Stieg Larsson: "The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo" ("Men Who Hate Women"); Małgorzata Kalicińska: "Miłość nad rozlewiskiem"

Since I caught a cold, I had to spend some time in bed - with a book, of course - hence the unplanned entry devoted to the books which I indulged in reading precisely because I was ill.

Stieg Larsson's thriller The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (the title of the Polish edition translates into Men who Hate Women) is the first book out of his three-volume series titled Millenium. So much has been written about this crime story, which appeared on the Polish book market a few months ago, that there is no need to advertise it any more. The novels have gained huge popularity in Sweden, and the fact was confirmed by the two awards granted to them by the Swedish Academy for Detective Novels. Unfortunately, Stieg Larsson himself died before the publication of his books and could not relish in the success.

Since the novel is an extremely involving crime story, it would be a mistake to summarize the plot, so the following will serve as a sort of introduction encouraging prospective readers to reach for the book immediately: Forty years ago, Harriet Vanger disappeared off the secluded island owned and inhabited by the powerful Vanger family. There was no corpse, no witnesses, no evidence. But her uncle, Henrik, is convinced that she was murdered by someone from her own deeply dysfunctional Vanger clan. Disgraced journalist Mikael Blomqvist is hired to investigate. A great read! Make sure you have plenty of time when you decide to start reading it because putting away the book (630 pages long) before one gets to the end seems impossible!

A third trip to the familiar magical world of Małgorzata Kalicińska's series was an indulgence which I needed badly as a convalescent;). Just like in the case of Larsson's novel, recommending this book seems redundant since Kalicińska's trilogy has recently been very popular in Poland. I bought the book as a Christmas gift for my sister, but I couldn't help reading it before it landed under the Christmas tree;) And, as always happens with her works, I found Kalicińska's story set in the rustic Mazurian Lake District so absorbing that tearing myself away from the book was almost painful. (Those who have read the first two books in the series probably know what I mean.) The third novel is not different: ok, maybe the author's style is sometimes irritating, maybe her rendition of the few erotic scenes deserves to be called pathetic (as if sex was an embarrassing addition to a fifty-year-old woman's life) but the charm of the country life of the extended family created by her is irresistible. Escapist fiction? - yes, and heartily recommended.

Gloria Naylor: "The Women of Brewster Place"; Christina Garcia: "Dreaming in Cuban"; Aminatta Forna: "Ancestor Stones"

Since I seem to be a better reader than blog writer, I sometimes have to squeeze a few reviews into one - to make sure I don't omit any of the books and keep a truthful record of my reading experiences. The sequence of the novels in this "three-in-one" entry is both chronological - as it reflects the order in which I read them - and subjective: the order turns out to reflect my ranking of those works. Accidentally, despite evident uniqueness and originality, the three novels seem to have quite a lot in common. So, with Christmas shopping deals so overwhelming, this entry may be taken for a "mega pack" bargain;)

Gloria Naylor's 1982 debut brought to this African American writer recognition from both literary critics (the National Book Award) and the general public (the 1989 TV series produced by Oprah Winfrey, who also played the leading role in it). This beautifully written lyrical novel consists of seven stories of seven women living in a rather impoverished neighborhood, all sharing in the experience of - what is suggested by Langston Hughes's poem serving as the book's credo - a dream deferred. So, the very opening of the novel implies that its protagonists are - to put it bluntly - losers. Why else would they be living in such a God-forsaken street as Brewster Place? However, it seems that the place itself has its effect on the people. The lyrical opening of the book presents Brewster Place as follows: Brewster Place was the bastard child of several clandestine meetings between the alderman of the sixth district and the managing director of Unico Realty Company...The gray bricks of the buildings were the color of dull silver during Brewster Place's youth. Although the street wasn't paved - after a heavy rain it was necessary to wade in ankle-deep to get home - there was a sense of promise in the street and in the times. However, the development of the city and the growing traffic required that some auxiliary streets be walled off. Since there was no one to fight for Brewster Place, the authorities decided to make Brewster Place a dead-end street. And so, the narrator continues, Brewster Place became especially fond of its colored daughters as they milled like determined spirits among its decay, trying to make it a home.

Naylor presents a range of female figures who, were it not for her wonderful skill of shaping round characters with only a few strokes of the pen, would fall into very stereotypical categories which are often - and unjustly - applied as labels to economically disadvantaged African American women: there is a friendly "community mama", Mattie Michael, who sacrificed all her life and money for her prodigal son; there is Mattie's friend, Etta May Johnson, who seeks love and a reliable partner but gets only deceived by men taking advantage of her affectionate nature and turning her into a slut ("bitch" would probably be a term used more often for Black women); there is also Lucielia, who for the love of her unfaithful man resorts to getting an abortion and, ultimately, loses her only daughter; there is also her opposite, Cora Lee, who loves her children only when they are little babies so has a new one every year or so with anonymous men coming to her bed at night like shadows; finally, there are "the two" - a lesbian couple who have moved in Brewster Place to flee from persecution but find intolerance and death instead. There is also Kiswana Browne, an idealistic young activist, who has moved into this neighborhood to help build a community here and work for the upgrading of the living conditions in the area. This turns out to be a dream, as beautiful as it is unrealistic: though the final chapter, titled "The Block Party", contains a scene of the women working together to chip away at the imprisoning wall, it is only someone's dream, and the reader is well aware of it.

Despite the fact that the novel is so very sad and disappointingly short, it deserves to be called a marvel, not only for what it contains but also for what it avoids delving in: the characters of the men who are so intricately connected with the women's lives, although so very few of them are visibly present in the novel.

Cristina Garcia with her 1992 novel Dreaming in Cuban is said to be a pioneer of Cuban-American writing in English, she is therefore thought to represent ethnic or, more precisely, Latina writing. Born in Havana in 1958, she immigrated with her parents to the U.S. in 1960 to avoid the results of the Cuban revolution under Castro's leadership. As the title suggests, the novel is about dreamers, mainly women, although men are also present in it: El Lider himself, who triggered the Revolution and whose ideas are indiscriminately embraced by the oldest woman, Celia del Pino; "Querido" (beloved) Gustavo - the absent one time lover and mute addressee of Celia's letters; Jorge del Pino - Celia's husband, mostly absent in flashback passages because he is away on business, present only as a ghost in the contemporary narrative of his daughter, whom he accompanies and advises as a guardian angel; Ivanito - Celia's grandson, who finally decides to emigrate to America; occasionally present are also Celia's two sons-in-law.

