Episoder
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Moshe Ludlow, a Romanian-born theater owner, opens the small townâs first integrated dance hall. His wife Chona runs The Heaven and Earth Grocery store on Chicken Hill, which caters to Blacks and European immigrants, mostly Jewish. Chona is generous and warm-hearted, and though the store makes little profit, she is loved by all the residents of Chicken Hill.
All of this wonderful novel, by James McBride, and entitled The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store is devoted to the description of the lives of the poor and discarded residents of Chicken Hill. Chona extends credit to the poor residents in spite of knowing she is unlikely ever to be paid. McBride, as a novelist, is able to describe the racism and anti-semitism of the white community in ways neither journalists nor anthropologists could. While in many ways the residents of Chicken Hill struggle to survive at the margins of white Christian America, McBrideâs story is full of humor and warmth.
Who cared that life was lonely, that jobs were thankless drudgery, that the romance of the proud American state was myth, that the rules of life were laid carefully in neat books and laws written by stern Europeans who stalked the town and state like the grim reaper, with their righteous churches spouting that Jews murdered their precious Jesus Christ. Their fellow Pennsylvanians knew nothing about the shattered shtetls and destroyed synagogues of the old country; they had not set eyes on the stunned elderly immigrants starving in tenements in New York, the old ones who came alone, who spoke Yiddish only , whose children died or left them to live in charity homes, the women frightened until the end, the men consigned to a life of selling vegetables and fruits on horse-drawn carts. They were a lost nation spread across the American countryside, bewildered, their Yeshiva education useless, their proud history ignored , as the clankety-clank of American industry churned around them, their proud past as watchmakers and tailors, scholars and historians, musicians and artists gone, wasted. Americans cared about a money. And power. And government. Jews had none of these things, their job was to tread lightly in the land of milk an honey and be thankful that they were free to walk the land without getting their duffs kickedâor worse. Life in America was hard, but it was free, and if you worked hard , you might gain some opportunity, maybe even a shop or business of some kind.While much of this novel is social criticism, there is much joy in McBrides description of music and dance in the daily lives of the poor on Chicken Hill. Most of McBridesâ prose in this and his other novels is wild and fantastical and full of warmth.
Chona takes it upon herself to watch over the life of a deaf black child, and when the state comes looking for him claiming he needs to be institutionalized, Chonaâs black neighbors help her to hide him away. The boy is eventually caught and sent to an insane asylum called Penhurst . Many of the workers at the so-called hospital are black folks from a nearby community; they are called the Lowgods.
We is in the same place, you an I, being colored. We are visitors here. Thing is , us Lowgods, wherever we is from, the old Africaland, I suppose, we were keepers of our fellowman. That was our purpose. Weâre still that way. Thatâs all we know of our history, the one was moved from us before we were brung here. You know what Lowgod means in our language? Little parent.A local black worker named Nate Timblin, with the help of the Lowgods, is able, nearly miraculously, to spring the boy from Penhurst.
This is a wonderful big-hearted novel by an incredible story teller. McBrideâs writing is so unusual and non-sequential that some readers may find it difficult to follow his narrative, but the effort will be well rewarded if you do.
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This story begins in 1469, in the fifth year of the Chenghua emperorâs reign, when Tan Yunxian was eight years old.
So begins Lisa Seeâs superb account of Chinese medicine in the 15th century. On one level it is a simple story of a girl, Tan, who wants to become a doctor and is tutored by her grandparents who are both doctors. Her best friend Meiling is in training to be a midwife, and the two girls pursue their dreams under the kind but demanding eyes of Tanâs grandparents. The book is worth reading just for this simple and lovely story, but Seeâs real intent is to talk about Chinese medicine, and especially male Chinese doctors.
Confucius made clear that any profession in which blood is involved is considered below usâŠA midwifeâs contact with blood places her in the same base level as a butcher. Furthermore, midwifes are disreputable. They are too much IN THE WORLD.
âPerhaps.â Grandmother sighs. âBut since we physicians acknowledge blood is corrupt and corrupting, then how can a woman give birth without the aid of a midwife?â
This appears to be one of the only issues the grandparents disagree on.
âChild look at me,â she says softly. âRespect your grandfather in all things but know as well that midwives are a necessity. A more pleasing phrase we use for a midwife is she who collects the newbornâAs absurd as it may sound to our western ears, Chinese doctors were not allowed even to touch a womanâs body. Insofar as they are involved in pregnancy and child birth it is only behind a screen set up between doctor and patient. A doctor âmight attend to a woman in laborâgiving her herbs to speed the delivery and make the baby slipperyâ but that is all.
Each of the young girls envies the other. Tan envies Meiling because she can actually be in the world and help women have safe deliveries. Meiling envies Tan both for her wealth and position and because she able to train to be a doctor.
He grandmother doctor tells Tan:
Iâm irritated with men. Iâm lucky to love your grandfather, but most menâother doctors especiallyâdonât like us to succeed. You must always show them respect and let them think they know more than you do, while understanding that you can achieve something they never can. You can actually help women.Both girls are successful in their studies and, for different reasons, are invited to attend women in the emperorâs court. If they are successful, male doctors will be credited, and if they fail, their very lives may be at stake.
Besides the history of Chinese medicine during this period, See gives the reader a long look at caste systems in China and the incredible history of foot-binding among the higher castes, and the ways in which higher caste girls are kept almost entirely out of the daily world of commerce. Tan continues to envy Meilingâs ability to look at the real world rather than living a shuttered and sheltered life.
After giving birth, the upper cast women do their month attended by a doctor and perhaps the midwife who assisted in the delivery. Watched over during the dangerous four weeks following birth.
Grandmother and I visit Lady Huang every morning to make sure she isnât affected by noxious dewâold blood and tissue that refuses to leave the child palaceâŠWe bring with us different warming medicines. Grandmother has been strict with Cook to make sure Lady Huang is offered warming food only. Her blood has transformed into milk, and the baby suckles well.Western doctors have certainly had their dismal history of denigrating midwives and failing to progress in the treatment of pregnant women, even for a time refusing to release their patented grip on the use of forceps to aid in delivery.
I loved this book on so many levels: the story, the researched history and the strong feminist bent the narrative takes.
I hear the sound of voices. Miss Zhao, Lady Kuo, and Poppy come into view and begin to cross the zigzag bridge to reach Meiling and me. For much of my life I felt alone, but over the years a circle of women came to love me, and I came to love each of those women in returnâŠwho knows , really, how many days might be left for a woman such as myself, and what yet I might do when surrounded by so much beauty and love. -
Manglende episoder?
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We are told not to judge a book by its, cover, but I invite you to judge this book by its delicious cover, the content as rich and colorful as its cover. Pomegranate, by Helen Elaine Lee, is deeply insightful, sad and transformative.
The book begins and ends with the same refrain:I live my life forward and backward.
Seems like my body remembers what I canât afford to forget
Here I am alive and awake. Still going forward and backward. And brave enough to tell about it.Ranita Atwater is finishing up a four year term at Oak Hills Correctional Center, about to be set free and determined to win back the parental rights that have been stripped from her.I stand up, like Iâm told. And as I approach the gates, the CO whoâs opening them up gives me a last bit of scorn: â Hasta luego; see you back here soon.â I throw some shade his way and walk through. And here it is, what Iâve been wanting and fearing. Freedom.The novel goes forward and backward: forward to her struggle to remain clean and sober, to convince the courts that she is fit to visit her two children and eventually perhaps even to win back the right to raise them. And backwards to the four years of imprisonment and the events that led up to it.
Without looking for it, and surprised at finding it, Ranita (Nita) finds her first real love in prison. Maxine, politically astute and living through the lens of politics 24/7, is the first person to love Nita for who she is and not simply for what she can give.
The few visits she gets from her kids and her daddy are both treasured and feared.
Jesus. Struggling to get my balance in this present-past jumble. Iâm just praying not everything my kids remember is bad. Reaching for the safety of low expectations, I own that nothing good will come of this. Theyâll look right through me. Iâll say something stupid, something wrong. Iâll find nothing at all to say.Amara, 13, and Theo, are nearly as anxious on these visits and in the early home visits once she is free, as Ranita is.
They listened for their names. Visualized their people coming through the trap. Bargained with their higher powers, Today, God willing, they would get a visit.
If they heard their names, they answered with relief and often tears. If they didnât, there was another absence to add to all the others, as they receded further and further from the free world.Ranita is lucky in some ways, she had a father who loved her and stood by her until he died during her last years of imprisonment. She had two aunties who had taken in her children, and were now charged with determining if Ranita was fit even to see her children, let alone live with them. And her mandated psychotherapist with immense power in the process of determining her fitness to parent turns out to be a good man and one who understands her on many levels, including her addictions.
