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Meanwhile…

May 15, 2011 in book reviews

All’s quiet on this front, but posts are jumpin’ over at Only Stories, my Tumblr. For the month of May, I’ve been reading and responding to short stories. Check it out.

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The beauty! in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

April 19, 2009 in book reviews

I finished reading Junot Díaz’s vibrant novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, this weekend…amid some tears on the downtown A train. It was that good.

For those of you who are even further behind in their Buzz Books Reading List, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the generational story of the de Leóns, with a (slight) emphasis on Oscar: his ignominious youth, his return to Santo Domingo, and his death-defying end.

No other book is written this truly. There is artifice here, but it is not the artifice of an elegant narrator, beautiful descriptions, and structured dialogue. This is a quick-flitting mind observing impressions as they are made with unfiltered disgust and admiration. Granted, this means that the story isn’t always even: it sprints too quickly in some parts, lags in others—but I hope it’s not too facile to say that life does that, too. Read with Drown, one can almost understand what it’s like to grow up poor, bored, and culturally oppressed in Dominican Jersey. And I do recommend reading Oscar Wao and Drown—I might be making a leap here, but there’s a Yunior in both books, and they both deliver pool tables as a side job during college. Drown‘s Yunior stories flesh out the life of Oscar’s narrator in a satisfying way, especially for a reader like me who was reluctant to say goodbye.

I especially enjoyed Yunior’s footnotes, which showed the extent to which the private lives of Dominicans are informed by the public history of the country. Oscar’s life is impossible to understand without an awareness of Trujillo’s overlong and terrifying reach. The various nicknames that Yunior employs for Trujillo (El Jefe, T-illo, Fuckface) evince an everyday familiarity with the dictator and his role in Dominican life, even decades after his assassination.

How to sum up? This was the singularly most alive book I’ve read in a long time. The story has a life, blood, and heartbeat all its own. With most books, I feel that my act of reading animates the characters, if only while they’re being read. But in the case of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, the characters animated me.

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This Week in Books

April 12, 2009 in book reviews

Recently Read

Every now and then I like to read a non-fiction book—it’s like going over a speed bump when I’m hurtling along too quickly on Fiction Boulevard. Instead of inhaling a novel a week, I’m forced to take a month to read the facts, assess the argument, and synthesize the thesis. And then when I go back to fiction, everything seems fresher. I guess I have a demonstrable genre bias.

Anyway, having finished the refreshingly uncluttered Postethnic America, I sped through Carolina de Robertis’s debut novel, The Invisible Mountain. A friend of mine described the book as “the greatest Lifetime movie ever made…and Lifetime’s made a lot of movies, so that’s saying a lot.” I agree, and with no degree of condescension or irony. The Invisible Mountain is like Gabriel García Márquez’s 100 Years of Solitude, but with an all-female cast of characters. I don’t think I need to explain—you pretty much know what you’re getting: a splash of magical realism, a revolution, epic narratives that span generations, and moving displays of passion. On the other hand, this is a debut novel, so expect flightly turns of phrase, à la “She sped, leapt, careened towards the dazzling bluebright open sea.”* Nevertheless, I still recommend picking up a copy of this book when it comes out in August—it’s the kind of engrossing book that turns off all of your extrasensory perceptions while reading it. Don’t read it on the subway.

Currently Reading

At last! I’ve been looking forward to reading this book ever since the buzz began, but I insisted on reading Drown first. I’m glad I did: having familiarized myself with Díaz’s previous stories about living Dominican in New Jersey and Washington Heights helped to contextualize Oscar’s life and those of his friends and family. And the narrative voices…wow. As I was discussing with a friend, it seems like most recently published and recently hyped books come in one of two voices: cynical white male and excited/impassioned white female. I’m not saying that Oscar’s voice is better, but it is startling. And invigorating. So, unlike The Invisible Mountain, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is exactly the right book to be reading on the subway—the cultural pastiche syncs up perfectly with the chaos of a subway car.

I’m still on the first story, but I can already tell that Jhumpa Lahiri is a master of domestic drama. This genre of story doesn’t often get its due, having been weighed down by bestselling tepid potboilers, but home sweet home can be literature’s most destructive setting.

Quickly, two things I’ve learned from Istanbul:
1. Istanbul is sad because it used to be mighty, but now it is not. Much like some people I know from high school.
2. Orhan Pamuk is definitely a mama’s boy.
*Not an actual quote—I’ve already loaned out my copy of the book, so I can’t refer back to an actual passage.

