The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

#168
Title: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Author: Junot Díaz
Publisher: Riverhead
Year: 2007
Country: Dominican Republic
339 pages

This ambitious first novel treats multiple themes of bridging identities, including Dominican/American cultures, Spanish/English languages, fiction and nonfiction writing conventions, individuals and families, personal and cultural history, and Latin American Magical Realism and science fiction. The voice of Oscar is only one of several telling this story. The resultant pastiche is lively and engaging, playful and yet deeply serious. This was not an easy book to read with outside distractions, but I kept feeling as though I should be reading it on a bus with conversations all around me.

Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time

#167
Title: Seize the Daylight: The Curious and Contentious Story of Daylight Saving Time
Author: David Prerau
Publisher: Thunder's Mouth Press
Year: 2005
270 pages

I enjoyed this natural history of daylight saving time, which was indeed contentious. The basic argument against it seems to have been that God's time is superior to man's time. War and commerce have provided the most compelling arguments for man's time (that is, artificial on a fixed schedule rather than artificial on local schedules). Those of us who remember the U.S. energy crisis of the mid-70's probably also remember the extension of daylight saving time and how unnatural it seemed. I myself wrote a letter to President Carter about being a child standing in the dark waiting for my school bus. For some people living at the advent of daylight saving efforts, the experience seemed even more unnatural. However, we would find their notion of naturalness fairly bizarre, as illustrated by this excerpt:

When the railroads in a country established a single time standard, several othger institutions quickly adopted railroad time for their own purposes. Even so, local time continued in extensive use as well. Railroad passengers still had to account for local time as well as railroad time as they moved between trains and towns. Some watchmakers began making watches with two dials, one for local time and one for railroad time, and the great Tom Tower Clock, in Oxford, England, was fitted with two minute hands. In an effort to be comprehensive, one British railroad timetable in 1840 informed passengers, "London time is kept at all stations on the railroad, which is 4 minutes earlier than Reading time, 5 1/2 minutes before Steventon time, 7 1/2 minutes before Cirencester time, 8 minutes before Chippenham time, and 14 minutes before Bridgewater time. (p. 36)
Now you know why so many early British detective novels hinged on train schedules.

Though the ostensive topic may seem arcane, the abstract topics are not: Artificial versus Divine, universal versus national, and the power of war and business to force changes in the infrastructure to serve their purposes.

Around the World

In the middle of the night I had this great idea: Read a book (in English or translation) by a writer from every country. If that's not possible, at least read a biography of someone from that country, or a history of it. There isn't consensus on how many countries there are, so I'll start with this list while bearing in mind that I may want to read authors from territories, colonies, and the like, such as Puerto Rico and Palestine. I was able to generate the names of 140 countries in the middle of the night (some, such as Wales, revealed in morning's cold, hard light not to be fully independent). I did bolt up one or twice to hiss "Lesotho!" and "Namibia!" to the cats, who could not have cared less.

I begin with The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Dominican Republic).

Your suggestions are welcome, especially for Namibian poets or a novelist of Palau. I'm also a little weak on the oeuvre of Sao Tome and Principe. I'm also thinking about countries whose writing I've already sampled. What would you think if I were to list books I've already read? For example, can I cross Italy off the list since I've read Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler? I'm thinking that this would let me concentrate on less well-known and newer countries.

Freddy Goes to Florida

#166
Title: Freddy Goes to Florida
Author: Walter R. Brooks
Publisher: Overlook
Year: 1997 (reprint of 1927)
208 pages

A sweet children's book about a group of farm animals who decide to migrate to Florida for the winter. First published in 1927, the animals' adventures are delightfully innocent by contemporary standards. The bad people are rough-looking men, most people are kind to the animals (at times the tale reminds one of 1941's Make Way for Ducklings), there are few cars, and one subplot requires a phaeton. A number of passages reminded me of The Hobbit, particularly because Freddy the Pig makes up little songs about the group's adventures. In addition, a fight among some robbers evokes the fight between Tolkien's trolls. A fast read for an adult, and probably fun to read aloud with a child.

The Complete Persepolis

#165
Title: The Complete Persepolis
Author: Marjane Satrapi
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Year: 2007
341 pages

An omnibus including Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return.

This is fascinating reading in a week where Iran is conducting missile tests. Like Bechdel's Fun Home, this memoir-in-cartoons begins in the narrator's girlhood and takes the reader through her young womanhood. Satrapi describes the Iranian revolution through a child's eyes--that is, personal concerns often supersede political knowledge. As the threat of fundamentalism grows, Satrapi's parents send her to Europe; after what sounds like a miserable adolescence, she returns to Iran. Where Bechdel's drawings are black lines on a white ground, Satrapi often works with white lines on a primarily black background. This contributes an atmospheric weight to her story, especially when all the men are dressed in black and the women are veiled. Some reviewers are unhappy with the middle European section, where Satrapi is a depressed, pot-smoking pseudo-anarchist. I thought it served as an excellent surreal foil for the equally surreal Iranian portions of the narrative that frame it.

If I could find a memoir in graphic novel form by a person with a disability or mental health diagnosis, similar to Persepolis and Fun Home, I'd teach a class using these three books. Let me know if you know of one!

Physik (Septimus Heap, Book 3)

#164
Title: Physik (Septimus Heap, Book 3)
Author: Angie Sage
Publisher: Katherine Tegen Books
Year: 2007
544 pages

In this volume of the Septimus Heap series, Sage continues to deliver a story that, though it uses many conventional children's fantasy motifs and devices, is fresh and entertaining. Darker than the first two books, Physik extends and deepens its world and develops the increasingly complex relationships between characters. More characters are introduced; characters mature into early adolescence, and the mysteries of this world are broadened with hints of Northern Trader culture and the hidden practices of alchemy. Civil unrest demonstrates that being a princess, or an ExtraOrdinary Wizard, is not sufficient to command the respect of a mob. Though this books action resolves fairly well, it clearly references future books (for example, the unfolding of Lucy and Simon's relationship). Whether other points a (such as what the rat-chasing mob is doing by the end of the book) were simply dropped or are relevant in a later volume cannot yet be determined. Queste (book 4) is now available at a bruising 596 pages.

The Death and Life of Dith Pran

#163
Title: The Death and Life of Dith Pran
Author: Sydney H. Schanberg
Publisher: Penguin
Year: 1984
112 pages

Gee, if I'd known that paperback copies in "acceptable" condition were selling on Amazon for $100, I'd have been even more thrilled to find my acceptable copy at a used bookstore in my neighborhood for $2.95.

This is the book version of the long article Schanberg wrote about his colleague and friend Dith Pran after Dith's escape from Cambodia. It is the basis for The Killing Fields, but is interesting in its own right as a brief memoir that lightly touches upon the agony of having privilege in circumstances where your loved ones do not. Schanberg's prose is spare and to the point; he's no great stylist, but the simplicity of the writing serves to convey immediacy and urgency. I recommend reading this first,  watching the film, then watching or reading Gray's Swimming to Cambodia.