Ranita learns to see the world politicly via her friend cum lover, Maxine who urges Ranita not to frequent the prison canteen, spending her pitiful earnings on sweets.
Everyone had to find a way to do their time, and the lens of politics was part of Maxineâs. She had no choice but seeing, and speaking what she saw.
âSeriously, Ranitaâ Maxine said âthink about all the products we make inside ... electronic cables and T-shirts, mattresses and flags. American flags, if you can believe the grotesque irony of that. Locked up all the Black folks and then make us produce flags for the country thatâs been demeaning and exploiting us since they captured and enslaved us ... after theyâve kept us from voting and owning anything, trapped us in city food deserts next to toxic waste, with shitty schools and shitty jobs and shitty food and shitty places to live ... no access, no exit ... policing every breath we take ... feeding us menthol cigarettes and drugs and blocking us from health care ... and pitted us against each other and against the folks who should be allies, hoping weâll kill each other off ....âAuthor Lee attended Harvard Law School and has been associated with dozens of prison groups and prison creative writing programs. She writes with such heart and such clarity of vision.
My dad, heâs spirit now. Gone and not gone. And that pomegranate he gifted me with, itâs got a whole other meaning.I try and see myself as filled with ruby seeds. Everything Iâve lived, the things Iâve been and doneâŠwhatâs done to meâŠand for me. The all of it, itâs in me. -
1900, Travancore, South India
She is twelve years old, and she will be married in the morning. Mother and daughter lie on the mat, their wet cheeks glued together.âThe saddest day of a girlâs life is the day of her wedding,â her mother says. âAfter that, God willing, it gets better.âSo begins Abraham Vergheseâs masterwork, The Covenant of Water, a sprawling novel that involves three generations, two continents, and several geographic locations. It is a superb piece of writing, but not, I think, a great novel. There is a huge cast of characters, a dizzying number of locations and episodes, and the sure hand of a compassionate doctor behind the pen.
It would be impossible to overview this monster of a novel in a few pages, but I will dip in a bit and tell the reader about some of the major themes.
In his Notes at the end of this 700 page wonderwork, Verghese tells us:
The story in these pages is entirely fictional, as are all of the major and minor characters, but I have tried to remain true to the real-world events of that time.Certainly it reads like a carefully researched historical novel. There are many doctors in this story, and each of them expresses some of the views and the overall compassion of Dr. Verghese himself.
The primary family in the novel has a weird connection with water. Each generation has at least one son who dies by drowning, and even the males who fear water and never cross over it find bizarre ways of dying due to water.
Big Ammachi is the matriarch of the family and devoted to keeping her first son away from water.
Some of the language in this novel is wonderfully mellifluous.
For most Westerners, Malayalamâs rolling ârhhaâ scrapes the mucosa off the hard palate and cramps the tongueHowever a Scottish doctor by the name of Rune, banters with the children outside his clinic with a Scandinavian lilt to his Malayalam. âRuneâs fees are nominal for the poor and painful for the rich.â
I learned so much about medicine and disease in this novel. For example, I learned just how diphtheria kills. I learned what life is like in a leprosarium, and was surprised to read that leprosy is far less contagious than I had thought, but also how it attacks nerve endings and leads to lepers injuring themselves without feeling it at all.
There are love scenes in this novel that are so beautiful, but nothing like the steamy scenes of western pornography. Verghese describes how simply seeing a naked foot or feeling the breath of a lover on ones skin can be so erotic.
The political content of this novel is both profound and subtle. It is obvious that Verghese favors democratic socialism. His many descriptions of the caste system are pointed but cognizant of its long history.
âBecause you loved my father, this is harder for you to graspâŠYou see yourselves as being kind and generous to him. The âkindâ slave owners in India, or anywhere , were always the ones who had the greatest difficulty seeing the injustice of slavey. Their kindness , their generosity compared to cruel slave owners, made them blind to the unfairness of a system of slavery that they created, they maintained, and that favored them. Iâs like the British bragging about the railways, the colleges, the hospitals they left usâtheir âkindnessâ! As though that justified robbing us of the right to self-rule for two centuries! As though we should thank them for what they stole!
Weâve been doing the same thing to each other in India for centuries. The inalienable right of the Brahmins. And the absence of any right for the untouchables. And all the layers in between. Everyone who is looked down on can look down on someone else. Except; the lowest. The British just came along and moved us down a rung.This is such a rich novel, and it is not unremittingly sad. If you take on this lovely book, try not to read it in short snippets before bedtime. The complexity of the narrative and the huge cast of characters would, I think, make it nearly incomprehensible. Read it in as sustained a manner as possible. No speed-reading. -
Let me begin by allowing Eleanora Shearer to say in her own words why she wrote this beautiful/awful novel:
My aim in writing this novel was to bring to life a story about the Caribbean in the aftermath of slaveryâa place and time that is not always well-known or well understood. Doing this history justice was incredibly important to me, especially given my family ties to the Caribbean. To make this story as accurate as possible, I have chosen to use some termsâsuch as âmulattoâ and âNegroââthat are offensive to many people today, myself included. There are also characters who express deeply racist views., which were widespread at the time. I do not use these terms or write these characters to condone them, but I want readers to be clear-eyed about the extent of the brutality and oppression that enslaved people faced. As we excavate history through fiction, we can confront the injustices of our past as a way to shed light on our present and work toward a more equitable futureAlthough I wonât reveal much of the story of Rachel as she searches the islands for her children who were taken from her and sold, I will sketch out some parts. When the King of England announced the end of slavery for Barbados in 1834, that did not mean the slaves were free, it simply changed their title from slave to apprentice, But they were still bound to the plantation owners who went after, caught and often executed so-called runaways.
Rachel has two sons and two daughters that were taken from her and sold. During the course of this harrowing but beautiful story, she finally finds two of her daughters and the one son who lived, the other having been killed during an uprising.
When the hurricanes came, they ripped up even the sturdiest tree; and when the white men came, they tore children out of their motherâs arms. And so, we learned to live without hope. For us, loss was the only thing that was certain.
Hope hurtsâŠShe [Rachel] had survived for so long by suppressing hope, but when she left, she dared to believe her children might be foundâŠHope led you to dream things that could not be, like freedom wrested from the white manâs unwilling hands, or a family reunited.On her journey from island to island, Rachel is assisted by others One man, Abraham, has lived as a hermit.
Me donâ think about it when me was young. When me first get here. Me think about going home. But thatâs why the white man love to keep us on islandsâhow can me get home? The sea help them keep us here.I found myself wondering why Shearer adopted the odd grammar and the pronoun Me instead of I. She answers that question in her authorâs note.
The other bit of historical accuracy I grappled with for this novel was how to write the dialogue. I wanted the characters to speak in a way that reflected the wonderful creole languages of the Caribbean, but also was accessible to non-Caribbean readers. In the end, I went with dialogue that is not always perfectly in line with how someone like Racheal or Mama B would have spoken at the time, but that still follows some of the rules of Caribbean grammar. Language such as Bajan creole do not conjugate many verbs, which lends an immediacy to Caribbean storytellingâŠThis novel reads as a kind of epic, and at least for this reader, there was no problem with suspending disbelief at some of the wild adventures. There are grisly scenes of chase and horrible descriptions of some punishments meted out. But as Shearer herself says, âI hope this sense of possibility, of love, is something readers will take away from the novel.â
Both her academic training and her own history lend authority to this historical novel. I agree whole heartedly with Shearerâs evaluation:
Women like Rachael (and the real Mother Rachael) set out to make a kind of freedom for themselves when they brought their families back together again. There is something so wonderfully hopeful in those stories. They are histories that need to be told. -
The best way to introduce you to young Demon Copperhead is to let him announce his entrance:
First, I got myself born. A decent crowd was on hand to watch, and theyâve always given me that much: the worst of the job was up to me, my mother being letâs just say out of it.
On any other day theyâd have seen her outside on the deck of her trailer home, good neighbors taking notice, pestering the tit of trouble as they will. All through the dog-breath air of late summer and fall, cast an eye up the mountain and there sheâd be, little bleach-blond smoking her Pall Malls, hanging on that railing like sheâs captain of her ship up there and now might be the hour itâs going down. This is an eighteen-year-old girl weâre discussing, all on her own and as pregnant as it gets. The day she failed to show, it fell to Nance Peggot to go bang on the door, barge inside, and find her passed out on the bathroom floor with her junk all over the place and me already coming out. A slick fish-colored hostage picking up grit from the vinyl, worming and shoving around because Iâm still inside the sack that babies float in, pre-real-life
Mr. Peggot was outside idling his truck, headed for evening service, probably thinking about how much of his life heâd spent waiting on women. His wife would have told him the Jesusing could hold on a minute, first she needed to see if the little pregnant gal had got herself liquored up again. Mrs. Peggot being a lady that doesnât beat around the bushes and if need be, will tell Christ Jesus to sit tight and keep his pretty hair on. She came back out yelling for him to call 911 because a poor child is in the bathroom trying to punch himself out of a bag.Here is Barbara Kingsolver showing her genius again, managing to take on the voice of a young boy and keeping that voice with all its grammatical blunders and peculiar wording for seven hundred pages of monologue. I can imagine writing a short story in the voice of my younger self, but to be able to convincingly hold that voice not just for a short story but for a very long novel simply astounds me.
