Unless

by Carol Shields.  Fourth Estate, 2002.

I think I enjoyed The Stone Diaries, but I had trouble getting excited about Unless.  (I didn’t notice until I was almost done with it that all the chapter titles were adverbs, with a few preposiitons thrown in for good measure; but what the titles have to do with the chapters themselves wasn’t obvious.)  Carol Shields was a woman writer writing about a woman writer (Reta Winters) writing about a woman writer (Alicia something or other) writing about…. you get the picture.  Except that Reta’s eldest daughter has inexplicably dropped out of college and started begging for a living on the streets of Toronto.  This is hugely disturbing to Reta, her husband Tom, and their two younger daughters.  (While I am sure it would indeed be very upsetting, I can think of lots of worse things that could happen to one’s child.  As Reta points out, she knows exactly where her daughter is and can go and see her whenever she wants, even if the girl refuses to talk to her.)  In the end, the reason for Norah’s rejection of family, friends, home, and education becomes clear and all ends “happily.”  I thought the ending was too pat, actually.

I did enjoy this little eponymous paragraph:

“Unless is the worry word of the English language.  It flies like a moth around the ear, you hardly hear it, and yet everything depends on its breathy presence. Unless–that’s the little subjunctive mineral you carry along in your pocket crease.  It’s always there, or else not there…. Unless you’re lucky, unless you’re healthy, fertile, unless you’re loved and fed, unless you’re clear about your sexual direction, unless you’re offered what others are offered, you go down in darkness, down to despair. Unless provides you with a trapdoor, a tunnel into the light, the reverse side of not enough. Unless keeps you from drowing in the presiding arrangements. Ironically, unless, the lever that finally shifts reality into a new perspective, cannot be expressed in French.  A moins que does have quite the heft; sauf is crude.  Unless is a miracle of language and perception,…. It makes us anxious, makes us cunning….But it gives us hope. (pp. 224-225)

It’s a book to be passed on, not one I would keep on my shelf.

She’s Come Undone

by Wally Lamb.  Pocket Books 1992.

I didn’t much care for this novel about an obese, disagreeable girl who eventually undergoes psychotherapy, loses weight and becomes a good person.  I don’t generally like books about unpleasant characters (think Gone with the Wind), and I didn’t find Dolores’ transformation very convincing.  In the first half of the book, she is really obnoxious, treating people worse than they treat her (which is badly).  Is it supposed to be the psychotherapy that turns her into a kind and generous person?  Or just growing up?  Anyway I finished the book because I liked her better in the second half, but I’ve already forgotten most of it.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

by Khaled Hosseini – Riverhead Books 2007

I think it took me just three days to finish Khaled Hosseini’s second novel (the first being The Kite Runner).  I was very quickly swept up in the story of the humble but strong Maryam and the intelligent and beautiful Laila, the gentle Tariq and the despicable Rasheed, Afghanistan and the Soviets, the Mujaheddin and the Taliban.  It was very hard to put the book down.  I had read about the events in Afghanistan, but the novel allowed me to experience them firsthand, as it were, through the eyes of Maryam and Laila, the two protagonists, wives of Rasheed.   I experienced their shame and humiliation at his hands and at the hands of the Taliban, for whom women were no better than slaves, completely dispensable.  How else can we explain the utter disregard for them, as written into the laws once the Taliban took over:

You will stay inside your home at all times.  It is not proper for women to wander aimlessly about the streets. If you go outside, you must be accompanied by a mahram, a male relative. If you are caught alone on the street, you will be beaten and sent home.

You will not, under any circumstance, show your face.  You will cover with burqa when outside.  If you do not, you will be severely beaten.

Cosmetics are forbidden.

Jewelry is forbidden.

You will not wear charming clothes.

You will not speak unless spoken to.

You will not make eye contact with men.

You will not laugh in public. If you do, you will be beaten.

You will not paint your nails. If you do, you will lose a finger.

Girls are forbidden from attending school.  All schools for girls will be closed immediately.

Women are forbidden from working.

If you are found guilty of adultery, you will be stoned to death.

Listen. Listen well. Obey. Allah-u-akbar.

