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I delved back into history by exploring one of my favorite twentieth-century topics - the less popular history of WWII. In 1997, Iris Chang released The Rape of Nanking, creating a stir among my roommate and several other Chinese-Americans in my freshman dorm. The massacre, rape, pillaging, and destruction of a city and hundreds of thousands of civilian inhabitants in 1937, years before WWII would come to Europe (and even longer before it would reach American shores) is a story that needed to be told, to resurrect memories of the past and learn from them.
Chang writes:Whatever the course of postwar history, the Rape of Nanking will stand as a blemish upon the honor of human beings. But what makes the blemish particularly repugnant is that history has never written a proper end for the story.
And despite the attention that Chang and others brought to the topic, it is still, as she calls it, "the forgotten Holocaust of World War II."
As far as the writing goes, Chang does not spare the reader a full share in the horrors of what occurred. It's gruesome, and turned my stomach a few times. (What is frustrating is how familiar to other atrocities it sounds. How often in the course of human history have we treated our fellow man and woman so brutally. Why do we do this? Why do we continue to?) More prosaicallly, perhaps, she constructs her narrative in a clever and effective manner, retelling the events from the perspectives of the Japanese invaders, the Chinese victims, and the expatriate Westerners who risked their lives to help save the people of Nanking. Each section illluminates a different aspect of the invasion, massacre, and occupation.
I wholeheartedly recommend this book, and I admire Chang's determination to tell a wrongly overlooked piece of history as well as her decision to use her voice to demand that the world avert their eyes no longer. If I have any qualms (and how difficult it is to voice them about a book so harrowing), they would regard the insertion of authorial emotion. Chang's insistence that the reader acknowledge the horrors of the Rape of Nanking is so strong that the Rape becomes almost an event unique in human history. She is careful in the epilogue to state that the Japanese are no more prone to evil than others, that "human being can [easily] be encouraged to allow their teenagers to be molded into efficient killing machines able to suppress their better natures." Yet that consciousness, that the Rape of Nanking took place in a war of atrocities, in a century of atrocities, in a history of atrocities, is sometimes missing, and could have strengthened the moral authority of the book.
I sound harsher than I mean to. It is a truly stunning work.
This week the Business section: the Times reports thatMajor book publishers have quietly begun selling directly to customers over the Internet, a move that could transform the trade by putting them in competition with online retailers such as Amazon.com.
It's not clear to me exactly what this will mean, but it could create a new amount of cooperation, rather than competition, between publishers and retailers. Either way, the losers in the transaction will probably continue to be independent bookstores. I can't say that I'm a big help to their business model, as I tend to browse rather than buy, and am cheap and check books out from the library instead of plunking down my cash. But on those rare occasions when I'm willing to purchase, I go small and local (unless I have a gift certificate to Borders).
Today's Book Review section raves about Jane Smiley's new offering, Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel. Referring to Smiley's "unmediated voice - blunt, uncompromising and witty," the review details the path that led the author to a year of reading that spanned the history of the novel, and what she learned about what has changed, and more importantly what has stayed the same. It's a defense of the novel: if there's one thing she believes, it's that reading fiction broadens our sympathies and stretches our imagination so we understand that even bad guys have their reasons.
I heartily enjoyed listening to Smiley speak back in April and so plan to gather even more of her thoughts by reading this book.
Also, Adam Gopnik, of New Yorker fame, has branched out into the world of young adult literature with The King in the Window, about an American boy's adventures in Paris. I loved (and heartily recommend - and may even lend) his collection of Parisian esays Paris to the Moon, and thus agree with the reviewer: "The only question ... is an obvious one: How long must readers wait before Gopnik writes a Parisian novel aimed at his legions of adult fans?"
The LA Times Magazine takes a look at the recent spate of memoirs written by soldiers returning from the action in Iraq. After hemming and hawing a little bit about the quality of an immediate response, without the years of gestation and rumination that apparently make for a good war memoir, Michael Slenske decides that these books are good for the American people, who need to have the real war brought into their homes. For confirmation, he turns to none other than John McCain, who opines:
Most historians would agree that definitive histories are written at a minimum of 20 to 30 years after a conflict is over. But that doesn't detract from a personal account of an individual's involvement. ... Firsthand experiences are always helpful in contributing to the knowledge of people who haven't been there.
Plus, speaking as a historian, I know that these memoirs will be a treasure trove for the historians of the future when they write about the Iraq war. (Of course, they will have to take into account people's biases and motivations, the pressures of publishing, etc. but good historians will do that. Good readers now should attempt to do so as well.)
My favorite description of any of the memoirs comes courtesy of Kirkus Reviews, which said of Colby Buzzell's My War: Killing Time in Iraq: "If military recruitment is down now, wait till the kids read this book." The Times article also includes a great excerpt.
I don't know that I'll be reading any of these any time soon, but I definitely agree that we should be listening to the soldiers as an important voice in the conversation on the war.
One thing that I don't recommend when you're reading a fictional memoir about high school is to receive several boxes of childhood stuff from your parents who are moving. This past Monday, somewhere in the middle of Lee's (from Prep, see last entry) sophomore year, my dad appeared with a box of dance trophies, a pile of random school papers, certificates, and diplomas, assorted other stuff, and all four of my high school yearbooks. I spent part of the evening with the book from my senior year, finding all the pictures of me, marvelling again at my classmates who were votes "most popular," "best hair," etc. (I didn't even remember quite a few of them), and wondering about all of the ways my high school experience was both wonderful and terrible. How much I could identify with Lee (and could identify the popular perfect people at TOHS who had their counterparts in Prep). How much I have grown since then, and how much I cherish that growth, but yet can still miss how much I felt part of that community.
In the end, I felt that it allowed me to finish reading Prep in a different way; it complicated the novel a lot. You can both love and hate high school, and I think that Sittenfeld should have emphasized that more. She should have teased out more of how some people only belong to a community when they are physically removed from it. Above all, though, I wish she hadn't ended with a little "where are they now?" about some of her main characters, although thankfully she spared us her protagonist's future.
Don't get me wrong. I enjoyed the book. It was a fun read, replete with all the secondhand discomfort and recognition of the embarrassing things that you did when you were a teenager. It'll be interesting to see what Sittenfeld - currently teaching at a private school in DC, just up the street from my old apartment - takes on next, and how she grows (or doesn't) as a writer.
