Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom--and Revenge

#415
Title: Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a Generation of Swashbuckling Jews Carved Out an Empire in the New World in Their Quest for Treasure, Religious Freedom--and Revenge
Author: Edward Kritzler
Publisher: Anchor Books
Year: 2008
340 pages

Kritzler's portrait of the Jewish pirate, and more broadly, the Jewish entrepreneur of the period of Europe's mass expulsions and pogroms, has all the elements of a great tale, immediately evoking Chabon's novel of swashbuckling Jews, Gentlemen of the Road. However, Kitzler's book is hard to read, repetitive, switches tenses, and otherwise pulls the reader out of the narrative and into an irritated search for previous statements, chronology, and gist. If you can work around the problematic delivery, you should find this a fascinating account of how Jewish and converso merchants, spurred by the threat of the Inquisition, helped determine the political fate of the Caribbean and other New World colonies.

I've read some complaints that Kritzler doesn't apologize for the involvement of Jews in the slave trade. Actually, he describes it as limited and does provide some commentary, though long after his first mention of this activity. However, this criticism seems to me to be beside the point--Kinzler neither defends nor reprimands his subjects for any specific actions. While the overall tone is admiring, the overall style is reportage.

Oryx and Crake

#414
Title: Oryx and Crake
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: Anchor
Year: 2004
416 pages

Audiobook here, though for $74 you could pay a friend to read it aloud to you. My download was through the vast, evil, yet comparatively inexpensive iTunes empire.


Long ago in my Philosophy of the Arts class, we read and argued a great deal about the Intentionalist Fallacy. This is the claim that the artist's intentions don't matter, that what matters is the meaning conveyed by the art product. I find authors' intentions interesting, but try first to understand the meanings that are present in the text. I usually enjoy this more, because the creators' intentions are often feverishly asserted but not realized in the art. Atwood claims that science fiction is about "talking squids in outer space," and that that's not what she writes. Margaret, you write about GMO humanoids in a post-apocalyptic dystopia. I see how that's not science fiction at all. :rolleyes: I suppose I could also say ":snap: What-EVAH!" For pretty much the rest of us, Oryx and Crake is science fiction, a thematic category in which Atwood does some lovely work. So don't bother finding the insulting authorial exegesis, but instead proceed directly to the book.

Oryx and Crake is poignant, poetic, and emotional, which is no small task with a not-very-sympathetic and schlubby protagonist, grandly catastrophic actions, and a wide-ranging narrative that includes an errant mother, rakunks (raccoon plus skunk), the sexual trafficking of children, biochemical attacks, gated compounds, and the aforementioned genetically modified humanoids. The story follows Snowman, who grew up as a comparatively average guy surrounded by geniuses. While not passive-aggressive, Snowman is passive, or hesitant, or uncertain, or unable to take a stand for his convictions, at many times from his childhood to adulthood. His reminiscence, often painful and self-loathing, supplies the story of how he comes to find himself wrapped in a sheet, in the tropical fringe of a beach with a not-so-human tribe, making up answers to their many irritating questions. Atwood is a wordsmith, and like Ursula Le Guin, writes a deeply satisfying, smart narrative.

Atwood is a master of world-building. Sure, some of what she proposes is far out, but this is, like The Handmaid's Tale, a cautionary fantasy. I remember hostile critiques when The Handmaid's Tale was first published, arguments that Atwood's near-future dystopia was unrealistic and wacked out. The intervening shifts in politics and culture make the idea of a fundamentalist religious government in the U.S. seem not so much an absurd speculation as a matter of degree. (Robert Heinlein, of course, gave us his own version of a military theocracy in his 1940 story "If This Goes On--.") As I check my food labels for GMO notices, read about fluorescent cats, and find that the Internet knows where I live even when I use someone else's computer, I find myself wondering if the Atwood is all that far off.

The Prophet of Yonwood

#413
Title: The Prophet of Yonwood
Author: Jeanne DuPrau
Publisher: Yearling
Year: 2007
289 pages

As in The People of Sparks, here we see well-intentioned but rigid people make things worse and inadvertently threaten their community while attempting to protect it.

The third volume in the Ember series is a prequel, though nominally so: We learn at the end what protagonist Nickie's relationship is to Ember, and the terms for Lina's visions of the magnificent city are set by the Prophet's vision and subsequent speculations about nearby parallel universes. Other than that, the novel is reasonably self-contained, and other than a few pages at the end that fast-forward to the Ember period, it could stand alone. I would argue that it should have been allowed to do so; a prequel that's thematically related but has a separate plot is a much more interesting proposition. However, I'm not the target audience, and I can't say whether I'd have liked a prequel that separate when I was 8-12 years old.

The People of Sparks

#412
Title: The People of Sparks
Author: Jeanne DuPrau
Publisher: Yearling
Year: 2005
352 pages

The City of Ember concludes with Lina and Doon having reached the surface from the cavern in which their city is built. They have written a note explaining how to leave Ember and flung it through a fissure far above the city. Now, joined by many of their compatriots, they travel across an empty land, eventually encountering the village of Sparks. Fortunately, the war feared by Ember's creators was, though horribly devastating, not the complete conflagration they had feared. There are some villages in the former California, Sparks being the most prosperous. The leadership and people of Sparks must contend with the unexpected drain on their resources posed by the larger group of Emberites, and both groups struggle to make sense of the other. Though there are plot lines about particular people and discoveries about the world, the story is centered on the ways in which economic tension increases in group/out group problems and leads to racist or excluding policies based on fear. The novel ends with a triumphant rediscovery and the promise of further emotional development for both Lina and Doon.

Lord Jim

#411
Title: Lord Jim
Author: Joseph Conrad
Publisher: Bantam
Year: 1900/1981
271 pages

Audiobook here. This relatively short novel was stretched to almost 14 hours, a slow reading rate.

At its heart, this is a novel about attempting to overcome one's own haemartia, or tragic flaw. While the Greek audiences of Aristotle's time found the hero sympathetic because of his important error. Setting aside the complexities of the term itself, it would seem that by the time in which Marlow narrates Jim's tale, the tone is a combination of horror, amused contempt, and pity. Were Jim not "one of us," an often-repeated sentiment, I assume there would have been more Schadenfreude than pity. If the story and highly predictable plot about seeking first escape from, then redemption for, one's misdeeds are set aside, the more interesting aspect of the novel is the question of "one of us" versus one of them and how identification or rejection of commonality affects Marlow's storytelling. Since Marlow's narration is the frame for several of Conrad's novels (including Heart of Darkness), it would be interesting to compare his reasons for and degree of relationship to the people whose stories he animates. In some ways "one of us" is a theme for Conrad's The Secret Agent as well.

The Hours

#410
Title: Michael Cunningham
Author: The Hours
Publisher: Picador
Year: 1998
230 pages

Read as  an audiobook while birdwatching in Thailand.

Well-constructed and well-crafted, this is a highly engaging and poignant novel in three interwoven strands. These three stories of depression and suicidality are related by Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway--the writing of it, the reading of it, and the becoming of it--across the 20th century. This description doesn't do justice the the elegance and precision of the telling. Especially enjoyable for those familiar with Woolf's works and life.