(pp. 248-249)

Whatever possessed these people to think that they had the right to restrict the activities of their fellow human beings in such a way?  Some of the rules are so petty and stupid (If you keep parakeets, you will be beaten. Your birds will be killed.) that it makes the reader want to laugh, but it was no joking matter, and we see just how serious the consequences could be.  Through the eyes of the two principal characters, we experience the powerlessness of Afghan women.

Hosseini, writing from a female point of view, captures well his characters’ feelings and perceptions.  It always amazes me that a male author can so successfully portray feminine experience.

A very special book, very worth reading.

Silver Wedding

by Maeve Binchy

This short novel is classic Binchy.  It takes a situation (the 25th wedding anniversary of Desmond and Deirdre Doyle) and chapter by chapter looks at that situation from the points of view of the various characters: the couple themselves, their three children, their friends, other relatives, and the priest that married them.  Everyone’s life has its tragic aspect.  The husband and the three adult children are struggling to free themselves from their mother’s insistence that they pretend they are something they aren’t.  Deirdre herself believes that she must pretend to satisfy her own mother, which turns out not to be true.  Amazingly, it all works out in the end.  Not my favorite Binchy, but a good one-day read.

Not Even My Name

by Thea Halo (Picador, 2000/2001)

Thea Halo’s mother was born to Greek parents in present-day Turkey during the Ottoman rule.  When she was ten, the Turks drove her and her family out of the village where they and their ancestors had lived for thousands of years and into the interior of the country.  Fourteen pages in the middle of the book summarize the general history and background of  Turkey’s expulsion of its non-Muslim peoples in the early twnetieth century, and the rest of the book focuses on what happened to Themia, the little Greek girl who became Thea Halo’s mother, Sano.  (The title refers to the fact that because the Assyrians she lived with could not pronounce her name, they gave her a new one, thus ending any connection to her Greek past.)   After her parents gave her up because they could not feed her, she was abused by the woman she worked for until she finally ran away.  At the age of 15, she married an Assyrian man much older than she and emigrated to the United States, where she learned English (possibly her sixth language) and raised a large family.  A kind of success story, only it is hard to imagine how she coped with the tragic loss of her entire family.  A very sad story, but one that needs to be told.

On a Hoof and a Prayer: Exploring Argentina at a Gallop

by Polly Evans. Bantam UK 2007, Delta Trade Paperbacks 2008

I like travel literature (Bill Bryson being my favorite travel writer), and I enjoyed this book, which I picked up at a discount when my local Borders closed (sob), a victim of the recession.  Polly Evans, a British writer, arranged to combine a tour of Argentina with some riding lessons on huge estancias.  She did not exactly explore Argentina at a gallop; she mostly took buses and airplanes to get around while arranging some riding activities from time to time.  Still, she’s a good writer and has a wicked sense of humor.

Her descriptive passages can be wonderfully impressive, like this one:

“What really struck me about his glacier…was its incredible, indisputable beauty.  It was more radiant by far than any glacier I’d seen in the past…. The white ice glistened.  It towered into amazingly sculpted pinnacles, and then carved itself into astonishingly glowing blue crevasses.  The depth of color was dazzling.  (explanation of why glacier ice appears to be blue)  I’d seen photographs of blue icebergs before,…but I’d always thought that extraordinary hue was due to some kind of photographer’s trick.  Now I realized that the opposite was true.  The photographs I’d seen hadn’t enhanced the color: This ice exuded a blueness that no image I had ever seen had been able to capture.  The ice quite literally shone.  From its crevasses, a thousand electric-blue light bulbs seemed to beam.  It was as though the ice itself was possessed of a tremendous energy.  In the deeper chasms, the ice appeared the color of a lurid snow cone that lightened to shimmering turquoise as each face climbed to a peak.  In places, the elements had carved these freezing mountains into seductive curves, then whipped their summits into sharply tapering spires.  Other sections fell away in sheer smooth drops, like a lustrous sorbet sliced by a knife.  And then, as the glacier rose on and up into the distance, and the peaks and gullies grew ever farther from the eye, the surface of this great expanse of ice took on the appearance of millions of sugary rosettes, the finely piped icing of a cake baked for an army of Patagonian giants.”  (Chapter 19, “On Ice”–a description of the Perito Moreno Glacier)

