Don Quixote (book 1), by Miguel Cervantes

Posted on May 23, 2008 by Thistle

donquixoteSpoilers.

Hem. Well, I’ll make this brief. I didn’t like this book at all. This is supposed to be such a great book, the model for modern times, or whatever such nonsense. To me, it felt like the 1600s version of Monty Python (which I also hate). Lots of bodily fluid, lots of sex jokes, lots of prejudice, etc, etc. The antics of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza went on for ages, stuff that could easily have been reduced to a fraction of their length. Admittedly, about 200 pages in (of about 450), Cervantes gives the reader a long break. We meet a lot of people not in any way related to Don Quixote, and they tell very interesting stories for a 100 pages or so. There’s even a lot of places where Don Quixote isn’t there. That, I think, is the only thing that enabled me to reach the end. If it had all gone on like the first 150-200 pages, I would have given up. I couldn’t have handled it. One more reference to vomit or feces and I was out of there! The last part slipped along pretty fast, though, as I said before, when Don Quixote was out of the way.

I have yet to do any research on this book, and I’m not sure what I’m going to find when I do. I personally didn’t get anything out of it except a desire to throw the book against the wall (but couldn’t, because it belongs to the library). I’m sure the critics will have a lot better review than I do, and that I’ll have tons of stuff that I may or may not believe to bring to my book club when I have to present this book mid-June. All I know now is that I will not be reading Book 2.

I do want to say one good thing about this book, though. Cervantes certainly has a strong sense of individual voice. Each character speaks in his own way, which made it really easy to skim through all those flowery, chivalry-copied speeches of Don Quixote’s, and really easy to read through the tales of other characters. If it was all in Quixote-language, I’d still be mid-book. So yay for that. I definitely concede that Cervantes is a good writer. Unfortunately, I don’t think that’s good enough to recommend the book, because good writing on a bad plot isn’t necessarily worth reading. As I say, some parts are interesting, but the humor in this – it’s supposed to be a comedy – just didn’t appeal to me. I’ve never been one for potty humor. Sorry.

Oh, and I suppose a brief plot synopsis is in order: A man reads a lot of chivalry books and goes insane. He runs off, thinking he’s a knight errant (dubbing himself Don Quixote), gets himself a squire, and goes on a lot of pointless adventures that are constructed to be grand (or even “real” sometimes – he does attack windmills that he thinks are giants…) in his mind. Everyone laughs at him and generally he gets beaten up, as well as his squire (Sancho Panza). Then the reader hears a lot of love-gone-awry stories from other people, which eventually right themselves, and Don Quixote is carted off back home by concerned fellow-villagers. If that sounds interesting enough to take up 450 pages of your time, and you don’t mind Monty Python type humor, have at it – this book is for you.

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Protected: The Book of Names, by Jill Gregory and Karen Tintori

Posted on May 8, 2008 by Thistle

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Protected: Phantom of the Opera, by Gaston Leroux

Posted on May 5, 2008 by Thistle

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The Bookseller of Kabul, by Asne Seierstad

Posted on May 1, 2008 by Thistle

the-bookseller-of-kabulIn her introduction, Seierstad states that she met Sultan Khan (the bookseller, whose name has been changed for anonymity) in Kabul, Afghanistan, after spending six months tagging along as a journalist with the military offensive in the country. She was impressed by his intelligence, by his love of literature, and by his refusal to give up his business despite decades of political oppression, and asked if he would allow her to spend several months living with his family, in order to write a book about them. The book, she tells readers up front, would not be the tale of typical Afghan life (most of the family is literate, several speak English, and they have plenty of money), but life as it was for this specific family. She also admits that she writes in what she deems a “literary” style – she acts as an omniscient narrator and puts in inner dialogue, thoughts, and feelings as she sees fit.

Now, that being said, Seierstad then goes through various happenings from her time in Kabul, as well as recounting some stories that happened before she got there (like the story of Sultan Khan’s proposal to his second wife, Sonya, a girl some forty years younger than him). Slowly, we go along little adventures, chapter at a time: tales of daily life of the refugee family members living in Pakistan (including an honor killing next door), an illegal and dangerous business trip across the Afghanistan/Pakistan border, various marriage proposals and negotiations, a trip to the bazaar, a wedding, a pilgrimage to the tomb of Ali in Mazar-i-Sharif, a trip to a women’s bathhouse (hammam), a trip to school, a woman’s quest for a job, a trip to the Ministry of Education, the plight of a thief (who stole from Sultan, who’s relentless) and his family, and a hunt for al-Qaida.

