I AM MALALA

 

I Am Malala, Malala Yousafzai, Little Brown and Company, 2013, 270 pp

This reading group pick turned out to be better than I expected. In case you missed it, MalalaYousafzai, aka The Girl Who Stood Up For Education and Was Shot By the Taliban, made headlines around the world after she was shot and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.

Her story is uplifting. Since she was a small girl, she loved to read and write, she loved school, and was encouraged by her father, a Pakistani advocate for education of both boys and girls. Hers and her father's outspoken presence in Pakistan drew the attention of the Taliban who eventually sent a young gunman to shoot her down while she was riding home from school in October, 2012. She lived through horrific medical procedures and recovered thanks to international outcry and support.

I learned from a child's POV what it was like growing up in Pakistan from 1997 to 2012. Still to this day she is not welcome in her country. Due to her transfer to Great Britain while she was fighting for her life, due to skillful surgeons and doctors, she recovered. She has continued to work for education, especially for women.

The book was co-written with British journalist Christina Lamb. It reads smoothly and I felt it captured Malala's childhood voice nicely. She was only 15 when she was shot. Her recovery took two years including several operations and extended physiotherapy.

Now anytime I feel angry about the lack of rights and opportunities for girls and women around the world, I think of Malala and what she endured. Apparently it is all a matter of enduring.

DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD

 Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk, Riverhead Books, 2019, 274 pp (originally published by Wydawnictwo Literackie, Krakow, Poland, 2009; translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones.)

When I reviewed Poland  by James Michener, I mentioned two books I planned to read by Polish authors. This is one of them and is the third novel I have read by Olga Tokarczuk. She is my favorite Polish author.

"Drive your plow over the bones of the dead" is a line from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Janina, protagonist of this novel, has many interests, one of which is working with a friend to translate William Blake into Polish.

If all of that sound obscure and scholarly, the novel is anything but. Instead it is a murder mystery, even a thriller. Men in Janina's village are turning up dead. It looks like murder but the police are not doing much to apprehend any suspects. Janina's attempts to provide evidence in the form of letters to the police chief are almost comical, making her appear to be an aging crank who is possibly losing touch with reality.

Her voice as the first person narrator of the story is unmistakable. "I am already at an age and additionally in a state where I must always wash my feet thoroughly before bed, in the event of having to be removed by ambulance in the Night." She despises her given name and has "afflictions" that can send her to bed for days. I can relate to that!

She is also an accomplished astrologer and does the charts of everyone she knows by which she predicts what will happen to them. When she is well she has incredible energy and strength. Her escapades in the village bring the sense of a small 21st century Polish town on the Czech border to life.

I won't say more because I would certainly spoil it for future readers. I found it all so entertaining with unique characters, some of whom reminded me of my interactions with New Age friends and my own past as a nonconformist hippy.

This is the third novel I have read by Tokarczuk, winner of the Man Booker International Prize and the Nobel Prize. Her latest novel, The Books of Jacob, historical fiction featuring a Polish Jew who claimed to be the Messiah, is due in English in early 2022. I can hardly wait.

SULA

Sula, Toni Morrison, Alfred A Knopf, 1973, 136 pp

 

Toni Morrison, one of my top three favorite authors, passed away in August of this year. She was 88 years old. She had won the Nobel Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, and wrote eleven novels. I have read them all. Now I am rereading: The Bluest Eye, her first novel, earlier this year and now Sula, her second.

 

I first read Sula in 2001. It was September of that momentous year of the terrorist attacks, from which America and the entire world is still reverberating. For me, that was a moment that announced the last gasp push back of patriarchal power; they are still gasping, they will not go down easily or they may take the planet down with them. Toni Morrison fought that power all her life through her support of important writers and through her novels.

She did not march or join demonstrations. She wrote from the viewpoint of a woman of color. I like to think she "womansplained"...to women, to men (if they would listen), to the whole world (if they would read.)

In fact, during September 2001, I read four of her novels. I was mightily impressed but I can see on rereading, that I missed a lot of her deeper meanings. Sula is about female friendship, always a fraught endeavor, susceptible to irreparable change, especially during and after puberty.

