Extra Entry: K.Miller, T.Cichocka: "Bajki rozebrane"

In their conversation recorded on 400 pages, Katarzyna Miller and Tatiana Cichocka remind the readers of the old truth that it's not people who tell stories but it's actually stories that tell people. Old tales containing collective wisdom passed down from generation to generation reflect people's yearnings, dreams, anxieties and joys encoded in archetypes (that is, in Jungian terms, symbolic themes which are innate and universal). The two women - Miller, a psychotherapist and philosopher, and Cichocka, a journalist - re-read the well known tales in order to discover meanings which are surprisingly up-to-date (like, for example, "Hansel and Gretel - Welcome to McWorld"). The fact that the two interlocutors are associated with Gender Studies at Warsaw University (as a teacher and a former student, respectively) may have resulted in their decision to apply Jungian rather than Freudian analytical psychology to their decoding of the tales, though references to the classical Bruno Bettelheim are not infrequent in the book.

Also, the fact is probably responsible for their gender-oriented interpretations of the tales (incidentally, this is precisely the reason why I bought the book;). So, what can an adult learn from, for example, the fact that in Andersen's The Snow Queen it is Kai who falls victim to the splinters of the mirror? Miller associates the splinter with patriarchal power with which the boy is contaminated. The power granted to the boy by the mere fact that he is male becomes the "patriarchal flaw" which corrupts him because he has no idea how to use this, well - undeserved and totally unearned - gift. Not knowing how to handle the power of the masculine position (no one has taught him that power means also responsibility), Kai relishes in executing it by becoming cruel to Gerda.

The book is worth recommending to any (prospective) parent or teacher, since it debunks certain myths connected with, for example, the need to avoid exposing children to the cruelty and violence permeating the Grimm Brothers' or Perrault's tales: fairy-tale cruelty is only symbolic, and evil must always be vanquished. In this way children learn that pain, cruelty and fear are part of life, but the hero/ine with whom the child identifies shall overcome;). A very wise and enlightening book: it teaches what to talk about when you talk about fairy tales with children.

P.S. I can't wait to meet my nieces (12 and 8) and re-read The Ugly Duckling, Cinderella, The Sleeping Beauty and Ali Baba with them. Especially as they both already know perfectly well who Mary Wollstonecraft was, what a heroic life Emmeline Pankhurst lived and the fact that New Zealand and Australia were the first countries in which women got the right to vote (courtesy of The Little Book on Feminism). They can also tell what the cover of the latest issue of the Zadra magazine illustrates. Unfortunately (or, maybe: fortunately?), my elder niece has also become sensitive to her (male) history teacher's chauvinism, but that's the price one always pays for a rising consciousness. Anyway, it seems that it's never too early - or too late;)

P.S.2. Thank you, evans, for recommending the book to me xxxxx;)

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.

Daniel Mendelsohn: "The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million."

Daniel Mendelsohn is an American writer of a well-established position thanks to his 2001 autobiographical book The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity, in which he explored his sexuality, frequently referring to the homosexual code of Greek mythology. He is also an awarded regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. His 2006 Book-Critics-Circle-awarded novel The Lost is another autobiographical work. In it the author records his round-the-world journey which he undertook to find out the circumstances in which his great-uncle Schmiel, his wife and four daughters were killed by the Nazis.

The decision to search for the lost members of the family was triggered by the desire to fill in the blanks in his grandfather's stories, as the narrator confesses: My grandfather told me all these stories, all these things, but he never talked about his brother and sister-in-law and the four girls, who, to me, seemed not so much dead as lost, vanished not only from the world but — even more terrible to me — from my grandfather’s stories. After his grandfather dies, Mendelsohn receives the mysterious wallet which he always saw in Grandfather's pocket, where he finds a set of letters from his great-uncle Schmiel to the family in America: his pleas and descriptions of the situation of Jews in the then Polish town of Bolechow at the onset of the Nazi terror. And so, reading Grandfather's gift as a sort of command to write the full history of the family, the narrator has produced what he calls a mythic narrative... about closeness and distance, intimacy and violence, love and death. To make sure the story sounds complete, he writes the novel in five sections named after the first five chapters of the Torah (starting with 'Bereishit' or 'Beginnings'), interweaving his narrative with the mythic narratives of the Creation, the Flood and Cain's murder of Abel, which serve here as master narratives universalizing and explaining the significance of the ordeal which Bolechow's Jews suffered from the Nazis. He interprets the story of Lot's wife as a warning that regret for what we have lost, for the pasts we have to abandon, often poisons any attempt to make a new life. For those who can't help it and look back the great danger is tears, the unstoppable weeping that the Greeks ... knew was not only a pain but a narcotic pleasure, too: a mournful contemplation so flawless so crystalline, that it can, in the end, immobilize you.

Having signaled that the story promises no optimistic ending, he constantly doubts whether it is possible to comprehend and render properly what happened to the victims of the Holocaust. Mendelsohn states: Whatever we see in museums, the artifacts and the evidence, can give us only the dimmest comprehension of what the event itself was like... We must be careful when we try to envision ‘what it was like.’ It is possible today, for instance, to walk inside a vintage cattle car in a museum, but... simply being in that enclosed, boxlike space... is not the same as being in that space after you’ve had to smother your toddler to death and to drink your own urine in desperation, experiences that visitors to such exhibits are unlikely to have recently undergone. In order to overcome this impossibility (probably), he records an eye-witness account of A terrible episode [which] happened with Mrs. Grynberg. The Ukrainians and the Germans who had broken into her house found her giving birth... When the birth pangs started she was dragged onto a dumpster in the yard of the town hall with a crowd... who cracked jokes and jeered and watched the pain of childbirth... The child was immediately torn from her arms along with its umbilical cord and thrown — It was trampled by the crowd and she was stood on her feet as blood poured out of her with her bleeding bits hanging.

Mendelsohn's effort to give the lost six their faces ends in a partial success only, since in the novel, which is a record of his search after all, equal attention is paid to the perished members of the family and to the ramifications on the significance of the biblical stories. Moreover, every step that Mendelsohn undertakes to gain scattered pieces of information about the victims (the Internet searches, the library visits, the airplane flights to meet the survivors from Bolechow) and his own bewilderment and desire to find out the truth are treated with equal solemnity. For me - too many details and names to remember, too many threads picked up that do not contribute to the discovery of the truth, if there is any to be discovered. Hence I gave up and left one fifth of this thick volume unread. I don't know what to blame it on - is it the book's fault confirming the narrator's immobilization or is it my attitude, resembling that of Huck Finn, who initially got interested in the story of Moses but, having learned that Moses had been long dead, refused to concentrate on Miss Watson's lesson.

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.