Garcia herself characterized her highly autobiographical writing as follows: For me, each book further embroiders the themes and obsessions that drove me to write in the first place. The characters may be different, the settings and times and particulars may vary wildly but the bigger questions of where do we belong and how do we negotiate our identities between and among cultures is what keeps me going. Therefore Cuba features prominently in the novel - as acknowledged by the writer and the title - as a dream home (still under construction;) for Celia, who watches the sea for signs of invader ships; as a hated and therefore forsaken home for Celia's daughter Lourdes, who in search of a new American home travels north to the region in which it gets cold enough for her to settle down; and, finally, as a lost home for Lourdes's daughter Pilar, who yearns for her grandma and Cuba but, after a short visit there, comes back to New York because she is American after all.

However, one could easily call this novel "matrifocal" (I heard this -awful?- term applied to a novel by an African American writer for a bit different reason than the one I'm suggesting here) because it seems to also concentrate on motherhood, and it is, well, motherhood gone awry. Celia, who is still in love with the Spanish officer, marries Jorge, who leaves her at home with his mother while making his long business trips. No wonder she hates it: the mother-in-law is awful to her. When she gets pregnant, she promises herself she will leave the child with the family and run away if it is a son. But it's a daughter, so she stays. Why? To nurture or rather to torture the baby, whom she is holding by the leg saying she does not want to remember her name when she shows her to the father for the first time? No wonder Lourdes develops a very close relationship with the father and only reluctantly comes back to Cuba to visit her mother on deathbed. And no wonder Jorge temporarily places Celia in an asylum. Celia loves her second daughter, whom she names after her friend from the asylum - Felicia, quite ironically. Felicia herself is a bad mother: neglecting the daughters but suffocating her son with affection which she pours on him because she has too much of it, all redundant after her husband has left her. Finally, following her namesake, Felicia goes mad. It seems that deprived of mother's affection, Lourdes cannot communicate with her daughter Pilar, who, turning her life into a rebellion against her mother, abuses her mother's trust and paints a punk version of the Statue of Liberty on the front wall of her bakery. Pilar also feels a strong bond with her grandmother and idealizes Cuba, as if in spite of her mother.

Strange as it may seem, this picture of motherhood presented by the so called ethnic writer is not such a far cry from the commonplace vision of a mother-daughter conflict. However, despite this somewhat critical opinion of its handling of the topic of motherhood, I must admit that reading Garcia's novel was time well spent, as the book is original and beautiful in many other aspects;)

Finally, Aminatta Forna's 2006 novel Ancestor Stones takes its readers to an unnamed country in Africa (the writer lives in London and Sierra Leone, so the latter becomes a natural candidate here) together with its narrator who, having received a letter from her cousin in Africa, goes there to claim her heritage - a coffee plantation. This trip becomes an occasion for the narrator to give voice to her numerous aunts, whose stories told in the first person narrative voice (as if heard and then recorded by the narrator) present the family's life in that country, exotic both for the narrator and the reader. (Now that I've written that, it actually sounds so cliche, but that's the risk that the writer took when she decided to arrange the novel in this way.) Despite the fact that the stories are inherently interesting as they reveal aspects of African women's lives which are appalling (and sensational) to a reader brought up in western culture (polygamy, female circumcision and total reduction of wives' roles to the domestic sphere), the novel was a drag and nothing gave me more satisfaction than reaching its ultimate page and putting it back onto the shelf.

First, the title is so banal that one expects to see it on a shining cover of a cheap edition of a page-turner categorized as "literature for housewives" (inverted commas indicate the conventional label used for trashy melodramas not the group of readers), for which PLN10 sounds like an extortionate price (instead of the 40 that I paid), and so are the titles of the chapters. Although it needs to be mentioned to the writer's advantage that her sub-titling the first chapter with the phrase "women's gardens" was a brilliant gesture with which she acknowledged Alice Walker as the first writer to turn the task of recovering Black women's untold history into her vocation. On the other hand, writing a novel with a view to reclaiming the past may be a noble undertaking, but suggesting that the book gives voice to those who normally don't have the right to speak and express themselves is too threadbare to make an impression any more. Moreover, the arrangement of the stories, which so resembles the structure of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club, forces the reader to constantly go back to revise the stories which she has already read in an effort to create individual narrators' coherent narratives out of what appears to be a bundle of mixed-up pieces. Mind you, this has nothing to do with Coover-like experimental novel, and the effect is so unlike Amy Tan's wonderful book.

There is another irritating quality about Forna's novel which was absent from the previous two books described here, namely the impression that the narrative lacks something that may be illusive but necessary, something that can be called authenticity. Abie (the main narrator) is only a tourist in Africa, and the narrative in which she retells the stories which purport to come from her African aunts sounds only like a tourist's account of the place which she may have visited but whose spirit she completely failed to catch.

Susan Griffin: "Woman and Nature. The Roaring Inside Her."

Susan Griffin's 1978 book Woman and Nature. The Roaring Inside Her represents the second wave of (American) feminism, or, rather, to be more precise - it is an Ecofeminist classic. Started in the 1970s, Ecofeminism (ecological feminism) is a philosophical, social and political movement combining, as the name suggests, ecology and feminism on the premise that there exists a parallel between social (patriarchal) oppression of women and exploitation of nature (representing masculine attitude).

Griffin elaborates on the conjunction of man and culture vs woman and nature with a view to breaking the negative associations visible in the traditional binaries of the western culture: man/woman, culture/nature. And so, she declares that the book was written for those of us whose language is not heard, whose words have been stolen or erased, those robbed of language, who are called voiceless or mute, even the earthworms, even the shellfish and the sponges, for those of us who speak our own language. The acclaimed poet and writer, feminist Adrienne Rich characterized the work as treating about memory and mutilation, female anger as power and female presence as transforming force.

