When the Rainbow Goddess Wept

#237
Title: When the Rainbow Goddess Wept
Author: Cecilia Manguerra Brainard
Publisher: Plume
Year: 1991/1995
Country: Philippines
216 pages

Narrated by Yvonne, a Filipina girl, this novel blends local legends and the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, heightening their parallels (and those of the legends and the plot) in a slightly folkloric, slightly magical realistic blend. I enjoyed the narrator's voice and found the story easy to follow and poignant. Read with Davenport's Song of the Exile, Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, and Kim's Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood for a broader fictional representation of the effects of Japanese expansionism from World War II through the Korean War.

The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen

Strangely, this previously-posted review is missing. I've re-numbered, but it's now out of sequence.


#233
Title: The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen
Author: M. T. Anderson
Publisher: Harcourt
Year: 2007
243 pages

Okay, but not as good as Anderson's previous in the series, Whales on Stilts!, which struck a better balance between parody and earnest absurdity. The Clue of the Linoleum Lederhosen has its own good jokes and affectionate jabs at genre fiction aimed at children, but doesn't pull it off as well. The authorial narrator is more talkative here, which is one of the up sides of this volume.

Embroideries

#235
Title: Embroideries
Author: Marjane Satrapi
Publisher: Pantheon
Year: 2006
144 pages

Both shorter and significantly narrower in scope than Persepolis, Embroideries is a graphic-format autobiography focused on women and, to a certain extent, gender relations. There is plenty of talk about sex, both its joyous and darker sides. In addition to the culture-specific slang meaning of "embroidery" given in the narrative, "embroidery" also potentially can be construed to refer to fictitious over-elaboration of a story. This may be a covert intention of the title.

The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic

#234
Title: The Lives They Left Behind: Suitcases from a State Hospital Attic
Authors: Darby Penney, Peter Stastny, Lisa Rinzler (photographer)
Publishers: Bellevue Literary Press
Year: 2008
205 pages

Terribly disappointing because it could have been wonderful, but instead suffers from repetitive, barely-restrained vitriol. The book's ostensible focus is on reconstructing, from suitcases left in the attic, the lives of people who were patients at a residential psychiatric hospital. This is an interesting proposition, but it is not pursued hermeneutically or adequately. The problem is not that the authors have a point to make and use the case studies to support it. Rather, they are not sufficiently up-front about their agenda and present a veneer of scientific inquiry to convey their neutrality. However, they are not neutral, and their thesis is ill-served by not being explicitly described.

An otherwise-interesting topic is marred by heavy negative over-generalization, failure to stick to the topic it proposes to present, and failure to separate the issue of type and quality of care from the question of what to do when a person is unable to manage in society. Making the book worse is poor editing, both in terms of sometimes-confusing organization and flow, and unclear and repetitive statements. Some important information and explanation are also missing (for example, whose hands are holding the people's possessions in the photos, and is it journalistically suspect to have used hands that appear to match the person's demographics?). Another area that seems deceptive and detracts significantly is the authors' contradictory attitude about the patients' privacy. On the publishing information page, they report that they would have used patients' names but for privacy laws. I can understand this regret; my dissertation study participants wanted me to use their names and I was not permitted to do so. However, the authors' desire to use names stems from their own wishes, not their subjects', as their subjects are dead. Presumably if the patients' relatives had given permission, the authors could have used the patients' names (since the survivors hold the decedents' privilege). It is possible that the patients would not have wanted their names used. In this light, the authors' use of people's first names, full-face photos, and potentially identifying information seems both coy and unethical, as well as unnecessary and provocative. Who is it who was stripped of their autonomy and used for other people's ends by the bad legal/medical/psychiatric abusers? And whose privacy is abrogated by the authors, for their own purposes? Hmm.

I support the authors' contentions that psychiatry has been used as an instrument of social control and management, that patients were and are pathologized and disbelieved, and that they often receive inadequate care, especially in public institutions. This is widely documented and more effectively demonstrated elsewhere, though it bears repeating. The authors could have used this book more effectively for this purpose had they constrained their editorializing and not engaged in multiple instances of extreme and overgeneralized assertions. For example, they don't give any examples of people who they think need any kind of psychiatric intervention, yet also condemn the state and psychiatric/medical profession for not providing other services. Perhaps most egregiously problematic, they condemn the objectification of the patients and the loss of their complexity and humanity, yet by only portraying the parts of  patients' histories that support the authors' perspective, they also treat the patients as objects that serve the authors' ends.

