Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven: A Memoir

#346
Title: Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven: A Memoir
Author: Susan Jane Gilman
Year: 2009
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
314 pages
As Keath Fraser's anthology Bad Trips amply illustrates, travel is fraught with difficulties and unexpected events, of which only some are humorous. Gilman tells the story of her out-of-college, around-the-world trip with Brown University acquaintance "Claire." It starts like any travelogue that recounts the misadventures of young travelers out of their depth. However, it's quickly clear that something is wrong with Claire, and in the context of the People's Republic of China in the mid-1980's, this becomes rapidly more perilous for both young women. Gilman does an excellent job of conveying her state at the time as well as her later reflections on these events. She is especially sensitive and astute about the effects of cultural dislocation on even a healthy traveler. A terrific memoir for inexperienced travelers, not because it is frightening (which it is), but because of the self-reflection and planning it may stimulate.

Bread and Dew: Stories by a Moldavian Writer

#345
Title: Bread and Dew: Stories by a Moldavian Writer
Author: Grigore Vieru
Illustrator: Eduard Zaryansky
Translator: James Riordan
Year: 1983 (translation)
Publisher: Raduga Publishers Moscow
Country: Moldavia
43 pages

A beautifully illustrated children's book from Soviet Moldavia, written by Moldavian poet Grigore Vieru. He presents several very short stories about a young boy named Doru. A couple, including the title story, are quite touching; most are heavy-handed moral tales with a strong Soviet message.

Deception Point

#344
Title: Deception Point
Author: Dan Brown
Year: 2001
Publisher: Pocket
568 pages

Cringe-inducing in the manner of The Day after Tomorrow. First, within the actual Thriller genre, it was unpredictable not because it developed suspense, but because the action was highly artificial, Byzantine, and encumbered with red herrings. I'm also fairly certain that the omniscient narrative voice actually lies and misrepresents what some of the key characters are thinking, misdirecting the reader rather than leading her astray by clever omission. However, I'm not willing to subject myself to more contact with it by going back in for examples. Second, because although some of the ideas are interesting, people who aren't science fiction writers write science fiction badly. Third, because, as in The Day after Tomorrow, the science itself is so laughable. To give one example that should not spoil much: Some people are dragged at high speed along Arctic ice, including hills. They fall onto a partially calved iceberg. The iceberg falls to the sea (200 feet, if I recall). It submerges in water that has previously been described as being so cold that it feels like acid on the skin. The iceberg bobs up and levels. The people lie there for several minutes. Not a one of them even has frostbite, to say nothing of frozen eyeballs or death by Arctic dunking. And this is only one example. If internal consistency and authorial honesty are important to you, don't waste your time.

People of the Book

#343
Title: People of the Book
Author: Geraldine Brooks
Year: 2008
Publisher: Viking
372 pages

A very enjoyable novel about the history of the Haggadah of Sarajevo. The frame involves the expert on antiquarian book conservation; though this part of the story is less interesting in some ways, it is a pleasure to "watch" her work and thereby learn about this field. The heart of the book is constructed of short narratives that relate to the evidence found in the Haggadah (for example, a stain) and explain the book's history and travels. I especially appreciated the voyeuristic pleasure of knowing more about the Haggadah's story than the protagonist ever can.

Saving Fish from Drowning

#342
Title: Saving Fish from Drowning
Author: Amy Tan
Year: 2005
Publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons
489 pages

While not Tan's best, this was an enjoyable and relatively quick read. The narrator is the ghost of a woman who died shortly before she was to have lead a tour group to Burma. The group decides to go anyway but immediately begins changing her itinerary. The ghost follows them as their deviations put them in greater and greater danger. The narrative voice wavers at times, but Tan's use of this frame allows her to make observations and jokes that require a non-omniscient and sometimes politically incorrect voice. I found the novel sometimes poignant and often funny, in a ratio opposite of my usual reading of Tan.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

#341
Title: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Author: Stieg Larsson
Year: 2009
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
590 pages

I know that many people really like this, and all of Scandinavia and Northern Europe is swamped with displays hawking copies of all three books in the series in multiple languages. There were aspects of it that I liked. At its best, it was weirdly like an amalgam of Heinlein's Citizen of the Galaxy with the gory parts of Kellerman's The Butcher's Theater. Overall, however, it simply alternated between flat and vile.

