Year: 2018

It’s really important to have a plan on what you are going to read on vacation.  I had no plan and ran out of books.  Thus this, found in one of these free book exchanges in hotels.  It is about a mail order bride from Bangaldesh and her early days in the US.  It was reasonably okay, though I wasn’t too sure what point it was trying to make.  Broadly, she realizes she is in love with her old Bangladeshi boyfriend, but sticks it out with the (in my mind suspiciously) okayish American so her parents can move to the First World.  I guess its a story of filial rather than marital love.  It’s a good thing I have a blog because I left it in Oregon and have already almost forgotten all about it

This book tells the story of a woman who is tired of her marriage and the life it has given her.  Written in 1899, it’s reads remarkably fresh and modern.  It is apparently – though I had never heard of it – widely regarded as an American classic.  While really an excellent book, that caused a furore when first published (apparently female self-discovery is “trite and sordid”), it was then forgotten for the next sixty years until feminist circles picked it up.  Patriarchy doesn’t play when it comes to pushing things out of print.

The main character is on holiday at the beach in Louisiana with her husband and children when she meets a man and finds herself growing interested in him.  She doesn’t actually cheat, but this interest slowly has her re-examining what she is doing, moving out of her husband’s house, and separating herself from her children whom, enjoyably shockingly, she feels pretty average about.  Kate Chopin knew something about having children, having had six herself in just eight years.  At some point you have to wonder at what point pregnancy tips into spousal abuse.  (As a side point, it’s interesting to note that in all countries without exception, birth rates decline as female empowerment goes up.  Makes you wonder how women in the past really felt about their children, especially after the third or fourth.)

It’s a book I strongly recommend, reaching out across over a hundred years to speak truths we still recognize about love and boredom.  Chopin is a remarkable writer, and shockingly contemporary.  Enjoy this, not from the book itself, but from her diary, which gives you a sense of her style:

I must tell you [her diary] a discovery I have made – the art of making oneself agreeable in conversation. Strange as it may appear it is not necessary to possess the faculty of speech; dumb persons, provided they be not deaf, can practice it as well as the most voluble. All required of you is to have control over the muscles of your face – to look pleased and chagrined…interested and entertained. Lead your antagonist to talk about himself – he will not enter reluctantly upon the subject I assure you – and twenty to one – he will report you as one of the most entertaining and intelligent persons

Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t.  You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft.  

When I got there it was all still and Sunday-like, and hot and sunshiny; the hands was gone to the fields; and there was them kind of faint dronings of bugs and flies in the air that makes it seem so lonesome and like everybody’s dead and gone; and if a breeze fans along and quivers the leaves it makes you feel mournful, because you feel like it’s spirits whispering—spirits that’s been dead ever so many years—and you always think they’re talking about YOU. As a general thing it makes a body wish HE was dead, too, and done with it all.

When the place was packed full the undertaker he slid around in his black gloves with his softy soothering ways, putting on the last touches, and getting people and things all ship-shape and comfortable, and making no more sound than a cat. He never spoke; he moved people around, he squeezed in late ones, he opened up passageways, and done it with nods, and signs with his hands. Then he took his place over against the wall. He was the softest, glidingest, stealthiest man I ever see; and there warn’t no more smile to him than there is to a ham.

He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn’t sell them, they’d get an Ab’litionist to go and steal them. It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn’t ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying, “Give a nigger an inch and he’ll take an ell.” Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger, which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm.

Have you ever wondered how long it takes to dig a grave?  Wonder no longer.  It takes an age.  However long you think it takes, double that.

If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a defeat. 

. . . I thought it safer to leave my case of arrack securely placed in the fork of a tree. To prevent the natives from drinking it, I let several of them see me put in a number of snakes and lizards; but I rather think this did not prevent them from tasting it.  We were accommodated here in the verandah of the large house, in which were serveral great baskets of dried human heads, the trophies of past generations of head hunters  . .  I slept very comfortably with half a dozen smoked dried human skulls suspended over my head

I took my evening meal in the midst of a circle of about a hundred spectators anxiously observing every movement and critising every mouthful, my thoughts involuntarily recurred to the lions at feeding time.  Like those noble animals, I too was used to it, and did not affect my appetite.  . . I. . turned showman myself, and exhibited the shadow of a dog’s head eating, which pleased them so much that all the village in succession came to see it.  The ’rabbit on the wall’ does not do in Borneo, as there is no animal it resembles.

