Sad

Khaled Hosseini’s second book, A Thousand Splendid Suns, is better than the first in that it takes place entirely in Afghanistan.  His first, The Kite Runner had an initial riveting section set in Afghanistan, but the second part, set in the United States was not as compelling.  A Thousand Splendid Suns compels utterly with overlapping narratives of women’s lives that are inseparable from the recent history of this beleagured country. While reading of the sorrows and tribulations of wives who are abused; daughters denied schooling and given away as child brides; and mothers whose sons are lost in senseless wars, one has a horrible feeling that this story is still being told, that women will remain, in many cases, mere objects, abused, despised and wasted, valued only for breeding and kept subservient by physical abuse and unjust social structures.  There are many sympathetic male figures in the book, and some of the worst men show glimmers of humanity, even the bully, Rasheed, and the weak father, Jalil; however, for the most part society encourages the worst impulses so that these glimmers are eventually lost.  A poignant moment in the book is after the Soviet occupation of Kabul, when Laila’s father tells her that it is actually a good time to be a woman in Afghanistan, because she is allowed to go to school and to be independent.  This while his two sons are fighting in the Jihad against the Russians, the Jihad that is mostly a reaction to the freedom allowed women under Soviet rule.  The breakdown of rebel forces into factions that tear the country apart after the Soviets leave is an illustration of the senselessness of war.  More people killed, homes destroyed, children orphaned, and women’s rights even further-circumscribed – Hosseini ends on a hopeful note, but his book, dedicated in part to the women of Afghanistan, was written two years ago.  Since then, the Taliban have increased their presence and no doubt stories such as those of Laila and especially Mariam will continue to be played out in obscurity.  We have to at least thank Hosseini who shines a light on these lives and tells his tale with love and compassion.

What’s everybody reading?

Whilst traveling (has anyone else noticed an increase in the use of ‘whilst’?), I like to check out what my fellow passengers are reading.  A lady in the Charleston airport was in the early pages of The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga; she also had the latest book by Pat Conroy (South of Broad) in her bag, which happens to be about Charleston, but she said it was awful.  On the plane between Newark and Boston, I spotted a woman in a window seat who was near the end of The Help, by Kathryn Stockett.  I hear from reliable sources that this is a must-read, but haven’t gotten hold of it yet.  On a weekend trip to DC at the end of September, it seemed that every other person was reading Dan Brown’s just-released novel, The Lost Symbol.  I read his first book and I’m pretty much done with him, but I realize they have a certain amount of entertainment value and make pretty good airport books.  As for me, I devoured The Likeness, by Tana French, which had the same gripping psychological suspense as her first (In the Woods).  I think I liked the first one a little better, but this was still a good read with an irresistible premise and quite a few of the same characters.  I also read a little mystery called The Book of Murder by an Argentinian author, Guillermo Martinez, whom I recently discovered by listening to a book on tape called The Oxford Murders.  He has a cool, dispassionate style, with clever plotting, subtle insights into human behavior and a touch of magic realism.  One of our hosts was reading The Beautiful and the Damned, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, which I have to confess I have not read.  My traveling companion was reading Shantaram by Gregory David Roberts for possibly the third or fourth time.  I used to reread books too, back when I didn’t feel so obsessed with time and how it runs out…..

TC – Poetry

I’ve embarked on a new Teaching Company Course - How to read and Understand Poetry, taught by William Spiegelman  It is lovely to listen to and think about poems while commuting to work, facing another day of drudgery.  As Goethe said, “One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture,  and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.” 

Professor Spiegelman has a good speaking manner, which a teacher ought to have if he or she can possibly manage it.  He is not quite so puckish and funny as McWhorter, but so far anyway he sticks to the topic and does not intrude upon it.  More to the point, I was immediately struck by his assertion that poems are not about ideas.  He tells a story of the painter, Degas, mentioning to his friend, the poet Mallarme, that he would like to write poems as he had so many ideas.  Mallarme replied, “My dear Degas, poems are not made of ideas, but words.”  A simple, even obvious, statement, but one that bears thinking about, for it is the choice and setting and arrangement of words that makes a poem what it is more than what the poet is trying to say, which according to Spiegelman, can be boiled down to half-a-dozen or so main ideas – love, death, living, etc.

His first poems are a pair by Wordsworth, the much-loved “I wandered lonely as a Cloud” which he amplifies with some biographical details about Wordsworth and then “The Reaper”which I had never read.  It would be helpful to read each poem first (which he suggests), because unlike the first poem which I know well, my unfamiliarity with the second made it somewhat hard to follow.  The poems themselves are not included in the bibliography so it will take some effort to hunt them up.  He then did Yeats’ “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” which I know by heart and spoke beautifully of the restful, dreamy rhythms of the poem.  He mentions that Yeats had been reading Thoreau and was influenced by him in writing this poem but adds that his seeker after simplicity is far from being practical, his vision is idealized, not pragmatic.  He states the longing of the poet to get away from the modern world, but I think he misses something of central importance.  The twice-stated, ”I will arise and go now”, seems too forceful for the rest of the poem and you get the feeling that he is not actually going to fulfill this ambition, that he is lying on a couch, inert, and will not summon the will to do what Thoreau did, that he will after all stay “on the pavements” grey.  The next poem is by another favorite of mine, Edna St Vincent Millay.  As Spiegelman notes, she is not so well-regarded these days, but I have loved her since junior high, reading “we were very tired, we were very merry, we went back and forth all night on a ferry.”  I love many of her poems, but do not remember this one, “The Buck in the Snow.”  The language and imagery are stunning.  It’s a fine example of her genius and from a simple snowy scene with deer in flight reaches to the very “strangeness” of life and death.

