aruba's book journal

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aruba's book journal

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1arubabookwoman
Feb. 9, 2009, 6:24 pm

Well--after a week or two of lurking and reading threads, I'm opening my own. I'm just going to record a few brief thoughts about what I read--no reviews per se, though if anyone wants to discuss a book, I'm always up for that. (I do write something that could be called a review of each book I read over at the 75 book challenge).

The main thing I have to remember is to try not to be too intimidated by all the professors, PhD's, writers, intellectuals, and downright very smart people here. My feeble brain stands in awe. I think I'm knowledgable enough about literature that in choosing my reading I weed out total duds, so that most of what I read probably has some merit or at least potential. However, I'm not qualified to make any sort of intelligent literary criticism, or to make a value judgment as to which book has more literary merit than another. It'll all probably boil down to whether I like a book and why or why not.

I'll use this entry to make a few comments on my January reading:

Bleak House--I became a great fan of Dickens in a Victorian Novel course many, many years ago. Still have to read Hard Times, Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chuzzlewit. Want to reread David Copperfield.
A Thousand Splendid Suns--I'm always suspicious of highly hyped books, and I did not particularly like this book. It didn't feel real to me. The Wasted Vigil has been recommended as a novel set in Afghanistan during the same time period that is well-worth reading. I picked it up a Powell's a couple of weeks ago.
I read Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids by Kenzaburo Oeand Life in the Cul-de-Sac by Senji Kuroi for Reading Globally. There is apparently a sequel of sorts to Nip the Buds, and I'd like to read it. I'd also like to read more of Kuroi.
Elizabeth George's new mystery--soso.
Sorrow of War-I appreciated the novelty of the North Vietnamese perspective on the Vietnam war, but there are anti-war novels I like better.
Hester Lilly--quiet short stories by Elizabeth Taylor
The Slynx-I'm a fan of dystopian future novels. This one has the dystopian future and weird science fiction characters. It was written by the grand-niece of Leo Tolstoy.
Poor People by William Vollmann compelling nonfiction. The poor people were up close and personal.

Book not finished: Terrestrials by Paul West. If anyone has any positive comments on this book I would love to hear them.

2tiffin
Feb. 9, 2009, 6:39 pm

Bleak House is my favourite Dickens, aruba. And like you, I didn't particularly enjoy "A Thousand Splendid Suns"!

3fannyprice
Feb. 9, 2009, 7:18 pm

Haha, aruba, I can assure you that the title of "Least Worthy Member of Club Read" belongs solidly to me. I am always polluting the pool with my idiotic ramblings on young adult books. I'm sure Lois regrets the day she invited me! :)

The Slynx looks very interesting. A Russian dystopian novel that I haven't heard of! (rushing to add to continent TBR.....)

4dchaikin
Feb. 11, 2009, 10:04 am

There is a lot of intellectual energy in this group. I probably should be intimidated too... but then it's fun and that's the point. And, no one's kicked me out yet ;) Actually, I think there is a nice variety of readers. I like the mixture.

ps - I agree with you about "A Thousand Splendid Suns." It felt like there was a lot of plot to force through, maybe too much.

5arubabookwoman
Feb. 11, 2009, 8:49 pm

My reading in February has so far been concentrated in Africa for Reading Globally. I really loved The Joys of Motherhood. When I learned it was published in the 1970's, after the Biafra War, I was surprised that there weren't more references to tensions between Yoruba and Igbo. This may be because the focus is on the personal rather than the political.

Emecheta's own life had some broad similarities to Nnu's in The Joys of Motherhood. She was married off to an older man she was engaged to from the age of 11, and had 5 children within 6 years. Her husband was abusive. Unlike Nnu, Emecheta took her children, left her husband and supported herself and children as she earned a degree from the University of London.

I decided to stay in Nigeria and read the widely acclaimed Half a Yellow Sun, which is about the Biafra War. While I don't think it was particularly insightful about the causes and effects of the war, I don't regret reading it. The portion of the book dealing with lives of Biafrans as they are strafed and bombed, as they are forced from their homes, as their children sicken and die, is very real and compelling. Some of the characters in the pre-war portions weren't real to me, but then I've never been to Nigeria. Those portions read like a romance novel at times.

I'm now in the middle of This Blinding Absence of Light, which seems particularly pertinent during this era of extreme rendition and torture. Despite the bleakness of its subject matter, there are touches of humor. I've just read a scene in which the narrator, who is charged with being the prisoners' "storyteller," is narrating the story of A Streetcar Named Desire to distract the other prisoners. They react with disbelief that somewhere in the world, a man (Marlon Brandon) got down on his knees before a woman and begged her to come back to him.

Also read Train to Pakistan in an anniversary edition with photographs by Margaret Bourke-White. The photographs are unbelievable.

6Medellia
Feb. 11, 2009, 8:58 pm

#5: Loved your thoughts on the Emecheta in the Reading Globally group. I liked Half of a Yellow Sun, too, though not as much as a lot of folks on the boards, I think. Your last sentence ("Those portions read like a romance novel at times") struck home with me--the thing I liked least about the novel was (what I felt to be) the soap-opera quality of pretty much all the romantic relationships. Still, I don't want to be too down on it: Adichie shows so much promise for such a young writer.

The Oe interests me as well. I assume that since you'd like to read the sequel, you enjoyed Nip the Buds?

7arubabookwoman
Feb. 16, 2009, 1:22 pm

I just read This Blinding Absence of Light by Tahar Ben Jelloun and I loved it. A young cadet has unwittingly participated in a coup attempt and spends the next 20 years in Tazmamart prison in Morocco, in a dark cubicle so small that he can't stand upright, and can't stretch out full length.

Over time, the prisoners die off, each in a unique and horrific way, the first by starvation, then one beats his head against the wall until he is dead, one is unable to expel his excrement, one is poisoned by thousands of roach eggs.

The prisoners develop a society, each prisoner serving a function in that society. The narrator's function is that of storyteller--he relates the stories of the books he has read and movies he has seen: "My friends, I would like your attention and absolute quiet, because I'm going to take you to America in the 1950's..." And so begins a surreal version of A Streetcar Named Desire.

For a solid month, he recites Camus's The Stranger. The other prisoners are enthralled: "A novel related in a dungeon, in the presence of death, cannot have the same meaning, the same consequences, as it would when read on a beach or in a meadow, in the shade of a cherry tree."

The cadet attempts to maintain sanity by any means he can: "Luckily my imagination was unharmed. It fed on anything. I could spin a whole story from out of a chance word....'Coffee' for example." And then he fantasizes about about where the beans come from, who discovers them, who thought of roasting them, all the way to, "I thought of a palace where a king or a prince will not get out of bed until he has had two cups of brisk arabica imported from Costa Rica, roasted by Italians, and prepared by a Neapolitan chef..."

The novel is based on real events as related by a former inmate of the prison. When the few remaining survivors were released, the dungeons at Tazmamart were bulldozed. Can the experience of horror be denied?

"What? A dungeon in Tazmamart? Who is this insolent idiot who dares think our country has committed such a crime, such an unspeakable evil?...What gall!..(T)he tool of our country's enemies, who envy our stability and prosperity. Human rights? But they are respected--just look around you! Political prisoners? No, we don't have those here...."

Highly recommended.
4 1/2 stars

8fannyprice
Feb. 21, 2009, 9:14 am

>7 arubabookwoman:, Intriguing book, aruba. Doesn't sound exactly "enjoyable" but it does sound good.

9tiffin
Feb. 21, 2009, 9:58 am

aruba, good review. And darkly fascinating - just thought of reciting Camus's The Stranger for a month alone, crikey!