Seierstad claims to be the impartial, “invisible” companion and guest here, but from page one, it is very obvious that this is not an impartial book. The book is riddled with biases so strong it slants the entire narrative. Though she is fluent in five languages, she is not fluent in the language most of the family members speak, so she received most of her information through the three family members who spoke good English. Already, people presenting their family for other people to read about often slant their stories, and then those stories get re-slanted through the interpreter’s eyes, and then they are passed through the mouth of the author. Throughout the whole book, I felt like all I was getting was Seierstad’s personal beefs with the culture. She seemed unable to understand their customs, and determined not to try to, either. She didn’t approve of the way women were treated there, and so she spent the majority of the book telling us about how cruel women are treated and how awful men are. There is no room for other points of view. And beyond the treatment of women, just the culture in general she didn’t seem to approve of, so she spent all her time pointing out how it’s their culture that causes all their problems. The narrative is sensationalist and childishly crude at times, and she seems to have a hang up on the suppressed sex drive of Muslims, which really bothered me.

While many of the stories and images were memorable and/or touching, because of her biased reporting and contrived “literary” style, I don’t know that I can believe anything that I read. What she presents as good and bad aren’t necessarily so. They are just what she believes is good and bad. I felt the same way toward this book as I do about American tourists who think that other cultures are amusing but fundamentally wrong just because they aren’t American. I didn’t feel like I learned anything at all about Afghan culture (even about unusual middle-class Afghan culture), which is really what I’d looked forward to in picking this up. Having stayed a week surrounded by my brother-in-law’s Muslim family in Palestine, I could see moments when people or setting resembled my experiences, and I felt like I was denied something that could have been really spectacular by the horrendous job Seierstad did as a journalist. Now, I know that Afghanistan and Palestine aren’t exactly the same, but there are some similarities, and I could definitely recognize a culture similar to what I’ve seen behind the mask of what she’d presented.

Honestly, I was slightly offended by her take on the whole thing, and I don’t blame Shah Muhammad Rais (the real name of Sultan Khan, who was so distinctive in the book that a false name couldn’t hide him) for his anger at her. He is taking her to court in Norway right now, claiming she defamed him, his family, and his country. He is also asking for political refugee status after the book began to be sold on the black market in Persian, claiming his family is now unsafe, as everyone recognized him as Sultan Khan. He is too well known in Kabul for anonymity. In the meantime, he has fired back by writing his own narrative (which I’m sure is no less biased, though on the other side of the fence), called There Once was a Bookseller in Kabul. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been translated into English. I’d love to read it.

Posted in 2008, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

My Antonia, by Willa Cather

Posted on April 21, 2008 by Thistle

my-antonia-willa-cather-paperback-cover-artSpoilers.

I got an unusual lesson in “Never judge a book by its cover” while reading My Antonia. My book cover tells me that Antonia Shimerda elopes with a railway conductor after her father’s tragic death, and later comes back to the city. Once she’s back, she’s “unprepared for the lecherous reaction her lush sensuality provokes” because of the toiling country life she’s used to. Despite obstacles, however, she struggles toward happiness.

Anyone who has read this book might wonder what in the world this description is about. First, Antonia moves from the country to the city several years after her father dies, and a long time before there is ever any mention of a railway conductor. Second, she never elopes. She plans a wedding with a longtime sweetheart but gets jilted and left pregnant. And that’s a decade or so after her father dies. After that, she goes back to the country and never lives in the city again. Yes, she struggles toward happiness; that might be the only correct point given in my Bantam Classic version’s synopsis. I’ve never been so confused in comparison. I kept waiting for Antonia to elope…

My Antonia is told from the point of view of one of Antonia’s childhood friends, Jim Burden. It is a very quiet story, where the details of what does and doesn’t happen are very trivial in comparison with the spirit of the book. I can see why it would be difficult to come up with a summary. The book captures prairie life. Across the course of over three decades, we see what happens to people and land. Willa Cather is amazing in her descriptions. While not every person will agree with her style of writing – it isn’t my particular favorite style – it can definitely be said that she knows exactly what she’s doing when it comes to description. She is very decisive in her voice. Each stroke she paints is clear and definite. Lines such as

…everything was wonderful to [Lena], and everything was true. It was like going to revival meetings with someone who is always being converted

and

The curly grass about us was on fire now. The bark of the oaks turned red as copper. There was a shimmer of gold on the brown river. Out in the stream the sandbars glittered like glass…

give a very final view of the things they describe. It is clear that Willa Cather could see, really see, everything she spoke about. Her people and landscapes are alive. And while I am not a particular fan of excessive setting, she integrates the setting in a subtle way, and I found myself at times actually seeing the pictures of fields of red grass in front of me, rather than floating blindly along the words. That doesn’t happen too often with landscape for me; it’s one of those places I lack in imagination when I read.