Woman and Nature consists of four books, titled "Matter" (How man regards and makes use of woman and nature); "Separation" (The separation in his vision and under his rule); "Passage" (Her journey through the Labyrinth to the Cave where she has Her Vision); and, finally, "Her Vision" (Now she sees through her own eyes (wherein the world is no longer his) - the separate rejoined). Two voices are heard (rather visible;) in the book: the paternal voice of patriarchal thought, a voice that claims to be objective, detached and bodiless, recognized here by phrases such as It is decided or The discovery was made - it is a voice of science and (male) logic. The other voice (marked by italics in the text) is her own and other women's, and voices from nature. The two voices are in a dialogic relation. An excerpt from "Matter" will sufficiently demonstrate how the two voices differ and how the women's voice breaks the authoritative dominating patriarchal discourse: "...it is hoped that the theory of mutation may make it possible to discover the exact moment when men became immortal. (Yet we read the words 'animals our fellow brethren in pain, disease, suffering and famine', and we hear that they may share our origins, that 'we may all be melted together')." With this trick, Griffin attempts to inscribe the female voice which undermines and questions the male voice. One might even risk a parallel with what the French representatives of l'ecriture feminine did to patriarchal discourse (I am thinking, for example of Kristeva's "Stabat Mater"): "Ablation. Abrasion. Mountain of accumulation. Aeolian deposits. Afforestation. Testimonies. Over and over we examined what was said of us. Over and over we testify. The lies. the conspiracy of appearances. There are fissures. There are cracks in the surface. We realize suddenly we are weeping."

Reading this book, one can't help getting emotional (and angry at times), as Griffin scrupulously follows the development of (male) Western civilization and history, all the time indicating its efforts to stigmatize and eradicate women from its course. Men's discoveries and inventions which allow them to control the natural world are intertwined with the accounts of witch trials:

" 1638 Galileo publishes Two New Sciences

1640 Carbon dioxide obtained by Helmont
1644 Descartes publishes Principia Philosophiae
1670 Rouen witch trials.
1687 Newton publishes Principia
(She confesses that every Monday the devil lay with her for fornication. She confesses that when he copulated with her she felt intense pain. She confesses that after having intercourse with the devil she married her daughter to him.)
... 1704 Newton publishes Optics
1717 Halley reveals that the world is adrift in a star swirl
1745 Witch trial at Lyons, five sentenced to death.
1749 Sister Maria Renata executed and burned
1775 Anna Maria Schnagel executed for witchcraft."
In this way the history of western civilization becomes the history of torture perpetrated on women. One can't help wondering how it was possible for man to make those milestone discoveries and to believe in such superstitions at the same time.

Finally, Griffin offers a new division of time bringing into focus those who have been erased from history. As a result, an alternative history is written: that of women's suffering and their struggle to gain human dignity (so often barely acknowledged in history books):

Hydra (The Dragon). The century during which Ales Mansfield was called a witch. The age when Katherine Kepler was tortured. The year when Ales Newman, Alice Nutter and Alizon Device were accused of belonging to a coven. The week when Anne Redferne, Anne Whittle, Elizabeth Demidyke, Jeanet Hargreaves, Katherine Hewit and Jeanet Preston were burned at the stake. The time that was governed by fire.
Taurus (The Bull). The decade ruled by Reine Louise Audre, Queen of the Markets. The time in which she led a march of eight hundred women to Versailles. The year during which women demanded that the grain speculators be punished, demanded that conditions at the marketplace be made better, that priests be able to marry, that women receive better education, that male midwifery be put to an end, ... the day of the month celebrated because that was when women brought down the Bastille.

P.S.1. I heartily recommend this book to all women and to those who doubt in discrimination against women; and to a student of mine who, disappointed at his result from British History exam, complained about the absence of questions concerning The Hundred Years' War and the fact that he had to learn about "a suffragist" (Emmeline Pankhurst).

P.S.2. I will call reading this book my private participation in Poznan Climate Summit;)

Amy Tan: "The Hundred Secret Senses" and "Saving Fish from Drowning"

Amy Tan's 1995 novel is typical of her oeuvre in that it focuses on the relations between two half-sisters, American-born Olivia and Chinese-born Kwan, whose different backgrounds allow the writer to depict the clash of the two cultures: Olivia stands for the pragmatic American culture whereas Kwan represents the mystical culture of China. Kwan believes she has yin eyes. She sees those who have died and now dwell in the World of Yin, ghosts who leave the mists just to visit her kitchen on Balboa Street in San Francisco. Kwan possesses the gift of the titular "secret senses" which she defines as follows: memory, seeing, hearing, feeling, all come together, then you know something true in your heart. Like one sense, I don't know how say, maybe sense of tingle. You know this: Tingly bones mean rain coming, refreshen mind. Tingly skin on arms, something scaring you, close you up, still pop out lots a goose bump.

Thanks to the "secret senses" Kwan remembers a life in the mid-nineteenth century, in which she was a young woman participating in a historical event important for China known as the Taiping Rebellion. Such fictional rewriting of history would place the novelist among postmodern historiographers but, given the fact that Amy Tan is a bi-cultural writer of Chinese background, the device is probably more associated with the idea of reincarnation. Although at first disliked by her sister-narrator, Kwan plays a very important role in Olivia's life: she teaches her how to use her own secret senses to solve her problem with her estranged husband. In order to re-unite Olivia with her husband, Kwan takes the two for a trip to China, which becomes a place of their spiritual renewal leading to the desired "happy ending". The whole story, with its exotic detour to China and Chinese history and philosophy, is magical: you never know, just like the narrator, whether what Kwan says is reality or fairy tale; and yet, improbable as it all sounds, you find yourself believing in reincarnation and in Kwan's return to the world of Yin.

A friend told me she would never reach for a book with the title Saving Fish from Drowning. I probably wouldn't either, but for Amy Tan, whose 2005 novel is a surprise for her regular readers. The book was called by a San Francisco Chronicle critic a modern twist on a "A Midsummer's Night Dream", where a group of friends get lost in the jungle on Christmas day and become involved in a set of bizarre events. The association with Shakespeare's comedy is relevant here not only because of the plot analogy but also because Saving Fish from Drowning contains numerous scenes of slapstick humor - the fact leaving me with ambivalent feelings.