10arubabookwoman
Feb. 22, 2009, 9:13 pm

I picked up Family of Secrets after I heard an interview with Russ Baker on the Thom Hartman show. Baker's investigation of the Bush family in the context of some of the seminal events of the last 50 years resulted in his discovery of new facts and documents relating to the Bay of Pigs, the Kennedy assassinations, Watergate, the Bush family connections with the Saudis, W's business failures and military service, Iraq, etc. etc. While he posits some interesting theories and fresh ways of looking at some of these events, no conclusions are reached.

However, Baker states, he now has a new understanding of how power works in America, including:

--Presidents have a lot less power and independence than he had assumed.

--Initiating reforms or standing up to powerful interests can invite retribution of a kind he had not imagined. Presidents are subject not only to pressure, but also to entrapment, blackmail or worse.

--Constant recourse to the 'lone wolf' theory to explain assassinations and comparable national traumas is empirically challenged.

Baker also notes, "Time and again, there has been a rush to bury inquiries into the most perplexing events of our time, along with a determination to subject dissenting views to ridicule. And the media weren't just enabling these efforts; they were complicit in them--not least by labeling anyone who dared to subject conventional views to a fresh and quizzical eye as 'conspiracy theorists'."

While I've closely followed the machinations of the Bush presidency, I have not been conversant with the various theories surrounding the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Kennedy assassinations, although I have been aware in a general way of the controversies surrounding these events. The new facts and documents Baker has discovered, and the inferences he draws from them are new to me and in my view merit consideration. The new information and potential theory Baker raises relating to the Watergate scandal is very intriguing and is something I've seen discussed nowhere else.

11polutropos
Feb. 24, 2009, 12:53 pm

Your review of Blinding Light is so good that I am again forced to break my vow to not buy more books. So thanks, I guess :-)

12Fullmoonblue
Feb. 24, 2009, 3:52 pm

re 7 -- oh wow... I saw you mention this title in Reading Globally, I think, and now I've broken down and ordered a copy...

In an entirely different vein, I'm looking forward to your thoughts on Bleak House. I read it a few years ago and ended up writing a seminar paper on the use of serpentine imagery in characters like Lady Dedlock and Oscar Wilde's Salome... Fun stuff, especially if you like art too. (Bram Dijkstra's Idols of Perversity was a treat for that angle.) Anyway, Dickens' portrait of Lady D really fascinated me, so I hope you'll enjoy the novel when you get to it.

13avaland
Feb. 24, 2009, 5:06 pm

>7 arubabookwoman: I found This Blinding Absence of Light very powerful also, Aruba. I have picked up several other books by Jelloun but have not read them yet. I think I saw somewhere that he has a new one out. There's also a piece on him in the current edition of World Literature Today.

14rachbxl
Bearbeitet: Feb. 26, 2009, 1:09 pm

Aruba, I've had my eye on This Blinding Absence of Light for quite a while, but your excellent review has decided me once and for all - thank you.

15arubabookwoman
Mrz. 4, 2009, 4:47 pm

This past weekend I was able to score 3 Jelloun paperbacks for 70 cents each at Half Price Books, and I'm now set to read some of his other works.

In the meantime, I read 2666 by Roberto Bolano. This seems to be one of those books that you either love or hate. I fall within the "love" group, but I think even if you ultimately end up in the "hate" group, the novel is well worth the time you need to invest to read it. The journey it takes you on is so diverse and interesting that it really doesn't matter where you end up.

Bolano apparently intended to publish the 5 books comprising the novel as 5 separate novels. If I had read each of the books separately, I would have felt each book to be "unfinished," and so I think the decision of Bolano's heirs to publish the books as one novel was a wise one. However, since finishing the novel, I've thought it might have been possible to have presented the books in a different order. For example, the whole tenor of the novel would have changed had 2666 begun with Book 4--- different, but not necessarily better. It's a fun exercise.

Book 1 involves 4 European academics, friends and lovers, whose area of specialization is a reclusive German author. When the author is sighted in Santa Teresa, they fly there to try to track him down.

In Book 2, The Part About Amalfitano, an exiled Argentinian professor of literature at Santa Teresa University ponders his life and the safety of his daughter, as the town of Santa Teresa suffers the disappearances and murders of hundreds of women.

In Book 3, The Part About Fate, an American reporter in Santa Teresa to cover a boxing match becomes involved in Santa Teresa's criminal underworld.

In Book 4, The Part About the Crimes, Bolano makes us feel the deaths of the more than 200 female victims of an apparent serial killer in Santa Teresa. Some have described this part as gruesome. Although it's horrific and appalling, the descriptions of the murders are clinical rather than gruesome, which makes the deaths all the more real.

Book 5 is supposed to unify and clarify the first 4 books. As it begins, we find ourselves in Prussia in between the two World Wars, with a one-legged veteran of World War I, his one-eyed wife, and their son who is most himself when underwater among the seaweed.

Ultimately, Book 5 does unite the books, while leaving the reader much to reflect on. In fact, as soon as I finished Book 5, I picked up Book 1, and began to read the novel all over again.

I highly recommend it. I think it's a book that literate people need to read (at least try to read?), even if in the end it's a book they hate.

16Fullmoonblue
Mrz. 5, 2009, 4:15 pm

"This past weekend I was able to score 3 Jelloun paperbacks for 70 cents each at Half Price Books, and I'm now set to read some of his other works."

Will be watching to see what you think of 'The Sand Child'... :)

17avaland
Mrz. 5, 2009, 4:46 pm

>15 arubabookwoman: I think we have a Bolano thread in this group somewhere.

18arubabookwoman
Mrz. 7, 2009, 7:28 pm

I finished Dark Star Safari by Paul Theroux, a leftover from February's Reading Globally--Africa segment, this week. Rather than a travelogue of the countries he visits on his journey (by foot, car, boat and train) between Cairo and Capetown, the bulk of the book consists of Theroux's various adventures and diversions along the way.

These range from hitching a ride on a decrepit steamer on Lake Victoria to escaping bandits on the Bandit Road in northern Kenya, from attending a literary salon with Naguib Mahfouz in Cairo to a sidetrip to Harar, Ethiopia, where Rimbaud retired from civilization and poetry to become a trader in arms and elephant tusks.

The book also consists of Theroux's musings on Arica's changes since the 1960's,when he lived there for 10 years. Those of us who love The Flames Trees of Thika will be sad to learn that it is now a "mess of improvised housesand streets thick with lurking kids and traffic and an odor of decrepitude." He visits with old colleagues, some of whom are now in positions of power (and some of whom he subjects to gentle ridicule)and muses on the futility of much of aid work in Africa today(comparing it to Mrs. Jelleby's schemes to grow coffee in Bleak House). Hemourns the fact that many of the new generation of educated Africans choose to leave Africa (a recurring theme of some of the books featured on the Reading Globally--Africa thread).

All in all, an interesting read.

I also finished The Burning Book by Maggie Gee, which I disliked very much. I'm not sure whether that's because I was expecting something totally different or because it is, in fact, not a very good book.

The back of the book said it was a novel that "addresses the theme of nuclear destruction in a way that is poignant and unforgettable..." I'd never read Gee before, but had thought she wrote science fiction or speculative fiction, and so thought the book might be about survival after nuclear holocaust, or perhaps the effects of Nagasaki and Hiroshima or something similar.

Instead I was treated to 4 generations (yes 4) of dysfunctional family (on both sides). I stopped reading carefully about half-way through, and skimmed the second half, but I don't think it got better.

