Girls of Riyadh

#196
Title: Girls of Riyadh
Author: Rajaa Alsanea
Publisher:
Year: 2005/2007
Country: Saudi Arabia
296 pages

Touted as a breakthrough, this epistolary novel needs to be understood in its cultural context in order to be something other than not-very-engaging chick lit. Within that cultural context, this novel-in-one-sided-e-mails is discrepant, jarring, and revolutionary (at least within the domestic sphere of the rich). However, even from this perspective, I had trouble with what felt like a self-conscious effort to mimic "Sex in the City." The characters' cattiness and meanspirited comments about other women's looks didn't make me like or respect them. Unlike the real women of RAWA and other revolutionaries, these self-preoccupied characters inspire no admiration. While the premise could work, the book suffers from telling, not showing, and is more like a gloss of the story than the story itself. The narrative itself just dribbles away and does not actually follow through on some of the promises the narrator makes to the reader-as-e-mail-recipient. It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't stand as a work of literature without its political and historical frame. This is not your mother's feminism, and not in a good way. For a more nuanced perspecive, try Satrapi's  Complete Persepolis.

The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears

#195
Title: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
Author: Dinaw Mengestu
Publisher: Riverhead
Year: 2008
Country: Ethiopia
228 pages

Some have said that this is a slow novel in which little happens. While I think these comments are true, they are not negative, and stopping there misses the point. Nor is it simply a story of the erosion of the immigrant's dream. Sepha Stephanos is not just an immigrant from Ethiopia who fled the war and didn't get the girl. The story is more subtle than that. Stephanos is paralyzed by memory and guilt. This guilt isn't just because of what he did and didn't do in Ethiopia or the U.S.; it is the guilt of a survivor, the guilt that makes simply being alive an almost unbearable burden. The circles of Washington, D.C.'s roads are the circles of Dante's hell (alluded to in the title). As in The Ministry of Pain, what nostalgia the immigrant can muster is impaired and tainted by the memories of war. Stephanos's flat guardedness is the point of his story, and perhaps his downfall as well.

Good Morning Comrades

#194
Title: Good Morning Comrades
Author: Ondjaki
Publisher: Biblioasis
Year: 2001/2008 (tr.)
Country: Angola
127 pages

A terrific, deceptively simple, and artful tale of fear in Angola. The story centers on a schoolboy. Through his interactions with his visiting aunt, his apparently straightforward and uncritical view of life in Luanda is called into question, both for the reader and, ultimately for him. His casual and matter-of-fact narrative transforms as events both real and imagined break through his facade. This description doesn't do justice to Ondjaki's economical and precise prose. I highly recommend Good Morning Comrades for both historical and literary reasons.

The Dark Child: The Autobiography of an African Boy

#193
Title: The Dark Child: The Autobiography of an African Boy
Author: Camara Laye
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux
Year: 1954/1994
Country: Guinea (French Guinea)
188 pages

According to some sources, this is not a memoir but a novel, or "literature," though the protagonist has the same name as the author. I will approach it as a fictionalized memoir; it is better as an autobiography than it is as a novel. This tale from 1954 fits in the "leaving for school" rather than the "leaving due to war" subgenre. For this reason, and because it stops short of Laye's experiences in France, it is more romantic and, despite the author's inner turmoil about leaving, less conflicted than many of its ilk. It tells an interesting enough story of growing to manhood, including initiation rites and adolescent circumcision that make it interesting to read in conjunction with Somé's Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman and Fadumo Korn's Born in  the Big Rains: A Memoir of Somalia and Survival. However, the unanswered question lingering at the edges of this narrative involves the larger changes in the author's community (and his view of it) due to his maturation and coming of age and to the changes in African colonialism and self-governance. I would like to know how his understanding of his village changed even after a few years studying in the capitol, whether he in fact returned from France, as his mother wished, and if so, what he found. The author foreshadows this question less than halfway in: "But the world rolls on, the world changes, perhaps more rapidly than anyone else's.... and the proof of it is that my own totem--I too have my totem--is still unknown to me" (p. 75). This memoir would have been better had he illustrated this statement (and others like it) rather than leaving it as a loose end.

