Beirut Nightmares - Ghada Samman

"When one's own homeland has 'emigrated,' leaving behind the values of humanity and social justice, how can any of its citizens be 'stable'?"




Set during the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, Beirut Nightmares is presented as a journal of a woman caught literally in the middle of the war.  Trapped in her apartment building where the war front has come and stalled, no one can escape; snipers are always seemingly present somewhere in the nearby buildings, waiting to shoot anyone who dares to appear outside.  Exactly whose side anyone is on is never clear; whether the author is Christian, Muslim, or something else in also kept hidden. 


The chapters are each presented as a separate nightmare, but are held together by the overall narrative.  While some of the chapters seem extremely real, others are not so obvious as to whether they are real or in the narrator's head.  Early on, she manages to sneak out at night to an adjacent pet shop that has been apparently abandoned but still full of animals in their cages.  She tries to help them by providing food and later escape, but finds that freedom is not so simple for the animals, just as it is not so beneficial for those trapped. 


Later on, the mannequins in stores along the street come to life; at first they are able to enjoy the restaurants along the avenue that have been abandoned by people, but soon they become victims of war just like everyone else.


A harrowing book, the best sections dealt with the narrator and her neighbors in the apartment below her as they slowly descend into panic and chaos.  Choices have to be made, but no one is there to help decide what is the best choice, or if there is a best choice, or if there is any choice.

The Bird Artist - Howard Norman

"I've never been all night anywhere but my own house," I said.

"Now you have."

"I'm going to have to explain it."

"Not to me."

"My mother, I meant.  My father."

"If we walk right up to your house hand in hand, stand right in the kitchen and ask for breakfast together, I bet they'll get the hint."



The bird artist is Fabian Vas, a young man living in Witless Bay, in the far reaches of Newfoundland in the early 20th century.  Fabian has been drawing since he was a young boy and is taking lessons, by correspondence, with a rather critical teacher who is sparse with compliments but who does seem to suggest that Fabian does have talent.  The village of Witless Bay is populated with the odd sorts you might expect in a remote village (think Northern Exposure, which was out at about the time this book was published) by the sea.  Fabian lives with his parents, who seem to mostly endure their marriage rather than enjoy it. Fabian has a puzzling relationship with Margaret Handle, who is a bit older than Fabian, drinks a lot, and is the dominant half of their relationship.  Fabian's passivity is, in fact, the distinguishing feature of his life. 


It seems the unchanging inflexibility of life in Witless Bay is a motivator, primarily for the women in this book, to seek, or inspire, change in the men in their lives.  Both Margaret and Fabian's mother, Alaric (his father is Orkney; odd names are a staple of life here), end up sleeping with the menacing lighthouse keeper Botho August.  Their motivations for doing so are intertwined;  Alaric is dissatisfied with her married life and Margaret is dissatisfied with Fabian, who has, essentially by providing no resistance, agreed with a marriage to his cousin (who he has never met) set up by his parents.  Alaric is not fond of Margaret.


The result of all this is a murder, the breakup of a family,  the beginning of an outlaw legend, and the growing up of Fabian.  And the making of an artist.  This is a decidedly peculiar book;  I have reread it several times, just for sheer enjoyment.  Margaret is an odd, at time frustrating, but always interesting character, as is Orkney, who seems to find himself in a most unconventional way.


Howard Norman has written 2 other books that I have read, The Museum Guard and The Haunting of L. Both take place in early 20th century Canada and include similar themes to The Bird Artist.  While I was less taken with them, they are both excellent.

The Fortress of Solitude - Jonathan Lethem

“What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?”

Dylan Ebdus grows up in 1970's Brooklyn, one of the only white children in his run down neighborhood.  His father is a reclusive avant-garde artist, working on an film project that will never be completed; his mother Rachel runs off with another man early on in the book.  Inasmuch as that is completely at odds with the way I grew up, I related to Dylan like few other fictional characters I have been acquainted with. 




Lethem throws a ton of pop culture from the 70's and 80's at you over the course of this sprawling book.  Dylan acquires a love of comic books from the man Rachel ends up with.  Besides providing the title of the book, this also leads Dylan to Mingus Rude, the son of a faded, drugged soul singer, who becomes Dylan's best friend growing up.  Though, in a book that is exceptionally keen to the unspoken rules of race relations, there are always qualifiers on their friendship.  Even after Dylan grows out of his dorky white kid early years, he still will be an outsider in his own neighborhood.