Another by McEwan

I really like his writing (Ian McEwan that is), and this book, Enduring Love, while pretty disturbing was more than a study in a scary obsession – it had also excellent scenes, characters and plot development.  There is one really funny scene – when the main character is trying to buy a gun from some seedy ex-hippies.  The great thing about McEwan is his careful cataloging of our shared human nature – the moods, whims, defensive and protective strategies that fill our days.  I also liked his description of Joe’s attempt to distract himself with work: 

Within twenty minutes I had drifted into the desired state, the high-walled infinite prison of directed thought.

A good read

While discussing books with a friend, we discovered a shared love of mysteries.  He recommended an Irish author, Tana French, whose first book, In the Wood, he described as a psychological thriller.  I got hold of the book and couldn’t put it down.  The central crime is sad and disturbing, but it is well-handled and the range of characters, suspects and subplots are all superb.  Reading this book reminded me of my book-obsessed childhood, spending hours and hours absorbed in a story, emerging only for meals, no worries about tasks or responsibilities.  It’s a great feeling.  Of course, now I have to read  her second book, a teasing first chapter was included at the end of this one, with some of the same characters and an intriguing new mystery.  I’ll be looking for The Likeness as soon as I have a block of time to devote to it.

Roth on Aging and Death

I haven’t read much Philip Roth as I tend to be a bit prudish and he is known for his graphic writing; however, I did read and enjoy The Plot Against America (it is told from a young boy’s point of view so not too much in the way of sex going on). I was interested in Everyman because of the idea of an aging author taking on the subject of death. In Plato’s Republic, there is an account of Socrates visiting an older friend, Cephalus, who urges him to come often as he, Cephalus, cannot get around much anymore and enjoys the pleasures of conversation.  Socrates replies: 

There is nothing which for my part I like better, Cephalus, than conversing with aged men; for I regard them as travellers who have gone on a journey which I too may have to go, and of whom I ought to enquire, whether the way is smooth and easy, or rugged and difficult.

 In Everyman, Roth sets out to chronicle a man’s life, beginning at his funeral and seen mostly through his own flashbacks.  It is well done and sad and truthful, and it shows us that the way is rugged and difficult.  It is especially painful when he propositions a young woman whom he has been watching every day jogging on the boardwalk.  His humiliation and loss of his old confidence is truly poignant.  However, Cephalus quotes Sophocles on this subject, who, when asked how love suits him as an old man, answers in a way that might have been useful to Roth’s narrator:

 Peace, he replied; most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master.

 Cephalus adds:  For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many. 

When he speaks of the complaints that his contemporaries have with aging, he says: 

that these regrets, and also the complaints about relations, are to be attributed to the same cause, which is not old age, but men’s characters and tempers; for he who is of a calm and happy nature will hardly feel the pressure of age, but to him who is of an opposite disposition youth and age are equally a burden.

 In Roth’s book, the sadness is in the relinquishing of all that one cares about and the reader participates in the sense of unfairness that overcomes the narrator whose body is breaking down with what seems, to  him, to be premature haste.  Roth’s chronicle is at times a searing account of this process, complete with surgical and anatomical details.  When he describes old age as ”a massacre”, one can feel his savage delight in the word, in telling this bitter truth to all.  One might wish for a more philosophical protagonist but cannot wish for a more courageous author, for he faces unflinchingly that which he (and we)are approaching, which is so hard to face or fathom– oblivion.

On aging and death

I  used to trick myself by adding a year or two to my age by way of becoming used to the idea of being 40 and then 50.  So, recently, I was pleasantly surprised to realize that I am actually turning 52, not 53.  The term over-the-hill is a bit of a joke bringing to mind silly Hallmark greeting cards; however, as with most cliches there is a kernel of truth in the saying, because there is a time when you do feel yourself cresting, that you’ve gained a certain high spot from which to look forward and back (I’ve been trying desperately to find the passage in Netherland (see previous post) that describes this feeling but I can’t seem to locate it).  You see the accumulated years behind you, but the road ahead is dim and shadowy.  You realize,for the first time, the finiteness of life, that yours is going to end.  Not to be morose, but it bears thinking of, for the illusion of immortality is surely what causes cruel and senseless behavior, is what is behind inertia and inevitably our disappointments in ourselves.  While rereading “How Proust Can Change your Life,”by Alain de Botton, he quotes Proust’s response to a newspaper editor’s question of how one should live if a calamitous event were foretold and a certain number of days only remained.  Proust answer was essentially that we all only have a certain number of days and that the calamity of death awaits all of us and should daily inform our actions and goals.  Coming to terms with death is tricky as what can be accepted intellectually may not really feel true to us on the quotidian level.