Shade's Children

#192
Title: Shade's Children
Author: Garth Nix
Publisher: HarperTrophy
Year: 1997/98
351 pages

I haven't yet had a chance to get Nix's Superior Saturday (Keys to the Kingdom #6), so I picked up Shade's Children for a break from heavier reading. It isn't a stellar example of what Nix can do, though it is sufficiently entertaining to carry itself. Compared to his other stand-alone novels, the concept is less-well thought through and rendered. The premise is promising: Aliens have made everyone over 14 disappear and now keep children corralled in dormitories until their "Sad Birthday," when they're taken away for parts. Most runaways are caught, but a few survive, including a group lead by Shade, a computer intelligence. As is always the case, Nix creates his environment well, dropping succulent hints and unusual details. The plot, however, has more holes and inexplicable events than is typical for this author. The wrap-up seems abrupt and would have benefited by 20-30 more pages focused on Shade before and during the climactic events. Read this one for the worldbuilding, not the story.

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England

#191
Title: An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England
Author: Brock Clarke
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Year: 2007
311 pages

An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England is best read as a spoof of fictionalized memoirs. Some reviewers haven't liked this novel; my guess is that they are reading it straight rather than as a parody of the genre. Of course the protagonist acts stupidly. Of course the characters are either flat or larger-than-life (My Friend Leonard, anyone?). It's meant to be absurd, and it means to draw attention repeatedly to its own artifice. In this sense, though it's written in a pretty straightforward narrative style, it is really better classified as postmodern than as classically-organized fiction.

Here's a reading strategy: First read James Frey's A Million Little Pieces, published as memoir but now widely accepted to be self-aggrandizing fiction. Then read (not watch) One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest for a narrator who's having trouble grasping what's happening in his life because his internal chatter is so pronounced. Finally, read The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time for a narrator who knows less than the reader does as he struggles to solve a mystery. Now read An Arsonist's Guide to Writers' Homes in New England, the putative memoir of Sam Pulsifer, who as a teenager accidentally burned down the Emily Dickinson House, killing two people and setting in motion the events of the rest of his life.

Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe

#190
Title: Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe
Author: Doreen Baingana
Publisher: Harlem Moon/Broadway Books
Year: 2005
Country: Uganda
200 pages

This short story collection is comprised of stories about and narrated by three Ugandan sisters. It focuses on the youngest (and presumably most autobiographical), Christine, and various aspects of her coming of age. Themes of family strife, beliefs, and place in the world are set against the lightly sketched but very present backdrop of Idi Amin's regime. Most affecting is "A Thank-You Note," in which the harsh realities of AIDS are juxtaposed with the joy and freedom of sexuality, neither negating the other. "Questions of Home," like many other narratives of travel and culture, nicely illustrates both culture shock and the reverse culture shock of return.

My Father's Rifle: A Childhood in Kurdistan

#189
Title: My Father's Rifle: A Childhood in Kurdistan
Author: Hiner Saleem
Publisher: Picador
Year: 2004
Country: Iraq (Kurdistan)
105 pages

Reviewers aren't clear whether this is fiction or memoir. It appears to be best treated as "fictionalized memoir." Azad Selim is a young boy in Iraqi Kurdistan. As the Baathist regime gains power, his community's life becomes increasingly miserable and its insurgency increases. The book is interesting but choppy and artless, a story without a plot. It is useful for its portrait of Kurdish villages and concerns, and to show U.S. readers a different side of Iraq's conflicts. It is also oddly refreshing to read a book from someone under Iraqi authority who (with his community) applauds Saddam Hussein's overthrow.