So on the one hand, it wasn't what I was expecting--but is it a worthy book? Citizen Kelly recently posted on a thread here Kurt Vonnegut's 8 rules for a good book, and this book violates at least 3 of them:

1. It does not start as close to the end as possible.

2. It does not give the reader as much information as possible as soon as possible.

3. It does not give the reader at least one character to root for.

Since Gee came highly recommended, and since I own another of her books, I will give her another chance, but I can't recommend this book to anyone.

I am currently reading Nabokov's Pale Fire (a reread--I first read it 38 years ago and loved it), Dostoevsky's The Insulted and the Injured (for the annual Dostoevsky read), and Paul Auster's New York Trilogy for my book club meeting Tuesday. I have not been in the habit of reading more than one book at a time until recently, but so far I am not finding it too confusing.

19arubabookwoman
Mrz. 13, 2009, 3:46 pm

I finished The New York Trilogy, and have become a Paul Auster fan. The three novellas constituting the trilogy are ostensibly noir detective stories, but those who like their mysteries solved may feel disappointed when they have finished the book.

In City of Glass, Quinn, a writer who drops out after the deaths of his wife and son and begins writing detective novels under a pseudonym, receives several midnight calls seeking the services of "Paul Auster" private detective. After he is unable to convince the caller that he is not Paul Auster and is not a detective, Quinn decides to assume Auster's identity and take the case.

In Ghosts, Blue, a private detective, is hired to spy on Black from a rented room across the street from Black's apartment. The only problem is, all Black seems to do is sit at his table, look out the window and write in his notebook.

In The Locked Room, Fanshaw disappears, leaving instructions to his wife that she ask the protagonist, Fanshaw's childhood friend, to review his writings and decide whether they are worthy of publication. She does so, the works are published (successfully), and the protagonist becomes involved with Fanshaw's wife. He begins living a perfect life, until he decides he must track Fanshaw down and ask him why he chose to disappear.

In each of the novellas, the detective becomes obsessed with the case he is working on to the extent that he abandons his real life, and we are left wondering what is real and what is not. Auster himself appears as an important character in one of the novellas, which ends with the narrator stating, "As for Auster, I am concerned that he behaved badly throughout. If our friendship has ended, he has only himself to blame. As for me, my thoughts remain with Quinn. He will be with me always."

The novellas are loosely connected, with recurring characters, events, motifs. The language flows, and the plots are suspenseful and engaging. The book is easy to read, but it is not a simple book. It's a book I think I may try to reread someday.

20arubabookwoman
Mrz. 16, 2009, 3:07 pm

Between 1810 and 1815, Sarah Baartman, a young woman of the Khoekhoe tribe of South Africa, was exhibited in Great Britain and France as a freak of nature, or as a sub-human species. Hottentot Venus by Barbara Chase-Riboud is a fictionalized account of her life.

In the Khoehoe culture, steatopygia, or collection of fat on the buttocks, in females was highly desireable. Various techniques were employed to encourage the swelling of the buttocks and it would not have been unusual for the buttocks to protrude 12 inches from the curve of the spine.

After Sarah's death, she was dissected and her brain and sexual organs were removed. Her skeleton, a cast of her body, and her brain and sexual organs were on display in France until the early 1970's. In the early 2000's, her remains were returned to South Africa, where she was buried.

This book's strength is in its imaginative recreation of Sarah's psyche. Throughout her years of "exhibition" she was conflicted as to whether she was being taken advantage of by her handlers, or was of her own free will earning her fortune. (She was exhibited in a cage, and forced to dance by threats of physical harm from her handlers--nevertheless, she resisted efforts by a relief society to "rescue" her).

The book's weakness is that at times its writing is clumsy or is not appropriate to its context. The author chose to narrate several of the sections of the book from the first-person point of view of one or the other of her handlers, which at times required that there be awkward and unrealistic instances of the handler "overhearing" conversations between Sarah and her confidante necessary for plot development. As to language use, does "You give me any more lip and I'll smash you one," sound 19th century to you?

Despite these technical faults, the book was fascinating and appalling and I recommend it.

3 stars.

21arubabookwoman
Mrz. 26, 2009, 4:48 pm

I've been away at a quilt retreat for 5 days, but still got some reading in.

Pale Fire--Vladimir Nabokov--I first read this 40 years ago in college, and for the past several years have wanted to reread it. It was the first book I encountered in which the author played games with the reader, and in which the novel was formatted in an unusual way. I loved it then, and I love it now--even more with 40 additional years of reading experience.

Blackwater--by Joyce Carol Oates--I always remember the summer of 1969 as the summer of man walking on the moon, Hurricane Camille hitting the Gulf Coast and Chappaquidick. This book recreates the last moments of Kelly Kelleher as she drowns in the car driven off a bridge by the Senator. We know the outcome--the only question is how long will the naive Kelly hold onto her naive hero-worship of the Senator and wait for him to rescue her. Overall, I don't think this book is successful as a novel, because I could never get Mary Jo Kopechne and Ted Kennedy out of my mind.

Headhunter by Timothy Findley--This book is set in near future Toronto, which is suffering from an epidemic of sturnusemia. Sturnusemia is thought to be caused by birds, and patrols roam the streets of Toronto killing all birds.
The action starts when a former librarian and current schizophrenic believes she has released Kurtz from page 92 of The Heart of Darkness, and that he will wreak havoc on Toronto if he is not contained. Fortunately, her new neighbor, Marlow, is a staff psychiatrist at an institute headed by Dr. Kurtz. The librarian "subtlely" begins to nudge Marlow to accomplish her goal.
All kinds of characters, mostly evil, are introduced, and it is difficult to tell who is sane and who is insane. This book is extremely entertaining, but is dark and serious at the same time.

A Box of Matches by Nicholson Baker--a middle-aged man with 2 kids, a wife and a pet duck, Greta, decides to get up a couple of hours earlier each morning, light a fire, and sit by the fire, drink his coffee and let his mind wander. This book is whimsical, and is about nothing and everything. A short and quiet read.

The Insulted and the Injured by Doestoevsky--the second of my intended year-long read of Doestoevesky. Next will be House of the Dead. I read Doestoevsky's better known works in high school and college. In doing this read I'm hoping to see what perspective reading his works in order lends, and also to add 40 years of life experience to my understanding of those works I have already read.

The Living End by Stanley Elkins--This is an amusing read, in which we follow the adventures of Ellerbee, a saintly man sent to Hell for keeping his liquor stores open on Sundays, and Ladlehaus, his murderer's accomplice. Quiz, another inhabitant of Hell, is loudly complaining that God unfairly smote him down for interrupting God's enjoyment of a children's musical recital. Jesus is finally able to persuade God to forgive Quiz, and let him into Heaven. Joseph has his doubts as to whether Jesus is the true Messiah, and Mary may be pregnant again. While these various threads are amusing, the book never forms a cohesive whole.

22Fullmoonblue
Mrz. 26, 2009, 7:32 pm

20 -- sounds interesting! I hadn't heard of this book, and I'm glad to know about it now.

23arubabookwoman
Apr. 2, 2009, 2:53 pm

I ended March with 2 short books by Paul Auster. I was intrigued by the alternate history aspect of Man in the Dark, his most recent work, in which several states secede from the union after the Supreme Court declared Bush the winner of the 2000 election. However the ending was abrupt, and I thought unsatisfactory.

Timbuktu is narrated by Mr. Bones, a homeless man's dog. I don't usually care for books in which animals are anthropomorphized, but this book is an exception. This was a very sensitive and touching book.