The characters are dimensionless and largely interchangeable. They all sound alike. This first volume is a long revenge fantasy in several parts, unsatisfying because it is unrealistic. In this way it reads structurally and thematically like romance or pornography, despite the lengths it goes to to establish its realism through historical and technological detail. It almost seemed like a collaboration rather than the work of a single author due to repeated abrupt changes of focus and level of detail. Unfortunately, the most detailed and consistent descriptions are of brutal rapes, which the narration ostensibly decries but lingers over lovingly. The effect is that of pornography that arouses the writer while he is writing, or the pornography of earlier eras that attempts the pretense of medical case report.

I am not a reader who tries to figure out mysteries. I'm not good at it, and I enjoy being surprised. I was largely unsurprised here. I knew Harriet wasn't dead. I knew she sent the flowers. I knew she had been sexually abused or raped, probably by a family member. I knew the woman in the window helped her escape. That Salander was autistic. That she was sexually abused. That she would help Blomqvist take down Wennerstrom. I knew that there was a succession of more than one murderer. All that really left was whether Harriet was Salander's mother and who the second criminal was. Note to author: Exposition along the lines of "Martin is very rational; oops, no he's not, he's a big old Biblically-driven freak like his father; why is that, well, who can say?" is really unsatisfying and contemptuous of your reader. "Oh, well, he's nuts" is about as irritating as, "Ooh, it was all a dream!" No. Not satisfactory.

There are a number of other irritants and inconsistencies, but I will identify only one: Harriet drops everything and moves back to the family that didn't save her? Really? And instantly turns around the ailing company? Really? Not.

Don't get me started on professional ethics. I could write a treatise.

Do reread Citizen of the Galaxy, toss in a little Kellermanesque sexualized snuff, and buy one of Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking books instead. They, too, are ubiquitous in Sweden.

Notes from the Underground (a.k.a. Notes from Underground)

#340
Title: Notes from the Underground (a.k.a. Notes from Underground)
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Year: 1864/1992
Publisher: Dover
96 pages

Read as a Project Gutenberg electronic text.

I remind myself that reading a first, whether it's Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, or e. e. cummings, may be a tedious look backward. I don't think this would be published these days because it's not very interesting, but as an early example of its genre and style it was remarkable. From the present perspective, the narrator's whiny, snively, rumination and self-justification is a grating bore. The contemporary version is Alain Mabanckou's African Psycho, which tells the same story of a disturbed, inadequate, grandiose first person narrator who is self-loathing, highly ambivalent about women, and unable to muster the interior strength to enact his important manifesto about life on a prostitute.

Around the World in 80 Days

#339
Title: Around the World in 80 Days
Author: Michael Palin
Year: 1995/1999
Publisher: BBC Consumer Publishing
256 pages

Read as an audiobook narrated by the author, then looked at the photos.

Palin and his film crew attempt a mid-1980's voyage with forms of transportation comparable to Fogg's. While some speed was made up by improvements in technology, this was balanced by three factors: The delays associated with a film crew and all of its equipment,  the contemporary lack of passenger services on train and ship routes in the age of the airplane, and customs and border crossing formalities. Though the premise appears similar to Verne's, Palin wants to see the sights and meet people. It is interesting to read this narrative, which preceded Palin's other BBC travel series and The Amazing Race.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society

#338
Title: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Authors: Mary Ann Shaffer & Annie Barrows
Year: 2008
Publisher: Dial Press
288 pages

The title alone should warn you off. It screams that preciousness substitutes for writing skill and narrative sophistication. An epistolary novel in which no voice comes off as genuine and the majority of the plot is predictable. Emotion is not communicated well, so the revelation of Rebecca's fate is flat. Light reading for the beach after you're already stunned by sunstroke and just want a predictable, bland romance.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold

#337
Title: The Spy Who Came in from the Cold
Author: John Le Carré
Year: 1963
Publisher: Dell
Country: Crete (Greece)
223 pages

A good use of the double agent/double cross angle to get a secret agent to do something that is in opposition to his intentions. It is fairly expository and ultimately clever but grim.

The Ghost Writer

Aug. 27th, 2009 | 01:35 pm

#336
Title: The Ghost Writer
Author: Philip Roth
Year: 1979
Publisher: Fawcett
223 pages

It was very strange to read this in Amsterdam, having picked it up in a used bookstore in the U.S. and having no notion of its contents. Roth begins with the themes that manhood begins with attending to consequences, and recognizing the fallibility of one's idols. It then veers engagingly and precipitously into Zuckerman's long fantasy about Anne Frank, raising questions such as what the Holocaust means for the generation of Jews that followed? Can you be free of history, or of fetishizing it? Though a short novel, I found it provocative and compelling.