The Ministry of Pain

#188
Title: The Ministry of Pain
Author: Dubravka Ugrešić
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Year: 2005/2007
Country: Croatia (former Yugoslavia)
 265 pages

The protagonist, Tanja, a literature professor, has fled the breakup of Yugoslavia, as have the students she now teaches in Amsterdam. Since the students all actually know the language (and are taking the class for a variety of other reasons), she uses her time with them to engage in "Yugonostalgia," an invocation or alchemical recreation of their memories of their former country. However, as is also the case for their fragmented nation(s), she and the students understand their relationship, purposes, and  ties to their origins differently. The Ministry of Pain works well as a novel of longing for a romanticized past, of exile and dislocation, and of existential loneliness. It is occasionally derailed by abstract socio-political passages that read more like mini-manifestos than anything else, though one could argue that they are exactly how Tanja would think under these circumstances. Quite aside from its cultural content, this is a fun read for academics for reasons similar to those found in Smiley's Moo.

Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman

#187
Title: Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman
Author: Malidoma Patrice Somé
Publisher: Penguin Compass
Year: 1994
Country: Burkina Faso (Upper Volta)
318 pages

As a child, Somé was kidnapped by Jesuits, to be trained as a priest and used as an intermediary with his people. He escaped as an adult (after assaulting a teacher, he fled the Jesuit school) and returned to his village. There, he was out of place and unable to assume an adult role. He was both lacking in local knowledge and had been taught a different way to see the world. Much of the memoir recounts Somé's grueling initiation and transition to cultural adulthood. Even after initiation, however, Somé remains a man of two worlds, charged by his elders to bridge his culture and the Western world.

Like many memoirs and narratives from non-Western cultures, magic and symbolism abound. This is not how I understand the world and its workings, so it is interesting to read Somé's descriptions. He addresses the worldview differences, but I would have wished for more commentary on the contrasts. Also like many memoirs from countries affected by colonialism and war, the questions of identity, identification, and multiple cultures are pervasive, critical, and ultimately unanswerable.

The Hungry Tide

#186
Title: The Hungry Tide
Author: Amitav Ghosh
Publisher: Mariner/Houghton Mifflin
Year: 2005
Country: Bangladesh
341 pages

A chance meeting between a young American woman and a local businessman, and their subsequent divergences and intersections, form the core strands of this novel, set in rural Bangladesh. The story's two strands intertwine like the rivers in Bangladesh's tide country, parallelism that is clearly deliberate. Ghosh evokes both characters and landscape very well, and skillfully sustains both overtly and subtle tensions throughout. Ghosh does a good job of resolving the basic storyline. However, the larger themes related to foreign versus domestic concerns, who controls the land, and environmentalism versus progress are simply dropped, significantly weakening a novel that, with a little more thoughtful effort, could have been much more powerful and complex.

Blindness

#185
Title: Blindness
Author: Jose Saramago
Publisher: Harcourt
Year: 1995 (translation: 1997)
Country: Portugal
337 pages

Blindness is an example of ray gun science fiction ("What if there were an awesome ray gun?!"), that is, the story's reason for existing is to answer the what if? In science fiction, the impetus of this subgenre is often an invention, a new discovery, or contact with aliens. Saramago's device is a sudden, contagious blindness of unknown etiology and mechanism. This is fine so far as it goes. McCarthy's The Road relies on a similar narrative strategy ("What if there were a cataclysmic event?") In this case, the technique allows the author to imagine a cascade of social and cultural events that would follow from the original event (again, similar to The Road). This is fine so far as it goes. Saramago does a good job of envisioning the increasingly dire circumstances of the protagonists, and the plot is sufficiently engrossing. However, Blindness shares several of The Road's flaws: There is minimal punctuation (which in this case, at least provides the reader with a parallel visual impairment), the characters' voices and personalities are largely interchangeable, and the resolution, while different in kind from McCarthy's, provokes a similar disappointment--the return to the story's "home" is too tidy and oversimplified, and ultimately demonstrates the author's failure of creativity, boldness, or both. Call it a 3/5 star read: Not bad, but not especially memorable, either.