Yet I don't think there is ever any deeper or more unconditional connection in life than childhood friendships between girls. It is hardly about words. It is just a communion of souls, a recognition, a pact. I got that on the first reading. What I got this time was the complexity of issues: sex, men, marriage, children and of course racism.

Morrison, in her usual incredible prose, captures all this. She hits economics, generations of women and mothers, longing for both freedom and safety, morality and mortality.

I read some reader reviews where I often came across women who found Sula, the character, hard to understand or accept. I think as we grow and age and experience the stages of life, many of us realize that we have a bit of Sula in ourselves, no matter how much we try to bury or ignore or fight against the kind of woman she was.

THE SPIRE

The Spire, William Golding, Harcourt Brace & World, 1964, 215 pp

 

Imagine my surprise when I started William Golding's 1964 novel The Spire and found myself in a fictional Salisbury cathedral. I have read four of Golding's novels, including his most famous Lord of the Flies, but never have I found a priest among his protagonists.

 

Dean Jocelin, the head priest, has a vision as well as an obsession to have a 404 foot high spire built onto his cathedral. He feels it will honor God and draw parishioners from miles around. He forces his will upon his architect, the workers and the townspeople. If he gets it built it will also, as the reader gradually learns, bring glory to himself.

In the medieval times of the novel's setting, such spires were being built onto churches across Europe, advancing architecture by leaps and bounds. New techniques had to be developed to support such height and weight. But Dean Jocelin's church has shaky foundations which cause the rising walls to shriek and wave in the wind while driving the architect/chief builder to despair as he tries to carry out the project.

It turns out this novel is a descent into madness tale. I love those! Thus it fits Golding's usual theme about man's will versus hardship and tragedy. The gothic setting, certain dark secrets carried by the priest, and the author's keen insights into human psychology made the book great for me.

However, once again I was confronted with stream-of-consciousness passages, multiple narrators, and as an additional touch, plenty of allegory, so it was a challenging read as well. Golding is the fourth Nobel Prize winning author I have read this year so far. His writing is a feat as amazing as the spire itself.

THE BLUEST EYE

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison, Holt Rinehart and Winton, 1970, 164 pp

 

Toni Morrison, one of my top three most loved authors, turned 88 in February. I have read all of her novels though not in order of publication. I plan to read them all again. At the February meeting of my One Book At A Time reading group, I mentioned Ms Morrison's birthday and was dismayed to learn that not one of them had read any other of her novels except Beloved. Therefore I suggested The Bluest Eye. We read and discussed it in April.

 

I had remembered this novel as the heart-wrenching story of a young girl whose deepest desire was to have blue eyes. I did not remember the startling details. Pecola Breedlove, black, poor, unloved, comes into the lives of two sisters, black, not as poor, and a bit more loved. The younger sister tells the story, looking back on herself at 10. Her sister Frieda and Pecola are 11.

Toni Morrison always writes about race, about the brutal facts of life for the people we whites call Black in our country when we are being what we think is polite, enlightened and beyond racism.

The narrator opens with a story early on about getting a blond, blue-eyed white doll for Christmas, thereby setting up the concepts of what America found beautiful in the 1940s, especially when it comes to females. I have to say right here that I am blond and blue-eyed, yet I have always had issues with my own looks. Have I been good looking enough, have I been thin enough, have I worn the right clothes.

The brilliance of the novel is that while it is a story about identity and beauty or the lack of it in a Black female child, any woman can fall right into the tale and empathize with these Black girls and women. Though a Black female probably has the most difficult position in our society, any woman at all has it rough. The things we won't do to be thought beautiful and desirable, to feel safe. The things Pecola did will break your heart.

This first novel by the first American Black woman to win the Nobel Prize is an introduction to her astounding intelligence and perceptive views. Though she later expressed dissatisfaction with the book, it seems to me she had to write it as an overture to the symphony she has written in the rest of them.

Of the members who showed up for our meeting, all had been put into the state of awe I hoped for. Great discussion of course. I hope they go on to read more Toni Morrison.