There's so much going on in this book - Rachel, though she is gone, remains a presence in Dylan's life for many years through the postcards she sends, always encouraging Dylan.  His father, who, despite living with Dylan and being his sole means of support, is almost a non-existent part of his life, holed up in his room working on his project.  In order to support his son, he eventually accepts some work designing covers of science fiction novels and despite himself, becomes celebrated in that community.  Dylan and Mingus traverse their separate paths through adolescence and their teen years, sometimes together, sometimes apart.  There's always music to bring them together, along with the comic books and tagging.  Dylan also comes into possession of a magic ring.  In a nod to experiencing the other's life, he ring makes Dylan invisible, while it allows Mingus to fly and reach unreachable heights.  Each has their own path to follow, emblematic of the differences in opportunities available to each because of their skin.  Dylan, through the help of a teacher, ends up getting admitted to Stuyvesant High, a academically rigorous high school, and eventually Camden College (the fictional college of a bunch of novels, and which seems to shift novel to novel between Vermont and New Hampshire, and sometimes goes by Hampden, depending on the writer).  Dylan develops a drug habit (its the 80's, so cocaine is the choice), while Mingus remains back in the old neighborhood, and is a dealer for the same. 


As with real life, its the dealer, not the user, who gets in trouble with the law (or is it the black, not the white?), and Dylan carries out a wild attempt to free Mingus from prison that does not go exactly as planned, and mainly reinforces the guilt Dylan feels.


This is a story where I was fascinated with the details, populated with people who care about the same things I did and still do.  While fully integrating into one giant melting pot seems at times impossible, we are much better people for making the attempt to try and break down walls and mix with one another.

The God of Small Things - Arundhati Roy

“There are things that can be forgotten. And things that cannot - that sit on dusty shelves like stuffed birds with baleful, sideways staring eyes.”


I read this not long after it came out in the late 90's. As a dive into international literature, it wasn't particularly easy - my knowledge of India isn't the greatest and a lot of this takes place in the late 1960's and involves issues relevant to India at the time, but not necessarily ones that were international.  It did help to read up on some of the background issues here.  Then again, this novel hits on universal themes.  Failed relationships and the resulting impacts being a big one.  The God of Small Things is a beautiful read; this is Roy's only novel (she is involved in a lot of social activism), but she has a particular voice - there's a dreamy quality to the writing in which I felt I was getting a very impressionistic idea of what was happening.  There is a hard story going on as well, but she prefers to put a veneer over it, possibly due to going back in time.  It's very effective.


This revolves around a relatively well off family in southern India.  Ammu, the daughter who left to escape the tyrannical father, only to get married to an abusive, alcoholic man in Caluctta, has returned home with her twins, Estha and Rahel, who are seven as the story begins. Ammu's father has died, and her brother Chacko has returned from England (after divorcing his British wife) to run the family business (pickles).  Also living there is her aunt, Baby Kochamma, who early in her life had converted to Catholicism in an ill-fated attempt to attract a Catholic priest who had come to their village.


Chacko's ex-wife comes to visit from England with their young daughter Sophie Mol.  With the splintered family now back together, at least physically, events begin to transpire.  Estha is molested in a bathroom while they see a musical.  Ammu enters into a discreet affair with Velutha, a low caste handyman working at their farm, who is adored by both Estha and Rahel.


Eventually the affair is discovered and Estha, Rahel and Sophie run away to tragic consequences that are only compounded by the lingering bitterness in all the family members.  The novel eventually returns to the present day in which the long separated twins reunite, but only after suffering much the same fate as their elders.

 

Between the World and Me - Ta-Nehisi Coates

“It is not necessary that you believe that the officer who choked Eric Garner set out that day to destroy a body. All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.”  


An odd discussion I had with my wife regarding this book.  She felt it lacked a unifying cry to do something together, as a group.  She is correct, that is not included here.  Possibly Mr Coates does not know what that something is.  But I do not think his intention was to include a solution.  I'm not sure he sees one.  The failure of this country to come to terms with its dark side, past and present, is something I consider on a daily basis and have failed to ever come up with my own answer or even a way forward.  I know that in the 50 odd years I have been here, many substantial progresses have been made, yet we still are at the starting line.