The novel, which starts with the author's foreword explaining that she based her story on the document found in a public library - the record of automatic writing performed by a Bibi Chen's ghost (this is a common device in fiction, used for example by Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter), purports to be based on real events. The illusion of realism is however shattered at the very beginning, when the reader finds out that the narrator is Bibi Chen, who organized a Christmas trip to China and Burma for her friends ("Following Buddha's Footsteps") but could not realize the plan because she died. Bibi, who introduces herself in the first chapter, titled A Brief History of My Shortened Life, presents the mysterious circumstances of her death in the form of a quote from the newspaper as follows: The report was a terrible thing to read: "The body of Bibi Chen, 63, retail maven, socialite, and board member of the Asian Art Museum, was found yesterday in the display window of her Union Square store, The Immortals, famed for its chinoiserie"... The article continued with a rather nebulous description of the weapon: a small, rakelike object that had severed my throat, and a rope tightened around my neck, suggesting that someone had tried to strangle me after stabbing had failed. The door had been forced open, and bloody footprints of size-twelve men's shoes led from the platform where I had died, then out the door, and down the street. Next to my body lay jewelry and broken figurines. According to one source, there was a paper with writing from a Satanic cult bragging that it had struck again.

Apart from creating suspense, the choice of a dead person for the narrator of the story (again familiar from, for example, Desperate Housewives) has allowed Amy Tan to create first-person omniscient narration and present the events of the story in a surprisingly original manner - I definitely liked this trick. Bibi Chen is dead, but she remains cool about the fact and follows her friends as a ghost, sometimes playing the role of a guardian angel, intervening when necessary by appearing in the characters' dreams and thus influencing their decisions - after all, the dream world is her reality now.

However, under this fantastic, magical and comic surface, a very serious issue is addressed by Tan's novel, namely the critique of Burma's military regime, its killing off dissenters and, especially, the damage that human rights activists' efforts combined with actions taken up by Western media can bring instead of help. The title very well explains this: Saving fish from drowning is a Burmese name for the act of fishing, which is approached with reverence: They scoop up the fish and bring them to shore. They say they are saving fish from drowning. Unfortunately ... the fish do not recover. So, the title is a euphemism for killing, which, paradoxically, is a consequence of the desire to help. Bibi herself makes a poignant comment on the hypocrisy behind and the elusiveness of Western help as follows: the military rulers gave Burma its new name, Myanmar, and changed Rangoon into Yangon, the Irrawaddy into the Ayeyarwaddy. And thus, practically no one in the Western world knows what those new names refer to, they are like the Burmese dissenters who disappeared, the country formerly calling itself Burma is invisible to most of the Western world, an illusion. The critique of the politics of the Western world offered in a form of a comic fantastic story may sound odd, but I actually found it intriguing.

Edward P. Jones: "The Known World"

Edward P. Jones's 2004 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel takes its readers to antebellum Virginia and to fictional Manchester County, in which a former slave, Henry Townsend, becomes an owner of his own plantation and 33 slaves. His first and oldest slave, Moses, an overseer and major character in this incredibly populous panoramic novel, is also one of the many points of view (or voices heard) in The Known World.

The following passage neatly introduces the issue which Jones's book takes under scrutiny: Moses was the first slave Henry Townsend had bought: $325 and a bill of sale from William Robbins, a white man. It took Moses more than two weeks to come to understand that someone wasn't fiddling with him and that indeed a black man, two shades darker than himself, owned him and any shadow he made. Sleeping in a cabin beside Henry in the first weeks after the sale, Moses had thought that it was already a strange world that made him a slave to a white man, but God had indeed set it twirling and twisting every which way when he put black people to owning their own kind. Was God even up there attending to business anymore?

The novel thus delves in a very perplexing problem of black people, well familiar with the slave-owner's whip, buying other black people and treating them with similar cruelty, as does Henry Townsend. Bought out of slavery by his father, who decided to never own a person, Henry is more loyal to his former owner than to the father. Though he originally plans to treat his slaves better than white people do, his ex-master, William Robbins, persuades him to change his mind as follows:

Henry, the law will protect you as a master to your slave, and it will not flinch when it protects you. . . . But the law expects you to know what is master and what is slave. And it does not matter if you are not much darker than your slave. The law is blind to that. You are the master and that is all the law wants to know. The law will come to you and stand behind you. But if you roll around and be a playmate to your property, and your property turns around and bites you, the law will come to you still, but it will not come with the full heart and all the deliberate speed that you need. You will have failed in your part of the bargain. You will have pointed to the line that separates you from your property and told your property that the line does not matter. Immediately after he hears this humiliating sermon, Henry hits Moses on the face and sends him to live in a shed.

This whole episode is told in flashback though, as in the novel Henry dies first and his young wife Caldonia runs the plantation with huge help from Moses. Despite her efforts, the plantation comes undone: slaves run away one by one, they start fighting among themselves and the work is not done properly and on time. The degeneration of the Townsends' plantation seems to be the linking motif of the otherwise very fragmentary novel, which presents a range of minor characters' stories. The inclusion of so many characters turns the book into a picaresque novel of an episodic structure and roguish characters: no one here is absolutely positive and no one, even the most influential white citizen of the county - Robbins - is absolutely negative. Moses himself is a living example of what slavery does to people: separated from the woman who he said was his "family", Moses later mistreats his wife and son. Moreover, seeing that a black man can be freed and become a slave owner, he intends to take his master's place by romancing with widow Caldonia. Finally, he persuades his wife to run away with the child and abuses the power which he has as an overseer by sending a pregnant woman to hard work in the field, which results in miscarriage.

Apart from the issue of black people's owning other black people, the novel uncovers some other facts concerning the reality of life under slavery, the most eye-opening to me being the practice of selling free black people into slavery again by so called slave "speculators". Now the burlesque ending of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, in which Huck and Tom free Jim, who is already freed by his owner, does not seem so entertaining at all: you might need to free a freed slave again and again. Moreover, another conclusion can be drawn at this juncture: namely that once a person becomes a slave, they will always remain slaves.

The most interesting episode, however, is connected with the character of Alice Night, a woman who "was kicked in the head by a mule" and became crazy. She wanders alone at night singing funny songs and talking nonsense to strangers. When she succeeds in running away from slavery, she becomes an artist and has her own art gallery. The story of Alice Night is the most poignant commentary on the debilitating effects of slavery on both owners and the owned. Though not even close to the power of Toni Morrison's Beloved (but then, what is?), Jones's novel is definitely worth giving it a try.