There is no way I could do justice to sketching out the whole story of Demonâs life, but I could easily assemble a series of terse bits of advice he gives to the reader. Although it says his name is Damon Fields on his birth certificate. âDid she think sheâd even get me off her tits before people turned that into Demon?â And once he got his copper-wire hair, he became Demon Copperhead.
Like Dickensâ David Copperfield, Demon is passed from foster home to foster home and works dangerous, low-paying jobs from the age of eight on. His mother loses custody and regains it several times, but takes in stray men one after another. The worst of these men, Stoner, beats on both him and his mother until Demon is taken from her by Childrenâs Services. âAt the time, I thought my life couldnât get any worse. Hereâs some advice: Donât ever think that.â
Demonâs great talent is drawing, and he loves to draw super-heroes. He draws his friends and tells them what super powers they have.
While he is with one family, the McCobbs, Mrs. McCobb takes him to Walmart and using money he has made sorting junk for a junk-dealer, she buys him new clothes, not so much for him but to protect her familyâs good name.
But at school the next day in my new clothes I still felt horrible. Not even proud. Embarrassed honestly, because nothing would change. Now theyâd all think I was just that much more pitiful, because of trying. Loser is a cliff. Once youâve gone over, youâre over.At one point, in desperation he seeks out his grandmother, hoping to be taken in and cared for.
My grandmother had no use for anything in the line of boys or men, âAny of them that stands up to make water,â was how she put it. Bad news for me.Still, his grandmother, his fatherâs mother, does provide for him and an uncle who lives with her encourages his art and provides sage advice when others only laugh at or curse him.
While Demonâs life is sad and his very existence precarious, this novel is often humorous and Kingsolverâs wisdom shines through. She exposes the many stereotypes applied to hill country miners, so-called hillbillies, and looks long and hard at opiate addiction. In her afterward, she acknowledges her debt to Charles Dickens:
Iâm grateful to Charles Dickens for writing David Copperfield, his impassioned critique of institutional poverty and its damaging effects on children in his society. Those problems are still with us. In adapting his novel to my own place and time, working for years with his outrage, inventiveness, and empathy at my elbow, Iâve come to think of him as my genius friend. -
Joy Castro is a brilliant writer of historical fiction. Many of you readers will know her for her novel Flight Risk. Today I want to talk to you about her 2023 novel, One Brilliant Flame. In her afterward entitled âGratitudeâ, she explains part of her motive for writing the book:
For most of my lifeâand I am fifty-four nowâI knew nothing about the political history of Key West or its importance as a rebel base for the anti-colonial insurgency in Cuba. It is a moment in US history that has been largely forgotten or erasedâa utopian moment of hope for true racial and gender equality. Unfortunately, it was eclipsed by Key Westâs Great Fire and the events that followed.My ignorance is much more profound than hers, and I found this novel to be fascinating on so many levels. Besides the well researched historical content, she also creates a wonderful cast of characters and a juicy story.
Most of her lead characters are girls or women. Chaveta is a powerful figure who begins working in a cigar factory at the age of twelve, stripping and cleaning tobacco leaves.
By the time I was twelve and the Flores Cubana factory would hire me, I was already the fastest stripper on the bench. I worked for only a year on the top floor with the other children and some women (smaller hands) before they moved me down to the main floor. At thirteen, I became the youngest roller in a shop of five hundred souls.Zenaida is a young writer, a girl who writes poetry (unheard of!), and also a roller who is paid by the number of cigars she rolls in a day. Sofia is the very much spoiled daughter of the owner of the factoryâcontemptuous of the servants and all those she considers beneath her. She is imperious, but distrusts boys and men and means to stay clear of them until her father dies and makes her a rich free woman.
Feliciano is a rebel fighter who fights for the liberation of Cuba from Spain, and, unlike most of his follow fighters, sees freedom for Cuba must be linked to freedom of girls and women. As his friend Chaveta points out:
âIf you are willing to kill and die for Cuba to be freeââshe glanced around sweeping the whole auditorium with her gazeââthen must you not also liberate every girl and woman in your midst? Must we not all be let alone, free and unmolested, to do as we will, and to choose whomever we wantâor choose no one at all?âEvery year in the town there is a pageant held to decide on the most desirable girl in the village. All the mothers seem eager to have their daughters appear at the pageant, partly for the monetary reward, but more simply for the recognition. But even Sofia, usually the good girl who curries favor with the older more conservative members of the community senses the pageant-stage is not so far removed from, the auction block.
Standing there in a row with other girls to demonstrate our figures and fine posture, gazed at by hundreds of eagerly chattering Cubans. I could not help thinking of the auction block.Among the many political discussions on how to liberate Cuba and whether or not to enlist the help of Americans, the topic of art arises, what it is and whether it can ever be used politically without compromising it. Poetry begins to appear on walls in town and shows the rift between various factions fighting for Cubaâs independence. The factory owners certainly have different interests and goals than the factory workers and the rebel fighters. The radical poet is named The Thorn and everyone assumes the writer is a man. Women canât write poetry. Of course eventually the town is in for a surprise.
A tremendous fire destroys Key West and sixteen of its cigar factories and essentially quells the dreamed of rebellion.
When I was growing up the period of Caribbean/US history was not taught in public school or college. In my own lifetime, we were mostly poor and marginalized people: my father and older relatives never talked about the past.Castro is determined to talk about it, and to educate the rest of us about this unique time and place in history. The novel is worth reading for the story standing alone, but the historical significance is obvious. -
Most readers know of Walter Mosley via his masterful Easy Rawlins mystery series. His faithful readers would no doubt hurry to get hold of a new book in that series, but my hunch is that Mosley wanted to speak with a different voice than the relatively well off Easy Rawlins who has both money and muscles on his side. Instead, the hero of Always Outnumbered, Always Outgunned is Socrates Fortlow, a man of the streets, a convicted murderer who spent twenty-seven years in jail and has been out of jail and has lived in Watts for eight years.
Like the Greek philosopher, Socrates, Socco is a deep thinker and one who questions those around him. The Greek philosopher Socrates says that his only claim to wisdom is that he knows that he knows nothing, and he sets out to expose those who make grand and unjustified claims to wisdom. He calls himself a gadfly (a kind of horsefly) that has attached himself to the flanks of the state, stinging with questions. To those who claim knowledge, he asks simply, âWhat is knowledge?â just as he asks politicians, âWhat is justice? What is good?â
Socrates of Watts who lives in a two room shack and works at a chain supermarket is also a man who asks questions, and then questions the answers he receives.
ââŠwe donât want nobody cainât stand up to whatâs got to be done,â Socrates said.
âAnd just what is that?â Howard asked.
âWhatâs the biggest problem a black man have?â Socrates asked as if the answer was as plain as wallpaper.
âThe po-liceâ said Howard.
Socrates smiled. âYeah, yeah. Itâs always trouble on the streetâand at home too. But they ainât the problem--not really.
So what is?â Stony asked.
âBeinâ a man, thatâs what. Standinâ up and sayinâ what it is we want. An what it is we ainât gonna take.âSay to who?â Right asked, âTo the cops?â
âI donât believe in goinâ to the cops ovah somethinâ like this here.â Socrates said. âA black manâno matter how bad he isâbeinâ brutalized by the cops is a hurt to all of us. Goinâ to the cops ovah a brother is like askinâ for chains.
There are fourteen interlocked stories in this marvelous little book, and each is a kind of morality tale. Tales about what to do and what not to do. Like the historical Socrates, Socco is trying to live a good life. In one of the chapters, Socco runs into a young man who steals from the rich while dressed in a suit and tie, and then quickly covers his suit with overalls and becomes an invisible black man.
âIâm sayin that this good life you talkinâ âbout comes outta your own brotherâs house. Either you gonna steal from a man like me or you gonna steal from a shop where I do my business. Anâ evâry time I go in there I be payinâ for security cameras andâ security guards anâ up-to-the-roof insurance that they got tâpay off what people been stealinâ. Anâ they gonna raise the prices higherân a [expletived] to pay the bills, witâ a little extra tâpay us back for stealinââAlong his way Socrates runs into a young boy who is perilously close to joining a gang, because he needs street protection. Socco lets the boy sleep in his shack and he feeds him and tries to get him away from the neighborhood where is in danger of being killed or killing others.