A PERSONAL MATTER

A Personal Matter, Kenzaburo Oe, Grove Press, 1969, 165 pp (originally published in Tokyo, Japan, 1964; translated from the Japanese by John Nathan)

 

 

By chance I read another translated novel, not from my challenge but from the 1964 list for My Big Fat Reading Project. Bonus!

 

Back in 2010 I read this author's 1958 novel, Nip the Buds, Shoot the Kids. As far as I could tell, that was his first novel. In both books the writing is powerful and clearly influenced by Western literature while putting the reader smack into 20th century Japan.

In A Personal Matter a frustrated intellectual named Bird is awaiting the birth of his first child. The child is born with a brain abnormality. If he lives he will be handicapped for life. Bird's mother-in-law is desperate to keep the newborn's condition from his mother. She is afraid it will frighten her only daughter too much to try for more children. 

Bird is ashamed to have produced such a child. He is not happy in his marriage but his job was gotten for him by his father-in-law and he is rather terrified by the mother-in-law. Should he just let the child die and lie to his wife about it? Should he approve an operation that may still leave him a vegetable?

He takes refuge in the arms of a former girlfriend. Over the period of a week, when the child's life hangs in the balance, Bird struggles with his conscience. He has long harbored a dream to visit Africa and had planned to make the trip shortly. Now everything is in chaotic flux.

 

In this, as well as other Japanese literature I have read, most of which was written in post WWII times, the country's traditional culture is in crisis due to its defeat, the end of the Emperor, the American occupation and the beginnings of democracy. It is as if the entire ancient culture is suffering from PTSD.

 

A Personal Matter is gritty, sometimes grotesque, especially when it comes to sexual matters. Bird's former girlfriend is a deeply immoral being and an enabler for his plans to deny responsibility for his baby. Yet there is a sort of dark humor and a psychological viewpoint to the plot, both of which make it feel as modern as any American novel from the 1960s.

 

At first I was put off by the characters and the ways they approached their problems, but the pace is fast, almost frenetic, and I became hooked on wanting to find out what Bird's decision would be. In an author bio, I read that Kenzaburo Oe himself had a disabled child. Perhaps that is why the story felt so real.

 

The author continued to write about the effects of the atomic bombing of his country and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994. 

(A Personal Matter is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE WREATH

The Wreath, Sigrid Undset, Penguin Classic, 2005 (originally published in 1920, translated from the Norwegian by Tina Nunnally, 1997) 291 pp

 

 

The Wreath, written by 1928 Nobel Prize winner Sigrid Undset, was published in Norway in 1920. It is the first of a trilogy called Kristin Lavransdatter, set in 14th century Norway. I read it for my Tiny Book Club. First translated into English by Charles Archer in 1923, a new translation by Tina Nunnally published in 1997 is now considered a much improved rendering of the book into English.

 

I liked The Wreath but I did not love it. Kristin herself is one of literature's great bad women. She had been betrothed by her father to a man who would bring land, wealth and stability into the family, as was the custom in the 14th century. Before the marriage can take place, Kristin falls passionately in love with a fallen knight, Erlend Nikulausson. They consummate their passion when a young Kristin is spending a year in a convent, supposedly to calm her down before her marriage. By the time she manages to convince her family to release her from the betrothal and allow her to marry Erlend, she is secretly pregnant.

The Wreath introduces the wild and beautiful world of Norway at that time. When the story opens Kristin is seven and goes on her first journey outside the valley where she was born. She adores her father and he her. Lavrans Bjorgulfson and his wife Ragnfrid had lost child after child, leaving Ragnfrid permanently depressed. When Kristin came along and managed to live, Lavrans became besotted with his daughter but Ragnfrid could never dare to give her love to another child she might lose.

Hard as it is to imagine being a daughter in such an almost primitive culture, the author makes sure you experience all of it. I kept thinking of Heidi while I read. Also Hild by Nicola Griffith. Religion plays a huge role with Christianity and ancient pagan beliefs competing daily in the lives of these people.