Zeruya Shalev: "Late Family (Terra)"

Zeryua Shalev is an Israeli writer who gained critical acclaim after publishing the novel Love Life, which was translated into more than 25 languages (the Polish translation from the original Hebrew language appeared in 2003). With Love Life she started a trilogy which was completed with the publication of Late Family in 2005, available now on the Polish book market in a beautiful hardcover edition.

Shalev's three novels are all written in the form of internal monologue of the protagonist who is always at a critical point of her life. First, in Love Life, the woman, infatuated with her father's childhood friend - a man twice older than she - lets her marriage fall apart by pursuing the erotic adventure. The sensuous prose, quite daring erotic scenes and the humiliation that she experiences during her sexual romp make the book an exciting journey into the mind of a woman who seems to be deranged with, well, a destructive passion. At that time Zeruya Shalev was sometimes compared to Erica Jong. The second novel of the trilogy, Husband and Wife, explores what happens in a marriage after twenty years of life in apparent security and comfort. The health crisis of the husband, who wakes up one morning and is unable to move, turns out to be a symptom of the crisis that the couple has been going through for some time. Brutally honest in her scrutiny of the protagonist's motives and most intimate thoughts, Zeruya Shalev offers again a disturbing narrative which some readers might even find too disturbing to go through.

Finally, in Late Family the readers are witnessing a personal crisis of a woman who decides to break up her family and leave her husband to search for freedom and independence. In its depiction of doubts and emotions of the protagonist, who yearns to go back to the security of her obnoxious marriage the moment she realizes that her dream of independence has come true, the narrative probes into the complexity of the psyche and the puzzling motives behind people's decisions. The novel ends with the protagonist landing in a new relationship which she wants to build because she has fallen in love. Since each of the prospective partners has a child or children, the new family is a very fragile and precarious construct when you look at it, and it is doubtful whether the woman will ever be able to feel as secure as she did with her reliable and predictable ex-husband.

Being such an honest analysis of a woman's psyche, the novel does not leave its readers with an obviously positive ending. There are a few nagging questions that arise after the reading is completed: Is this all desire to be independent in life just a naive dream, a fiction created by those who are bored with the routine - but also safety - of marriage? Is there any alternative to the normative pattern of life (that is marriage) that could be satisfying, or are people made in such a way that a solitary existence scares them to death and makes them pursue anybody willing to share life with them, maybe only because they are scared as well? It is because of the ability to pose such questions that I find the novel so brilliant.

P.S. Here is an interview with Zeruya Shalev in which she reveals her political views (something she never does in her novels) and where you can find out some facts from her life, career and learn about an injury which she incurred in a terrorist attack.

TOP OF THE TOPS: "A" like ATWOOD

TOP OF THE TOPS was suggested to me by a former student - now a friend - of mine, who said she would find it more useful if I recommended books which may not be recent publications but which make up my private literary canon. TOP OF THE TOPS will be devoted then to the works which over years have become my classics and which I would naturally recommend to anyone wishing a genuine reading adventure, hopefully as life-transforming as those that I've been privileged to experience. The idea of the alphabet for my TOP OF THE TOPS is catchy, but I might not "fill in" all the letters evenly, I might not follow the alphabetical order, either, though I will do my best.

Margaret Atwood comes first in the series for a number of reasons: first, her surname's initial nicely matches the first letter in the alphabet; second, for quite a few years now Atwood has been my number one candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature, and just recently the Nobel Committee disappointed me again. This disappointment in the Nobel Committee's verdict(s) is bitter not only because they haven't chosen Atwood but because they seem reluctant to grant the Prize to women writers. Let me think: the last decade saw only two luminous exceptions: that of Elfriede Jelinek (I still remember what scandal broke out then) and Doris Lessing; the other eight prizes went to male writers. Looking at the last two decades, I can add two exceptional (in both senses) laureates, that is Wislawa Szymborska and Toni Morrison. The numbers are merciless and telling: since 1988 only 4 women and as many as 16 men have received the Nobel Prize for Literature, that is women make up 20% of the total number of Nobel Prize laureates. I'm starting to wonder whether this Nobel Prize is at all representative.

In my unflinching support for Atwood, gender is not the ultimate criterion by any means, as her literary output is impressive: Atwood has been writing poetry since 1961 and novels since 1969 (by now she has written about twenty of them). She is a most prolific poet, novelist, essayist (or literary critic if you like) and children's literature writer. Atwood is frequently considered a post-colonial writer because of her ramifications on Canadian identity (subdued by American (U.S.) cultural hegemony, sometimes called neo-colonialism) which are combined with feminist issues that she raises. Feminist and post-colonial aspects of her writing are easily combined - in her works both women and Canada are culturally dominated.

I have read a vast majority (well, probably all) of Atwood's novels, and my favorite are: 1. Surfacing (1972) 2. Lady Oracle (1976) 3. The Robber Bride (1993), next come Bodily Harm (1981) and the radical feminist anti-utopia The Handmaid's Tale (1985), which was turned into a movie by Volker Schlondorff.

My first encounter with Margaret Atwood took place quite a few years ago, when I was still a student. The book that I came across then was a Polish edition of Surfacing (the Polish title "Wynurzenie" can be understood in three ways at least, all wonderfully encapsulating the novel's sense). The novel perfectly fits the description of post-colonial literature, though I prefer to read it as a feminist story of the protagonist's journey (both physical and psychological) to finding her own place in the world after a traumatic experience. Unoriginal as I sound at this point, I'm not going to reveal anything more about Surfacing, hoping that my Readers will discover it for themselves. Few books have influenced me so, though originally I'd never expected the reading to be that rewarding, since at first I thought the story was a drag. As it turned out, I read the book at one sitting and then I couldn't sleep a wink all night: I also experienced what Aristotle probably meant when he used the word "catharsis". My advice: in order not to miss the roller-coaster experience of reading Surfacing, if you do not feel very confident about your English, read it in Polish - you certainly won't regret it. Have fun and let me know how you found the book.
P.S. Here is a short interview with the wonderful writer, in which she talks about her recent book Moral Disorder, but not only.