I also read an interesting Italian work, The Tartar Steppe by Dino Buzzati. I liked the feel of solitude, isolation, and vastness created by the author, which were positive rather than negative traits.

I am finishing up Confessions of a Thug by Philip Meadows Taylor, who was a police official in India in the mid-1800's. The "thugs" (this may be the source of the term?) were a type of highwaymen, murdering, terrorizing and looting. This particular thug murdered upward of 1000 victims, but the thugs have a complicated system of "ethics" governing who will be their victims, when and where they conduct their activities, etc. The book is based on true events experienced by Taylor and has been described as the first "true crime" novel. It is fascinating.

24Fullmoonblue
Apr. 3, 2009, 2:14 am

I've tried to read Auster before (Mr. Vertigo) and just couldn't get into it. But maybe I started with the wrong book. Your comments make me want to go find my copy of Timbuktu, which I picked up at the same time but then didn't give a chance... so thank you. :)

25timjones
Bearbeitet: Apr. 8, 2009, 8:53 am

#18: Re: "It does not give the reader as much information as possible as soon as possible"

I don't agree with "Give the reader as much information as possible as soon as possible" as a rule for a good book, or at least, not without strong qualifications. This rule leads straight to the dreaded "infodumps" which occur in all too many science fiction books - the scenes where two characters sit down in a bar, and one says to the other "As you know, Bob, we live on a planet orbiting a double star ..." And so on for the rest of the chapter.

As a reader, I prefer books that gradually fill in the background to the story. As a writer, the trick is to figure out how and when information needs to be fed into the story.

Kurt Vonnegut's other 'rules' look pretty sensible to me, though.

26arubabookwoman
Apr. 9, 2009, 2:48 pm

I agree that following that rule could lead to infodumps. I was reading the rule with emphasis on the "as possible" limitations. A good author would realize that an info dump is giving the reader more info than possible sooner than possible.

I thought Vonegut's rules were interesting, and I've seen a bit of discussion back and forth on them. In fact, as I recall his last rule was--ignore all the rules!

27Nickelini
Apr. 9, 2009, 3:57 pm

23 - The "thugs" (this may be the source of the term?) were a type of highwaymen, murdering, terrorizing and looting.
-------------------------

I love this sort of question, so I checked the OED. You are absolutely correct:

(With capital T.) One of an association of professional robbers and murderers in India, who strangled their victims; a p'hansigar. Also attrib.
Their methods were described already in Thevenot's Voyages, c 1665 (see Yule). They are mentioned under their more correct name of p'hansigars (phanseegurs), i.e. ‘stranglers’, by Forbes Orient. Mem. IV. 13 (1813), and as Thugs, Thags, or Thegs from 1810. Their suppression was rigidly prosecuted from 1831, and the system is now extinct.-------------

Sounds like a really interesting book!

28arubabookwoman
Bearbeitet: Mai 3, 2009, 9:16 pm

Thanks for checking the origin of Thugs, Nickelini! Now we know.

I finished Confessions of a Thug and recommend it to anyone who likes to read about India. It really was a fascinating book. Taylor wrote several other novels based on Indian history. One, Seeta, deals with the Indian Mutiny of 1857-8, and is said to be the only book by a 19th Century British author that is at all sympathetic to the mutineers. I may try to track this down for a future read, though I don't know how accessible it is.

I had set aside a number of books for the Reading Globally Slavery Theme: Property by Valerie Martin, The Known World by Edward Jones, Cloudsplitter by Russell Banks, Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather, Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty, and The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Chesnutt

I only got to read Sapphira and the Slave Girl, The Marrow of Tradition and Property. A common theme in these three novels is the prevalence of "parallel" families: the white male slave owner who fathers children by a female slaves.

In Sapphira, the wife unjustly suspects that her husband is paying too much attention to Nancy, her young slave, and so seeks to destroy Nancy's life by forcing her nephew's sexual attentions on Nancy. Cather writes poignantly of the hopeless predicament of female slaves such as Nancy.

In Marrow, a young white woman cannot accept that her deceased father had married a former slave, and that she has a half-sister from that marriage. The events in the novel take place before and during the Wilmington race riots of 1898. Some of Chesnutt's relatives lived through these events, and he wrote the novel shortly after visiting them. In his introduction to the book, Eric Sundquist states that there is "no better anatomy of the racial politics of the nation in the aftermath of Reconstruction and its descent into harsh segregation."

I would also like to read Chesnutt's collection of stories, The Conjure Woman.

For personal reasons, Property was a very difficult book for me to read. My mother's family has deep roots in Louisiana, and her direct ancestors were slave-owning plantation owners in West Feliciana Parish near St. Francisville, which is the setting of this book. One of Martin's source reference books was the diary of Bennett Barrow, who is my great, great, great +/- grandfather, in which he describes his brutal treatment of his slaves. The diary, and Property were blood-chilling reads for me. Of the three slavery books I read, I think Property best conveyed the obscenity of slavery.

I spent about 2 1/2 weeks reading The Sleepwalkers by Hermann Broch. I know it is supposed to be a "Great Book," but either I didn't put enough effort into reading it, or my brain is not smart enought to absorb it, with the result that I won't be reading any more Hermann Broch any time soon.

I finished The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin's Russia by Orlando Figes. It is an amazing book and I will post about it soon.

I intend to read some lighter books in May, starting with Pnin by Nabokov and Naoko by Keigo Higashino. I'll probably also read some Katherine Mansfield for Monthly Author read, and I have two Polish books set aside for Reading Globally, Street of Crocodiles by Bruno Schulz and Lucifer Unemployed by Aleksander Wat.

29arubabookwoman
Mai 6, 2009, 3:19 pm

Review of The Whisperers by Orlando Figes (2007)

During Stalin's reign of terror 25 million people were either shot by execution squads, were gulag prisoners, were kulaks sent to special settlements, or were slave laborers. These "repressed" constituted about 1/8 of the total population, and the figure does not include those who died of famine or war-related causes. In addition, there were further tens of millions, the relatives, whose lives were damaged with profound social consequences which are still felt today.

This amazing book concerns itself only minimally with statistics. Based on thousands of interviews, documents, letters, diaries and photos, it is a book of people and their experiences. We are immersed in the lives of several multi-generational families, from the earliest years of the 20th century to date. We also hear, in their own words, the stories of dozens of others who relate their experiences during Stalin's reign.

No one was safe from condemnation, and no one knew who to trust. Said one man, "After long acquaintance with his role, man grows into it so closely that he can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in Party Slogans."

Many people were convicted for crimes such as simply being "the daughter of an enemy of the people." Appealing a conviction was futile--as one former prisoner said, "There is nothing more to be said about my case. There is no case, only a soap bubble in the shape of an elephant. I cannot refute what is not, was not or could never have been."

Wives of some of the more privileged convicted were sent to Amolinsk Labor Camp for the Wives of Traitors to the Motherland. The camp was opened in 1938 and by 1941 had 10,000 inmates. It was considered a relatively "good" camp, but rations were given in accordance with meeting work quotas, and failure to meet a work quota for more than 10 consecutive days meant transfered to the "death barracks."

I was particularly moved by the plight of the children. Most labor camps that had female prisoners also had children's compounds. The children's compound at Armolinsk had 400 children under the age of 4 in 1941, almost all conceived in camp. One mother who endured the death of her 18 month old daughter in the compound described the treatment of the children thusly:

"I saw the nurses getting the children up in the mornings. They would force them out of their cold beds with shoves and kicks....Pushing the children with their fists and swearing at them roughly, they took off their night clothes and washed them in ice-cold water. The babies didn't even dare to cry. They made little sniffing noise like old men and let out hoots. This awful hooting noise would come from the cots for days at a time. Children already old enough to be sitting up or crawling would lie on their backs, their knees pressed to their stomachs, making these strange noises, like the muffled cooing of pigeons."

