"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;)

Lionel Shriver: "We Need to Talk About Kevin"

We Need to Talk About Kevin is a novel by an American-born writer currently living in London, Lionel Shriver, who assumed a male name to match her tomboy personality. The novel won the Orange Prize in 2005. The book is written in the form of letters (though the adjective "epistolary" somehow sounds too 18th century here) from Eva to her absent and mute husband Franklin. The narrator states that it is not co-respondence but respondence. 

As the name suggests, Eva is the mother of the titular hero, who is currently in jail for staging a school massacre and murdering a dozen or so people with... a cross-bow (so, the novel is not a statement against the American law respecting citizens' right to possess guns). It is not even about Kevin - its dense, psychological prose would resemble patient's discourse if the letters to Franklin weren't so methodically written. The letters do function as therapy - Eva tries to understand why the tragedy happened. It is actually tempting to try applying a Freudian interpretation here. (I found a nice set of questions which might serve as discussion points )

The novel is considered to be feminist but - given such popular series as "Desperate Housewives" or "Sex and the City" - I wonder if the topic of maternal ambivalence is still controversial enough to earn the label for the book. Well, true, the conclusion that being a mother... turned my days  into an unending stream of shit and piss and cookies that Kevin didn't even like, or (this one is a diamond) that the real love shares more in common with hatred and rage than it does with geniality or politeness justly deserves the blurb motherhood gone awry. But then: really?

Eva narrates a situation from the prison, where she is waiting to pay the weekly visit to her son and starts talking to another delinquent's mother, Loretta. When Eva blames herself for the crime by admitting that she wasn't a very good mother, Loretta squeezes her hand, saying: It's always the mother's fault, ain't it? That boy turn out bad cause his mama a drunk, or a she a junkie. She let him run wild, she don't teach him right from wrong. She never home when he back from school. Nobody ever say his daddy a drunk, or his daddy not home after school. And nobody ever say they some kids just damned mean.  This is a very important moment - two women, victimized by their sons, blamed for the catastrophe by society, supporting each other by just being together and understanding. Maybe that is why the novel deserves to be called feminist? 

Anyway, though not an easy read, the book is definitely worth the effort, especially that the discovery at the end comes as a shock. The novel at times reminds me of Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, which I wish I had not almost completely forgotten. Shriver's narrative will surely stay in my memory much longer.