Nothing spectacular happens in My Antonia, plot-wise. It really is a very quiet book. A quiet struggle that isn’t always a struggle, a quiet success that isn’t always a success. It’s slow, but not in the way of boring. More like in the way of a lazy summer afternoon. So that you just want to relax in a hammock when you read. That would have been nice.

A couple little mentionables: First, don’t read the stories about Peter and Pavel and the wolves or about the vagrant and the wheat thresher when you’re in the middle of a quiet lunch when your kids are sleeping. How I happened to catch both these stories mid-meal, I don’t know, but the irony was not funny. Or maybe it was. Second, I think I have to consider any book to be worth reading if the following lines occur (Antonia speaking first):

“Now, all you children be quiet, Rudolph is going to tell about the murder.”
“Hurrah! The murder!” the children murmured, looking pleased and interested.

And then later, a little parenthetical insert halfway through the murder story:

Here the children interrupted Rudolph’s narrative by smothered giggles.

If that doesn’t get you interested…

Posted in 2008, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Eye, by Vladimir Nabokov

Posted on April 16, 2008 by Thistle

eyeSpoilers.

The Eye is Vladimir Nabokov’s fourth novel (more of a novella, really). It is told from the point of view of a tutor, who, towards the beginning of the book, is beaten up and humiliated in front of his students by the jealous husband of his mistress. He then goes home and attempts suicide. Now, whether the suicide is successful can be debated; suffice to say that he “recovers” and thinks of himself as dead, afterwards forming a new life among people he hasn’t known before. Most of these people are familiar with each other – family or old friends – all except one: Smurov. The narrator, who considers himself now to be nothing more than an all-seeing “eye,” initially describes Smurov as a gentleman. Smurov is intelligent, witty, comfortable in society, handsome, mysterious, well-mannered, and well-dressed. The narrator assumes that Vanya, the single lady within the group, will fall in love with Smurov.

It becomes clear fairly quickly (though it is never said directly until the end) that the narrator and Smurov are the same person, and that he is speaking of himself in third person. It is clever on Nabokov’s part, because Smurov is a classically unreliable person – not only in his judgment of himself, but in his dealings with others. Through the story, the narrator watches Smurov (at one point he says of himself, “In respect to myself I was now an onlooker”) and those around him, attempting to discern Vanya’s feelings for him. As he watches and snoops (going so far as to steal someone’s mail to find out their opinion of Smurov), he discovers that those around Smurov think of him as shabby, self-absorbed, absurd, and deceitful, also as a fraud, a “sexual lefty,” a spy, and a thief. The only person who thinks well of Smurov, in fact, is the demented old uncle who has actually confused him with Vanya’s fiancé. While the narrator suffers each of these opinions as personal blows, the reader doesn’t need the narrator’s snooping to discover these things – they are apparent simply by the double narrative. While the narrator may think he speaks well of Smurov, or himself, he reveals at the same time his blundering, petty nature.

Towards the end, the narrator makes a grand (and ridiculous) declaration of love to Vanya despite the fact that she is engaged. He runs off afterwards and hides in a flower shop with a mirrored wall, and when he leaves, Nabokov writes, in my opinion, the most poignant and meaningful description in the book:

As I pushed the door, I noticed the reflection in the side mirror: a young man in a derby carrying a bouquet, hurried toward me. That reflection and I merged into one. I walked out into the street.

From this moment on, the narrator is referred to as Smurov, whereas he never has been before. After this, he is called by name for the first time. The “eye” has integrated back into the body. Smurov no longer sees himself only in reflection (the mirrors being the people he associates with). After this, all he sees is what he wants to see. The last two passages are mere fantasy, grossly obvious to the reader even if Smurov does his best to convince us otherwise. He is as unconvincing in the lie to the reader as he has been in all his previous lies to other characters. No reader would believe him at the end when he proclaims how happy he is:

I swear, I swear I am happy. I have realized that the only happiness in this world is…to be nothing but a big, slightly vitreous, somewhat bloodshot, unblinking eye. I swear that this is happiness. What does it matter that I am a bit cheap … What more can I do to prove it, how to proclaim that I am happy? Oh, to shout it so that all of you believe me at last, you cruel, smug people…