Describing one nurse responsible for feeding 17 infants she said,

"The nurse brought a steaming bowl of porridge from the kitchen, and portioned it out into the separate dishes. She grabbed the nearest baby, forced its arms back, tied them in place, and began cramming spoonful after spoonful of hot porridge down its throat, not leaving it enough time to swallowing, exactly as if she were feeding a turkey chick."

The parents of older children often coached their children on ways and means to avoid being sent to an orphanage in the event that they, the parents, were arrested. These older children could try to fend for themselves, with help from friends or teachers. Younger children were not so lucky, and even older children usually ended up in an orphanage, since it was a crime to harbor the child of an enemy of the people, and relatives and friends were reluctant to help them.

Very little communication was allowed between exiled parent and child. When and if released, the parents were often unable to locate the children they lost when they were seized. Those who found each other, discovered they were strangers and found it difficult to establish familial relationships again. Not only were parents broken, but children were irreparably scarred.

The effects of Stalin's reign of terror are with the Soviet people today: "It is not only Stalin that you cannot forgive, but you yourself. It is not that you did something bad--maybe you did nothing wrong, at least on the face of it--but that you became accustomed to evil."

This book is one of my favorite reads of the year. I could not put it down. Many of the experiences sound unbelievable, yet are confirmed time and again by others. In his afterword, Figes stated that upon beginning this project, he was concerned that older people might be reluctant to share their experiences for fear that harsh authoritarian rule might return. He found that in the early 1990's when there was an outpouring of memoirs about the Stalinist repressions, people shared the facts of the repression--the details of their arrest and imprisonment. His goal was to illuminate the damage to their inner lives, "the painful memories of personal betrayal and lost relationships that shaped their history." In this he succeeded admirably.

I read One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch and The Gulag Archipelago in the 1970's and will have to revisit them. I don't remember being as overwhelmed with the events described as I was with The Whisperers. Perhaps that is because these earlier books may have focused on the details and facts relating to the arrests and imprisonments, rather than to the effects of these experiences on the psyche of the people, both the betrayers and those betrayed.

30pamelad
Mai 6, 2009, 5:37 pm

Aruba, there is a wonderful Russian film about Stalin's purges, Burnt by the Sun. Have you seen it?

Adding The Whisperers to my wishlist.

31rebeccanyc
Mai 6, 2009, 7:35 pm

The Case of Comrade Tulayev by Victor Serge gives deep fictional insight into the Stalin era, by a man who was an anti-Stalin revolutionary.

32dchaikin
Mai 7, 2009, 8:50 am

#29 - Wow.

33kidzdoc
Mai 7, 2009, 9:04 am

#29: That is an amazing review, arubabookwoman. Thank you.

34nobooksnolife
Mai 7, 2009, 10:47 am

Thanks for sharing your comments in #29; very useful!

35fannyprice
Mai 7, 2009, 10:52 pm

>29 arubabookwoman:, aruba, The Whisperers sounds really excellent. I especially like the quote you mentioned "After long acquaintance with his role, man grows into it so closely that he can no longer differentiate his true self from the self he simulates, so that even the most intimate of individuals speak to each other in Party Slogans." I have always found it interesting how the most brutalizing totalitarian regimes are those that make their citizens police each other and reinforce the very system that they hate. This sounds like a must read.

36chrine
Mai 7, 2009, 11:57 pm

Hola aruba

As someone who is very rarely a reader of non-fiction, your review of The Whisperers made the book sound interesting indeed. Great review.

37avaland
Mai 9, 2009, 9:05 am

>30 pamelad: Can vouch also for the movie Pamelad mentions. Very powerful film and a darling, talented little girl actress!

38arubabookwoman
Bearbeitet: Mai 24, 2009, 7:59 pm

Have been ignoring this thread for a while so time to jump back in. Pamelad and avaland, I'll be checking Netflix for that movie--it sounds great. Rebecca--thanks for the recommendation of the book. It's going on my tbr pile. Thanks to everyone else for commenting.

I decided on some lighter reads for a while, and my next reads were two popular "books about books," The Uncommon Reader by Alan Bennett and The Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby. Of the two, I liked "the Spree" better, for Hornby's acerbic wit in poking fun at certain smug intellectuals, and for his eclectic reading choices.

My next read was The Chameleon's Shadow by Minette Walters, a British crime writer whose novels I usually enjoy. This one had too many unrealistic characters, and unbelievable coincidences.

My Revolutions by Hari Kunzru disappointed me. Rather than focusing on the present, and what happened after the former revolutionary is confronted by his past, the book primarily narrates his development as a revolutionary. (And his reasons primarily seem to be that he liked a girl who was heavily into the movement, and he didn't like his father).

39arubabookwoman
Mai 24, 2009, 8:17 pm

(LT wouldn't let me type anything more in the message above and I didn't want to lose it so I submitted it) Continuing with my comments re My Revolutions:

The discussions and bickering among the cell members were repetitive and boring, and it was hard to believe that he got as deep into the revolutionary movement as he did.

I enjoyed Pnin by Nabokov very much. While Timofey Pnin bears some similarity to Charles Kinbote of Pale Fire, Pnin is such an endearing and sympathetic character we wish him so much better fortune than he is unfortunately dealt.

I also enjoyed The Wilderness by Samantha Harvey, one of the candidates for the upcoming Orange Prize. Jacob, a 60-ish architect, has just been diagnosed with Alzheimers, and we spend the next four years with him as his cognitive abilities decline. As he visits and revisits the major episodes of his life, we share his bewilderment as to what is real and what is not: does he or does he not have a daughter?; what is the significance of "the missing 'e'"?; what were the shots ringing out over the moors?; who is the strange woman who has moved in with him and is always telling him what to do? It is a beautifully written book.

My one quibble with it was that, based on my personal experiences with a husband who is an architect, the depiction of Jacob's professional life as an architect did not feel real. That was easy to overlook, however, in an otherwise fine book.

40arubabookwoman
Mai 29, 2009, 5:23 pm

Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey of Humankind by Randall White (2002)

A group of 4 artist friends and I have decided to study art history together, roughly following Sister Wendy's History of Painting. We are meeting each week, and each of us is pursuing independent reading and studies relating to the topic we are on which we discuss. Our first five meetings have been on Paleolithic Art, which is covered in the first two pages of Sister Wendy's book.

Along with other readings, I read Prehistoric Art: The Symbolic Journey of Humankind as part of my study. As the book states in an early chapter, "The study of prehistoric representation has been (and continues to be) a strange and eclectic enterprise. In part because it is international and cross-disciplinary in scope, it is composed of researchers trained in domains as diverse as the Catholic priesthood, art history, art, anthropology, geology, psychology and archaeology....In addition, it is a field that has been heavily influenced by the work of passionate amateurs with little or no relevant training. Nonetheless, the major intellectual contexts in which prehistoric representations are discussed are art history, anthropological archaeology, and the art world."

In these varied contexts, this book covers the Paleolitic period--roughly from 300,000 years ago to 20,000 years ago. It has a great selection of illustrations, and is beautifully photographed. The bulk of the book is focused on European prehistoric art, although there are chapters on the prehistoric art of Africa, the Americas, Asia and Australia, as well.