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This Week in Books

March 28, 2009 in book reviews

Currently Reading

(Postethnic America by David Hollinger)

This book has really helped me define what I find so frustrating and discouraging about race studies in academia. The whole discussion has become mired in politically-correct talk, such that the simplest idea must be couched in increasingly tentative and vague language. Don’t talk about identity, talk about affiliations. Don’t even talk about race, talk about ethno-racial blocs. It’s not that I disagree that our identities ought to be voluntary rather than prescriptive, or that I don’t recognize that race is a completely arbitrary and socially-constructed idea. It’s just exhausting to keep up with what is permitted in the discussion of race/ethnicity/culture/affiliation/whatever.

Nevertheless, I’m finding Hollinger’s writing to be remarkably clear, and it serves as both a good primer and refresher course for the developments that have taken place in race studies from the ’60s through the year 2000. I would actually recommend this 200-page (with generous line spacing) book for the casual reader.

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This Week in Books

March 14, 2009 in book reviews

While I haven’t been telling you about it, I have been reading. Here’s a little rundown:

Currently Reading

I’m not big on poems. I read them more out of duty, because I feel like a heretic for not appreciating them, but like many of the unwashed masses, I often finish a poem and I’m like, “Uh.” But every now and then, I find a poem that actually makes more sense to me than most novels, that perfectly distills into a handful of lines more than a novel can say. And then I get my hands on that poet’s chapbook.

I had read a description of Dear Darkness that made a big to-do out of Kevin Young’s “Ode” series to various southern foods (“Ode to Collard Greens,” “Ode to Okra,” and so on). This sounded more interesting to me than odes to life and death, so I tracked down a copy of this collection, and I’m liking it. I’m not in love, and I still have moments of “uh,” but these poems are so kind and reverent to the foods and people of his childhood.

Back to Orhan Pamuk’s non-fiction—this one is a bit more memoir-ish, about his childhood growing up in Istanbul. Turns out his parents were quite well-off. I’m also learning a lot less innocuous details, too. Gossip: ORHAN PAMUK’S NEW NOVEL COMES OUT THIS FALL AHHHHHH!!!

Ok, that’s it for now. The other books I’m reading have not yet been published, so I’m going to defer my comments until you can read along.

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The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby

June 13, 2008 in book reviews

In the mid-20th century, so I’ve been told, middlebrow culture aspired to high-falutin’ secular thought. It was all science and Plato back then. And look at us now! What’s happened to us?

Susan Jacoby, the curmudgeonly author of The Age of American Unreason, blames it on Americans’ patriotic objection to intellectual thought.

In this update to Richard Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (sweet jacket, by the way), Jacoby lists the three founding beliefs of the anti-intellectual church:
1. Experts are usually foreigners, and thus, they are alien to the American body politic.
2. The educated minority is always trying to impose its views on the affable majority.
3. The educated class is an enemy of religion.
So according to Jacoby, most folks see smart people as non-believing pinkos. Maybe this is why “elite” has turned from a compliment into an insult. With eerie prescience, Jacoby predicted that elitism would probably resurface as a political negative in the next presidential race. And what do you know? It has! Barack Obama, symbol of the “elite,” has been cast as “out of touch” with the American people. Putting aside my opinion on whether or not Obama is the better presidential candidate, wouldn’t we want a candidate to be elite and out of touch with the American people? Wouldn’t we want our president to be, bluntly, better than we are?

The Age of American Unreason wisely reminds us that the past is the key to the present. Why do we need to be reminded of this? Because in an age when thought is seen as the opposite of action, rather than something that precedes or goes hand-in-hand with action, we need to be reminded to keep up with our history lessons. As Jacoby points out, “It is the ignorance and erosion of historical memory that make serious deceptions possible and plausible.” The war in Iraq isn’t our first unpopular war, and with our paltry collective memory, it won’t be our last.

Susan Jacoby is also excellent on the subject of junk thought and the impossibility of banishing it from our lives—its inconsistencies can only be pointed out to our interlocutors, but they can’t be dispelled. The nastiest part about pseudoscience is that irrational arguments can’t be disproven. The tenacity of junk thought calls for intellectual responsibilty: the spurious arguments that veil themselves in intellectual jargon only serve to undermine the effectiveness of intellectuals. In other words, “junk thought with an intellectual patina fosters anti-intellectualism.”

What does this mean for bloggers (like me)? I’ll spare you the mincing words of Jacoby’s disdain and summarize: leave the writing to those with PhDs.