Socrates thought about a promise heâd made. A murky pledge. He swore to himself that heâd never hurt another personâexcept if he had to for self-preservation. He swore to try and do good if the chance came before him. That way he could ease the evil deeds that he had perpetrated in the long evil life that heâd lived.In my not-so-humble judgment, I think Socco is wiser that the Greek Socrates who lets the state convict him of a crime he did not commit (atheism and corrupting the youth), when he could have saved himself, instead leaving his wife and children to fend for themselves while he takes the hemlock.
As for religion coming to the rescue, Socratesâ aunt Bellandra Beaufort tries to set young Socco staight.
âGod ainât nowhere near here, childâŠHeâs a million miles away, out in the middle âa the ocean somewhere. Anâ he ainât white like they say he is neither.â
âGodâs black?â little Socrates asked the tall skinny woman. He was sitting in her lap, leaning against her bony breast.
âNaw baby,â she said sadly. âHe ainât black. If he was there wouldnât be all this mess down her witâ us. Naw. Godâs blue.
âBlue?â
Uh-huh. Blue like the ocean. Blue. Sad and cold and far away like the sky is far and blue. You got to go a long long way to get to God. And even if you get there he might not say a thing. Not a damn thing.â
It is no accident that Mosley chooses Socrates as the name for his new lead character. Mosley understands the dialectical process of Socrates, But unlike the historical Socrates, Mosleyâs charter does not revel in his ignorance. He is an evangelist for good.
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Although this happened more when I was younger, I occasionally run into an author who so impresses me that I know I will read all of her work as soon as I can get hold of it. Sue Miller is just such an author. I have now read all but one of her long list of excellent novels including her memoir of her father, The Story of My Father.
The recurring themes in her novels had already convinced me that much of her fiction is autobiographical, and her memoir of her father solidified that conviction. It is as if she has stirred together a cauldron of her memories of her several marriages and her life as a parent, and then spills them out in the pages of her novels. The Arsonist, one of her latest novels, is as usual, a close description of the everyday life of her characters. While the title suggests it is a novel about arson, turns out that the arsons and the arsonist are of minor importance to Miller while the major theme is how relationships go wrong and occasionally go right.
The Boston Globe says of this late novel, âEntertainingâŠFantastic sizzle both sexual and spiritual.â While sexual sizzle is no longer an issue for me, the spiritual sizzle of her work hits me hard and stays with me.
Many years ago I read and reviewed her first, and most famous novel, The Good Mother. And then, only this past summer did I pick up an early novel, While I Was Gone. Having just traveled to my home for a final visit with my last living sibling, and while there involved in an intense discussion with my oldest male friend about choosing death while still mobile and cognizant, I found myself arguing for life and possibility. My brother died while I was on the train coming home, and his death added to the impact the novel had on me. The heroine of the novel is married when she has kind of mystical experience in which she feels outside her life, indeed, outside her body. She then goes through a series of reflections on her life regarding her marriage and family. She wonders if she has chosen well, and begins a flirtation with an old lover which very nearly derails her marriage. What occurs is that she begins to think about alternate lives she might have lived and alternate relationships she might have pursued. In short, she considers all that seems bland and repetitive in her present life, and only at the last moment begins to realize all that is good about her family life and her life with her husband. It takes a shock and a crisis to jolt her into this new appraisal.
Another of the recurring themes in her books is Alzheimerâs or other debilitating diseases. In The Story of My Father, she recounts the slow dissolution of her father as he struggles with and finally succumbs to the disease. While the book is sad, Miller is brutally honest about her own feelings, her resentments mixed with fear and deep loyalty to her once brilliant, academic father.
Although there are plots and story-lines, it is what happens in the interior life that really interests Miller and creates the spiritual sizzle of her words. While she has immense respect and admiration for her fatherâs intellectual pursuits, she also comes to realize how his intense interests in many ways distanced him from his wife and children.There was an impartiality, and therefore a distance, in even my fatherâs closest and most loving attentionâŠI certainly knew him to be capable of forgetfulness of what to him seemed mundane or unimportant, and this occasionally included obligations heâd undertaken to one of us or to my motherâŠthe nightmare side of living with someone whose first allegiance is elsewhere, is other worldly. You are left, you are abandoned. You have no real importance in the great scheme of things.So far I have said nothing about Millerâs conflicted relationship with her mother, and her self-doubts being a mother, who, like her father, needs huge amounts of time to write and reflect, too often to the detriment of her children.
There is so much more to say about the complex emotional reflections of this brilliant author. I will content myself with a final comment about Millerâs unabashed love of men. Of course she is critical of the non-domesticity of many/most men, but her descriptions of her father and of the husbands in her novels leave no doubt that she admires so much about good men, good fathers. Perhaps there is a book, The Good Father, in her future. -
I know next to nothing about horses and am, at best, a sloppy historian. Geraldine Brooks knows tons about horses and is a superb historian. Her 2022 book, Horse, fascinated me from the first page to the last. Her character Jess, in 2019, is an articulator, i.e. a combination artist and zoologist who puts together skeletons. She is hired by the Smithsonian Museum to dis-articulate and then re-articulate a famous horse skeleton. Dr. Catherine Morgan is a scientific researcher whom Jess has been assigned to assist.
Says Catherine:
One of my areas of interest is the effect of conformation on the locomotor biomechanics of the horse. Basically, Iâm trying to determine what bone structure allows them to run fast while avoiding injury. To do that, Iâm measuring and describing all the great racehorses whose skeletons are still available.
Catherine stepped up to the exhibit label on the plinth and drew out her reading glasses. âHorse!â She read. âI canât believe it. I donât suppose you people have the Mona Lisa stashed somewhere, labeled Smiling Girl?â
âNot just Horse,â she said. THE horse. What you have here is the greatest racing stallion in American turf history.
Jessâ story is just one of the threads in this magnificent historical novel. Warfieldâs Jarret is a slave on the farm of a famous horse breeder, not given a last name, but identified by his ownerâs name. Thomas Scott is a not well known artist who is commissioned to paint a portrait of Darley, a racehorse who has been given to Jarretâs father, Harry, who has bought his own freedom. The horse is given to him in lieu of a yearâs wages, and yet it is against the law for a negro to own a racehorse, let alone to race him in stakes races. So, the horse must be officially registered in Warfieldâs name.
It is Jarret who raises and trains the horse, and in a manner that differs in important ways from tradition. Unlike todayâs thoroughbreds who are raced as two year olds. Darley is not even ridden until he is much older.
âWhen can we ride him? She asked.â
âLong time yet, miss Clay. His bones got to grow. Best let that happen in its own good time. Harry, âdidnât hold with the newfangled idea of racing two-year-olds.â
Instead the horses are not raced until they are four or older, and they are trained to run four mile heats, sometimes three such heats in a single day.
Alongside the story of Darley the racehorse, there is in this carefully researched novel another more serious strain regarding slavery and the perilous lives of slaves who can be bought and sold on the whim of the owner. Jarretâs father intends to buy his son out of slavery, but he has already depleted his funds in buying the freedom of his wife, and is counting on the purses from races to buy Jarretâs freedom.
Jarret is close to horses from his infancy. âLook at himâŠHeâs half colt himself.â
The first bed he could remember was in a horse stall. He shared straw with the two geldings in the carriage house while his mother slept in the mansion, nursemaid to the mistressâs infant. Jarret hardly saw her. His first language had been the subtle gestures and sounds of horses. Heâd been slow to master human speech, but he could interpret the horses: their moods, their alliances, their simple wants and many fears. He came to believe that horses lived with a world of fear, and when you grasped that, you had a clear idea of how to be with them.Much of this novel is about the mounting sense of rebellion among the slaves, wanting to run and to be free, but so aware of the consequences if caught. Theo, the Englishman horse painter is well aware of how negroes are depicted by artists, and is writing a dissertation on the depictions of Africans in British art.
He planned to write of Coon caricatures, Oriental fantasies, the decorative enslaved servant in ornate livery, proffering fruit or waving peacock-feathered fans for a White master. His thesis argued that these paintings were never meant to be viewed as portraits of individuals, merely status signifiers of the privilege, wealth, and power of the White sitters. The reality of quotidian Black life didnât merit depictionâŠThis is a superb novel on so many levels, and the journalist, historian Brooks juggles the various stories with the same craftsmanship that won her the Pulitzer prize for her earlier book March.
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Heâs been much more careful in his marriage to Annie. More careful and more faithful.
Yet not entirely faithful.
Which is partly whatâs making him remember the end with Frieda.
Because heâs done it again.Sue Miller has done it again: written an astounding novel about family life and all of its complexities.
