Post-nuclear dystopias

Right in time for North Korea to go nuclear, I finished reading Tatyana Tolstaya's The Slynx, a tale of a future Moscow after the Blast. While some have survived (and gained virtual immortality) to remember the good old days, most know only this world: primitive and strange. Everyone has a Consequence from the radiation, ranging from extra limbs to feathers (and more).

I don't want to say too much about it, because it's going to be a future selection in our Russian literature book club. But it's a fascinating satire of Soviet Russia, as well as a deeply disturbing portrait of the Russians' historical tendency toward cults of personality.

On another note, books play a huge role in the novel, as the main character becomes obsessed with reading:

I only wanted books - nothing more - only books, only words, it was never anything but words - give them to me, I don't have any!

It's terrifying to imagine - what if there was nothing left to read?! Luckily, that's unlikely to ever be a problem for me! :)

Trouble in Education

It has been a busy time at the Library. Catching up on some reading, and checking out some books for an upcoming book club. (Anyone interested in a 6 novel "history of Russian literature" group?) And also lots of work.

But on a guilty pleasure trip to the library on Saturday (I wanted a romance novel - it shall not be reviewed here, as I've already revealed too much about an occasional weakness), I finally broke down and checked out my first audio book.

I went with Jonathan Kozol's The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America, which had been hovering at the edges of my book list. Kozol has been writing for some time about how public schooling is failing American children; this is a pretty damning indictment of our self-congratulation of Brown v. Board of Ed while letting the schools reossify into middle-class white and lower-class of color. And lest you think this is "separate but equal," curricula and even recess are entirely different matters. And how disgusting is the administrators' euphemism "diverse" for schools that are anything but, over 90% African-American. That's not diversity, it's just not whiteness.

This is a touchy subject for me, as I've wondered what I would do if I were raising my own future children in Los Angeles. I don't think most of the schools are good enough for my children; yet I believe very strongly that more middle-class families have to keep their children in struggling school systems, and work to lift them up. On a more pressing timeline, the Munchkins (aged 7 and 4) are currently attending/will attend a public elementary school, but will they have to go private or charter by junior high?

Also troubling is the relentless emphasis on teaching to the test that Kozol finds in these schools. I have never ever liked standardized testing, although in retrospect it was pretty cool to spend school time on an activity I knew I'd do well on. But precisely because I was the queen of the multiple choice exam, I never believed that it could say all that much about how smart you were. Isn't real learning and intelligence about more than that? And hearing how much time is spent on testing instead of science, history, music, PE, or the silly activities that make school fun made me so mad that I fumed down the street.

Which reminds me... I was listening to the book while walking down the street. I loaded the cds onto iTunes, and from iTunes to my iPod, and was good to go. It's definitely strange to listen to a book, but I think as it goes, nonfiction is the way to break into it. It's all written in one voice - the author's - anyway, and so it feels sort of like a lecture. It a nice way to commute (and also works for grocery shopping).

Vote! (or else I'll footnote you to death)

Among other things in recent days, I've been reading Consider the Lobster, David Foster Wallace's collection of essays about random cultural phenomena that he has been contracted by some magazine or another to write about. He's an interesting guy - I'd like to know a little more about him. (Probably googling or wiki-ing him would work. If only I weren't too lazy to do that before writing this...)

Anyway, DFW has a reputation for being ridiculously smart and for loving the footnotes. As a tangential, full-of-asides thinker, I like this. But I still think it's a gimmick. Plus, it sometimes works better than others. In "Big Red Son," the footnotes are hilariously juxtaposed against the topic, which is porn. In "Host," the footnotes are actually placed within boxes within the body of the text, with arrows from the referring point (and sometimes more arrows to fn's about fn's, etc.) Visually kinda cool. The Dostoyevsky article, on the other hand, is too academic for footnotes, even if it seems ironic to write that. And "Up, Simba," a 2000 Rolling Stone profile of John McCain, would completely flounder if it had footnotes at all.