As I write this, the news is filled with another black man killed by police while pinned to the ground. I do not know how many others have been killed without such notice since the last time such a story was national news.  Reading this book has not made me more aware of this ongoing destruction, but it has made me more sensitive to the desperation and hopelessness of it.  In light of recent mass murders, the push to have armed citizens seems to be increasing.  Beyond the incredible notion that introducing more weaponry into a society that is already the most heavily armed by a huge factor, there is an hideously ignored racial factor.  The man killed today had a gun in his possession and early indications are that that gun caused his demise.  This is one of the primal fears in a white world: a black man with a gun.  For the police it can represent a way out; he may have used it against us, thus we had to do it.  While I have no doubt that the increased carrying of weapons by citizens will lead to more death, I also have no doubt that armed black men will also become more common victims because they represent a danger.

update 7/9/16.  And it continues.  All Lives Matter is a hypocrisy, a lie.  Just as the sky is blue fails to take in all aspects, the hurried and mumbled all lives matter does likewise.  A bomb in Baghdad a week ago takes the lives of 200...300? we don't even know the number and it barely registers on our conscience.  The killing of 140 in France brings much more concern, the radius involved to touch our lives is that much closer.  50 killed at a gay nightclub in Orlando is even closer, the fear begins to seem real. How much lives matter is a function of identification.  All lives matter seeks to blunt the hardening of our hearts.

Black Lives Matter.  Whether we begin to see that is still just a hope.

A Wild Sheep Chase - Haruki Murakami

"She’d become so beautiful, it defied understanding. Never had I feasted my eyes on such beauty. It transcended all concepts within the boundaries of my awareness. She was at one with her ears, gliding down the oblique face of time like a protean beam of light.

"You are extraordinary." I said after catching my breath.

"I know." she said. 'These are my ears in their unblocked state."




I get to say that I was reading Murakami before he became so wildly popular in the US.  This was the first book of his that I read, sometime back in the early 90's.  As I recall, I was trying to find Hard Boiled Wonderland at the library, but this was available instead.  But this was good enough to get me hooked.


Describing a Murakami novel is always a challenge - both in terms of plot and exactly how to categorize it.  Japanese magical realism, topped with a love of American detective fiction and fueled with a skepticism of modern Japanese society?  There is something that runs through all his work along those lines.  A Wild Sheep Chase has a more straightforward plot than a lot of his later work, not that it makes a lot of sense.


Our hero, who like many an early Murakami protagonist, is never named.  He's divorced and runs an ad agency with a friend.  Pretty typical Murakami guy - not particularly motivated, mostly just passing through life.  He gets a letter from an old friend, "the Rat," whom he has not seen in years.  It includes a photo that our hero uses in a magazine advertisement as a background.  Because of this he is contacted by associates of "the Boss," a shadowy influential political figure.  It seems that the photo includes a special sheep (identified by a star shaped mark on its back) that has supernatural power and this sheep has provided the Boss his power.  He needs the sheep back to maintain his influence, and possibly his life.  Our hero, along with his girlfriend with the alluring ears (another Murakami special) seek out the Rat.
The physical journey is less important than the mental (metaphysical?) one.  They end up in the mountains of Japan at an abandoned farmhouse with seemingly little to do until an odd man dressed as a sheep turns up.  I generally find it next to impossible to say what a Murakami novel is about, though undeniably there is a lot to be gained.  The closest I can come is to say his books allow you to appreciate your own world in a different perspective than you normally do.  Maybe we all need to allow our ears to be unblocked from time to time.

A Little Life - Hanya Yanagihara

“If I were a different kind of person, I might say that this whole incident is a metaphor for life in general: things get broken, and sometimes they get repaired, and in most cases, you realize that no matter what gets damaged, life rearranges itself to compensate for your loss, sometimes wonderfully.”