I learned a great deal from the book's detailed discussions and illustrations of the cave paintings, but I was particularly interested in the "Venus" figures found at Kosienko and other areas of Eastern Europe. As a textile artist, I was fascinated by the graves in which 13,000 ivory beads were arranged around the bodies of a man and two children. The beads were thought to have possibly been attached to clothing. Experimentation revealed that each ivory bead took 1 1/2 hours to create!

We're starting the Neolithic period now, and I've ordered from the library some books on the discoveries at Catalhoyuk in Turkey, as well as some books on Mesopotanian art. The Neolithic is also the period during which many of the European stone megaliths, such as Stonehenge were created. Since we each choose different books and different aspects to focus on, it looks like we will have an interesting study segment. (This is still the first two pages of the Sister Wendy book). We joke that we'll be in our 90's before we get to Matisse.

41dchaikin
Jun. 1, 2009, 9:23 pm

aruba, that sounds like an amazing reading group theme, regardless of how far along you get.

42avaland
Jun. 2, 2009, 8:03 am

>38 arubabookwoman: I liked the Hornby book particularly because he would list books bought and books read...

The Wilderness sounds intriguing, but perhaps a little too close to home for me to read now. I have made careful observations of my mother's decline over the last eight years or so and I have often tried imagine what she was going through (that may be the reader in me!). It is a sad process.

43arubabookwoman
Jun. 30, 2009, 5:03 pm

I've been spending the afternoon catching up on reading threads, and I've added several new books to my TBR list. Now, I'm not sure how many reviews of the books I've read in June I will get to, but over the next few days, I hope to cover them all.

--Dan--We are having a great time with art history, and I am learning so much. This month I read most of The Leopard's Tale: Revealing the Mysteries of Catalhoyuk by Ian Hodder. This was a fascinating, although somewhat pedantic, book, although its focus was primarily archealogical. This week we have finally moved beyond prehistoric art into the art of Mesopotamia, and I am reading a beautiful book, Art of the First Cities: The Third Millenium B.C. from the Mediterranean to the Indus edited by Joan Aruz.

avaland--one thing that is so sad about Alzheimers is the fact that at least in the beginning stages one is fully aware of what is happening, but is helpless to stop the process. I thought The Wilderness was an excellent portrayal of this aspect of the disease, and it seemed to be a very real depiction of the process of the disease from an ''insider's" viewpoint.

45arubabookwoman
Jun. 30, 2009, 5:14 pm

Atmospheric Disturbances by Rivka Galchen

Leo is a psychiatrist who decides that the woman who has come home one evening is not his wife, even though she looks exactly like his wife, speaks exactly like his wife, and knows everything his wife knows. Leo decides to investigate the disappearance of his wife, and enlists the assistance of Harvey, one of his psychiatric patients who believes himself to be a secret agent whose sole purpose is to control the weather.

While its premise holds a great deal of promise, this book does not live up to its potential. The characters are endearing; however, the plot is inconsistent and none of it made any sense internally. It simply did not feel real, and I never found any of the situations in which the characters found themselves to be particularly humorous.

46arubabookwoman
Jun. 30, 2009, 5:21 pm

Evening is the Whole Day by Preeta Samarasan

This novel begins and ends with the departure of Chellam, the doomed and disgraced servant girl of the wealthy Rajasekharan family of Ipoh, Malaysia. This sad, beautiful and hopeful story can be characterized by Tolstoy's line that every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. The flawed but sympathetic characters are beautifully drawn and there is sufficient humor and whimsy to prevent the novel from becoming a tear-jerker. Aasha, the bewildered and lonely 6 year old daughter, whose only companions are ghosts that only she can see, is particularly poignant. I highly recommend this book.

47arubabookwoman
Jun. 30, 2009, 5:38 pm

Shyness and Dignity by Dag Solstad

Elias Rukla has taught Norwegian literature to secondary school students for more than 25 years. One day while teaching The Wild Duck, (which he recognizes his students are 'not in a position to understand"), he has an epiphany. Later that day, he breaks down in a public fit of rage, and realizes his life has been irrevocably changed.

He spends the rest of the day wandering the city and meditating on his life in an attempt to understand how he has come to feel so detached and alone. At one point, he imagines auditioning for a part as a fictional character in a novel by one of the great authors of the early twentieth century, and being rejected.

"Only Thomas Mann would take the poor candidate aspiring to be a fictional character seriously. He would have looked at Elias Rukla and asked if he could, in a few words, say why he was of the opinion that precisely his fate was suitable as fictional material, either in the capacity of a central character or a minor figure."

After hearing Elias's account of his life, he imagines Thomas Mann "giving him a reserved but friendly look, and saying, Well, I can't promise you anything, as there is no way I can fit you and your life into any present plans, as far as I can see....This should be enough to keep you from being discouraged and make you continue your life as before even if should not be granted the privilege of entering one of my novels, as a character."

Elias is an alienated, isolated soul, "a socially aware individual who no longer has anything to say," and who doesn't know what to do next.

Highly recommended if you are in the mood for this kind of angst.

48fannyprice
Jun. 30, 2009, 7:28 pm

>44 arubabookwoman:, Aruba, nice reading! Despite your review, I am still intrigued by Atmospheric Disturbances

49rebeccanyc
Jul. 1, 2009, 10:04 am

I agree more or less with you about Atmospheric Disturbances. I wanted to like it more than I did and I thought the author put more effort into being clever than into pulling the story and characters together. But I also thought I might have missed some of what she was trying to do.

50arubabookwoman
Jul. 15, 2009, 2:23 pm

Well, I have some time to enter comments on a few more of my June books. Maybe I will get to my July reads someday too.

#48 & 49--Atmospheric Disturbances got very good reviews, and I probably didn't get some of what she was trying to do either. By all means read it if it sounds intriguing.

Brain Surgeon by Keith Black and A Journey Round My Skull by Frigues Karinthy.

These books have similar topics--brain tumors--one from the point of view of the doctor, the other from the point of view of the patient. However, I can recommend only A Journey Round My Skull as a good read.

There is no doubt that Keith Black, the surgeon-author of Brain Surgeon is brilliant. He dissected frogs at the age of 7. During his 10th grade summer job in a research lab, he performed heart transplants on dogs. As a medical student he made important clinical discoveries. He is not a good writer, however, and the book reads like a Reader's Digest version of My Most Memorable Character--Myself.

The prose is wooden and the tone is incredibly smug. This is not to say that Dr. Black isn't justified in being proud of his accomplishments, and I certainly didn't wish any of his patients harm, but didn't he EVER make a wrong decision or mistake? However, if the events he describes are true, I might want him to my surgeon if I ever have a brain tumor--just hope he hasn't read this first.

A Journey Round My Skull describes Karinthy's diagnosis and treatment to remove a brain tumor. Strangely enough given the subject matter, it is a delightful read. Karinthy's sparkling personality and self-deprecating humor never desert him. He is a talented writer, and he never bores.

Poking a little fun at the world-reknowned surgeon who will operate on him, he says, "I found it a little humiliating that he was not interested in my own views about my condition. He probably regarded me as a layman who had no opinions on such matters, or perhaps, having heard that I was some kind of poet, he was on his guard against the vagaries of an overheated imagination."

He is also contemplative, as he comes to realize that as a writer, "for the first time in my life, I was to observe not for the sake of recording that personal vision which the artist calls 'truth'...but for the sake of reality, which remains reality even if we have no means of communicating its message. Never had I been so far from a lyrical state of mind as in this, the most subjective phase of my life."