Which reminds me, "Up, Simba" is perhaps the most interesting article of the bunch. (Speaking as a historian.) It's an amazing reminder of how quickly political history can move. McCain's primary opponent is "the Shrub" and the journalists are in thrall to their cell phones (with pull-out antennae) and the occasional Palm Pilot. Imagine political wonks now without their Blackberries. And DFW's commentary on voter apathy and politician sincerity and the staged artifice of the whole campaign trail is like crack for this post-West Wing viewer. And since political engagement is near and dear to my heart, I was particularly impressed by this passage:

If you are bored and disgusted by politics and don't bother to vote, you are in effect voting for the entrenched Establishments of the two major parties, who please rest assured are not dumb, and who are keenly aware that it is in their interests to keep you disgusted and bored and cynical and to give you every possible psychological reason to stay at home doing one-hitters and watching MTV on primary [replacable with Election - ed.] day. By all means stay home if you want, but don't bullshit yourself that you're not voting. In reality, there is no such thing as not voting: you either vote by voting, or you vote by staying home and tacitly doubling the value of some Diehard's vote.

And this is backed up by all sorts of anecdotal evidence, btw. Anyway, I'm planning to use this argument whenever I can. It's the kind of thing that you know on some level, but sometimes need spelled out for you. At least I think so.

I'm going to put Infinite Jest, DFW's novel, on my reading list. I need the extra information to determine what exactly I think of this hyper-erudite writer.

Not the most uplifting of reading...

I finished Disgrace (J.M. Coetzee) sometime in the last week or so. I haven't written about it mainly because I wasn't sure what to say. Sometime, with the book club selections, it seems to work best to blog my review after the meeting, and incorporate others' views into my own coalesced opinion.

But I got bored of waiting. This novel is filled with disturbing events and internal reveries. In this respect, it reflects - sometimes overtly, sometimes implicitly - the confusion and readjustment of whites (even liberal ones) to the post-apartheid world. Sex is potent as a symbol of asserting manliness and power - as a weapon, a reassurance of attraction, etc. It reminded me a lot of Philip Roth in this respect. (I'm not very convinced that male authors like women very much. Are they representative of the average man's secret fears? I'd prefer to think not.) But there is also a generational dispute between the male pro(?)tagonist and his daughter. Like in Fathers and Sons (thanks to Michael and a review he found for the comparison), in a time of change and confusion, the eternal struggle between parents and children is freighted with extra meaning.

But attempts of erudition aside, what was most striking about Disgrace was how much of it I spent wanting to cover my eyes, urging the main character "What are you thinking?! - Stop." It's not that much fun, and I'm not totally convinced that it deserved the Booker.

For all my ambivalence, however, Disgrace is a far more accomplished novel than the one I just finished: Intuition, by Allegra Goodman. It made it onto my reading list after a promising review earlier this year. Set in a research lab in the mid-80s, Intuition addresses the ups and downs of scientific research and the intuitions (hence the title) that lead people to monomaniacal obsession with proving their instincts correct. In the end, intuition can ruin relationships.

Intuition is a fascinating topic for a book on scientific inquiry, a field that is supposedly ruled by reason and empirical evidence. And Goodman starts out with a fast pace, drawing interesting characters and setting up several intriguing story arcs. But around half-way through, it fizzles out, and the last hundred or more pages was just a slog to the finish. I also wondered why Goodman set the novel in Boston of 1986 rather than today - it was never clear to me why an era two decades past was crucial to her story.

So both books are pretty much downers, and while I wouldn't go so far as to say I disliked either, neither managed to capture my imagination for very long.

Cricket - c.1989-2006

this is my fuzzy little princess, seen last Christmas

On a day tailormade for memorials, it saddens me to add to the bunch Cricket, my (parents') tortoiseshell who was terrified of just about everything, and a little bit bitchy, but all in all a very sweet little cat.

She became part of our household in July 1995; she came into the animal shelter in a carrier while we were there and settled into my mother's arms before ever going into a shelter cage. And though she hid for the first few days in our house, and was later pestered by her rambunctious fellow kitty Mikey, she settled in. We named her Cricket after the squeaky noise she made, although she came to whine imperiously more than squeak. And even though she had been ailing for quite some time, it is still a shock to lose her.