Around the World in 80 Days

#335
Title: Around the World in 80 Days
Author: Jules Verne
Year: 1972/2004
Publisher: Penguin
254 pages

Ultimately a critique of a mechanistic, clockwork world view that anticipates the assembly line and Taylor's time-motion studies. The ending switches its terms with a romantic suturing worthy of Austen, though Fogg is still an enigma and a profoundly non-psychological character. The Penguin edition I read included end notes that were fairly useless--the reader does not need a definition of "physiognomy," which is easy to look up, but absolutely could use a discussion of the buying power of £20,000 in Fogg's day, though the latter is not provided.

The Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson & The Olympians, Book Two)

#334
Title: The Sea of Monsters (Percy Jackson & The Olympians, Book Two)
Author: Rick Riordan
Year: 2006
Publisher: Miramax/Hyperion
280 pages

This second volume in the Percy Jackson & The Olympians series can be read alone but still suffers some of the flaws of a bridging book. Character development seemed thin despite Percy's growing maturity, and the characters were less dimensional. The plot, though interesting in outline and necessary for the advancement of the larger narrative, came off as picaresque and flimsy. There was more deus ex machina with magical objects and characteristics of this world that were not adequately foreshadowed or integrated, as well as several discrepancies in world rules. For example, Percy asserts again that his magical pen always returns to his pocket, but it certainly did not in the previous book. The tone of the first-person voice was troublingly and self-consciously "teenage," bringing one of the worst elements of much middle reader/young adult literature to the series.

At his best, Riordan is poignant and astute. A speech on pp. 252-253 provides a great illustration of the conjunction of story and philosophy:

"[Y]ou are part god, part human. You live in both worlds. You can be harmed by both, and you can affect both. That's what makes heroes so special. You carry the hopes of humanity into the realm of the eternal. Monsters never die. They are reborn from the chaos and barbarism that is always bubbling underneath civilization.... They must be defeated again and again, kept at bay. Heroes embody that struggle. You fight the battles humanity must win, every generation, in order to stay human."
I hope for continued moral complexity in subsequent installments.

The Family of Man

#333
Title: The Family of Man
Author: Edward Steichen
Year: 1955
Publisher: Museum of Modern Art, New York
Country: Luxembourg
194 pages

Yes, Luxembourg. If you don't like that, I'll have to read something by Hugo Gernsback, another Luxembourgian-turned-American and the person for whom the Hugo Award in science fiction is named. Did you know that Luxembourg is where the Family of Man collection is now housed? Or that Carl Sandburg, who wrote the Prologue to the book, was Steichen's brother-in-law? Or that Leo Lionni, whom you think of as "The guy who did children's books about mice with construction paper illustrations," was the Art Director for this book? I thought not. Your knowledge of Luxembourg is woefully inadequate. You do remember that The Family of Man was one of the books on your hip great aunt's coffee table in the 1960's, though, right?

The 1955 edition of The Family of Man features over 500 photos, most of people, from 68 countries, making it an excellent fit for my Books of the World challenge. The black and white photos of a variety of human activities are interspersed with quotations from many cultures. A number of the cultures and countries depicted no longer exist in the form represented here. The photos are grouped thematically and associatively, the choice of photos highlighting the commonality of human emotion and experience. For example, the two-page spread of pages 58-59 shows a 12-person, multi-generational family group (I presume) from Bechuanaland, minimally garbed and looking into the camera. On the facing page, an agricultural family of 11 from "U.S.A." is similarly grouped and looking straight into the camera. Pages 94-95 present a circle of 18 photos of groups dancing in circles. There is also social commentary. A page of scientists faces a boy surrounded by the wreckage of buildings in Germany.

If you're not familiar with this collection, culled from more than two million submitted photos, go find it and take a look. You'll recognize Arbus, Eisenstadt, Cartier-Bresson, Adams, Page, Doisneau, Lange and many Life photographers. You'll recognize some subjects (like Einstein and Alice Liddell) and photos (such as Lang's on the bottom of page 151). Others are simply emblematic of human experience, but far from generic.

