Volunteering Around the Globe: Life-Changing Travel Adventures

#434
Title: Volunteering Around the Globe: Life-Changing Travel Adventures
Author: Susan Stone
Publisher: Capital Books
Year: 2008
207 pages

This reference book provides a good starting point for people who would like to volunteer in international settings and aren't sure where to start. The inclusion of Jewish aid organizations is refreshing. There are many personal reports and a good list of initial resources. Structurally, it needs an index; for decision-making purposes, it needs more discussion of how to evaluate whether to volunteer in a corrupt organization or social structure.

The Diamond of Darkhold (Book of Ember #4)

#433
Title: The Diamond of Darkhold (Book of Ember #4)
Author: Jeanne DuPrau
Publisher: Yearling
Year: 2008
295 pages

A satisfying conclusion to this series (essentially a trilogy and and out-of-sequence prequel). As in the first book, Lina and Doon take on a quest for better quality of life based on an uninterpretable document from the Builders. Though they encounter obstacles and belligerents, one can't really say they meet enemies. A hallmark of this series is that ultimately most people, even those in opposition, are rendered benign or ineffective over the course of the story, making this a good series for people who like dystopian themes but not the distress of a true dystopia.

I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced

#432
Title: I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced
Authors: Nujood Ali with Delphine Minoui
Translator: Linda Coverdale
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
Year: 2010
189 pages

This is a straightforward account by a young Yemeni girl of her arranged marriage to an abusive man much older than she. Where it matters is that the author successfully petitioned for a divorce, setting precedent and inspiring other girls and young women to contest forced marriages.

My engagement with Nujood and her story was interfered with by what I presume is Delphine Minoui's writing as well as the fact of translation. I didn't experience Najood's first-person story as her own, but as one told to and interpreted by an adult. Her voice was rendered confusingly as both too mature and overly cute. If you can put this aside, this is a quick book and a good look at female life in less privileged parts of the world.

Spook Country

#431
Title: Spook Country
Author: William Gibson
Publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons
Year: 2007
379 pages

Spook Country is less about its plot than it is about the idea that activities and images occur around you and you may never see or know about them. This is illustrated by a number of related narratives and descriptions that demonstrate this idea in action.

Spook Country is not about the story, but about the witnessing of the story. Nominal protagonist Hollis's role is to see, not to do. "Spook country" here takes multiple forms--CIA spooks, spirits, systema, virtual art installations, data and fake data, radiation. The tale of the locative art is also the tale of the mysterious shipping container--you can only detect it with specialized access, but it's there. Doing what? Sometimes just existing, and at other times meaning something.

Just as Tito's father was shot for no good reason, sometimes meaning is obscure or inheres only in our perceptions and fantasies, not in the data itself. Numinous moments are followed by more benzodiazepines. However, unanswered questions about meaning bother me: What's in it for Bigend? What's the danger of observers? Why does Bobby sleep or not sleep in particular squares of the grid? The answer "it doesn't mean anything" is as unsatisfying as the explanations "it was all a dream," "it was the drugs," or "he was insane."

Though "selling out" doesn't appear to be an explicit theme, it happens several times near the end. Perhaps this is to highlight that there are principles, and there is pragmatism.

I thought this was Gibson's best and most substantial novel since Idoru, which I am apparently alone in liking.

Never Let Me Go

#430
Title: Never Let Me Go
Author: Kazuo Ishiguro
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 2005
294 pages