Lest you be thinking this is unrelated to books, Cricket used to like to lie on my back or the back of my legs if I was reading on my stomach. (Each of my cats has had a different way of reading with me. Pushy used to like to curl up under my chin and drool on the pages; Mikey would prefer to swish his tail in front of my face so that I couldn't see.)

Farewell Cricket. We've loved you very much.

Meme, or, How I Learned a New Word Today

Until this afternoon, meme was one of those words (like trope and singularity had once been) that I vaguely knew but mostly dismissed as pretention. Until I got tagged by greenLAgirl, accused of falling for a pyramid scheme by Michael, and figured it was time I got an official definition. Hooray for Dictionary.com which built on Michael's expanded definition of "chain letter/thought virus" and explained that a meme was from same Latin root as "mime" and is "a unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another." Like a gene, except of ideas.

Anyway, but I believe I was tagged to talk about my literary tastes, not my fondness for etymology. So, without further ado:

A book that changed my life
The Fall of a Sparrow, by Robert Hellenga. Friends have challenged this one, but I read it at the exactly the right moment, in the right place.

A book I’ve read more than once
Emma, by Jane Austen. Possibly my all-time favorite book.

A book I’d take with me if I were stuck on a desert island
I am leaning toward Tolstoy, and War and Peace for the epic sweep. But I would also consider The Bible (King James), since I haven't read much of it and I'd have the time to consider a lot of stories.

A book that made me laugh
Anything by Helen Fielding - I am particularly fond of two that I know made me laugh aloud in public: Cause Celeb and Olivia Joules and the Overactive Imagination

A book that made me cry
A Prayer for Owen Meany, by John Irving. That book tore me apart inside.

A book that I wish had been written
My dissertation? It was going to be on life behind the lines (i.e. where they sent all the promising students and most of the government) in Soviet Union during WWII.

A book that I wish had never been written
So many books have inspired hatred and violence - I could choose one of them. But I won't, because I don't seem to be able to find it in me to wish a book unwritten.

A book I’ve been meaning to read
I've had Herodotus' Histories on the backburner since I got through half of it the first week of my graduate program. Also at least 30 others.

I’m currently reading
In addition to my pile of New Yorkers, I have begun Disgrace, by J.M. Coetzee.

Mr. Library (better known to some as the voice behind Vibes Watch) has graciously consented to be tagged. And I am realizing that my blogroll is pretty limited. So.... help me build it up, yo. I recognize that Rahul is probably above this, but just in case, I'll try tagging him too. As well as HH, whose i8 I just discovered. Will you come to LA and cook for me?

Three Lucys

A glimpse at three characters sharing the Library "Name of the Week":

She wore the prettiest sundresses, white and yellow and covered with blue and purple flowers. All wavy and loose. Sometimes she'd wear her hair up, to give her neck some air she said, and she looked nice that way. But then when she'd take it down, the way it tumbled off her heead and rolled across her shoulders in waves, and colored like fire, the way fire is not just one color but about seven, all becoming one another over and back again: that was her hair.

There was something that she did to me, just looking at her, knowing she was close. That was all I did, of course: look, pass her in the hallway on the way to supper, smell the scent of her in my room after she'd cleaned it, her presence everywhere, in this house, on my mind, her note in my pocket.

Now here she is, flowered dress, bare feet and all, in a house full of the smell of baking, no longer a child playing at farmng but a solid countrywoman, a boervrou.

Temptress and Madonna, these Lucys. Or maybe simply Eve. The former two are the magical women at the heart of Daniel Wallace's The Watermelon King; the latter is the stable daughter of a unstable academic in J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, my current read and next book club selection.

The Watermelon King

My "books to read" list - at least the one I currently use - dates back to Christmas 2002, when Michael purchased me an adorable book-tracking book. It has served me quite happily. So no entry on the list is even four years old. Yet I cannot for the life of me remember the circumstances that led me to put Daniel Wallace's The Watermelon King on the list. But list it I did, and this past weekend, I actually got around to reading it.