While we work on obtaining our advanced degrees, we also ought to be better at reading both sides of the story. Jacoby rightfully points out that we can’t have intellectual robustness until we read as many opposing viewpoints as complementary viewpoints:

“That kind of curiosity, which demands firsthand evidence of whether the devil really has horns, is essential to the intellectual and political health of any society. In today’s America, intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike, whether on the left or right, tend to tune out any voice that is not an echo.”

Point taken. Looks like it’s time to throw in some Commentary in with that Harper’s.

What do we stand to lose from the surround sound of homogeneity? Well, consider first why we use “the media” as a singular noun. Jacoby quotes Todd Gitlin to chilling effect: “Through all the confusion we sense something like a unity at work…Even as we click around, something feels uniform.” The TV may have 400+ stations, but there’s only one show on.

I know this all sounds like a downer, and I would argue that The Age of American Unreason is needlessly hopeless and uninspiring. Think of what we’ve gained, culturally, since the advent of a visual culture: we’ve learned an entirely new vocabulary of visual and cinematic iconography. We’ve gained the emotional proximity of seeing far-away locales, rather than picturing them on a map. Video has made the news that much more real, even as Jacoby accuses us of relying on video to distance us from real life.

Video is only one of the abstractions that Susan Jacoby blames for the rise of anti-intellectualism. She blames it on the South. She blames it on the youth. She blames it on religion; she blames it on rock ‘n roll. Jacoby’s Satan would undoubtedly be a teenager from Alabama listening to Jesus rock. While she isn’t partisan in her politics, Jacoby takes elitism to hurtful, unhelpful lengths. I’d like to remind Jacoby that older does not always mean better. E-mail is not “an early sign of the enfeeblement of print culture.” Just because interpersonal communication has moved to a less preservable format does not mean that letter-writing sensibilities have stalled. Those who would write letters write lengthy e-mails (and lengthy blog posts). Those who don’t write lengthy e-mails probably wouldn’t have written a letter worth preserving 50 years ago. I’m sure some of you out there can vouch for the inaccuracy of Jacoby’s assertion: “Neither I, nor anyone I know, turns to e-mail with anything like the sense of anticipation and pleasure that used to accompany my opening of the mailbox.” I don’t know about you, but it’s exciting even to open my work e-mail every morning. 40 new e-mails overnight! I’m so popular!

Similarly, Jacoby praises Robert Kennedy for quoting Aeschylus during a public address after the assassination of Martin Luther King. But she damns those politicians who would quote Bob Dylan. I say, if the sentiment behind the quote is just as complex, who cares who the source is? The same problem crops up again when Jacoby discounts the value of cultural analysis. Students are reading popular fiction in their literature classes! she bemoans. She should, instead, be a proponent of cultural analysis so long as the teaching of pop culture is accompanied by sophisticated modes of dissection. I don’t care if you’re reading Harlan Coben; if you’re reading it with an active mind, there are valuable insights to be made.

Nevertheless, despite Susan Jacoby’s obvious prejudices against everything she is not (zing), The Age of American Unreason opened my eyes. Even if you disagree with some of Jacoby’s pointed barbs, this will be the most you’ve engaged with a book in a long time.

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The Twilight of the General

June 3, 2008 in book reviews

The General in His Labyrinth is Gabriel García Marquez’s fictionalized chronicle of Simon Bolívar‘s farewell tour through a post-”liberated” South America, which he took shortly before his death. Reading this book begs the question: Has Marquez written a fictional history or a faithful rendering of history as it happens?

Let me first emphasize that The General is not Marquez for Beginners. If you haven’t already read One Hundred Years of Solitude or Love in the Time of Cholera, then you’re short-changing yourself by reading this book. The General is for the Marquez completist, or maybe for someone well-versed in and enthusiastic about South American history. Unlike those novels in which Marquez conjures up a self-contained family history, The General drapes itself over the sharp contours of historical fact. Though you’d think a little factual underpinning would only serve to heighten the experience of reading about Bolívar’s last days, I actually found it to detract from the drama. The emotional power of The General derives from Marquez’s description of Bolívar’s withdrawal from friends, lovers, and his legacy. When Bolívar declares, “I am not myself,” it’s as if he’s unhinged his former, recognized self from his current, deteriorating self. The past becomes someone else, something to be scrutinized and assessed through the lens of old age.

This book would be an appropriate subject for Edward Said’s book of criticism on artwork created late in life, On Late Style. As Gabriel García Marquez ages, so, too, do his protagonists. (The rumored new novel from Marquez undoubtedly features a cast of nonagenarians.) The General in His Labyrinth is suffused with a feeling of twilight; it’s a sustained goodbye to a continent. And because this is Marquez, the whole tour is redolent with an elegiac beauty.

