Junot Diaz: "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"; Ernest J. Gaines: "A Lesson Before Dying"

Winner of 2008 Pulitzer Prize for fiction Junot Diaz wrote a very contemporary story about love, which corroborates the pop-song phrase "love hurts". Oscar is an overweight lovesick ghetto nerd, who devours fantasy fiction in the hope of becoming a Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien. Because of an ancient curse, fuku, he will finally die in the name of love, beaten to death by a gang of bandits, such as those who are in the service of Dominican tyrannical President Trujillo. In an interview, the author himself defined the subject of his novel as follows: It’s the quest story of this young Dominican guy Oscar, his quest for love, for a safe place in the world, which is what love is. It’s not only his quest, but it turns out to have been his entire family’s quest. If nothing else speaks to the human condition, it is that quest. You could expand it, of course, another degree and just say that that’s really what this whole thing that we call humanity is about: each of us trying to find a place where we’re safe and where we can know love. The rest of it is, in the end, kind of garbage.

Universal though the story's theme is, Diaz is a very demanding writer, exposing his readers to the multiculturality of his characters by peppering his narrative with many (unitalicized) Spanish words and expressions. In this way he seems to repeat the gesture of many bicultural writers - for example Gloria Anzaldua - who emphasize their rich and complex border identity by mixing two languages. This constant crossing of linguistic borders reflects the mixed identity of Dominicans, who are of African, Taino and Spanish descent. Despite such heterogeneity, all of them are subject to the Curse and Doom of the New World - fuku, brought about by an Admiral, who was both its midwife and one of its great European victims. In this way Oscar Wao's cursed life reflects Dominicans' history shaped by bad luck, and a sense of doom is perceptible from the very beginning of the story.

However, despite the fact that the story is so sad and tragic, it is also very entertaining: the narrative is funny, also in the footnotes supplied For those of you who missed your mandatory two seconds of Dominican history. A passage about Trujillo will sufficiently illustrate Diaz's fierce style: Homeboy dominated Santo Domingo like it was his very own private Mordor; not only did he lock the country away from the rest of the world, isolate it behind the Plátano Curtain, he acted like it was his very own plantation, acted like he owned everything and everyone, killed whomever he wanted to kill, sons, brothers, fathers, mothers, took women away from their husbands on their wedding nights and then would brag publicly about ‘the great honeymoon’ he’d had the night before. His Eye was everywhere; he had a Secret Police that out-Stasi’d the Stasi, that kept watch on everyone, even those everyones who lived in the States.

All in all, with its absorbing narrative - rich and playful thanks to its shifts in language and point of view - the book is a wonderful read and deserves a place on every book shelf. Only one thing disturbed me as a woman reader: the narrator's uncritical attitude to machismo, so pervasive and taken for granted (natural, some might say) both in the culture that he depicted and in his narrative.

Ernest J. Gaines's Lesson Before Dying won the 1993 National Book Critics Award for a reason. This piece of solid realistic prose poignantly portrays a small town's life in Louisiana in the 1940s, where African Americans still suffer from segregation and are expected to show respect and submissiveness to whites despite the fact that slavery is long over. The narrator, Grant Wiggins, is a university graduate working as a teacher of the Negro plantation school. Although he returned to the town to help his people improve their life, he has lost all hope for the possibility of such improvement. Another African American young man, Jefferson, has been accused of and charged with murder of a white shop owner. His complicity in the crime is dubious (he was only an innocent bystander), but the prejudiced white community leads to his conviction and execution on an electric chair.

The verdict and the ensuing sentence may as well have been the result of the incompetent defense, and a passage from the advocate's speech will illustrate white people's attitude to the members of the black community. In his final speech before the jury the advocate focused on undermining Jefferson's humanity, which supposedly made him incapable of committing the crime: Gentlemen of the jury, look at him--look at him--look that this. Do you see a man sitting here? I ask you, I implore, look carefully--do you see a man sitting here? Look at the shape of this skull, this face as flat as the palm of my hand--look deeply into those eyes. Do you see a modicum of intelligence? Do you see anyone here who could plan a murder, a robbery, can plan--can plan--can plan anything? A cornered animal to strike quickly out of fear, a trait inherited from his ancestors in the deepest jungle of blackest Africa--yes, yes, that he can do--but to plan? To plan, gentlemen of the jury? No, gentlemen, this skull here holds no plans. What you see here is a thing that acts on command. A thing to hold the handle of a plow, a thing to load your bales of cotton, a thing to dig your ditches, to chop your wood, to pull your corn. That is what you see here, but you do not see anything capable of planning a robbery or a murder. ... I would just as soon put a hog in the electric chair as this.

The lesson mentioned in the title begins when Grant is asked by Jefferson's grandmother to teach the boy that he is not a hog and to make sure that he goes to his death like a man. The task seems impossible since at first Jefferson, who is mentally slow and barely literate, refuses to speak to Wiggins. In the course of the two men's weekly meetings Grant manages to transform Jefferson into a hero, who is the strongest man in the courthouse when he walks to his electric chair. However, it seems that Jefferson is not the only student here: Wiggins, who hates himself for having to teach black children on white people's terms and for the necessity to compromise his pride in the constant struggle over whether I should act like the teacher that I was, or like the nigger that I was supposed to be, also learns from Jefferson a lesson in heroism (a hero does for others) and humanity. Jefferson, who in the novel is compared to Jesus (analogies can be easily drawn though they are not too obtrusive), proves his manhood by accepting with dignity the plight that befalls him, and teaches Wiggins to accept his own, and do the utmost for the bettering of his people's condition. In this the novel seems to endorse the lesson preached by the famous black nation's leader from the turn of the twentieth century, Booker T. Washington: cast down your buckets where you are. In the reality in which black people are constantly humiliated (for example, Wiggins can enter the sheriff's house only through the kitchen door, and has to wait over two hours for the sheriff to finally come to the kitchen and speak to him), preserving one's dignity is subversive enough to be perceived as fighting for civil rights. A great book: poignant, moving and eye-opening.

P.S. After reading this book one can't fail to realize that the recent inauguration of the American President marked a historic change, perhaps comparable only to the inauguration of George Washington. President of the United States Barack Obama - I still have to repeat it to myself over and over again to make it sink in.

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.

"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;)

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.