51arubabookwoman
Jul. 15, 2009, 2:30 pm

Naoko by Keigo Higashino

Naoko and her young daughter Monami are involved in a horrible bus accident which kills Naoko. When she awakes from her coma, Monami believes she is Naoko, inhabiting Monami's body. Since she knows things only Naoko would know, Heisuke, her husband/father, accepts this apparent impossibility.

The author could have chosen to treat this story as a farce a la "Freaky Friday." Instead, the book explores the meaning of marriage and gender roles, as Monami decides she wants an entirely different life from that chosen by Naoko. Recommended.

52arubabookwoman
Jul. 15, 2009, 2:41 pm

Nixonland by Rick Perlstein

This book explores the turbulent 1960's and 1970's, as Nixon reinvented himself politically and became president. I had difficulty getting into the book, since one is bombarded by facts and events at a furious pace, in a style reminescent of the old Billy Joel song "We didn't start the fire." Once I got into the rhythm though, I couldn't put the book down.

Perlstein seems to have examined every nook and cranny of the era, which means that the book can only briefly mention many of the events and people of the time. However, the seminal events--the summer race riots, the Black Panthers, the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, the 1968 Democratic convention riots, the trial of the Chicago 7, Vietnam, Spiro Agnew and the "nattering nabobs of negativism," the dirty tricks and Watergate break-in of the 1972 campaign--are covered in detail.

Perlstein writes in an engaging, easy to read conversational style. I do fear, however, that unless you have a basic familiarity with the era (perhaps by having lived through it), parts of the book may be difficult to follow.

My one criticism of the book, and it is a major one, is that it ended abruptly with Nixon's victory in the 1972 election. I cannot imagine that a book whose purpose is to definitively explore the Nixon era would omit the Watergate hearings and Nixon's resignation in disgrace. Maybe a sequel?

53dchaikin
Jul. 15, 2009, 2:56 pm

abw - you have me excited about Nixonland allover again...it's sitting on my Kindle, patiently waiting...

Nice review. I'm slightly surprised to book focuses on Nixon, I was under the impression it's a book about the era. As for missing Watergate, I've always seen that as the start of a different era, so perhaps there is some sense to leave it off (or at least leave off it's exposure.)

54arubabookwoman
Jul. 15, 2009, 3:03 pm

Iphigenia:The Diary by Teresa de la Parra

When this book was first published in 1924, it "hit patriarchal society like a bomb thrown by a revolutionary." Maria Eugenia has lived most of her life with her father in liberated, Bohemian France. After his death, she must return to Venezuela, where she finds that her uncle has swindled her out of most of her inheritance, and she must live in seclusion with her grandmother and maiden aunt.

This beautifully written, insightful and amusing novel perfectly captures the voice and inner life of Maria Eugenia, from a self-assured, yet naive, teenager until several years later when she must decide whether to bow to the strictures of her grandmother's rigid societal rules.

Here is a sample of Maria Eugenia's voice as, near the beginning of the book, she justifies her deceptions against her grandmother:

"I note that it is truly stupendous how rapidly and deeply this habit of lying has taken root in me...I believe that in life lying plays a rather flexible and conciliatory role worthy of consideration. In contrast, truth, that victorious and shining antipode of the lie, in spite of its great splendor, in spite of its great beauty...is sometimes rather indiscreet and usually falls upon the person who ennunciates it like a dynamite blast. Unquestionably it is also something of a wet blanket, and I consider it, on occasion, as the mother of pessimism and inaction, while the lie, the humble denigrated lie despite its universally wretched reputation, on the contrary often gives wings to the spirit and lifting of the soul above the arid wasteland of reality..., and when we live under oppression then it smiles at us sweetly, presenting us with shiny sparks of independence. Yes the lie stretches a protective wing over the oppressed, it discreetly reconciles despotism with liberty, and if I were an artist, I would already have symbolized it...in the figure of a snowy white dove, wings stretched in flight as a sign of independence and displaying an olive branch in its beak."

While its theme of the oppression of women could have resulted in a heavy-handed, humorless novel, this is a witty, delightful read.

55arubabookwoman
Jul. 15, 2009, 3:10 pm

Dan--Nixonland focuses on the era, not the person. It uses Nixon's psyche as a metaphor for the times. (Not in an overblown way). Unlike you, I think the Nixon era ended with his resignation, not his reelection.

It is a fascinating book--I was amazed at how much I had forgotten. I hope you get to it sooner rather than later!

56dchaikin
Jul. 15, 2009, 10:00 pm

I will get there, just a few hundred others first...

57fannyprice
Jul. 17, 2009, 1:53 pm

>51 arubabookwoman:, aruba, Naoko sounds fascinating. Another one for the TBR pile.

58urania1
Jul. 19, 2009, 11:28 am

I just added Iphigenia: A Diary to my wishlist.

59arubabookwoman
Aug. 9, 2009, 9:04 pm

fanny and urania--I'll be interested to hear what you think of those two books when you get to them.

I'm many books behind in recording, but first here are two about New Orleans and Katrina:

City of Refuge by Tom Piazza is a novel following two New Orleans families affected by Hurricane Katrina. I have been waiting for a novel that explores the psychic trauma Katrina and its aftermath inflicted on New Orleanians. Unfortunately, this is not that novel.

One of the families is headed by S.J. Williams, a widower and a leading figure in the Ninth Ward. He is responsible for his sister Lucy, an alcoholic and sometime crack addict, and her teenage son Wesley, who is flirting with membership in a gang.

The other family consists of a young couple and their two small children. They moved to New Orleans from the North, because of their love for the city, its music, food, and charm. The husband Craig loves the lifestyle, his wife not so much--she is concerned about schools for the kids, and crime, rather than parades or the music clubs.

The writing is amateurish, particularly in Craig's portion of the story. The author attempts to convey the spirit of New Orleans merely by Craig reciting long lists of the names of the people, places and events he loves. These names will be meaningless to many people, and even if you are familiar with New Orleans, (I am a former 18 year resident of the city), the lists are rather boring. They certainly do not convey a sense of why Craig loves New Orleans so much that he would be willing to risk losing his family for the sake of staying in New Orleans after Katrina.

While it is easier to understand the spell New Orleans has over the Williams family--they have been there for generations--the Williams family members sometimes come across as stereotypes, to the detriment of their development as individual characters.

Overall, this was a very disappointing read.

Nine Lives: Death and Life in New Orleans by Dan Baum does what City of Refuge did not do--it conveys what life was like in New Orleans pre-Katrina--how varied and unique it was, and why so many people will live no where else in the world, despite all New Oreleans' problems. For this, I highly recommend it.

Nine Lives tells the story of nine New Orleanians from the time of Hurricane Betsy in 1965 (which also flooded the Ninth Ward) until after Katrina. We hear in their own words the lives of a former King of Rex, a streetcar repairman, a transvestite bar owner, the wife of the most famous Mardi Gras Indian, the New Orleans coroner, the leader of one of New Orleans' most famous high school marching bands, a New Orleans cop, and a New Orleans criminal.

I found the sections about Frank Minyard, New Orleans coroner, particularly enlightening. For example, he describes the days waiting for the bodies of the victims to arrive, as first the 82nd Air Borne, then the National Guard, then the State Patrol, are each in turn denied permission to retrieve bodies. When a representative of Kenyon, a subsidiary of the largest funeral home operator in the U.S. shows up to begin retrieval, Frank says, "Let me see if I've got this straight. Dead people rot on the streets of New Orleans so the Feds can sign a private contract."

This book is skillfully written--no long lists here. While each of the individuals fully discusses the Katrina experience, there is so much more to this book. If you want to understand "why New Orleans matters" (ironically this is the title of a nonfiction work by Tom Piazza, the author of the previous book I described), read this book.