In addition, there are a lot of interesting historical tidbits–how so many British ended up in Argentina, the economic crisis of the 1970s, Juan and Evita Peron, Felix Aldao (”a very sanguinary monk”), Juan Manuel Rosas (whose 19th-century reign was also “sanguinary”) and Charles Darwin, the Manzaneros (”apple people”) and the savage Yamana of Tierra del Fuego, who apparently tolerated the cold of their frosty homeland without the aid of clothing but were wiped out by European diseases.  I never knew any of this (except Darwin, of course) and was fascinated.

Link to this book on amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Hoof-Prayer-Exploring-Argentina-Gallop/dp/0385341105

Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

by Barack Obama, Three Rivers Press 1995, 2004

Barack Obama wrote this book after finishing law school.  It tells the story of his life up to that point, divided into three sections: “Origins” (how his parents met and married and how they separated when he was a baby; his mother’s remarriage and his years in Indonesia; going to high school while living with his maternal grandparents in Hawaii; college; New York); “Chicago” (where he worked as a community organizer), and finally “Kenya” (where he goes to meet his relatives).  I was struck by the honesty with which he recounts his early years.  He was always smart, but not always well-behaved.  In some ways it’s amazing to think, “This man grew up to be President of the United States!”

Speaking for myself, I was most interested in his tales of Indonesia and Kenya, because I doubt that many (if any) other U.S. Presidents have had the opportunities he had to live in other countries, not as a tourist but as someone who belongs there.  (In Indonesia, he learned the language and went to school.  In Kenya, he lived with his relatives, who accepted him wholeheartedly into the family.)  This is a man who has truly had a multi-cultural life.  I was also fascinated by how he learned how to live as a black man in America, despite being raised in a white family.  I don’t think he saw himself as having any choice in the matter.

The book is well-written, although most of the dialog must have been reconstructed from imperfect memories.  Having read it, I would still like to read The Audacity of Hope.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

by Michael Pollan (Penguin, 2006)

Reading the first part of this book (”Corn”) makes me thankful that I have been a semi-vegetarian (lacto/ovo/occasional seafood) for over 30 years.  Pollan’s premise is interesting: to try to answer the question “What should I have for dinner?”  He soon refines that to “What am I actually eating?” and “Where does it come from?”  The answer is not pretty.  (In fact, it’s quite off-putting.)  Pollan writes, “‘You are what you eat’ is a truism hard to argue with, and yet it is, as a visit to a feedlot suggests, incomplete, for you are what what you eat eats, too.” (p. 84)

The second section of the book (”Grass”)  is about the organic food industry (yes, you read that correctly).  It confirms what I suspected about organic food available in my local Whole Foods: it is sometimes not quite what we think it is.  But the most interesting aspect of this middle part is the description of how Virginia “grass farmer” Joel Salatin raises cattle, hogs, rabbits, chickens, and turkeys in a self-sufficient and sustainable way.  By rotating his cattle through different pastures and following the cattle with chickens that “sanitize” and fertilize the pasture, Salatin uses his animals to “do most of the work” on the farm.  The animals keep the grass healthy, and the grass in turn feeds the animals, which then feed the humans.  This is farming as it should be.

The final section of the book (”The Forest”) considers hunting and gathering.  I agree with Pollan as to the ethics of meat-eating (basically okay as long as we can really accept the fact that what we are eating is the dead body of a once living, breathing animal), and I respect his decision to hunt and kill a wild pig in California; if you want to eat animals, I believe you should be able to kill them and clean them.  (I choose not to do these things, but that is my choice, which Pollan in turn respects.)  I appreciated the honesty with which Pollan describes his ambivalence about the hunt.  I also learned a lot from the chapter on mushrooms.

Each section of the book culminates in a description of the meal consumed with the foods described in that section: a fast-food meal eaten in a car for “Corn”, a  dinner centering around Joel Salatin’s chickens and eggs for “Grass,” and a meal consisting almost entirely of foods hunted, foraged, or grown by the author and his foraging friends for “The Forest”.