Yes, I'd like to see gay people and fewer people from the U.S. Nonetheless, it's a startlingly broad collection for 1955, and even more moving than when I first looked it about 40 years ago.

Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali

#332
Title: Monique and the Mango Rains: Two Years with a Midwife in Mali
Author: Kris Holloway
Year: 2007
Publisher: Waveland Press
Country: Mali
235 pages

The author, a Peace Corps volunteer in a village in Mali, recounts her experience with an emphasis on her friendship with Monique, the local midwife. The narrative is not as interior as some travel/work memoirs; the trade-off is that Holloway is able to focus on descriptions of the village, her work with Monique, and interpersonal relationships. Holloway is warm but not sentimental; she recounts her conversations with Monique about female genital mutilation as well as Monique's forbidden love for a childhood friend. The realities of hunger, disease, and war are all present, as well as the dilemmas faced by aid workers from more affluent and powerful nations. This is a memoir I hope to teach with in the future.

Light One Candle: A Survivor's Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem

#331
Title: Light One Candle: A Survivor's Tale from Lithuania to Jerusalem
Author: Solly Ganor
Year: 2003
Publisher: Kodansha America
Country: Lithuania
354 pages

If I've counted correctly, this is 100 for 2009.

Ganor's Holocaust narrative takes place primarily in villages and ghettos, providing a useful contrast to memoirs that primarily describe life in the camps. Ganor has some access to the outside world and at many points is able to comment on the relations between the Jewish captives and the communities within or near which their confinement takes place. Though most of the non-Jewish citizens in his account are not sympathetic, there are more than in many Holocaust narratives. Ganor frames his otherwise chronological and straightforward story with two meetings with the U.S. Nisei (2nd generation Japanese) soldier who rescued him. He also punctuates his own story with this soldier's. It's the first book I've read by a Jewish Holocaust survivor that names the existence of U.S. interment camps for citizens of Japanese ancestry or origin. I appreciated reading a Jewish narrative that also accounted for a Japanese-American soldier's, though from a purely literary perspective it wasn't as successful as it might have been.

Recently I've read a number of accounts of genocide in Asia, Africa, South America, and Oceania. In conjunction with Ganor, these remind me that we are all ready to dehumanize and kill each other with little provocation; the unique horrors of the Nazi approach are its scale and mechanized, sanitized nature.

Read with Gilbert Tuhabonye's This Voice in My Heart: A Runner's Memoir of Genocide, Faith, and Forgiveness to compare an African genocide to the European, and with Lauren Kessler's excellent Stubborn Twig: Three Generations in the Life of a Japanese American Family to learn more about interment and its effects on one Japanese-American family.

The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson & The Olympians, Book One)

#330
Title: The Lightning Thief (Percy Jackson & The Olympians, Book One)
Author: Rick Riordan
Year: 2005
Publisher: Miramax/Hyperion
377 pages

The success of Harry Potter contributed to three outcomes: Derivative and opportunistic works; books the publisher retitled "[Silly Name] and the X of Y"; and a chance for good middle reader/young adult authors to be considered more seriously for publication and promotion.

These Percy Jackson books (and Michael Scott's Alchemyst series) have little in common with Harry Potter except what Harry has with the genre he entered: Young heroes using magic and medieval-y weapons to defeat evil on their quest. It could be argued that Riordan and Scott do a much better job than Rowling of making mythology an integrated and self-consistent component of the story.

Certainly there is Potteresque resonance. Instead of following the protagonist through the school year, the opening volume begins in the school year but its focus is the summer vacation. I love the idea that Percy and other children like him have ADD or ADHD and dyslexia and can't sit still is because their brains are structured for Ancient Greek. Percy might do well take heed of Virgil's sentiment (that's Έλληνες, ακόμη και όταν φέρνουν δώρα to Percy and "I fear the Greeks even bearing gifts" to you), but instead undertakes a cross-country quest, accompanied by a young woman and a satyr. Unlike Rowling's generally covert and episodic use of mythological material (e.g., Fluffy/Cerberus), Riordan's is the overt focus rather than the backdrop.

Middle readers should identify with Percy and enjoy the ways in which his boring schoolwork in Latin and classical culture suddenly become relevant. Adults who studied Greek long ago may marvel that once upon a time, they knew what an aorist optative was and wish that their brains, too, were hardwired for classical languages. Φεῦ, Φεῦ.