Netherland

After reading descriptions of Joseph O’Neill’s new novel Netherland which talked of it as a post 9/11 novel, I was not really interested in reading it and that is the reaction of most people when I attempt to describe the book in reference to that date.  However, after hearing the author interviewed by Terri Gross on Fresh Air, I decided to give it a try, and I’m glad I did.  It touches on the events of September 11, 2001, only in the most delicate way, so that the mind that fears pressure on a sore spot is put at ease.  The story is a somewhat dark, yet dreamy (and occasionally funny) meditation on adulthood, national identity, parenting, marriage and life, but again the touch is light.  The main character, Hans is struggling with the dissolution of his marriage and the death of his Mother, which among other things including Cricket, make up the book’s several threads. The comparison to The Great Gatsby seems apt, but is not overstated (the reference to Daisy brought a smile).  In the end, I found myself flipping back through the book for certain passages that resonated as when Hans describes his own tendency toward dreaminess and mystery resulting in him “stepping around in a murk of his own making” and his concern about his own son and how to “ensure that he does not grow like his father, which is to say, without warning.”  Speaking of his confused state of mind, he adds, “I still have no firm idea whether my own descent into disorder was referable to an Achilles heel or whether it’s a generally punishable folly to approach life trustingly — carelessly, some might say.” I’ve been thinking lately about the fate of dreamers and pondering how one might possibly fit into this life, the answer seems to be not very well or only by luck.

Housekeeping

I just finished Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson.  It is a somewhat slight book, but the writing is at times beautiful and profound.  The plot seems more a contrivance on which to hang her meditations on the self, loneliness, estrangement.  I didn’t quite believe in the two girls, but the family, with the history of loss, the town of Fingerbone itself, so lost and outside of society with its murders and death by the elements and the train coming through just increasing the sense of loneliness and isolation.  Fingerbone, I did believe in. The character of Sylvie is the most compelling, besides that of the Grandmother, whose efforts at housekeeping were eventually lost to time and the elements.  In other words, things fall apart, especially families, houses, civilization, without constant vigilance; i.e., housekeeping. 

Once Lucille defects, the writing becomes more meditative and beautiful.  For instance:

Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house.  Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them.  You simply say, ”Here are the perimeters of our attention.  If you prowl around under the windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades.  If you wish us to suffer your envious curiousity, you must permit us not to notice it.”  Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire.

Another extended metaphor occurs when she talks about how transients, and all those who live by different rules than those of society, are inherently threatening to that society.  Sylvie is one of these and Ruthie becomes one.

So a diaspora threatened always.  And there is no living creature, though the whims of eons had put its eyes on boggling stalks and clamped it in a carapace, diminished it to a  pinpoint and given it a taste for mud and stuck it down a well or hid it under a stone, but that creature will live on if it can.  So certainly Fingerbone, which despite all its difficulties sometimes seemed pleasant and ordinary, would value itself, too, and live on if and as it could.  So every wanderer whose presence suggested it might be as well to drift, or it could not matter much, was met with something that seemed at first sight a moral reaction, since morality is a check upon the strongest temptations.

If a somewhat thin plot and contrived characters are needed to allow this type of writing to bloom, then so be it. 

 

Teaching Company Revelations

I just finished Classical Mythology taught by Elizabeth Vandiver. You really can’t go wrong with Greek and Roman myths and it was fun to revisit old familiar stories and learn  new interpretations of some of them.  Her discussion of Ovid was particularly interesting to me after reading Jane Alison’s fictionalized account of the exiled poet.  I also liked how she talked about modern placement of the urge to mythologize into the future with Science Fiction.  But her chapter on the “Terrible House of Atreus” and her reading of the Oresteia by Aeschylus really resonated for a few reasons.  Through Rufus Fears’ course Books that Have Made History, Books that can Change your Life (still my favorite), I read the Iliad, so had already had an introduction to the House of Atreus and the bloody deeds of Agamemnon.  Professor Fears also devotes some time to the Greek tragedies, but to me they were his weakest chapters.  I couldn’t really figure out why one would want to read or watch the bloody drama of intergenerational slaying.  Professor Vandiver gave a broader context to the House of Atreus, going back to the first evil deed committed by Tantalos and showing how the curses on the family just multiplied through the generations with parents slaying children and vice versa.  The playwright’s intention, as explained by Vandiver, was to show how the personal vengeance method of dispensing justice breaks down when the parties are of the same family.  Each person had an absolute duty to commit an action (Orestes had to avenge the death of his father) as well as an absolute duty not to commit that action (he also was not allowed to harm his mother).  Fears also brought up the irreconcilable nature of these forces but Vandiver takes it a step further when she shows how the trial of Orestes introduces a new, sustainable form of justice – a court of law with judgment by peers.  She is also great when discussing the story of Oedipus.