Nabokov’s gift is his prose. Often, in fact, he seems to go too far, sacrificing content and substance for style, structure, and color. Every sentence is a play of [sic] words. On first reading The Eye, I was dissatisfied, and I decided to take a day to think about it before writing up a review. There are so many layers to a Nabokov book that it takes time to sift through them. What Nabokov has presented in this book is a strong criticism of first person narration. First person narration is often thought of as reliable simply because the world is seen directly through the narrator’s eyes. People, however, are notoriously unreliable in their judgment of themselves and the world around them. Through a many-layered narrative, a separation for most of the book of Smurov and narrator, the reader comes to see Smurov for what he is, the same way that the group he mixes with comes to see him. Smurov discovers this viewpoint of himself, but too late to save himself from the reader’s judgment. I read an essay that quotes Wayne Booth as saying this is a “Secret communion of the author and reader behind the narrator’s back,” and I think that’s a very apt description for this book. I don’t believe The Eye is anywhere near as masterful as some of Nabokov’s other works (Lolita, for example, is superb), but it is amusing, well-written, and worth reading.

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November Ever After, by Laura Torres

Posted on April 14, 2008 by Thistle

novemberSpoilers.

About a year ago, I stumbled across a description of this young adult fiction book while searching for another title, and it looked interesting. Amy is dealing with the recent loss of her mother, and throughout the book, discovers that her best friend, Sara, has kept secret from her the fact that she’s a lesbian. Amy is left trying to deal with the triple blow – death, secrets, and a change in the way she has to view the world and her friendships.

Now this sounded interesting to me. I decided to check it out last week, and read it today after finishing my last book. It didn’t take long, something like two hours. Unfortunately, while this is written about sixteen-year-olds, it seems to be written for eight-year-olds (but not like she meant it to be that way, just that it was badly written). A sort of odd way to juxtapose mature content with elementary style. I wasn’t real impressed. The characters didn’t seem real, their feelings felt fake, the plot was forced and most of it was shoved into the last twenty pages. A lot of it read like junior-high romance novels.

And beyond that, the ending left me a little upset. The book was published in 1999, and I know homosexuality was even more controversial of a subject then than now, but it felt like the author had a very specific opinion and purposely watered it down in order to make the book more acceptable. I’m not sure what her opinion was – it could have been that homosexuality is an acceptable part of life and we should be more open minded in our society, or it might have been that homosexuality is wrong and something that will hurt everyone – but either way, it was like those two opinions got mixed up at the end. Amy, at the end, is uncomfortable with Sara, tells her she thinks she’s doing something wrong and non-Christian, but also decides she’ll be her friend and tolerate her. At the same time, she personally acknowledges that she’s been a bad friend and that Sara is a good person who has never chided Amy for her religious beliefs (they have different ones), and thus may be the better person and friend here. It really felt like either the author wasn’t sure what her opinion was, or, like I said before (and I think this is more likely) she had an opinion and tried to water it down and neutralize it.

I was very disappointed. I felt like the story was interesting enough that it could have been well written, but wasn’t. Thankfully it only took up two hours of my time and now I can move on to something more interesting, like Nabokov!

Posted in 2008, Prose, Young Adult | Tagged | 1 Comment

Facing the Lion, by Joseph Lemasolai Lekuton

Posted on April 9, 2008 by Thistle

lionSubtitled: Growing Up Maasai on the African Savanna

I saw this book on the shelf at Barnes & Nobles a week or two ago when I took one of my sons to buy a reward book. It looked interesting, especially after reading about the Maasai people in Out of Africa earlier this year. I wrote down the name and author, then checked this out from the library last night. I knew it was a memoir, but didn’t realize it was a juvenile memoir sponsored by National Geographic. It certainly reads like a NG book – each chapter is like a five minute documentary (though I’m definitely not interested in seeing a mini-doc on tribal circumcision ceremonies…).

At first, I sort of struggled to get through the chapters. I’m used to books with a lot more detail, elaboration, and depth, and this was very surface level. It’s written for kids, not for adults. But as I pushed on, the boredom and exasperation passed, and by the end, I did find that I learned things. Not in the same way that Isak Dinesen taught me – rather than feeling like I’d experienced the African savanna, I felt as if someone who’d once lived there had told me stories about it. Storytelling has its merits, and is pleasurable. I’m not sure how much of this book I’ll remember a year from now, but it made a light, short, healthy break from my current Harry Potter streak, which is always useful. And the book does have a good, inspiring message, especially for kids who face monstrous obstacles in their lives.