A novel that may well be purposely frustrating - the subject matter is horrifically grim and the writing doesn't offer much escape.  There are several spots where your impulse is to scream at some of the characters to do something, yet you know they won't.  Often, this is a problem with novels (or possibly more often, movies.  Roger Ebert referred to it as the "idiot plot."), where you have to withstand people following an indefensible line of action that could be fixed with one simple action.  While you could definitely make that argument here, where several of the characters seem to be enablers despite their best intentions.  But this is a book of extremes - a character so scarred by a childhood that is one horrible situation peopled

by evil men after another. The author's intent is to force you with this as the reader by essentially giving you no options otherwise.  I was willing to do that, I imagine others will not.


This all starts off as a story of four young men, recent graduates of an unnamed college in the northeast.  They are close friends despite their disparate backgrounds.  In an unusual flip, it is the two white kids who come from more economically disadvantaged backgrounds (to be fair, we never know the racial background of Jude, as he has no idea himself; the book is rather vague on this point, but I, rightly or wrongly, put him in the white camp).  They are living in New York and just starting out in the careers (and life).  JB wants to be an artist, Willem an actor, Malcolm an architect and Jude is interested in both theoretical math and the law.  They will all be wildly successful in their chosen endeavors.  One of the potentially irritating things about this book is everyone's success - this is not a book that dwells on the travails of common life - everyone, eventually, is wealthy and spends much of their time eating at fine restaurants, going to the theater, or a gallery opening, or whatever else it is that the privileged of New York do.  We never get a sense of time here either - no external events that root the story in a particular time, other than its "current" (there are cell phones and some other things that at least give us that). Again, though, I think these are just ways of focusing on the real horror story that is here.


The focus of that horror is Jude.  Jude has a limp; Jude is careful to never show his body to anyone; Jude cuts himself, repeatedly, in scenes that are difficult to read.  His friends will become gradually aware of these things, and the causes, as the novel progresses. But Jude is extraordinarily reluctant to reveal his past, and even when he does, fanatically unwilling to do anything about it.


We learn first of the monastery he lived, beginning soon after he was born (and found in or near a trash bin as a baby). While the monks there do provide for his care, they also prey on him emotionally and physically.  Jude's recollections are at their most guarded here - what is happening is obvious from his retelling, but the descriptions are not that (compared to later) graphic.  Jude eventually befriends the seemingly kind Brother Luke, and they run away together when Jude is around 10.  Brother Luke turns out to be a methodical predator, using Jude for financial support and for his own gratification.  These are hard sections to read - child abuse gone hyper. 


Jude will manage to get away from this, but not to anywhere better - his story has a long way to go before he manages to break free.  But of course he doesn't really ever break free.  The time that was supposed to be his childhood will always be with him.  It is Brother Luke that teaches him to cut himself, and this is often his only release decades after.


Jude does derive support from those around him, particularly his 3 college friends.  One of his law professors ends up legally adopting him at age 30, and event of profound importance to Jude.  But all this only soothes the pain inside, it can never make it completely go away.  Interestingly, Jude becomes a highly respected (and feared) corporate attorney, known for being tough both in the courtroom and with his fellow employees.  Which is in marked contrast to his behavior around his friends, where he is apologetic to a fault.  The one exception, though, is in letting them into his past - in that respect, he is the take no prisoners lawyer.  One of the faults I had early on was the inability of any of his friends to be able to get him to go to a psychologist or other mental health specialist.  There are a few attempts early on, but are given up quickly.  The author answers this somewhat later on in a an at least somewhat satisfactory manner (and to be fair, Jude does eventually end up seeing a psychiatrist, but only of necessity and not in a manner that leaves much room for success).


The other odd thing about the book is the nature of the relationship between Jude and Willem.  For a good part of the book they are best friends, but they become lovers (sorta, kinda) later on.  On the one hand, it isn't that surprising, but both characters claim to not be gay.  Willem, who spends much of the early novel going from girlfriend to girlfriend, does own up to having had male lovers, but is quite adamant in explaining that he's not gay once he is in a relationship with Jude, he just happens to be in love with Jude.  Jude, whose attitude toward sex is to difficult to discuss here, is apparently not attracted to men in the least, but seems to just stick with what he knows. 


This is a book worth reading - its not pleasant, at times its suffocating, but it goes places few novels ever will.  Days after finishing, I still do not know what to make of Jude's life; if you add and subtract the various pieces, where do you come out?