In her newest novel, Monogamy, published in 2020, Miller undertakes to describe in meticulous detail the marriage of Graham and Annie. I will not be spoiling the novel for you readers by telling you that the anatomy of this marriage is described after Graham dies in his sleep of a heart attack. Viewed as an ideal couple by those who know them, Miller shows us the underside of the marriage as Annie begins to deal with her grief.
Both Annie and Graham have been married before. During the 70s Graham and Frieda had decided to experiment with an open marriage.
An open marriage. Theyâd agreed on it at first. It had been that eraâthe world was shifting and changing rapidly around them, and Graham had stepped into this altered universe eagerly, along with what seemed like half of Cambridge, compelled by all the things it seemed to promiseâamong them a different meaning for marriage, for sex.
The problems was that Graham had been happy in this new world, and Frieda hadnât. She tired, she dutifully had a few lovers in the first year or so. But then she got pregnant with Lucas and realized that sheâd really never wanted any of it.
As was so often the case, men jumped at this new freedom while so many women simply went along with it, or pretended to, in order to preserve their marriages. It is Frieda who steps away from the marriage, taking Lucas with her. Eventually, Graham and Frieda become friends and share custody of their young son. Frieda also, though not by choice, assumes the role of confessor for Graham, and he confesses to her his infidelity with a recently divorced woman in their circle of friends, Her name is Rosemary, and he also tells his oldest male friend about his new âslipâ.
The problem is that RosemaryâRosemary Gregory, the woman heâs slept with maybe four maybe five timesâhas started to behave as if thereâs some kind of commitment between them, as though she has a claim on him...He needs to end it, but thatâs something heâs never been good atâdisappointing people. At being, as he sees it, unkind.After his death, Annie discovers that both his best friend and Frieda knew of the infidelity, and it seems as if perhaps everyone knows but Annie.
What is most amazing about Millerâs writing is how completely she develops her characters and how thoroughly she describes their lives. Although describing only an incident here and there, a memory of the past, an anticipation of the future, it feels to the reader that they are being told everything in detail. Philosophers who called themselves phenomenologists argued that philosophy should be a description of lived life, and as Iris Murdoch has pointed out, if this is, indeed, the task of the philosopher, then novelists are the very best at doing this. And Sue Miller is of the first rank in this description of the lived inner lives of her characters.
In the past couple of months I have read four of Millerâs novels, all close descriptions of marriages and family life. The Senatorâs Wife equals the exquisitely detailed description of the slow dissolution of a marriage. While I Was Gone also displays the immense emotional intelligence of Sue Miller.
It is hard to do justice to her novels by reviewing them, since their greatness is in the magnificent description of the relationships. She does not preach, and tells us that she has no great insights about monogamy or marriage. But I think you will disagree with the authorâ own assessment of her work if you swim into her wonderfully articulated stories.
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Preeti Desai is a successful corporate lawyer who has, in her estimation, finally achieved the assimilation into American culture that she had striven all of her life to achieve. But then a horrible accident involving her brother and sister-in-law, call her back to India, and she realizes how much she still walks like and elephant. Her mother has told her this so often. âI was around nine years old when I realized she wasnât calling me fat. She meant that I wasnât demure and obedientâqualities ever good Indian daughter should have.â
And so begins this fascinating, sometimes heartbreaking story of an Indian family that has immigrated to the U.S. and parents who desperately want their two children to assimilate and succeed as Americans, but also want them to retain Indian values and culture. Mansi Shah, with her incisive and lovely prose lays out this story in her 2022 novel, A Taste of Ginger.
Preeti has not talked to her mother for months:
Not since she found out that my boyfriendânow ex-boyfriendâand I had been living together in Los Angelas. Cohabitating with a dhoriya was, in her opinion, the most shameful thing her daughter could have done. Living with a white boy was right up there with marrying someone from a lower caste or talking back to your elders.Preeti and her brother, Neel, have been striving since childhood to sluff off Indian clothes and habits in order to succeed in this new home in Chicago.
Despite living in America for over twenty years, my parents didnât have any friends who werenât Gujarati. Much to my chagrin as a teenager trying to fit into this new country. Devon Avenue gave my parents the option of living in the West without giving up the East, and expecting their children to do the same.When her brother and pregnant sister-in-law are seriously injured in a rickshaw truck accident in India, Preeti must fly âhomeâ although she risks losing her job at the law firm where she works 60+ hour a week. And there she finds as an NRI (non-resident Indian) that she is as singled out and foreign as she has been in the states. Unlike in Los Angela, in India she looks the same as those around her, but is immediately set apart.
Having been born in a higher caste, her family had lived a relatively wealthy life in India with servants to care for their daily needs; in America her engineer father is not recognized for the educated man he is and must take on what for him is menial labor. It is not until she returns to India that she really realizes how much her parents had given up to come to America. Neither had she really understood the Indian caste system, which she is forced to recognize when she has the audacity to associate with an Indian photographer who is of a lower caste. And finally, she did not realize that her mother had been unhappy in this country, yearning for her old life in India, but unwilling to go back.
As an immigrant child of immigrant parents, I grew up knowing my future had to be their future. That meant getting the best grades , going to the best college, and getting the best job to ensure the sacrifices they had made for us were validated.While her brother Neel has also had to work hard to assimilate, he has been able to retain some core Indian values. He marries a very traditional Indian girl who seems to easily balance the two cultures. Preeti admires but also resents her apparent ease as she reverts to Indian values. âYou guys are among the lucky few that have a love marriage that fell within the biodata matches of the arranged system, and you have to protect it...You have to give me hope that someday, somewhere, i will be able to find that kind of happiness too.â
Although her sister-in-law survives the accident, the baby does not, and it turns out that Preeti must stay in India much longer than intended to help her loved brother re-unite with his grief-stricken wife.
Shah develops her story and her charters slowly with a keen eye and forgiving heart. Over the time there, she finally manages to reconnect with her mother, and to realize how she has struggled in her American life. She also comes to understand how limited her knowledge of the caste system is.
During my Indian childhood and infrequent trips back, I had never had occasion to be around anyone from another caste outside of servants and vendors, and I wasnât familiar with the differences in lifestyle between them. It hadnât occurred to me that there were public schools here because Iâd only known people who went to private ones. What I knew of India applied only to the upper caste, and I realized I knew nothing of how most of the country lived. -
Judy Blunt wrote these lovely snapshots of thirty years of life on wheat and cattle ranches in northeastern Montana as memoir. It stuns me that I had not run across this book before, finally gathered together as a book in 2002. Many, even most, of my reader friends had read this long ago. Iâm happy I discovered the volume on a friendâs bookshelf during a recent train trip to Salt lake City.In August of 1986, I left Phillips County with a new divorce and an old car, with three scared kids and some clothes piled in back. We followed the sun west for hours, climbing mountain passes, crossing river after river, until we spanned the final bridge into Missoula. The kids started school the next morning, and within days I started my freshman year at the University of Montana, the four of us holding hands and stepping together into a world of mountains and shopping malls.
I have to suppose the title is ironic, since the break was anything but clean. First, at thirteen, she fought against turning into a woman, then married a man twice her age whom she started dating at fifteen and married at eighteen. A marriage more of inevitability than choice.
I was eighteen when I walked down the aisle on my fatherâs arm. The groom was almost thirty, a man of simple tastes and few passions, staunch honor and little experience. I joined him at the alter, bristling with independence yet eager to please, desperate for attention yet filled with fierce energy born of old angerâa riddle behind my homemade veil. From my parents to the unwitting hands of my husband I passed the terrible power of judgment and reward, the absolute authority I connected with love.Blunt understand how two edged the praise was for tough ranch women. âallowedâ to do menâs work, but never to own land or livestock.
In my real-life, out-west community, the depressing sequel was being written as i watched, and the work parts were harder to skip. I knew women savvy to the working of cattle and horses, women who rode the hay rake in June and took to the fields at harvest. But without exception, they picked up a thank-you and walked back to tackle the work that was theirs alone. Womenâs work. If I learned nothing else in my early years, I learned the scorn that twisted those words into insults.The prose in this book is simple but so beautiful. Hard to believe she did not really start writing until she was in her thirties. I could easily make this review simply a string of quote from the book.
Womanly arts be damned. I wanted the ease, the power, of my mother, horseback. I wanted the real myth, and I set out to get it.