I don’t want to commit the sin of reading the author through his protagonist, but it is impossible not to read many of the General’s edicts as issued through Marquez’s pen. In fact, I consider The General to be the most personal novel of Marquez’s that I’ve read, especially in light of confessions like this: “[H]e could not renounce his infinite capacity for illusion at the very moment he needed it most.” It’s tempting to think of magic realism as a coping mechanism for old age. And then we have wry asides like this one: “There’s nothing more dangerous than a written memoir.” Perhaps this is why we’ve never received Volume II of Marquez’s memoir, Living to Tell the Tale? When Bolívar bemoans “the fact is there are fewer and fewer good books,” it reads as much like authorial comment as like the fictional criticism of a political leader.

The General in His Labyrinth is also a defense of a life and a continent. Marquez writes of the fractured South American identity:

“The damn problem is that we stopped being Spaniards and then we went here and there and everywhere in countries that change their names and governments so much from one day to the next we don’t know where the hell we come from.”

It’s a spurious explanation for the continent’s lack of cohesion, but still a clever summation of post-colonial confusion. And of the Western perspective of South American politics:

“Don’t attempt to teach us how we should be, don’t attempt to make us just like you, don’t try to have us do well in twenty years what you have done so badly in two thousand…Damn it, please let us have our Middle Ages in peace!”

Bolívar’s exasperated outbursts are as valid now as they were then.

So where does that leave The General? Unfortunately, the book itself is not as compelling as its potential insights into Marquez and his beliefs. In the end, The General in His Labyrinth offers us the same narrative that we can find in Marquez’s other, better titles: a man near the end of his days reconciles his love for an abstraction.

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“I don’t want to be a tree, I want to be its meaning”: MY NAME IS RED

April 14, 2008 in book reviews

I FINALLY. FINISHED. THIS BOOK.

What took me so long? Let me tell you a few things about My Name Is Red. Let’s begin with a plot summary of sorts:

A sixteenth-century sultan commissions a workshop of miniaturists to paint his portrait in the Western artistic tradition. Two of the miniaturists are killed, presumably to protest the blasphemy of illustrating from the Western perspective—that is, from depicting the world as Man sees it, rather than as Allah sees it. By summoning a variety of perspectives (including characters from a miniature hanging in a coffeeshop) and a parade of parables, Pamuk (himself a former aspiring artist) unravels a narrative that is at once a conventional mystery and a profound—at times, baffling—exploration of the Turkish mind.

The most rewarding aspect of My Name Is Red is the opportunity to read up on Islam’s complicated relationship with art. Because of the commandment to “not make unto thee any graven image, or likeness of anything,” figurative painting is forbidden. Furthermore, those miniaturists who do paint strive to perceive and depict the world as Allah sees it—and thus, the injunction against perspective (A fly 2 inches away from the viewer, depicted as larger than a minaret 200 yards away, would be deeply insulting). The difference between the Venetian approach to art and the Turkish approach is summed up as “They paint what they see, whereas we paint what we look at” (emphasis mine).

In the same vein, blindness is the ultimate state of grace for a painter—only then will he draw from a kind of platonic ideal, rather than be influenced by the world as he sees it. The goal of a Turkish miniaturist is to paint the meaning, rather than the thing. Style is a conceit and a sin. The Eastern aesthetic opposes the Western cult of personality: “Where there is true art and genuine virtuosity the artist can paint an incomparable masterpiece without leaving even a trace of his identity…What was venerated as style was nothing more than an imperfection or flaw that revealed the guilty hand.” The artist is not the creator, but merely the conduit or servant of a perfect, objective perspective.

The miniaturists of My Name is Red radiate the same passion and clarity of purpose that Pamuk brings to his own writing. One of the miniaturists exclaims: “God must’ve wanted the art of illumination to be ecstasy so He could demonstrate how the world itself is ecstasy to those who truly see.” This sense of ecstasy is one that appears again and again in Pamuk’s writing; by separating the function of seeing from authorial judgment, he is able to revel, to truly marvel at his characters, Istanbul, and the world. All in all, the novel displays truly brilliant ideas on art, artistry, and representation. I was struck by the passage in which the miniaturist Olive explains:

“To see is to know without remembering…It is impossible, at one and the same time, to look at the horse and at the page upon which the horse’s image appears. First, the illustrator looks at the horse, then he quickly transfers whatever rests in his mind to the page. In the interim, even if only a wink in time, what the artist represents on the page is not the horse he sees, but the memory of the horse he has seen.”