Did you know that the air around us is full of yeast spores, which we can collect by setting out a paste of flour and water and then make superb bread?  I didn’t either.  This is just one example of the many fascinating facts I learned from reading this extraordinary book.  Moreover, the prose is elegant and funny.  I finished the book in about a week and was kind of sorry it was over.

The book connects with several others I have read over the past few years: My Year of Meats by Ruth Ozeki; Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver and family; Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser.

36 Views of Mount Fuji: On Finding Myself in Japan

by Cathy N. Davidson.  Dutton 1993 (out of print)

This is the third time I have read this wonderful book about bridging two cultures.  In the early 1980s, Cathy Davidson and her husband Ted, American academics, went to Japan to live and teach.  Over the next decade or so, they straddled two worlds.  The book describes not only the Japanese world that they fell in love with, but also the culture shock that they experienced as they traveled between the two cultures.  This is what distinguishes 36 Views from other memoirs about living and working in a foreign culture.

The book is sometimes funny, as when Davidson describes the dinner where a Japanese couple try to get her and her husband to teach them exactly how to eat soup in America.  It is sometimes heart-breakingly sad, as when she recounts the delicacy with which her Japanese friends and colleagues helped her and her husband after the sudden death of his brother and sister-in-law in an accident.  It is always fascinating, as in her description of her visit to a sacred grove on Kudakajima, an island near Okinawa with a communal matriarchal society.  And it is unfailingly honest.  Davidson skillfully portrays her states of mind as she straddles the two cultures, never completely at home in either.  This feeling of incompleteness, of longing for the other, is something with which all who have enjoyed living in a foreign culture can identify.  It is the bittersweet price that we pay for stepping outside of the familiar and learning to appreciate new ways of doing things, of looking at the world.

I cannot recommend this book highly enough.  It is not particularly easy to read, but English learners who have lived in other cultures will appreciate the descriptions of learning to get along in a strange place, of struggling with the language, and of learning to adapt and disadapt as they travel back and forth between the home culture and the new culture.

China Boy

by Gus Lee. Plume, 1991.

China Boy is the story of little Kai Ting, only son in a Chinese immigrant family in San Francisco in the mid-twentieth century.  The book is set during Kai’s eighth year of life.  His beloved mother has died and his father has married a cruel, abusive American woman whose apparent goal is to erase every vestige of Chinese language and culture from the home while breaking the spirits of the two children who are still living there (Kai and his older sister Janie).  (The reader has to wonder how the father could stand by and watch his wife abuse his children to such an extent.)

Kai, an undersized, weak child who inexplicably never masters either Chinese or English, is the punching bag of the other boys (and one girl) who populate the extremely rough neighborhood of the Panhandle, where the family lives.  The book tells the story of how a series of kind adults, mostly staff of the Y.M.C.A. where his father finally signs him up for boxing lessons, support and teach Kai how to stand up and fight for himself.

Many of the characters (such as Hector Pueblo, the Mexican mechanic who rescues Kai from a savage beating on the street; Mr. Barraza, the boxing coach; Mr. Punsalong, the multiracial boxer with a background of martial arts; Angie Costello, who takes it upon herself to fatten Kai up; and Mr. Lewis, the one in charge of the Y boxing program; Toussaint LaRue [Toos] and his mother; and the other friends that Kai makes in the neighborhood and at the Y) are skillfully developed into people we can imagine and would like to meet.  Unfortunately, Lee writes their speech so that someone learning English would never understand: e.g., “He’s muy rapido, you know, bery quick. Black boy get in his face and firs’ t’ree punches, firs’ kick, yo’ boy go lik’ dis and lik’ dat, so touch.” (p. 123)  or “China Boy, you’se jus a stupid fool ofa chink.  You’se standin here in my schoo’ yard, like ratfacedogshit. I’se gonna teach ya’ll some Fist City, China Boy….Gimme yo’ face…” (p. 183)  Since there is a lot of dialogue, an English language learner would have to really struggle to comprehend; and this is not a good model for speech, needless to say!

There is a lot of graphic violence and at least one truly evil character (the wicked stepmother).  It’s a good story, though–one though it  has been told many times before (e.g., The Karate Kid), never fails to entertain and inspire.