The Game of Sunken Places

#236
Title: The Game of Sunken Places
Author: M. T. Anderson
Publisher: Scholastic
Year: 2005
302 pages

High school friends engage in a quest that recalls Jumanji fused to Ender's Game. Within Anderson's oeuvre, it falls between the M. T. Anderson's Thrilling Tales books and Feed in terms of whimsy and emotional realism. As in those books, absurdity intermingles with sudden moments of poignancy. The relationship between the boys was not as tense (or intense) as I would have liked for greater emotional and plot complexity and payoff. Anderson does better in the first person; his third-person stories tend toward an excess of awkward exposition.

Mother's Beloved: Stories from Laos

#232
Title: Mother's Beloved: Stories from Laos
Author: Outhine Bounyavon (ed. Bounheng Inversin and Daniel Duffy)
Publisher: University of Washington Press
Year: 1999
Country: Laos
171 pages (of which 88 read in English, the rest in Lao)

The author's name also appears transliterated on the Cataloging-in-Publication data as Uthin Bunnyāvong. The University of Washington Press listing is here.

This bilingual collection of short stories by Outhine Bounyavon is the first to be published in English. The stories, as well as Peter Koret's helpful introductory essay, "Contemporary Lao Literature," are presented in bilingual Lao/U.S. English facing pages. Since the essay describes what happens in several of the stories, leave it for after reading the collection.

Outhine's stories are likely to strike the Western reader as slightly alien in structure. Their linguistic style can't really be assessed; the translation, at least, is a little clunky. The stories tend toward moral themes such as the rightness of respect, kindness, and honesty. They are not particularly nuanced. This collection gives the reader a good sense of how s/he might structure a story to tell to a Laotian listener. My favorite, "Father's Friend," is, perhaps, about both compassion and seeing the world differently. Many of the stories, though I don't disagree with their morals, are somewhat soppy; again, this may convey some cultural information.

Having read this collection, I would be interested to read something like Bounsang Khamkeo's I Little Slave: A Prison Memoir from Communist Laos to broaden my unerstanding of the author's, and stories', context.

2008 world books stats

Number of books: 105
Number of pages: 27,376
Mean pages/book: 260.7
Books of the world (first book for the country, and read in 2008):

1. Algeria: Yasmina Khadra: In the Name of God*
2. Angola: Ondjaki: Good Morning Comrades
3. Bangladesh: Amitav Ghosh: The Hungry Tide
4. Burkina Faso: Malidoma Patrice Somé: Of Water and the Spirit: Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman
5. Brazil: Paulo Coelho: The Alchemist
6. Burundi: Gilbert Tuhabonye and Gary Brozek: This Voice in My Heart: A Genocide Survivor's Story of Escape, Faith, and Forgiveness
7. Croatia: Dubravka Ugrešić: The Ministry of Pain
8. Dominican Republic: Junot Díaz: The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
9. Ethiopia: Dinaw Mengestu: The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears
   
10. Finland: Johanna Sinisalo: Troll: A Love Story
11. Ghana: Ama Ata Aidoo: Our Sister Killjoy, or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint
12. Greenland (member country of the Kingdom of Denmark): Gretel Ehrlich: This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland
13. Guadeloupe (overseas department of France): Gisèle Pineau: The Drifting of Spirits
14. Guinea:  Camara Laye: The Dark Child: The Autobiography of an African Boy
15. Iran: Marjane Satrapi: The Complete Persepolis*
16. Iraq: Hiner Saleem: My Father's Rifle: A Childhood in Kurdistan
17. Korea, North: Richard E. Kim: Lost Names: Scenes from a Korean Boyhood
    
18. Malaysia: Tash Aw: The Harmony Silk Factory
19. Mozambique: Lina Magaia: Dumba Nengue: Run for Your Life: Peasant Tales of Tragedy in Mozambique
20. Nepal: Samrat Upadhyay: Arresting God in Kathmandu
21. Palestine: Raja Shehadeh: Strangers in the House: Coming of Age in Occupied Palestine
22. Portugal: José Saramago: Blindness
23. Saint Lucia: Derek Walcott: The Prodigal: A Poem
24. Saudi Arabia: Rajaa Alsanea: Girls of Riyadh
25. Serbia: Milorad Pavić: Dictionary of the Khazars: A Lexicon Novel
26. Singapore: Gerrie Lim: Invisible Trade: High Class Sex for Sale in Singapore
27. Somalia: Fadumo Korn with Sabine Eichhorst: Born in the Big Rains: A Memoir of Somalia and Survival
28. Sri Lanka: Michael Ondaatje: Running in the Family
29. Turkey: Orhan Pamuk: The White Castle
30. Uganda: Doreen Baingana: Tropical Fish: Tales from Entebbe
31. Vietnam: Monique Truong: The Book of Salt*

*I've read books from this country before, but am using this one for the challenge.

(Sky Burial: An Epic Love Story of Tibet) not counted because I think it's fake.

Goal for 2009: 104+ books, with attention to these challenges: Books of the World, Great African Reads, Scavella's Caribbean Reading Challenge.