That fall, as I turned twelve, the sole member of my peer group defected. My cousin Lois turned thirteen and despite our blood-sister oath forbidding such things, she put on a bra, ratted her hair into haystacks and kissed the hired man. I worked on my own appearance with grim determination. I spit and crossed my legs like field hand. , I peeled my nails off with my teeth, and kept my hair bobbed away from my face. I preferred stacking bales and working cattle, and ducked house chores when I could. I climbed trees, rode the milk pen steers to a standstill and strung frogs ten-deep on a willow spear. I read myself into the strongest characters of half the Malta library. I made it last a year. And when, in the inexorable process of time, as my body betrayed me, my rage was terrible....Dark brown hair, sun-faded to the color of hay, ear length and shaggy, needing a wash. A big, raw-boned girl my mother said. Tall for twelve. A square, horsy face, I thought, yet hidden by owlish glasses, chin jutting like a shoehorn, my fatherâs chin and his wolfish teeth wrangling for space behind my tight lips...That night I tiptoed to the bathroom, selected a clean sock from the laundry basket and gripped it in my teeth, just in case. After dabbing my bare chest with alcohol, I attempted to lance my breast buds with a darning needle.
Unable to prevent either her periods or her budding breasts, she finally succumbs to adulthood. While many of these little vignettes are sad or frightening, they are not without humor and and told as only a born storyteller can tell them.
I loved this book. It returned me to the simple joy of reading. Judy Blunt is a tough and brilliant woman who finally broke clean in her thirties and pursued the education she had always dreamed of. She had to defy her husband and her community to do it. She shows us a tough ranch-womenâs brand of feminism built in the crucible of hard work and bearing children.
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Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant chemist who, perhaps unfortunately, is also beautiful.
Once a research chemist, Elizabeth Zott was a woman with flawless skin and an unmistakable demeanor of someone who was not average and never would be.
The main character in Bonnie Garmusâ delightful 2022 novel, Lessons in Chemistry is as stubborn as she is brilliant. She refuses to be seen as simply an extension of her Nobel Prize nominated boyfriend whom she lives with but refuses to marry. Her hiring by a scientific think-tank is already viewed by the male workforce as due to the influence of her famous boyfriend. And she realizes that no matter how brilliant her work is, she will be seen as riding the coat-tails of Calvin Evans.
Elizabeth meets Calvin when he discovers her stealing beakers from his lab, which she explains is due to a lack of funding for her research.
âThe problem, Calvin,â she asserted, âis that half the population is being wasted. Itâs not just that i canât get the supplies I need to complete my work, itâs that women canât get the education they need to do what theyâre meant to do. And even if they do attend college, it will never be in a place like Cambridge. Which means they wonât be offered the same opportunities nor afforded the same respect. Theyâll start at the bottom and stay there. Donât even get me started on pay. And all because they didnât attend a school that wouldnât admit them in the first place.âThe action in this novel takes place in the 60s, but Garmus thinks not much has changed since then.
Garmus creates some really funny and delightful characters including a dog who understands a very large number of words and a precocious daughter âwho could hum a Bach concerto but couldnât tie her own shoes; who could explain the earthâs rotation but stumbled at tac-tac-toe.â
The plot of the novel is less important than the commentary on science and society that Garmus provides. Briefly put, Calvin dies, and Elizabeth is fired from the research institute soon after his death. Out of a job and nearly broke, she has little to do but work on her already very accomplished cooking skills. Cooking she insists is like chemistry, in fact it is chemistry at the practical level. Eventually in this whacky story, Elizabeth becomes the reluctant star of a cooking show, Supper at Six. Unexpectedly, the show is a huge hit, and she soon has a devoted following. Between recipes, Elizabeth provides running commentary on the absurd exclusion of women from science, making them stay at home and make babies in a form of legalized slavery.
The all-male workforce at the institute sees Elizabethâs research project as unimportant and bound to go nowhere, and after she is fired, her work is simply stolen by one of her male colleagues. Only Calvin recognizes her brilliance, and he is no longer there to defend her.
Darwin had long ago proposed that life sprang from a single-celled bacterium, which then went on to diversify into a complex planet of people, plants, and animals. Zott? She was like a bloodhound on the trail of where that first cell had come from. In other words , she was out to solve one of the greatest chemical mysteries of all time, and if her findings continued apace, there was no question she would do just that.As her fame blossoms as cooking-show host, Elizabeth has only one real friend, Harriet, whom Elizabeth has hired as her assistant. They agree on most things, but not on one essential point.
According to Harriet, men were a world apart from women. They required coddling, they had fragile egos, they couldnât allow a woman intelligence or skill if it exceeded their own. âHarriet thatâs ridiculous,â Elizabeth had argued. âMen and women are both human beings. And as humans, weâre by-products of our upbringings, victims of our lackluster educational system, and choosers of our behaviors. In short, the reduction of women to something LESS than men, and the elevation of men to something MORE than women, is not biological: itâs cultural.I did not choose this book for its political significance, but simply because it sounded delightful and it is. Bonnie Garmus has worked widely in the fields of technology, medicine and education, and she shows off her considerable talents in this wonderful comedic novel. Like her zany character Elizabeth, Bonnie decides, âDonât work the system. Outsmart it.â
If you as a reader sometimes read a book just for the delight of reading it, this is a book for you, easily the funniest and most clever book I have read this year.
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Teacher seeks pupil. Must hast have an earnest desire to save the world
Apply in person
This ad enrages the narrator of the book, Ishmael. Although he has in the past sought a teacher, he is now disillusioned, and angry at the naive audacity of the ad. He answers the ad simply to expose the person who wrote it as a fake. Imagine his response when he discovers just who that is.Because it was backed by darkness, the glass in this window was blackâopaque, reflective. I made no attempt to see beyond as I approached. I was the spectacle under observation. On arrival, I continued to gaze into my own eyes for a moment, then rolled the focus forward beyond the glassâand found myself looking into another pair of eyes.
I fell back, startled. Then recognizing what Iâd seen. I fell back again, now a little frightened.
The creature on the other side of the glass was a full-grown gorilla.
And so begins one of the most captivating and insightful books I have read in years. Actually the book had gone through several iterations until Quinn published the current version in 1992.
Iâm surprised it took me so long to discover this brilliant treatise on humanâs destruction of the earth, quite a fitting topic for our earth-day show.
Yes, he is being interviewed by a gorilla and a very clever one at that. A poster on the wall reads
WITH MAN GONE
WILL THERE
BE HOPE
FOR GORILLA?
This koan recurs many times in the book. The gorilla announces, âI am the teacher,â and so begins an incredibly complex discussion of how we got to where we are, and how we might save ourselves and the rest of sentient life forms on earth.
Once you learn to discern the voice of Mother Culture humming in the background, telling her story over and over again to the people of your culture, youâll never stop being conscious of it. Wherever you go for the rest of your life, youâll be tempted to say to the people around you âHow can you listen to this stuff and not recognize it for what it is?â and if you do this, people will look at you oddly and wonder what the devil youâre talking about. In other words, if you take this educational journey with me, youâre going to find yourself alienated from the people around youâfriends, family, past associates, and so on.There is a whole philosophy of history spun out in the gorillaâs lessons, from creation myths to a tracing of the history of agriculture. The story of The Leavers and The Takers. The story is too complex to simply overview, nor am i anything like as clever as Quinn and the gorilla.
âAnd so your account of creation ends, âAnd finally man appeared.â
âYes.â
âMeaning what?â
âMeaning that there was no more to come. Meaning that creation had come to an end.â
âThis is what it was all leading up toâ
âYes.â
âOf course. Everyone in your culture knows this. The pinnacle was reached in man. Man is the climax of the whole cosmic drama of creation.â
âYes.â
âWhen man finally appeared, creation came to an end, because its objective had been reached. There was nothing left to create.â
âThat seems to be the unspoken assumption.â
Ishmael is a wise if impatient teacher and he does not simply lay out his theory of how we came to this precipice we are on, he proceeds in Socratic fashion, urging the narrator to dig out the story, and play his part in discovery, to bring out of concealment the story of our own destruction.
At first I thought that the author must have read The Sixth Extinction, and was playing off of it, but if anything, it is the other way around since this novel predates the publication of The Sixth Extinction and centers more on economic history than on scientific data.
In essence, the world was made for man, and man was made to rule it. But since the world would not meekly submit, man had to conquer it.
âIâm saying that the price youâve paid is not the price of becoming human. Itâs not even the price of having the things you just mentioned. Itâs the price of enacting a story that casts mankind as the enemy of the world.âMartin Heidegger tells a similar story in his essay, âThe Question Concerning Technology,â in which he claims that the present worlding, the world we are bringing into existence, treats nature as standing reserve, that which stands in reserve for us to use and use up. Quinnâs version of the story sis far less pompous than Heideggerâs and far more entertaining.
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Black Cake is a sprawling, brilliant debut novel by Charmaine Wilkerson. It is hard to believe it is a debut novel, since the writing is so rich and complex, but she has been writing for a long time.