Therein lies a manifesto’s worth of ideas about seeing, representation, and the freedoms and limitations of an artist—ideas I’d love to bring to any roundtable. But even as Pamuk questions the very philosophy of art, he, too, is limited by his medium.

This is, after all, a novel. And no dizzying heights of rhetoric can make up for the fact that the novel plods along. The story disappears under anecdotes, vignettes, and parables. The characters—most often, the female ones, slaves to pettiness, hysteria, and manipulation—are more symbolic than real. (Take, for example, the miniaturists, who announce themselves in scare quotes—My name is “Butterfly,” My name is “Stork”—they are almost self-consciously archetypes rather than characters). It’s unfortunate that I’ve never seen a fully developed female character in Pamuk’s fiction. Only in his memoirs does a single woman come alive, and it’s his daughter.

Perhaps My Name is Red is intended to be more of a vehicle for thoughts on Turkish art than a full-fledged novel, but if that’s the case, then I highly resent the back copy for promising me a “fiendishly devious mystery [and] a beguiling love story.” Not like I was in it for the narrative goods, but after reading Snow, I was expecting as much driving narrative as political philosophy.

If you’re going to follow my lead, be aware of what you’re getting yourself into: this murder mystery comes with a heaping side of Symposium.

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The Seven Deadly Words of Book Reviewing: Guilty as Charged

March 29, 2008 in book reviews

I was in the middle of slogging through several book reviews for work, mining each one for quotes, when I came across this Paper Cuts article on the seven most over-used and abused words in book reviews. It’s so spot-on—you’d be surprised by how few books haven’t been called “compelling” or “lyrical.”

My favorite part of this article are the comments, where readers make their own book review jargon nominations. The best comment:

IT’S SO TRUE.

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The Inheritance of Loss

January 13, 2008 in book reviews

Apologies for all the silence around here—writing down my New Year’s resolutions took some time. As promised, my thoughts on Kiran Desai’s excellent Booker Prize–winning novel.

What a heartbreakingly beautiful book. In this novel of immigration and cultural upheaval, Kiran Desai uncoils three intertwined narratives, each one redolent with a mixture of naïve hopes and bitter epiphanies. Biju leaves his father in Kalimpong, India, to live as an illegal resident of New York City. His big break never comes. His father’s employer, an ex-judge, boils over with self-hating resentment towards his backward culture and country. The judge’s granddaughter, Sai, falls in love with her math tutor only to find that she can’t—and doesn’t want—to cross the caste lines that divide them. She cites an argument that will sound familiar to anyone who’s read Denis de Rougement’s Love in the Western World:

“Romantically she decided that love must surely reside in the gap between desire and fulfillment, in the lack, not the contentment. Love was the ache, the anticipation, the retreat, everything around it but the emotion itself.”

That is, love exists only so long as something prevents the love from being consummated. Sai loves Gyan, her Nepali math tutor, and at the same time, bolsters the social norms that place her so unattainably above him.

Desai’s voice drips with cynicism when she echoes the oft-heard colonialist imperatives to progress, progress. Every character in this novel participates in the competitive individual narrative of moving forward, armed with the knowledge that “if you invested in [modernism], it would inform you that you were worth something in this world.” However, when we step back to comprehend the novel as a whole, we see that the prerogative of progress is actually leaving India behind. The judge observes, “He realized truth was best looked at in tiny aggregates, for many baby truths could yet add up to one big size unsavory lie.” The tiny aggregates of progress add up to the lie of globalization: one country cannot move forward without another country being left behind. No one wants all countries to move forward together—if that were true, why would we so stolidly reiterate the boundaries that separate our nation from others? We benefit from keeping other populations at bay—take for example, the threat in illegal immigrant Saeed’s observation that “one skilled person at the photocopy machine [making fake visas] could bring America to its knees.”

After reading some reviews for The Inheritance of Loss on GoodReads, I was struck by one common complaint: that this book is too much of a “downer.” I have to disagree—although my review of this book makes it sound like some kind of post-colonial tragedy (and it is), in my mind, I kept comparing Desai’s writing to Zadie Smith’s. Desai revels in the immediacy of low culture and possesses the same ear for hilariously accurate dialogue that Smith does. Desai and Smith share a common affection for exhibiting cultural personalities, but where Smith is generally optimistic about globalization’s potential for hybridity, intermingling, and the new people, ideas, and stories it engenders, Desai sees the oppressive hand of the post-colonial arbiters at hand, making decisions on behalf of other countries. Both the optimism and the warnings are essential to understanding the effect of our new world order.

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