"My reading habits" - questionnaire

Invited by padma, I have no choice but to disclose a bit of my privacy, which I have been avoiding doing on this blog. Accepting a challenge like this might have positive consequences though: probably for the first time in many years I have stopped to reflect on my reading habits and literary preferences - they play quite an important part in my life after all. Here are ten things that I am revealing about my reading:

1. What time of the day is my favorite time for reading.
No preferences - the only condition is: free time. If I have a day off, I like to spend it reading: wearing pajamas, totally cutting myself off the world (I don't even switch the radio on).

2. Where I read.
My favorite place is the living room sofa: curled up, with a hot drink and a bowl of grapes. However, a lot of my reading takes place in bed, and this fact is totally unrelated to the quality of my sex life;) I don't read on buses or trams because I don't use public transport, and reading in the car, especially when one is driving, is risky. I sometimes try to read when I travel in the passenger seat though, but I do it only when I'm desperate to finish my book.

3. If I read in bed, which position is my favorite (what question is this?).
On my back, half-sitting, resting my head on three pillows.

4. What type of books I like reading best.
Well, fiction, of course. I read poetry only occasionally - when my super-ego tells me to reach for a poet(ess) who has just become very famous or trendy - to know what they talk about on tv and in the papers (as was the case with, for example, Jacek Dehnel). Now, thinking of my preferences, I must admit that I have become quite sexist in my choices as, given an alternative, I will always reach for a woman's book. Because of my professional interest I mostly read Anglo-American books, with the reservation that "Anglo-American" is a blanket term. I also try to catch up with the developments on the Polish literary market, especially whenever Olga Tokarczuk or Jerzy Pilch writes a new book. Somehow Andrzej Stasiuk seems to have dropped out of my "holy trinity" of writers and I can't think of the name that would replace him at the moment.

5. What book I bought recently.
I buy books in bulk, so it's never one title. Plus, I use two sources: Polish bookshops and American internet bookshops.
My most recent purchase in a Polish bookshop: Aminatta Forna: Kamienie Przodków (Ancestor Stones) - I will write about it when I get to read it, Agnieszka Gajewska: Hasło: Feminizm, Jerzy Jarniewicz: Od pieśni do skowytu - sketches on American poets (those two because of my professional interest, they won't appear on my blog).
A selection from my most recent purchase in Amazon.com: Mary Eagleton: Figuring the Woman Author in Contemporary Fiction (professional interest), Edmund White: The Flaneur, Joanna Kavenna: Inglorious (I will write about these two in due time).

6. What I read recently.
Zeruya Shalev: Late Family (I should have written about it last week). Alan Bennett: The Uncommon Reader (courtesy of padma, I won't write about it because she did).

7. What I am reading now.
Edward P. Jones: The Known World (it will eventually appear on my blog) and Dominick LaCapra: History and Reading: Tocqueville, Foucault, French Studies (I won't write about this one, don't worry;)

8. Do I make dog-ears or use bookmarks.
I use bookmarks - I have quite a lot of them scattered all over the place: in all drawers and books that I am reading.

9. What I think about audiobooks.
They can be dangerous when one drives, and I listen to those only when I drive long distances. Once I was driving and listening to Stephen Hawking's A Universe in a Nutshell, which was very involving since I had to really focus to follow the argument. When it came to string theory, I got so absorbed in the explanation that my car somehow veered to the left and it was only after I spotted a huge lorry coming from the opposite direction dangerously close toward me that I realized how I had literally got carried away by the book. Well, it was a close shave; ever since then I have avoided absorbing audiobooks and turned to listening to music in my car instead.
I must admit though that once audiobooks saved me from a very likely depression: I was bedridden recovering after an eye surgery, which made it impossible for me to read or watch anything for a week! Among others it was David Lodge's Therapy (what a title;) on tape that helped me get through that time. I could only say then: thank God for audiobooks.

10. What I think about e-books.
Nothing yet - I try not to read from the computer screen. But who knows - I have a sneaking suspicion verging on conviction that I will sooner or later have to resort to this type of books. For the time being, I am o.k. without them.

P.S. I'd like to invite whoever reads my blog and feels like participating in the game: feel free to join me, fill in the questionnaire in your comments below or leave links to your blogs - a sort of coming out;)

Amy Tan: "The Joy Luck Club"

Sometimes when I read a book which has gained a, well, canonical status, I wonder how it happened that it took me so long to finally reach for it. Such is the case with Amy Tan's 1989 literary debut which immediately made her an international celebrity. (In 1993 Wayne Wang turned the novel into a movie to which Amy Tan wrote screenplay.) I read The Bonesetter's Daughter and The Kitchen God's Wife quite some time ago, soon after they appeared on the Polish market. However, now I am determined to read them once again as I see that my first encounter with Amy Tan was a false start.

Now, first encounters: I strongly believe that whether or not one becomes a devoted reader of a particular writer's books is decided by the first encounter. Let's take Margaret Atwood (coming soon in the TOP OF TOPS series which I'm planning to start here next week): had it not been for my lucky choice of Surfacing, I might have never fallen in love with her writing. As for the first encounter, Amy Tan was not so lucky, but I'm going to make up for it.

Amy Tan's fiction represents Chinese-American minority literature, together with for example Maxine Hong Kingston's (I heartily recommend The Woman Warrior by the way - a diamond) and Gish Jen's novels. The label "minority fiction" suggests that the obvious theme explored in the novel is identity, which has recently become almost a cliche. True - the life of the Chinese diaspora in San Francisco is the narrative's focus. Sometimes, however, it is not about what but how the topic is handled that decides about the book's merit.

The Joy Luck Club is not one but seven interlacing narratives representing the voices of Chinese mothers who emigrated to San Francisco somewhere in the 1940s and their American-born daughters, with one voice dominating and intuitively associated with the writer herself, that is with a thirty-six-year-old American woman of Chinese descent. All right, it can be said that this heterogeneity and fragmentation of narration reflect the fragmented and heterogeneous identity of a Chinese-American person living sort of in between the two worlds, who finally has to decide who she is or choose who she wants to be. In the book the question is answered as follows: Chinese people had Chinese opinions. American people had American opinions. And in almost every case, the American version was much better. It was only later that I discovered there was a serious flaw with the American version.