Benedetta Bennet (known as Benny), and Coventina (Covey) have been best friends for life, and their voices are two of the most important narrative voices in this novel, although there are a host of narrators representing generations of families. The chapters are split between then (1965) and now (2018). Benny and Byron, once super-close siblings have drifted apart as they matured, but the death of Eleanor Bennett, their mother, brings them together, and the narrative she has left behind for them shows them that Eleanor was not the person they or others thought she was. Benny and Byron, or B & B as their mother likes to call them, have been summoned to Eleanor Bennettâs attorneyâs office and are given a handwritten note and a USB drive. The note says simply âB and B, thereâs a small black cake in the freezer for you. Donât throw it out.â
As Wilkerson tells us in her Authorâs Note:
It was my personal familiarity with a particular Caribbean food, black cake, that led obliquely to this book. It started me thinking about the emotional weight carried by recipes and other familial markers that are handed down from one generation to the next. Then it had me writing about characters who must hold fast to their sense of self when they learn their lives have been built on a dubious narrative.What we call holiday fruit cake is as close as most of us come to black cake. But the Caribbean black cake is made with fruit that has been soaked in alcohol over long periods of times, and is especially treasured as a wedding cake.
Not everyone sits down to write a book but everyone is a storyteller, in one form or other. As I wrote this novel, a lifetime of anecdotes and fleeting impressions shared by the Caribbean members of my multicultural family helped me to develop some of the fictional characters and scenarios from the 1950s and 1960s. The scenes from the unnamed island in the Caribbean reflect some of the geography and history of Jamaica...The fictional town where members of the bookâs older generation grew up is inspired by the northeast coast of that island and uses a mix of actual and invented locations.Without telling you much of the story that unfolds as B and B listen to the story their mother tells them, one of the two best friends is given by her father as a bride to a much older and powerful money-lender. Benny, who is a great long-distance swimmer helps Covey to escape the island and the marriage, but must then escape and change her own identity because of the long reach of the money lender and his family.
While B and B slowly learn the real history of their mother, scores of other characters are introduced. Covey eventually becomes a kind of food anthropologist telling family stories via food traditions. Benny becomes s world famous open-water distance swimmer, and eventually marries and moves to the United States.
In many ways Wilkerson displays the dangers for Blacks living in white communities., and in this way the novel seems very current. A black man pulled over for a busted tail light, and while trying to get his wallet, the officer pulls a gun on him.
What was the kid supposed to do if he was asked to show his driverâs license?
How is a person supposed to reach for their wallet? Are black people in America not allowed to have hands?
Byron would like to believe that this epidemic of mistreatment, this bullying of unarmed black men is just that, an outbreak, though prolonged, that can be brought under control. He wants to keep believing in law enforcement officers, to respect the risky work that they do, knowing that every day they step into unknown territory. He wants to know that he can still pick up the phone and call the cops if he ever needs to. Thereâs a lot of anger out there. A lot of hurt. Where are they all gonna end upâblack white, whoeverâif things donât get better?
Good question, and Wilkerson is a master at spotlighting this and so many contemporary issues. This is a wonderful novel, one of the best I have read in the past two years, and a fitting tribute to Womenâs History month.
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Try to imagine what it would be like to not be remembered by anyone. Adeline Larue has made the mistake of praying to the dark gods to be free and to live without fear of death. The title of this Faustian tale is The Invisible Life of Addie Larue, by V.E. Schwab.
The author warns us in a prefatory note which she attributes to Estele Magritte, 1642-1719:
The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle , unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price. And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.I am not a big fan of fantastical literature, but this novel raises so many fascinating philosophical questions about personal identity and its link to memory that I continued to ponder the questions long after I had finished reading the story, a story which stands on its own even without the philosophical meandering, but which is so much better as a book because of the reflections on personal identity.
Adeline is a girl who lived at the cusp between 1698 and the eighteenth century. Much loved by her father, a woodworker, he always takes her with him when he takes his wares to market. âAdeline is seven, the same as the number of freckles on her face. She is bright and small and quick as a sparrow.â She continues to leave her small village three times a year to go to the city of Le Mans, but when she turns twelve, her parents decide she should no longer be allowed to go to the large town, that it is unseemly for a young girl to wander the market.
âYou are not a child anymore.â
And Adeline understands and still does not understand at allâfeels as if sheâs being punished for simply growing up.
And then she is sixteen and, against her will, betrothed to a man more than twice her age.
I do not want to marry.
âI do not want to belong to someone else,â she says with sudden vehemence. The words are a door flung wide, and now the rest pour out of her. â I do not want to belong to anyone but myself. I want to be free. Free to live, and to find my own way, to love, or to be alone, but at least it is my choice, and I am so tired of having no choices, so scared of the years rushing by beneath my feet. I do not want to die as Iâve lived, which is no life at all.
This she tells to a shadow, a handsome man with dark curls and green eyes, a man she comes to call Luc.
The novel jumps from France in 1714 to New York City in 2014. Addieâs wish has been granted and she has lived for over three hundred years. The curse for her freedom and apparent immortality is that no one remembers her. She is forgotten simply by turning her back or walking away. If she takes a man to her bed, she knows he will awaken in the morning startled by the stranger in bed with him. Although she can get money, usually by stealing, landlords will not rent to a lone woman. It is only when she begins to wear trousers and a buttoned coat, a hat that is pulled down over her face that she can roam freely.
The darkness claimed heâd given her freedom, but really, there is no such thing as freedom for a woman, not in a world where they are bound up inside their clothes, and sealed inside their homes, a world where only men are given leave to roam.I will return to the story in a moment, but let us first ask about the connection between memory and personhood. Oliver Sacks describes a man who has no short-term memory at all, but only a hazy recall of a distant past. If philosophers are right, memory is a necessary condition of personal identity, of being the same person over time. Sacks tells of tricking a client (he does not like the word âpatientâ) into looking into a mirror and seeing not the person he thinks himself to be, but a much older man. He is horrified and confused, and Sacks chides himself for such a cruel trick.
I agree with Sacks and others that memory is crucial to personal identity. But what of Schwabâs clever trick of asking whether a person not remembered is really a person. Will they feel as Addie does, that she is really invisible because unknown.
Eventually, Addie wanders into a bookstore, The Last Word, and steals a copy of The Odyssey, in Greek no less. She knows that even if the clerk sees her theft, by the time he confronts her on the street, he will have forgotten who she is and what he is doing with her. Imagine the shocked surprise when she returns to the shop a few days later asking to exchange to book for an English copy, and the clerk says, âI remember youâ and scolds her for her impudence in trying now to exchange the stolen book for another. But all Addie can hear are his words, â I remember you.â
Finally she is known, remembered, but how can this be so, how can the clerk, Henry, remember her in spite of the curse? To discover the answer to that question as well as the fates of Adeline and Henry, you will have to read the book.
While this novel will more than stretch your ability to suspend disbelief, I think it will also enchant you and lead you to ask questions about your own identity and what it depends on.
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If you are one of the many who believe that eugenics was a tool only of Nazi Germany, you should read the excellent and thoroughly researched historical novel by Louise Fein entitled, The Hidden Child.
Often, the best way of really bringing home the horrors of a practice is to embody it, to show how real people are affected by the practice. Louise Fein has done just that in her sad but wonderful novel. As Eleanor is watching over her beautiful five year old child, Mabel, frolicking in a park, suddenly and out of nowhere Mabel begins to act in a most frightening way. A postman has just dropped his bike in shock as he points to the beautiful child in front of him.
Eleanor turns in confusion.
Mabel! Sticks scattered around her, sheâs sitting on the dusty ground, face twisted, her eyes weirdly rolling back. Her chin drops to her chest, once, twice, hands twitching.
Eleanorâs feet are rooted to the ground in horror. Her daughter looks as though sheâs been possessed, her normal sweet expression vanished behind the contorted features of her face.
But this is not the first nor the last of these fits. Eleanorâs instinctive reaction is to brush of the momentary behavior, and she implores the postman not to fetch a doctor. Besides her inclination to deny and hope the momentary aberration is just that, passing and of no significance, she is married to a psychologist who is a leader of the eugenics movement in the U.K., and who would be most embarrassed to admit his daughter is among the unfit who need to be weeded from society.
Fein skillfully weaves her story. Edward, the psychologist husband, insists that Mabelâs ailment must not be discovered, both to protect the child from being singled out and ridiculed, and to protect his own reputation within the movement. He insists that it will be best for all concerned if Mabel is locked away in a sanitarium and kept from public scrutiny.
Although heartbroken, Eleanor cannot stand up to her husband and his professional stature and eventually defers to his judgment. Unable even to visit her young child, she slowly becomes more and more aware that her husband sees only what he wants to see and that he even skews his research to omit evidence that would count against his theories regarding the improvement of the race via incarceration, sterilization and other drastic measures.