This melancholic novel is science fiction to the extent that it is an alternate 1980s (more or less) where, as we learn gradually, the protagonist and all of her school friends are clones who have been grown as organ donors. However, the reader doesn't learn this until far into the narrative, where one of the teachers names it explicitly in a moment of conflict and frustration. Though this is something of a bombshell for the reader, the narrator and her friends have an overt response (yes, we know that), and a covert response (they're a bit embarrassed by the teacher's outburst). The recognition of this discrepancy between the reader's response and the narrator's is a good encapsulation of why this novel is truly creepy--the children all know they're being raised for parts, but they keep this knowledge diffuse and suppressed. In some ways this is an ultimate British novel, the kind I would read as an adolescent and wonder, what just happened? what gave offense? why has this relationship suddenly ended? It was all too subtle for me, and Ishiguro turns that subtle, squeamish sensibility into a determinant in the book's action. The students have been slowly but clearly taught that their duty is to become spare parts, but they don't think about this much, or question it, or really even talk about it. Thus, theme #1 is about inevitability and the passivity of a British underclass. This is no Logan's Run--there is no protest, no flight, no rage against the machine. In fact, after their education the clones wander around more or less aimlessly until they just decide it's time to become carers (people who take care for the donors) and, after that, to request to become donors. Donors die in no more than four donations. One does one's duty, in one's understated and constrained way.

The second theme is existential. The directors of Hailsham, the school that this group of clones attends, is on the model of A Fine British Education for the Colonials. This is partly due to altruistic scruples, and partly to the attempt to demonstrate that the clones have souls, i.e., are (like those persons from colonial climes) fully human. This is revealed toward the end of the book, but the form it takes throughout is the pervasive, underlying question of what gives a life its meaning. Like the students in Lev Grossman's dyspeptic The Magicians, the Hailsham students find that being a special student at a special school does not necessarily prepare you to do anything. Similarly, Octavian Nothing learned that no matter how erudite and cultured he and his mother became, they were still just property. The Hailsham students grasp for straws of meaning where they can--in the teacher's words, in made-up narratives about the teachers and each other, in their relationships, and in their interpretations of Hailsham's policies. Ultimately, none of it matters. The Hailsham graduates will still become donors, no matter how beautiful the art they produce or what literary works they read. Again, this is all excruciatingly understated, but definitely present. It certainly contrasts with the intense anger expressed by writers in formerly colonized countries, who go to school only to discover that the promise of freedom is a lie, and that their opportunities and options are not equal. That the narrator of Never Let Me Go is reasonably happy with her life is more chilling than any talk of clones or souls.

Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human

#429
Title: Rebuilt: How Becoming Part Computer Made Me More Human
Author: Michael Chorost
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Year: 2005
238 pages

Michael Chorost, already partially deaf, suddenly went completely deaf. More than just a memoir of this experience of deafness and acquiring a cochlear implant, Rebuilt's narrative is intertwined with Chorost's thoughts and speculations about becoming a cyborg (that is, a human with "software that makes if-then-else decisions and acts on the body to carry them out" (p. 40). This is a good book to read with Donna Haraway's "A Cyborg Manifesto," which Chorost references extensively, and Myron Uhlberg's Hands of My Father: A Hearing Boy, His Deaf Parents, and the Language of Love.

Chorost's musings can sometimes be tiring. Put the book down and return to it later--it's worth following him through the whole thought, but sometimes his style can be wearing as he delves into semiotics and representation.

Note to Houghton Mifflin: What's wrong with this statement? "...I would find an oak seed in the yard, break its green whirlybird wings in half, and paste the sap-sticky center on my nose...." (p. 32). Clearly, copy editing is a lost art.

The Forest of Hands and Teeth

#428
Title: The Forest of Hands and Teeth
Author: Carrie Ryan
Publisher: Delacorte
Year: 2009
318 pages

This has been tagged as a young adult dystopian novel, and while I agree with "young adult," it's dystopian only in the sense that all zombie novels are dystopian--a spreading horror, present or past, destroys much of civilization. Perhaps it shades slightly more into dystopian territory, in that a character alludes to the Unconsecrated--this village's name for the zombies--having originated in scientific attempts to make people immortal. However, this aside is so tangential to the action of the story, so peripheral to the central narrative, that, while intriguing, it is not a sufficiently central point to support calling this a dystopia.It is young adult horror with science fiction elements.