It came as a bit of a surprise. In addition to a quirky title, it had a quirky design. (You can see the cover here.) And this is when I discovered that it was by the author of Big Fish, the 2003 film directed by Tim Burton and starring Ewan McGregor. I watched this movie with my parents (it is right up their alley); while I found it sweet, I couldn't imagine seeking out works by the author. And yet apparently I had. Anyway, on with the book...

The Watermelon King is set in the same fictional town as Big Fish - Ashland, Alabama. And in both stories, a young man is in search of a parent's past; in both, the father figure has created a world of fabulous tales that cannot be believed. But perhaps they should be.

Wallace's characters are mostly caricature, and yet roughly plausible, even when the events befalling them are not. In TWK, our hero Thomas Rider spends the first half of the novel allowing them to speak for themselves, and make their case about their role in his mother's life and death. And once he takes over the narrative, events again converge in a way that sweeps everyone in the town along with it. The journey's end is mostly predictable; the past that leads you there is not quite.

I enjoyed reading TWK. It passes quickly and has a strong forward momentum. I started it while lying on the beach, which may be why I would label it "beach reading." More accurately, it's for a wicker chair on a veranda (a porch will do) on a sticky afternoon, with a pitcher of lemonade by your side.

The Secret Life of Books

Normally I don't have that much patience for essays about how "readerly" a person is - I kind of find it annoying. Maybe because I like to believe that I'm an iconoclast, and whenever other people proclaim their allegiance to books I'm like "uh, poseur" or "oh, maybe I'm not so unique."

But for whatever reason, I was touched by Dana Gioia's essay in a recent issue of Stanford magazine. It's about his childhood as a reader - definitely going against the grain in his immigrant, working-class community. And the way that reading opened new vistas. I had already learned that Gioia is a reader by compulsion, but was nonetheless moved by his phraseology:

every true reader has a secret life, which is equally intense, complex and important. The books we read are no different from the people we meet or the cities we visit. Some books, people or places hardly matter, others change our lives, and still others plant some idea or sentiment that influences our futures. No one else will ever read, reread or misread the same books in the same way or in the same order. Our inner lives are as rich and real as our outer lives, even if they remain mostly unknowable to others. Perhaps that is why books matter so much. They serve as our intimate companions. Some books guide us. Others lead us astray. A few rescue or redeem us. All of them confide something of the wonder, joy, terror and mystery of being alive.

I've argued with others whether it's better to observe or do. I usually end up feeling like I'm losing out by liking to read my adventures rather than live them. But Gioia argues that the lives we read are our own and intensely real as well, something I've felt intuitively but not heard often enough from others. So despite the fact that he is part of the Administration as head of the National Endowment for the Arts, he gets a little star from Erin's Library.

Adieu Mahfouz

It turns out that I read Palace Walk at a relevant time. Nobel Prize-winner (the first to write in Arabic) Naguib Mahfouz has passed away. He was 94 and had been ailing since a fall earlier in the summer. His death is a reminder to me that we may be losing a generation of authors that create sweeping, epic views of a place and time. The Latin American magical realist authors such as Gabriel Garcia Marquez are aging. Young English-language writers like Jonathan Safran Foer maintain the magic and sympathetic voice, but are often gimmickly; other novels, like Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections, show society through a family's life but are harsher and more sarcastic in tone. I personally like empathy.

But back to Mahfouz. He essentially popularized the novel for Arabic audiences and brought Egypt to life at the same time. Some excerpts from the NY Times obit:

Mr. Mahfouz’s city was teeming Cairo, and his characters were its most ordinary people: civil servants and bureaucrats, grocers, shopkeepers, poor retirees, petty thieves and prostitutes, peasants and women brutalized by tradition, a people caught in the upheavals of a nation struggling through the 20th century.

[He] was often called the Egyptian Balzac for his vivid frescoes of Cairenes and their social, political and religious dilemmas. Critics compared his richly detailed Cairo with the London of Charles Dickens, the Paris of Émile Zola and the St. Petersburg of Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Peter Theroux, the American translator of several major Arab novelists, wrote about completing a new version of “Children of the Alley” in 1996: “Readers of Mahfouz in any language are in thrall to his magic. The warmth of Mahfouz’s characters, the velocity of his storytelling, his gift for fluent dialogue and telling details are unique in modern Arabic literature.”

update: Here is the LA Times' obit. It's very prettily written.