Posted in 2008, Children's, Prose | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck

Posted on March 21, 2008 by Thistle

grapesI really thought I wouldn’t like this book. I was very hesitant to begin it, thinking it would just bog me down like so many others I’ve read this year. As it turns out, this is one of the best books I’ve read in a long time. I love the contrast Steinbeck makes between chapters: one chapter of plot, one chapter of very impressionist, camera-like motion. The characters were incredibly life-like, and it was more like a character study than a setting-based book (which is what most people have complained about to me, all the setting and description). Reading the characters was almost like reading an extreme form of family history. My great-grandma was from Oklahoma and lived through the great depression. She didn’t travel out to California, but stayed in OK. She was in a unique, if not particularly pleasant, position, as her mother was Cherokee and her father was Anglo. A lot of prejudice on both Anglo and Cherokee sides was put against her family. But getting back to the point, reading The Grapes of Wrath was like getting a little glimpse of the life my family comes from. The attitudes towards charity, the attitudes towards land, the attitudes about men and women and gender roles, the attitudes towards government, all that – I recognize the parts that have been passed down my family for years, becoming more diluted with each new generation. I recognize my grandpa in the descriptions of men, I recognize my grandma in the women, I recognize my mom’s views on charity and the role of government, etc. It’s really incredible.

Steinbeck isn’t pretending at all here – this is social commentary at its rawest. At the same time, he isn’t completely heavy-handed. His characters do have spots of good luck. In a situation that goes from bad to worse, continually, progressively, throughout the novel, it’s not so melancholy as to be unrealistic. Yes, terrible things happen, and the bad by far outweighs the good, but if the Joads just hit one misfortune after another with no break, the commentary would lose its value and meaning. Steinbeck puts in just the right amount of counterbalance so that the reader doesn’t get completely bogged down. You want the Joads to triumph even though you know they won’t. You get a third of the way into the book and already know each misfortune that’s going to happen and don’t want to read anymore but still have to go on. It’s masterfully done.

I think of immigrants today, the terrible things that they go through and the way we treat them in the US. They are poor. They have no choices in a lot of ways. We bring them here, pay them little, treat them like they’re stupid, dirty, uncivilized beasts, and send them back where they came from when we’ve used them well enough. What an awful thing! And I know that they aren’t US citizens, but if you look back then, states were much more segregated, and the Californians didn’t want the “okies” to invade any more than people don’t want the Mexicans to come in. We don’t want to give them a chance at citizenship. We build a wall to stop them. But if we can get them in enough to work for cheap, it’s okay. Just send them back afterwards. Sigh. Our society is doing just the same thing as then, and I think it would benefit people to go back and read this sort of work, to get some sense of our humanity back. One of the things Ma Joad says:

I’m learnin’ one thing good… If you’re in trouble or hurt or need – go to the poor people. They’re the only ones that’ll help – the only ones.

What a powerful statement. So many powerful messages in this book. A very worthwhile and fulfilling read, and I can’t wait to present it to my book club in April.

Posted in 2008, Adult, Prose | Tagged , , , , | 7 Comments

[refuge], by multiple authors

Posted on March 21, 2008 by Thistle

refugeIn February 2008, I went to Palestine to visit my sister and to be there for her wedding. I met her husband, Rami, who is a Palestinian refugee. Before I left, he gave me a copy of this book, which he and another student had worked to put together. It is a collection of stories, essays, memoirs, photos, poems, and more by the children of the Jenin refugee camp.

The stories are laid side by side in both Arabic and English. Rami and the other student did all the translations, and Rami himself contributed to the collection, having grown up in the refugee camp as well. The stories were so powerful, particularly in describing the violence that some of these children had seen and gone through. The photos really captured the essence of the camp as well.

This is a book that has never officially been published, and is not available to the mainstream. The only reason I have a copy at all is because the people who printed it accidentally got the order wrong, so some of the facing pages in Arabic and English are not the same story. Since I don’t read Arabic, this doesn’t matter to me.

Unfortunately, I don’t think anything ever came of the project. I know the plan was to try to publish and sell copies with the money to benefit the refugee camp, but I never heard anything else about it, and I know Rami moved away from the area not long after that. I’d guess that my copy is one of the few still in existence.

Posted in 2008, Adult, Poetry, Prose, Visual | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment