to read more slowly, and as Joudah would advise, more closely. Or perhaps I am simply beginning to see that understanding the poet’s experience is not essential to making my own connection with the words and with “the music of the language”.

Like A Straw Bird it Follows Me: And Other Poems by Ghassan Zaqtan, translated by Fady Joudah

Ghassan Zaqtan is a contemporary Palestinian poet who has been widely published in Arabic. His first collection translated to English contains selections from 1998-2008. The title is drawn from Zaqtan’s concern with what are only fragments of poems, “…beginnings that flap like wings in my head” (“Black Horses”, 18). “In the year two thousand or a little before, there might have been / a prelude that inhabited me, it resembled summer /…/ Like a straw bird / it follows me.” (“The Bird Follows Me”, 1-2,16-17)

Zaqtan’s verse is unquestionably the work of a poet from a region where conflict, loss, exile and displacement are the backdrop to everyday life. These themes are common in his verse, but explored in a voice that is highly personal. Death is ever-present on these pages and Zaqtan’s spirits are noisy and restless, unable to find peace.

The Dead in the Garden

Don’t open the window
don’t wake up
I beg you don’t wake up…
they were dancing on the garden grass
as if they were the garden’s motive
or its meditation
and they were screaming there

Beneath the light
their dust was coming apart (1-9)


Everything As It Was

What led him over there
in such cold weather?
Not longing or curiosity
but maybe fear or perhaps it was
the chill in the room,
though everything appeared as it was,
as he wrote in an old poem he could not finish

“…Everything is still as it was
since we had gone out to war,
since childhood or before,
……………………………………………….

“everything was as if nothing had changed.
Perhaps we
we who fell upon the war
from the school bell…”

That was in the summer of 1986 in Damascus, his mother was still alive then
And there was an opening somewhere in that poem, more like a hole that followed
him,
he’d heard it stumble behind him wherever he went, especially when toward the
anxious
endings in his dreams, and even there, they, the boys who did not return after the
midnight
patrols, and the dead who went back to sit on the doorsteps of their houses

Now he feels a saunter in him through that opening,
without knowing exactly where it is,
and where the poem is, in its painful incompleteness (1-10, 22-37)

There is diversity and depth in this collection that is difficult to capture in less than the full text of the poems. I have read these poems several times over the past year, hesitating to share my thoughts without feeling the assurance of having mastered their meaning. But each time I visit them, I find more to connect with and more that remains elusive, awaiting discovery, and I remember that this is as it should be with great poetry.

Not Yet

Whenever I say it’s time I went
The songs I thought would never return arrive
And the old hands knock on my door
Hands that thought of me
Or shepherded my roads
In a time that was …obliterated. (11-16)

5 Stars

The Earth in the Attic by Fady Joudah

Fady Joudah is a Palestinian-American poet, whose collection, The Earth in the Attic, won the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition. A practicing emergency room physician and member of Doctors without Borders, Joudah has also translated the poetry of the Palestinian poets Mahmoud Darwish and Ghassam Zaqtan. Although Joudah was born and lives in the United States, he was raised in the Middle East, his parents being Palestinian refugees. There is clarity to Joudah’s imagery and uniqueness in the way it integrates disparate worlds - being both American and from a family of Palestinian refugees, and a practitioner of medicine both in Houston and in poverty-stricken African countries.

“Sleeping Trees” is based on accompanying his father on a visit to his home village and is representative of how his poetry reflects the experience of the returning exile.

….My father
Learned to fly in a dream. This is the story
Of a sycamore tree he used to climb
When he was young to watch the rain.

Sometimes it rained so hard it hurt. Like being
Beaten with sticks. Then the mud would run red.

My brother believed bad dreams could kill
A man in his sleep, he insisted
We wake my father from his muffled screams
On the night of the day he took us to see his village.
No longer his village he found his tree amputated. (3-13)

I found Joudah to be at his best when merging his experience as a physician with his humanitarian concerns. My favorite in this collection is “Pulse”, a poem delivered in 15 sections. In her introduction, Louise Gluck notes the likelihood that it is set in Darfur, where Joudah served with Doctors Without Borders. .

Halimah’s mother did not seem aware Halimah was dying.

You should have seen Halimah fight her airlessness
Twisting around for a comfortable spot in the world.
………………………….

…Halimah
Died of a failing heart
Early this dawn, her mother, with tears now,

Was on the road, twenty steps past me
Before I turned and found her waiting.

We walked back toward each other, we met, we
Read verses from the Quran,
Our palms open,
Elbows upright like surgeons

Ready to gown up after scrubbing, the slap
Of rubber gloves before we went our separate ways. ("Pulse 12" 1-3, 9-19)

4 Stars

Great posts on Ghassan Zaqtan and Fady Joudah Linda. Death and remembering those who have died, seems ever present in the poems you have quoted and I suppose that is hardly surprising when you consider the background to the poetry of the two men.

Interesting stuff from Joudah on the process of translation and how he thinks the translator inhabits another spirit in addition to the original poet.

Thanks Barry. Although he was in theory there in a secondary role as translator, Joudah was for me the more interesting speaker. He has another collection of his own poetry due to be published soon: Alight.

Terrific recap of the Writers Institute event, all the better after such disappointment with Coetzee. I remember being surprised when I first noticed translations were copyrighted by the translator, and realizing it was a statement about the artistry required.

I also like the comparison of writing to algebra: the sentence structure that best presents the knowns and unknowns to the reader.

Thank you for taking the time to summarize the Writers Institute event in such detail and then treat us to excerpts from their poetry as well. I appreciated the integration and your reflections when describing your own process of growing understanding as you approached the works.

I too find your summaries of the Writers Institute events fascinating. Thank you for sharing them.

Thanks MJ, Lisa and Rebecca. I feel fortunate to have access to the Writers Institute talks and the process of taking notes and writing the summaries helps me gain the most from them. I'm glad that others enjoy them as well.

Coming late, but l really enjoyed your summary of the Zaqtan/Joudah talk. I always wonder about about translated poetry, but the excerpts you post from Zaqtan are excellent. Powerful stuff.

Thanks Dan. The two talks I attended this year by translators of poetry were both fascinating and gave me an appreciation of the special challenges they encounter with rhyme, meter etc. As MJ noted above, there is true artistry required.

I finally got my 2013 thread started and I look forward to seeing everyone there: www.librarything.com/topic/147337.