After reading the descriptions in Nine Lives of the St. Charles Avenue mansion that was the home of the former King of Rex, I pulled The Majesty of St. Charles by Kerri McCaffety of the shelves. I had bought this book several years ago when I returned to New Orleans for a brief visit, but had not yet read it. It's eye candy for aristocracy wannabes. Interesting to see how the other half lives.

60janemarieprice
Aug. 11, 2009, 10:48 am

59 - Thanks for those. I read City of Refuge last year. We went to a reading with Piazza. He had some interesting things to say about the book – particularly that he wasn’t planning on writing another book about New Orleans, but the story was stuck in his head and he felt the need to get it out. I felt the same way for a long time. I found all of my projects for school (architecture) kept relating back to things about Louisiana. It wasn’t necessarily helpful and often didn’t turn out well, but I had to get it out of my head because it was making me crazy. I could really see that struggle in this book.

I am glad to see how much you liked Nine Lives. I have heard a lot of good things about it and it is high on my wishlist. I am starting Why New Orleans Matters soon and have Breach of Faith waiting in the wings. I hope to do a long Louisiana jag of reading this summer/fall. I hope to get your thoughts on some of it.

61amandameale
Aug. 12, 2009, 9:00 am

Wow! You have some very interesting books here. Have taken notes. Thanks!!

62arubabookwoman
Sept. 29, 2009, 6:09 pm

Well another 6 weeks or so has slipped by and I have tons of books to describe. I probably won't get to them all, but I'll try to highlight some of my readings.

First, I read a few more books about New Orleans/Katrina. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers came highly recommended from kidzdoc, and this true story of the experiences of an Arab-American family in Katrina and its aftermath certainly lives up to all the rave reviews it has received.

As Katrina approached New Orleans, Kathy Zeitoun and the Zeitoun children evacuated the city. Abdulrahman stayed behind to protect their home, their rental properties, and their contracting business. Abdulrahman came through the hurricane relatively unscathed, but the levee breaks put his house underwater. For the next several days, he spent his time helping with rescue work, and camping out at night on his roof. He kept in touch with Kathy every day.

Abruptly the lines of communication are broken and neither Kathy or Abdulrahman's brothers and sisters hear from him. As the days pass, Kathy, watching media reports of lawlessness and seeing dead bodies in the streets of New Orleans, comes to believe that he is dead. Abdulrahman has in fact experienced a kind of death--because he was Arab and because he was "suspiciously" paddling around New Orleans, he was seized by Homeland Security, and caged in a Guantanamo-type facility set up at the New Orleans train station. He was treated brutally, and was allowed no phone calls or any communication with the outside world.

These two aspects of the book--the failure of the government's rescue attempts, and the lawlessness of the government's treatment of suspected terrorists--mesh surprisingly well. Zeitoun is a compelling read--I read it in one sitting.

I also read The Good Pirates of the Forgotten Bayous by Ken Wells. The people of St. Bernard Parish, which adjoins Orleans Parish, suffered as much from the levee breaks as the 9th Ward, but also bore the brunt of the storm itself since it was closer to the eye. This is the most riveting account of what it was like to actually experience the storm that I have read. One man survives after he was washed out of his attic window by hanging from a tree branch while 12 foot flood waters rushed by his body. A woman rode out the storm with her invalid father in her car, which she parked on top of one of the levees that did not break after an unsuccessful attempt to outrun the flood waters. Several shrimpers stayed aboard their shrimp boats during the storm. The personal stories of these and other survivors are unforgettable. The last third of the book, describing the author's followup with the survivors over the several months after the storm, fizzle out.

63arubabookwoman
Sept. 29, 2009, 6:41 pm

Enough New Orleans for a while. I also read several ER books:

The Unit (wrong touchstone) by Nini Holmqvist is set in the near future in a society where "dispensables" (women over 50 and men over 60) are moved to seemingly idyllic communities where all their needs and desires are taken care of. The catch: they must serve as guinea pigs for medical research studies and as a source of organs for transplant to persons who are "indispensable."

The focus of the book is on the relationships the dispensables form among themselves as they await their "final" donation, and the psychological effects caused by living under such circumstances. While the book does not explicitly explore the moral issues raised, the characters are painfully real, even as the situations they face are unreal. Recommended.

A Lucky Child: A Memoir of Surviving Auschwitz as a Young Boy by Thomas Buergenthal

Although originally written in English, this book was published in several other countries before a UK or US publisher would issue it in English, the thought being that there are already "enough" Holocaust survivor stories. Buergenthal, the representative of the US on the World Court, feels that to speak in terms of numbers is to dehumanize the victims and to trivialize the tragedy. Each Holocaust survivor has a personal story to tell, and each one must be heard.

Buergenthal wrote his story more than 50 years after the events he endured as a child. However, he is still able to capture his experiences through the eyes of a child. He was only 4 when Hitler invaded Poland and just 10 when he was rescued, barely alive, from a concentration camp. He was often the youngest prisoner in each camp to which he was transported. His mother attributed his survival to luck. His story, however, shows that his survival was due to more than luck: the quick thinking of his parents, the compassion of strangers, and the support of friends all played a major role. Highly recommended.

Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon

The first sentence of this book: "'We are on our way to the hospital,' Ryan's father says. 'Listen to me son: You are not going to bleed to death.'"

We abruptly leave Ryan to be introduced to Lucy, who slips out of town in the middle of the night a couple of days after her graduation from high school, with George her former history teacher, as they arrive at the deserted Lighthouse Motel in the middle of the Great Plains.

Cut to Mike, nearing the Arctic Circle on his so far futile search for his schizophrenic (or not) brother.

Now, could you stop reading after this beginning? I couldn't. This book is highly readable, its characters are beautifully depicted, and the plot is compelling. The three story lines inexorably converge, as the novel explores the themes of identity and what is real and what is imaginary. Highly recommended

64arubabookwoman
Sept. 29, 2009, 6:57 pm

And some Japanese literature:

No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai

I'd read good things about Dazai's The Setting Sun, a novel of post World War II Japan, so when I came across this I grabbed it. It is the story of a young man from a well-to-do family who squanders his life, and along the way destroys the lives of those who care for him. Throughout it all, he is intellectually aware of what he is doing, and perhaps why, but he disqualifies himself from being human. He is amoral, cold, unfeeling and very difficult to empathize with. Yet Dazai skillfully conveys his pain. Dazai's writing style is precise and spare. I found the book to be similar to Soseki's Kokoro. Recommended.

The Sea and Poison by Shusaku Endo

This book focuses on two medical interns and a nurse who participated in brutal and murderous medical experimentation using American POWs as the subjects during World War II. Their life stories are presented and help us understand--to the extent possible--what in their psyches allowed them to participate. We also learn their post-war fate.

Endo writes in declarative, understated prose. The despair of the characters as they recognize the horror of their crimes is brilliantly conveyed. Highly recommended.

More to come soon.

65RidgewayGirl
Sept. 29, 2009, 8:25 pm

The first sentence of Await Your Reply was enough to send me scurrying to add it to my wishlist!

66urania1
Sept. 29, 2009, 9:36 pm

Oh why isn't The Sea and Poison on Kindle?

67solla
Sept. 29, 2009, 9:44 pm

Wow, you have done a really good job of making me want to read several more books. Thanks for such vivid descriptions.

68charbutton
Sept. 30, 2009, 2:52 am

Thanks for the great reviews - Zeitoun and Await Your Reply have been added to my wishlist.