Despite all of it entrancing elements, I was not wholly won over. Even after discussing the book with my book club members. The Middle Ages comprise 1000 years of not one thing good for women. Compared to then we have indeed come a long way. The only thing easier for a woman then was to become a fallen one and the repercussions were dire in the extreme.

Sigrid Undset certainly brings to life all the subjection but she also has a rather too obvious mission that included ideas such as passion trumps all and women are people too. Kristin suffers unbelievably in this tale though she does finally marry her true love. I was not completely convinced by this character. It is so clear that marriage to Erlend is only going to bring her more suffering that I do not feel at all compelled to read the second book in the trilogy, The Wife.

 

If I had read The Wreath back in the 1980s when I first read The Mists of Avalon, I think I would have loved it and gone on to finish the trilogy. Sometimes, timing is everything. I have to credit Sigrid Undset for taking on a subject that before 1920 had mostly always been written about by men in Western Europe.

 

 

(The Nunnally translation of The Wreath is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)

THE TREE OF MAN

The Tree of Man, Patrick White, Viking Press, 1955, 480 pp

 

 

Patrick White was an Australian novelist who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973. My friend and I of the newly formed Literary Snobs reading group picked this book for our first meeting. Not many people write like this anymore. His prose is highly literary, filled with poetical passages and lyrical descriptions of place, weather, and characters.

 

The Tree of Man follows the life of one man in almost completely chronological order from childhood to death. All along the way, the author adds in pithy moments of truth about human life delivered both from the main characters' points of view as well as from his close third person narration. The pace is generally as leisurely as a sunrise or sunset in the Australian outback but there are occasional spurts of action which ramp up the reader's speed of turning the pages.

Stan Parker is a loner who had inherited a piece of land in the undeveloped hills outside of Sydney. The book opens as he arrives on the land at about the age of twenty. Sixty years or so later when he dies his humble home is one of the last original structures still standing in what has become the suburbs of Sydney. He had picked up an orphan from the nearest town and married her. Amy is another type of loner but together they evolved a love that brought them through parenthood and plenty of disappointments. They do not come through unscathed yet somehow maintain a tenacious grip on life through stoicism, continuous grueling hard work on their dairy farm, and a rather twitchy sort of loyalty to each other.

In any life, the majority of days and nights comprise a tedious, boring repetitiveness enlivened by the usual momentous events, such as falling in love, births, extreme weather, wars, betrayals, and deaths. Thus, reading this book for me was not unlike living, though I have not experienced a pioneer life of backbreaking labor.

Life also contains periods of emotional and psychological upheaval that bring to the forefront the dark side of any personality. When Stan and particularly Amy experience such periods the writing plumbs that darkness with an unflinching gaze. At those points in the novel, I felt like Joyce Carol Oates had grabbed the pen.

It was a mixed reading experience made up of wonder, tedium, and moments of personal enlightenment. I am fairly eclectic and embracive in my reading so I let Patrick White determine my reading speed and my emotional balance for the many hours spent with his book. I will say that not once did I not believe him. In the next to last chapter, when Stan dies, I felt Amy's feelings. You expect death, you are powerless before it, and yet life goes on if not much longer in yourself, then in your offspring.

If his other novels are anything like this then he deserved his prize. The banality of human life is everywhere around us and he was able to describe that as well as clothe it with the beautiful and poetic essence that gets us through.

(The Tree of Man is out of print. Even my library did not have a copy nor has it been made into an eBook so far. I found my copy at Abe Books in paperback.)

THE SLAVE

Shop Indie Bookstores


The Slave, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Farrar Straus and Cudahy, 1962, 311 pp (translated from the Yiddish by the author and Cecil Hemley)

Summary from Goodreads: Four years after the Chmielnicki massacres of the seventeenth century, Jacob, a slave and cowherd in a Polish village high in the mountains, falls in love with Wanda, his master's daughter. Even after he is ransomed, he finds he can't live without her, and the two escape together to a distant Jewish community. Racked by his consciousness of sin in taking a Gentile wife and by the difficulties of concealing her identity, Jacob nonetheless stands firm as the violence of the era threatens to destroy the ill-fated couple. 