There are things I can live without knowing. I don't need the whole back story; in many ways it's more interesting not to have a huge revelation about the long, long ago time and how things came to be. Perhaps some of that is filled in in the next book; perhaps not. What we should have learned: Why on earth the Sisterhood allows infected people to join the Unconsecrated rather than chopping off their heads; how or why both Mary's and Gabrielle's villages are overrun; why Mary and her group of survivors assume the members of the Sisterhood who bolted themselves into the Cathedral didn't survive; why Mary thinks that Gate I would lead to the ocean. There's more, but these are the big points. More irritating, and constituting plot disruptions/bad writing: If the zombies can pile up enough to get to an upstairs story, why don't they do this with the village fences? Who does maintenance on the path fences beyond the Guardians' range? If zombies can take down sturdy, braced wooden doors in a relatively short time, why can't they take down cyclone fencing even more quickly?

Psychologically, this is a novel about claustrophobia. The (seemingly) lone village, the tiny beacon holding back the unending, zombie-filled forest. The stern and secret-keeping Sisterhood, a religious order that controls the village, its inhabitants' lives, and access to historical and current knowledge. The young girl, who wants to marry for love, break out of the village's tight periphery, and  re-discover this "ocean" her mother described to her in her childhood. It is also about selfishness; more specifically, selfishness rewarded. Mary, the protagonist, is cut from the same histrionic and narcissistic cloth as Twilight's Bella. She is moody, impulsive, self-focused and self-preoccupied, willing to put her ambivalent desires ahead of (as far as she knows) the well-being of everyone in the world. Why is Travis attractive? For the same reason Edward is: Because the female protagonist says so.

If I were still back in my text deconstructin' days, I'd say that Mary's fervent desire for a particular kind of love, bolstered by the repeated symbol of the ocean (Freud's oceanic oneness, q.v.) and the image of the ocean-like forest, is what causes the village fence to be breached, admitting the endless tide of Unconsecrated who consume or infect just about everyone, converting them from individuals to an undifferentiated, oceanic mass of zombies. In psychoanalytic terms, it's the ambivalent desire to return to the pre-individuated ego state (bonus for you Kleinians: Snapping and rending included!). Since Mary's village understands the zombies in religious terms, a translation of the above might be that desire casts one out of paradise; this Mary has original sin. While Mary doesn't lust after a creature of darkness as Bella does, this theme is present, though displaced onto Mary's mother. The story is that Mary's mother allows herself to be bitten by her husband (who is now a zombie) because Mary isn't there to stop her. Mary is too busy getting creeped out by her friend and nice-guy Harry, who in a prefiguring of this zombie/ocean trope grasps her hands under water (she's doing laundry) and initiates a courtship. However, it's not clear that Mary would have prevented her mother from being bitten by her father; Mary, though devastated, also apparently finds it all unbearably meaningful and argues with the Sisterhood, and her brother, that her mother should be permitted to join her father as part of the unknowing, uncaring zombie horde. Who can say that the addition of Mary's mother and of Gabrielle (a parallel sacrifice by the Sisterhood) isn't the tipping point that allows the Unconsecrated to breach the fence?

At the end of the novel, having navigated the oceanic forest and seeing her love interest (who turned out not to be enough for her, anyway) zombified and castrated, I mean decapitated, by her, Mary reaches the real ocean. There, she immerses herself with, incidentally, a large number of zombies and chopped-up zombie parts. Then, to the lighthouse with an older man whose job is to decapitate the zombies who wash onto the beach. It wasn't her mom she wanted all along, it was her dad! Oedipal mystery solved.

Oh, and this bears little resemblance to The Hunger Games, with which I've seen it compared. Instead, think The Road, but with zombies instead of the charred ashes of a ruined civilization, and a whiny self-serving kid. Same ending, though: It's sad about the other(s), but now you're safe because you've found another claustrophobic enclave, where you can be protected (until the horror engulfs it as well).