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.

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.

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.