My Review:

I have not yet read anything by I B Singer I did not love. The Slave is no exception. Singer was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978 and always wrote in Yiddish until his death in 1991, in Surfside, FL.

After all my reading this year about slavery in America, I come to this reminder that slavery is as old an institution as prostitution. Both seem to be inherent in the human story. 

The Slave is an epic in 311 pages. Jacob was a learned and pious Jew, son of wealthy parents, who found himself a slave to a farmer in a remote mountain village. His birthplace, Josefov, was a Polish town that lay in the path of Ukrainian Cossacks in the 17th century. The ensuing massacres had cleared the town of Jews. Jacob fled, thinking his parents, wife and children dead, then fell into the hands of robbers who sold him into slavery. 

Though he desperately strove to stay true to his faith, Jacob began to love the farmer's daughter. Wanda was a step above her environment, a practically prehistoric milieu of pagan superstition, tooth and claw existence, and rural poverty. But she was a Gentile and therefore forbidden. Her passion for him finally overcame his religious scruples and they planned to escape.

Of course, that plan fell through on the first attempt. Jacob's life from then on is one of perils and his search for redemption, taking him all the way to Israel as part of the early Zionist movement, at last reuniting with Wanda, and on to his final days where he finds peace and wisdom.

Besides being a beautiful love story, the novel is also a contemplation of the place of religion in human society including the contradiction that it condemns believers who do not follow its commandments while it honors the phenomenon that spirituality can lift us above our animal nature. The result is a timeless tale.

How interesting that Singer published a novel called The Slave just as the Civil Rights Movement was catching fire in America, his adopted country since 1935.  

VOICES FROM CHERNOBYL

Shop Indie Bookstores

Voices From Chernobyl, Svetlana Alexievich, Picador, 2006, 236 pp (translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen)

Summary from Goodreads: On April 26, 1986, the worst nuclear reactor accident in history occurred in Chernobyl and contaminated as much as three quarters of Europe. Voices from Chernobyl is the first book to present personal accounts of the tragedy. Journalist Svetlana Alexievich interviewed hundreds of people affected by the meltdown---from innocent citizens to firefighters to those called in to clean up the disaster---and their stories reveal the fear, anger, and uncertainty with which they still live. Comprised of interviews in monologue form, Voices from Chernobyl is a crucially important work, unforgettable in its emotional power and honesty.

My Review:

The first non-fiction author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is also the first Ukrainian female writer to win this prize. Svetlana Alexievich began her career as a journalist but turned to creating books based on collages of interviews with people who have lived through catastrophe. After winning numerous awards, she received her Nobel Prize in 2015.

The subtitle of this book is The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster. I have always been opposed to the proliferation and use of atomic weapons, but I had thought that nuclear energy might be a good alternative to petroleum based sources. Reading Voices From Chernobyl has pretty much disabused me of that idea.

Alexievich's interviews with the eyewitnesses, firefighters, cleanup team members, physicians, physicists, and ordinary people about the explosions at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power reactor in 1986 and the aftermath, combine to create an explosion of loss, destruction, and long term effects. It is almost unbelievable and extremely hard to read about what those people experienced at the time. She also gives a clear picture of the long term legacy of cancer and birth defects that is still ongoing. Several women sob as they say, "It is a sin to have children."

If you can stand to read this book I highly recommend it. You will get details and viewpoints never seen in any news reports. The governments of the world can be counted on to downplay such events. 

I am now convinced that homo sapiens is not responsible enough as a species to handle nuclear power. Should we evolve as a species to a point where we are immune to radioactivity, I wonder if we would even be the same species. Most dangerous of all is ignorance.

I read the book for discussion with The Tiny Book Club. We did so, long and deeply a couple weeks ago. Last night we met again at my house to watch the documentary "Radioactive Wolves" and learned that the indigenous plant and animal life in the "Zone," the vast contaminated area around Chernobyl, appears to be unaffected by the radiation and is in fact thriving. The area is returning to the wild country it was before the Soviets "developed" it for farming and the power plant. Thought provoking and grounds for more discussion!

(Voices From Chernobyl is available in paperback by order from Once Upon A Time Bookstore.)