The discovery made in each case finally determines the choice to remain faithful to the mothers' Chinese tradition which the daughters gain as legacy. Structuring the novel as she did allowed Amy Tan to present intricate bonds between the daughters and their mothers, who remember their mothers as well. As it paradoxically happens with societies in which patriarchy is still very strong, sense of identity and belonging to a tradition is instilled in a girl through stories told by the mother. So, Amy Tan demonstrates the truth universally acknowledged that although public (written, official) discourse is the domain of men, it is women's (mothers') private (oral, unofficial) stories whispered in one's ear before sleep that make one what they are.

In the novel the mothers, all brought up in Chinese patriarchy silencing women, teach their daughters obedience to the tradition of their Chinese ancestors but also, again paradoxically, encourage them to speak up for themselves: My mother once told me why I was so confused all the time. She said I was without wood. ... "A girl is like a young tree," she said. "You must stand tall and listen to your mother standing next to you. That is the only way to grow strong and straight. But if you bend to listen to other people, you will grow crooked and weak. You will fall to the ground with the first strong wind. And then you will be like a weed, growing wild, in any direction, running along the ground until someone pulls you out and throws you away."

By depicting her protagonists as strong and powerful, Amy Tan debunks the myth of helpless Chinese women subjected to men whom they owe respect, obedience and servitude. It is women who rule this world thanks to their beliefs in the Yin people and the uncanny power of ghosts. And it is this legacy that the mothers pass to their daughters and make them powerful thanks to - a third paradox - the fact that they are Chinese. A jewel of a book? - yes.

P.S. Here is a nice Barnes&Noble interview with Amy Tan in which she reveals who the Yin people are and talks about her childhood, her career before writing (you'd never guess) and her struggling with Lyme disease:

Anne Enright: "The Gathering"

I've been putting off writing this review for quite some time now and I can see that it's been more than a week since my last entry was placed here. There is a good reason for this delay: I have very ambivalent feelings about Anne Enright's The Gathering. Consequently, the fact that the book is the 2007 Booker Prize winner, which suggests that many literary-minded people have found unquestionable merits in it, is quite intimidating for someone whose reaction to the book is not so one hundred per cent positive.

A brief summary of the situation (it can only be brief since action-wise not much happens in the novel) could go as follows: the narrator's favorite brother Liam drowned himself in England, and the woman, 39-year-old Veronica, is grieving while waiting for his body to be brought for the funeral, which is an occasion for the titular gathering of the family at Liam's wake.

The title can however be understood as a commentary on what Veronica is doing throughout the narrative: she is collecting scattered bits and pieces of the past which she may or may not correctly remember. It seems that the trauma of the brother's suicide triggered some memories which she had pushed to the unconscious long before. She starts the narrative as follows: I would like to write down what happened in my grandmother's house the summer I was eight or nine, but I am not sure if it really did happen. I need to bear witness to an uncertain event. I feel it roaring inside me - this thing that may not have taken place. I don't even know what name to put on it. I think you might call it a crime of the flesh, but the flesh is long fallen away and I am not sure what hurt may linger in the bones. Well, the crime that she is talking about so vaguely is an act of sexual abuse done to her nine-year-old brother which she accidentally witnessed. Yet, this recovered memory is not presented as sensational in the book, which actually is a big advantage - offering a gloomy vision of Irish life, Enright's novel is not cheaply thrilling at all.

When I was reading the book, I had a suspicion that the unveiling of the harm done to Liam was actually a cover story for something that may have happened to the narrator herself - something which she is unable to confront and name. What invites such a conclusion is her attitude to sex - although this narrative abounds in descriptions of sex, they can hardly be called sexy. She seems to display deep aversion to sex, for example, when writing about her big family: ...and there were pathetic ones like me, who had parents that were just helpless to it, and bred as naturally as they might shit. The descriptions of her husband making sex to her (well, that 's what it boils down to in the story as she seems to loathe it) also suggest that she might have a problem with sex. And yet, she obsessively writes about it. Was Veronica sexually abused as a child? Or is she suffering from false memory syndrome?

The book is praised for its brilliant lyricism and eloquence - true. Once you get into it, you may yield to its charm. You will also get moved by the story itself, provided you are patient enough to get at least half way through. The point is that being so modernist in character (no chronology, fragmentation: jumping into the past and back to the present, stream of consciousness at times, focus on the psychology of the narrator) and because so little in it is certain, the novel is bound to quickly slip out of your head - after a month or two you'll hardly remember it at all. Well, lucky me I'm writing this blog - to remind myself I have read The Gathering.

Salman Rushdie: "Shalimar the Clown"

Salman Rushdie has been the most outstanding writer associated with the Indian subcontinent ever since he received the Booker Prize for Midnight Children in 1981. In 2008 the Booker of Bookers went again to this novel. However, Rushdie became a celebrity and entered the popular imagination not because so many people read his book but because Ayatollah Khomeini called for his death in response to the 1988 novel The Satanic Verses. It seems that any novel that Rushdie writes is bound to succeed with critics - his latest Enchantress of Florence was longlisted for the 2008 Booker Prize (didn't get on the Man Booker Prize short list, though). Instead of reaching for this novel, I read Shalimar the Clown, which also did very well in the run up to the 2005 Whitbread (Costa) Book Awards.

The novel (the Polish edition is 485 pages long) starts in Los Angeles, where a very popular ambassador Ophuls is killed by his driver, the titular Shalimar the Clown. The ambassador is introduced as a father to India aka Kashmira, and it is from her perspective that the reader enters this, well, crime story. The subsequent chapters are set in the past - in Kashmir, where the love story of India's mother Boonyi and Shalimar the Clown unravels. It is later in the novel that the reader finds out the motives for the original crime, which is perceived first as a terrorist act of political character and later turns out to be a revenge of a lover spurned.

Rushdie's novel seems to be a pean to the paradisiacal past of the troubled region of Kashmir, where Indian and Pakistani ambitions were bound to enter into conflict. Shalimar the Clown and Boonyi's love story seals the peaceful coexistence of the two communities, Hindu and Muslim, living as neighbors in Kashmir. And then an American ambassador arrives and the woman successfully tempts him with her dance and finally lands with him in America as his, well, call it: misstress. Shalimar the Clown, her husband, is left behind, dishonored and vengeful. Rushdie deftly combines here an individual lost-love tragedy with the subject of Islamic radicalism - the titular hero joins a Jihadist training camp and becomes a famous terrorist because of the desire for personal vendetta. Thanks to this the novelist seems to have given a face and a life and even a tragic story to the figure of a terrorist, usually perceived as anonymous and veiled.