The story itself is compelling and so well written, but the controversy behind the theory is really the most important part of this novel. Fein, herself, has a child with epilepsy, and that no doubt adds to her careful and thorough research in writing this book. In her notes at the end of the novel:
I was therefore rather shocked that when I began to look into the ideas behind the inhumane treatment of people with disabilities, including epilepsy, in the 1920s, I found , in fact, that Nazi Germany took its lead in this area from widespread and accepted eugenics ideas circulating in both the United Kingdom and the United States. The eugenics movement had been born in England in the late nineteenth century and was extremely widespread in the first thirty years or so of the twentieth century.
The pseudo-science of eugenics and other theories such as craniology are thoroughly debunked by Stephen Jay Gould in his superb set of essays, The Mismeasure of Man. Like Edward in this novel, many of the experiments meant to support the theories were manipulated such that only confirmatory data was allowed and contra evidence swept under the rug.
This novel and the story stand on their own quite apart from the eugenics controversy, but the social and political importance of the book needs to be emphasized.
I will end with another quote from the authorâs end notes:
Legislation was proposed for compulsory sterilization and incarceration of those considered âweak-minded,â a catchall phrase for those with learning difficulties as well as epileptics, criminals, those with behavioral difficulties, alcoholics and anyone else considered âundesirableâ and ruinous to the health of the population in general. -
Believe me, I am giving nothing away by beginning my remarks by quoting the last page of Elizabethâs Stroutâs new novel, Oh William
And then I thought, Oh William!
But when I think Oh William!, donât I mean Oh Lucy! too?
Donât I mean Oh Everyone, Oh dear Everybody in this whole wide world, we do not know anybody, not even ourselves!
Except a little tiny, tiny bit we do.
But we are all mythologies, mysterious. We are all mysteries, is what I mean.
This may be the only thing in the world I know to be true.
Strout in her unique way, again reminds us that there are no ordinary people, that everyone is extraordinary, and that the simplest of day to day events is filled with mystery.
As she does in each of her novels, Strout revisits old characters. This time it is Lucy Barton who reappears. Like Strout, Lucy Barton is an author. Her most recent husband, David has died leaving her buried in grief. And she decides to tell us a few things about her first husband William with whom she has remained good friends after their divorce. They have two adult daughters together, and the two daughters have a half-sister from Williamâs last marriage. William has been married three times: Lucy, Joanne, and Estelle.
William has been having terrifying dreams and he finds it quite natural to confide in Lucy regarding those dreams. He wonders if the dreams have simply to do with getting older.
âMaybe,â I said. But I was not sure this was the reason. William has always been a mystery to meâand to our girls as well. I said, tentatively, âDo you want to see anyone to talk to about them?âStroutâs writing is so simplistic, so flat, and yet her readers understand they are being given a very wise view of the world. At times her writing seems almost like the awkward journal jottings of a high-schooler. And yet, and yet there seem to be profound insights about marriage, about raising children, about respecting old relationships and getting beyond petty jealousy.
Both William and Lucy have had sad, lonely childhoods and few warm feelings about their mothers.
There is this about my own mother:
I have written about her and I really do not care to write anything else about her. But I understand one might need to know a few things for this story. The few things would be this: I have no memory of my mother ever touching any of her children except in violence. I do not remember that she ever said, I love you, Lucy.
The rather complicated and often humorous plot of this novel is, I think, much less important than Lucyâs asides; asides about choice and loneliness and not being able to let go of past hurts.
People are lonely, is my point here. Many people canât say to those they know well what it is they feel they might want to say.The only other writer I can think of who is as skillful in uncovering the extraordinary in ordinary lives is Alice Munro, and like Munro who writes almost exclusively short stories, Strout makes her points in passing, in throw-off comments. Her insights cannot be easily summed up, her messages not easily articulated.
I will leave you with this heart-rending quote from Lucy.
There have been timesâand I mean recentlyâwhen I feel the curtain of my childhood descend around me once again. A terrible enclosure, a quiet horror: This is the feeling and it was with me my entire childhood, and it came back to me with a whoosh the other day. To remember so quietly, yet vividly, to have it re-presented to me in this way, the sense of doom I grew up with, knowing I could never leave that house (except to go to school, which meant the world to me, even though I had no friends there, but I was out of the house)âto have this come back to me presented a domain of dull and terrifying dreariness to me.: There was no escape.
When I was young there was no escape, is what I am saying.
Oh Elizabeth, you genius story-teller, please keep writing.
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It is 1932, England and all of Europe is still under the cloud of World War I. So many men died in the war that there are thousands upon thousands of young widows or unmarried âspinstersâ who are dubbed âsurplus woman', woman who will be unlikely to marry or have children. Violet Speedwell is one such woman; at thirty-eight, she has lost both her older brother and her finance, Laurence. Violetâs mother is inconsolable over the death of her oldest son, and is super-critical of her daughter, so much so that she makes Violetâs life miserable, and Violet longs to get away from her home and town where she feels suffocated by the life of caring for her aging mother.
When Violet spots an ad for a typist in a nearby town, she applies, and immediately accepts the low-paying job when it is offered.
When it became clear that Mrs. Speedwell was not going to see her off as she normally did, watching from the doorway until visitors were out of sight, Violet went over and kissed her on the forehead. âGood-bye, Motherâ she murmured. âIâll see you next Sunday.â
Mrs. Speedwell sniffed,. âDonât bother. I may be dead by then.â
And thus Violet begins her new life, living in a boardinghouse with other young women and working long hours typing forms for an insurance company. Excited by the new freedom, she puts up with meals of sardines on toast or beans on toast.
She took herself to the cinema every weekâher one indulgence, which she paid for by going without a meal that day.Her life is dreary and lonely until one day she goes to the grand cathedral in Winchester and happens onto a particular service, one filled with mostly older women. She is not at the church to pray, âprayers had died in the war alongside George and Laurence and a nation full of young men.â
It turns out to be a special mass for broderers, i.e. women who embroider seat cushions and kneelers for the hard wooden benches of the cathedral. At first blocked from entering the group, she persists and eventually is allowed to be a part of the group. An so begins a new and much less socially impoverished life as she befriends other broderers and comes under the very kind tutelage of Miss Pesel, one of two women in charge of the group of women.
When I picked up this novel, I knew nothing of spinning, weaving, crocheting , or embroidering, but I was fascinated by the descriptions and by the friendships between the women. Although Violet has had very limited introduction to needlework, she quickly takes to it under the watchful eye of Miss Pesel. She also becomes friends with an older man, Arthur, who is a bell-ringer for the cathedral. Arthur is married to a woman who is frail and ailing, unable to recover from the loss of her son in the war.
In order to be allowed to attend the daytime broderers meetings, Violet comes up with a plan to improve efficiency in the insurance office such that it will allow both she and Olive, the other typist to attend the meetings.
âBut, Miss Speedwell, I shall say this idea came from me, if you donât mind,â he added with a frown. âI canât think what management would say about a girl having such a ...progressive ideaâThe author, Chevalier, has such a wonderful ear for the nuances and prejudices of this time in a Europe decimated by one war and on the eve of another.
Violet decides on a walking tour in the country in place of the holidays of the past spent with her mother and younger brother and his family. She has a frightening encounter with a man she calls the corn man, having met him in a cornfield and then followed by him. Having walked to Sthe small town where Arthur lives, she confides in him about the scare she has had. â He frightened you?â
âYesâ Arthur looked at her waiting.
âItâs not easy being a woman on your your own,â Violet explained after a moment. âNo one expects it, though there are plenty of us. The âsurplus womenâ. One would think it would not be such a surprise to see a woman walk through a field, or have a cup of tea in a pub.âThis is such a lovely little novel; I didnât expect to be so intrigued by it, reading it as a kind of respite from two rather heavy novels, but by the end, I knew I had to call it to the attention of other readers.
Among the broderers, Violet becomes a special friend of Gilda, and Gilda seems to light up when yet another woman, DJ, Dorothy, shows up at meetings.
When Gilda appearedâout of breath and shouting helloâDJ started, and suddenly solidified, as if outlined by solid black. She did not stop smiling, but her eyes drifted toward the corner of the room as if to dodge attention. Gilda too seemed out of sorts, looking everywhere but at DJ, and laughing a little too brightly as she removed her cloche...Violet discovered that there was something to discover, though she did not yet understand what it was.Only Violet and eventually Miss Pesel accept the relationship between the two women.
There was something around them that made them seem closer than others, although they were not actually standing closer or even looking at each other. It was like an invisible fence, penning them together.
âThatâs what can happen when youâre a spinster.â
It was said quietly, behind Violet, one woman to another. There was sarcasm in the words and a harshness, and something like fear..
Violet comes to see just how lovely and natural the relationship between Gilda and DJ is, opening her eyes to new possibilities.
- Vis mere