Generation Gaps

I just reread Ivan Turgenev's Fathers and Sons. It's been about 10 years and a whole lot of growing up in the interim, so I was pleased to discover that many of my initial insights still seemed sound: parents and children will always struggle to simultaneously bridge and widen the gap between them; it's tragic when people are so wrapped up with negation that they deny themselves the joy of ever embracing anything; you can enjoy both a simple, sweet love story and a passionate one.

But knowing Russian history and literature enriched the story in so many ways. Reform and revolution were really starting to take hold in younger generations, and the reform had to choose between Europhilism and Slavophilism - learning from the (to be freed) serfs or teaching them, elitism or back-to-the-soil-ism. So after generations of a relatively static caste system, there was about to be room for limited social mobility, and plenty of anxiety about how that would look. The novel was published in 1862 and set in 1859 or '60, and make no mistake - this was a seminal moment in Russian history and book is firmly grounded in it. It is not an explanation of primitive Russian through the ages.

However, what makes it work for a Western audience is that the relationship between fathers and sons (i.e. parents and children) is a universal one, even in harmonious times. And certainly, the generation gaps between Boomers and their parents, and Xers and Boomers are part of the contemporary American consciousness - so we are predisposed to identify with the story of an older generation battling to maintain its hold on society while its children begin their inevitable march to dominance.

I like Turgenev quite a bit. His descriptions and characterizations are vivid, and his attention to detail - finding wonder in the smallest events - lovely. A wonderful introduction to mid-19th century Russia, a place of turmoil and boredom, impoverishment and beauty.

I found the plot

I finished Palace Walk last night and in the last 100 pages or so I found the plot. It is indeed the story of a family, and how external events (the Egyptian independence moving following the Great War) threaten to tear a happy equilibrium apart.

I enjoyed this book quite a bit, and will definitely read the others in the trilogy. My main quibble with Mahfouz concerns his use of stream-of-consciousness when he enters the heads of his characters. It is a useful tool for showing their internal contradictions and how they rationalize them away - but sometimes the streams are so convoluted as to be almost unreadable. Juxtaposed against the rest of his prose, these passages can be jarring. (*In fairness, this could be the fault of the translation. If anyone reads Arabic and wants to find the book and let me know, I'd be curious to find out.)

Also, if you think you might like Mahfouz but aren't in the mood for a 500 page starter novel, I also recommend the slim Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth. Weighing in at less than 200 pages, you can get a taste of Mahfouz as well as a fascinating fictionalized account of a monotheistic pharoah and his beautiful wife Nefertiti.

Old-timey Cairo

When my dear friends Lisa and Mariam up and moved to Cairo on me, I was envious, albeit not envious enough to drop everything and join them. I am fascinated by Egypt and its loooooong history, and how ancient Egyptian culture, Arab Muslim culture, and international globalism all come together there. (One thing I did learn from my favorite correspondents: there is a class of people who are "recyclers" and in the end virtually all trash ends up reused somehow.)

And yet, instead of reading about modern Egypt, I keep ending up with books that go back almost 100 years. This selection is by Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz: Palace Walk, the first in his "Cairo Trilogy." Published in the 1950s, the novel seemed (to me) as though it could have taken place at any time, until the war, a hope for German victory, and Australian occupiers arises. Even then, it took me at least another 100 pages until I realized that this was World War I, not II. And now, sheepish about my lack of knowledge of Mediterranean history during the World Wars, I am grounded in the novel itself.

Palace Walk takes the reader into the lives of an upper-middle class Cairene family. The husband is a tyrant to his family, but hedonistic and charming with his friends and the ladies. One son takes after his father (but doesn't know it), another is a serious law student, and the third a naive and rambunctious youngster. The daughters are sweet, dutiful, and largely reconciled to having their lives sheltered from the outside world. The younger is a ravishing blonde; the elder capable and caustic, but unfortunately plagued with a big nose which may or may not stymie their marriage options.