The novel is not an easy read - it devotes a lot of space to the portrayal of the complex situation in Kashmir, contains frequent historical references (for example, the 1965 India-Pakistan war and the acts of cruelty perpetrated on the Kashmiri people) and delves in the issue of religious fanaticism and causes of terrorism. However, Rushdie is a wonderful storyteller, craftily combining the historical-political content with a gripping story of love, betrayal and revenge. It took me a few days to read the book, including 14 hours on the train to Cracow and back, and it was definitely time well spent.

Alexandra Potter: "Me and Mr Darcy"

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a woman must sometimes commit an act of pure and utter indulgence in her choice of the book to read. Especially that she might be right in the middle of reading an award-winning product of a literary genius which she finds a bit gloomy and quite heavy going. And so I did. And now I wish I had not. Being a fan of Bridget Jones's Diary (especially its filmed version - and this does not happen often with me, who thinks films ruin books), I expected the book to be something similar to now common chic lit. sequels or variations of Pride and Prejudice - quite light and uproariously funny. But, er HELLO, not THAT LIGHT and not SO UNentertaining. 

Given that the main character Emily is a bookworm and works in a bookshop, I was especially disappointed by virtually non-existent literary allusions (if you cross out the names and a few quotes from Pride and Prejudice) and generally very feeble play on Austen's novel (well, it was rather an attempt at re-writing the two episodes of Bridget Jones as far as I could tell and I must admit that the narrator's voice did sound to me like Renee Zellweger - something that definitely helped me go through the book till its ending.) Finally, the weak story line was nothing surprising, as based-ons tend to be predictable. 

I was actually willing to forgive the author the book's weaknesses but there were moments - and quite a few of them I must admit - that reading this book I felt I was being offended. Not only weren't the situations funny enough to make you smile, but the narrator explained them to you just in case you did not get the "subtle joke". This is precisely what makes one a lousy joke teller. 

So, instead of wasting time thinking about Me and Mr Darcy, I... switched on Bridget Jones's Diary for the umpteenth time this year. And this would be my recommendation except that what I recommend here is literature, not film. Potter came up with an idea of getting her character involved in a fictional story from the 19th century. I think Antonia S. Byatt came up with something rather similar a few years ago in her wonderful novel Possession, which is my recommendation - instead of Potter's book. 

Armistead Maupin: "Michael Tolliver Lives."

There are at least three major reasons why I reached for Maupin's latest novel:

First, I decided to answer Padma's challenge and read at least one book in which a town/city is a protagonist (by the way, I am a regular visitor to her great blog), and this book is the latest (seventh) installment of Maupin's extremely popular Tales of the City series turned into a TV soap opera, the city being San Francisco. 

Second, I happened to visit San Francisco's Barnes and Noble bookstore, which was at the time promoting Michael Tolliver Lives as one of the recent popular paperback releases and I saw it as a lucky coincidence. Plus, having read the previous episodes of the series, I was happy to be able to meet Maupin's characters again - it feels like catching up with the news from your old friends (well, that's the trick soap operas play, after all). 

Last but not least, I am a great fan of Maupin's prose and I would have bought the book sooner or later anyway - I just love the way he writes. Take the following passage, which is a description of a love relationship: We lay on the sofa after supper, intertwined and swapping endearments. I won't bother to repeat them here. Whoever named them sweet nothings was right. They really are nothing; they're little more than footnotes to a feeling, almost useless out of context. - Perfectly worded, subtle and yet so intimate that one might blush reading it. 

Armistead Maupin himself seems to have obtained a status of a cult writer as he was one of the first gay pop-culture figures, who already in the 1970s introduced homosexual characters and their world in a mainstream newspaper. Maupin is a master of characters - they are so flesh and blood that they are almost tangible. Apart from being a great humorist, Maupin is also simply a master of sentiments and of the English language - dialogues between his campy characters are little pearls to be learned by heart. (Sometimes, when I read a book by Maupin or Andrew Holleran, for that matter, I think that those writers have a way with words comparable to that of Shakespeare - never mind the proportions - whose protagonists utter epigrams whenever they open their mouths. Of course, Maupin's predecessor is rather Oscar Wilde with his witticism).  No wonder then that Starbucks printed a quote of his on its cups in 2005: "Life is too short to hide being gay", which may have served as Maupin's contribution to gay activism. 

Although the book can be classified as melodrama verging on comedy, Maupin continues to be the first to cunningly familiarize both gay and mainstream audiences with topics which might be considered breakthrough (in the 1980s, when the AIDS epidemic was labeled as a "gay disease", he introduced a woman character who had AIDS - quite a prophetic gesture, one might say). Michael Tolliver Lives  is another breakthrough moment as it treats about love between an HIV-positive fifty-five year old man with someone who could be his son, thus initiating a discussion concerning for example ageism (a problem which is common to heterosexual women and homosexual men), also by depicting sex life when the body is old, sagging and no longer beautiful. 

This paperback HarperCollins edition has a P.S. which contains an interview with the author. Asked what he was proudest of having written, Maupin indicated Michael Tolliver's coming-out letter to his parents from More Tales of the City (1980), which was the writer's coming-out letter at the same time and which people still use for their coming-out purposes. I can't help taking a look at the confession again: You can succeed and be happy and find peace with friends - all kinds of friends - who don't give a damn who you go to bed with. Most of all, though, you can love and be loved, without hating yourself for it. But no one ever said that to me, Mama. I had to find it out on my own, with the help of the city that has become my home. I know this may be hard for you to believe, but San Francisco is full of men and women, both straight and gay ... they aren't radicals or weirdoes ... their message is so simple: yes, you are a person. Yes, I like you. Yes, it's all right for you to like me too.

Well, finally, the city itself. San Francisco is celebrated in the whole series as a liberal and tolerant city, whose grass-scenting streets (it's actually hard to believe how ubiquitous the scent is) will embrace anyone seeking an asylum - it is home. 

For Mrs Madrigal, for San Francisco, finally, for the beauty of Maupin's prose - a little pearl;)