And then there is the mother, Amina. She suffers with a distant and stern husband, but over the years has forgotten that she is, compared to other Cairene wives, suffering indeed. Her world revolves around custom, routine, and her beloved family.

I'm two-thirds through the book (which is 500 pages long), and haven't quite figured out whether there is a strict plot and upcoming climax. It is in some ways more like the Tolstoyan life-of-a-family epics. But I guess Mahfouz has another 2 volumes to make his narrative arc. Regardless, it's a beautiful book, and very evocative in its depiction of the scenes and sounds of colonial Cairo.

Another Egyptian Mystery

The information hasn't made it onto this blog, but many of my readers will know that I am a sucker for Elizabeth Peters' Amelia Peabody mysteries. Peabody is a sassy archeologist in turn-of-the-(20th)century Egypt, and the matriarch of a menagerie of humans and cats. (She is also the mother of Ramses, who over the course of the series proceeds from precocious pest to broodingly romantic hero and a personal favorite fictional character.)

But I digress, as this post is actually about my Maine trip reading, Arthur Phillips' The Archeologist. Set mostly in 1922, the novel is concerned with a young archeologist, Ralph Trilipush, and his drive to discover the tomb of the mysterious early king (not Pharoah, we are instructed) and erotic poet Atum-hadu. The narrative is formed of Trilipush's journal and correspondence from Egypt back to Boston, where his funders and fiancee await, as well as letters from Mr. Ferrell, written three decades later, to the fiancee's nephew, about how he, an Australian private investigator, found himself intangled in the Trilipush case. Which, we eventually find, is filled with intrigue, murder, pretense, and a search for a king that may or may not exist.

I would stretch to make any but the most general comparisons between Phillips work and Peters' series. [On second thought, I am finding more similarities.] Peters has a doctorate in Egyptology, which grounds her works in serious scholarship, but is also aware that she is writing swashbuckling romantic mysteries at the same time. Phillips, googling reveals, was inspired by a scrap of letter to base a novel on the unfamilar topic of Egyptology. (One thing both authors do is integrate famous archeologists such as Howard Carter, discoverer of King Tut's tomb, into their work.)

Phillips' characters are enigmas, appearing through their own or others' writing. And everyone has good reason to misrepresent him or herself. Thus the reader must determine how much to trust, and which lines to read between. This can get tiresome, and I imagine some readers will put the book down rather than do so. However, it does make for an entertaining psychological mystery. To say more would reveal too much.

I was a big fan of Phillips' 2002 novel, Prague (set in Budapest, of course). Only mixed reviews kept me away from his follow-up until now. After reading both, I can say that is a more ambitious novel, but that The ArcheologistPrague is the more satisfying and successful.

The History of Love

So much for the lazy summer days (post-Nationals, at least) of my youth. Summer of '06 has had a whirlwind quality to it thus far. While I've been reading steadily, I've been posting practically not at all. But I'm here today, the last of my vacation, catching up.

Last month's book club selection was Nicole Krauss' The History of Love. I can't mention it without the aside that she is married to Jonathan Safran Foer and they are an obnoxiously talented and successful young couple. Hmph. But I can't be too grudging about it, because they are both lovely and soulful writers who have truly touched me.

The History of Love is a little too complicated to explain, but as a rough outline it follows the tale of a book "The History of Love," and its impact on its elderly author and the teenage namesake of its heroine. Plus assorted other characters. There are enough twists to keep you guessing, and while I'm pretty sure I've figured it all out by now, I am apt to agree with my librarian Adele, who claims that the novel reveals new insights upon further readings.

I found the two main characters, Leo and Alma (the younger), utterly heartbreaking and charming. Their idiosyncracies made them recognizable and above all human. And while all the characters live to various extents in worlds of their own making, their attempts to bridge distances and create connections are both funny and touching. The note Leo wears on his lapel when he goes out is just one example.

The night I finished reading, I found myself lying in bed weeping, not of our sorrow, but because of an overabundance of emotion. Krauss, like her husband, is expert at probing emotional soft spots, and manipulating them in ways that aren't overbearing, but leave lasting marks.