Poets and moralists, judging from our English trees and fruits, have thought that small fruits always grew on lofty trees, so that their fall should be harmless to man, while the large ones trailed on the ground. Two of the largest and heaviest fruits known, however, the Brazil-nut fruit (Bertholletia) and durion, grow on lofty forest trees, from which they fall as soon as they are ripe, and often wound or kill the native inhabitants. From this we may learn two things: first, not to draw general conclusions from a very partial view of nature, and secondly, that trees and fruits, no less than the varied productions of the animal kingdom, do not appear to be organized with exclusive reference to the use and convenience of man

What I learned from this book is that you can still be a very successful person even while having plenty of serious faults, making a LOT of mistakes, and not really learning from any of them. 

Before the American Civil War, Grant had been kicked out of the army for being an alcoholic, lost his money in a swindle (not the first time, not the last), and was doing kind of a bad job as a clerk at a leather store.

Once the war started he moved up through the ranks pretty slowly, both because of the drinking problem and because he did a terrible job of managing the politics.  Politics was far more important than merit apparently in choosing leadership in the North, and it showed:  despite being massively superior in men and material they were beaten frequently.  Eventually the North were reduced to actually considering merit, and Grant reached the top of the power structure, with a million men reporting to him. 

This is when things started to get really bloody.  One reason the South was so hard to finally beat was that the end of the war was fought on their territory, where they knew the land and could dig in, so it was some sort of version of a war of attrition (as in the first world war).  Grant succeeded in part because he was willing to let people die.  Lots of people thought he was a butcher, but not too many had any idea of how else they could win.  As one Southern solider put it:

We have met a man this time who either does not know when he is whipped, or who cares not if he loses his whole Army, so that he may accomplish an end.  

Interesting was to see what it was like for the slaves as they started to win.  It reads very much like the fall of a massive four million person concentration camp:

. . .scenes of ecstatic jubilation greeted them as they passed abandoned plantations and were applauded by former slaves.  One ex-slave, seated on a lawn, rocking back and forth in joy, kept shouting, “Glory, hallelujah, glory, hallelujah . . . Bless God, bless God.  I never spected to see dis day. 

The slaves flocked to volunteer for the Union side, and at first the leadership restricted.  Once they were allowed in they proved incredibly dedicated, and far tougher than the regular troops.  This seems totally unsurprising to me, given what the slaves had survived, and what they were fighting for, but apparently was to the white people of that time. 

Once the North was won, Grant became a politician, not a great choice for someone really terrible at politics.  He also continued terrible with his money.  Much of the content for this massive, exhaustively researched book, comes from Grant’s own memoir, which he wrote at great speed, in a race against death from mouth cancer (all those cigars!), so as to leave his wife a little money, as he had managed to lose it all again. 

Grant’s wife was famously ugly.  Charmingly, he famously adored her.  She had some sort of major squint, which she tried to get treated:

When she mentioned the visit afterward to her husband, he was thunderstruck as to what had made her entertain such an idea.  “Why, you are getting to be such a great man and I am such a plain little wife,” Julia replied.  “I thought if my eyes were as others are I might not be so very, very plain., Ulys; who knows”

I learnt a lot about the Civil War in this book, about slavery, about Reconstruction, about military nicknames (Old Goggle-Eyed Snapping Turtle being my favourite); but mostly I learnt you don’t have to be perfect to still get something done. 

This book just shows you how hard it is to write a good book.  It has lots of good elements: sweeping family story, tragic Russian setting, etc.  And yet somehow it never quite rises about servicable, and I didn’t care enough to finish it. 

The main and most interesting story is about a young American woman in the 1930s who has a holiday romance with a Russian man who is there on a business trip. Unfortunately she does not do what you are supposed to do with a holiday romance, that is, just do more Facebook stalking than you will admit to, and forget about it.  Instead she up and follows him to Russia.  Naturally, he is horrified.  She is horrified too, as Russia is nothing like the paradise he had written about in his letters.  This is because, as he points out in an awkward reunion, he has to write something for the censors.

To get a visa, she gives up her American passport at a Moscow government office.  BIG MISTAKE.  Apparently the Russian government at that time was laying hands on many American passports – telling people they were ‘lost in the mail’ and so forth.  The woman tries to go to the American embassy to get a new passport. but as she has no passport, they won’t believe she is American; they weren’t that excited to get back all these potential commies.  She ends up spending the rest of her life in Russia, and that life includes quite some prisons and labour camps.

Anyway, Gulag Archipelago it is not.  Also all of this could have been prevented by Facebook.

I never review books where I know the author

This is a neatly written novel about a child’s life in a convent school.  It is based on the author’s own experiences in the early twentieth century, and it is as impressively weird as you hope such a place might be.  They bathe in cloaks, so as not to see their own bodies.  They try to sleep on their backs, with their hands crossed on their chests, so they will be neat if they die in their beds.  They are not allowed to have particular friends.  They are not supposed to enjoy things they are good at. 

Unsurprisingly, the author does not emerge from this unscathed.  In fact, she is pretty well scathed. A  novel she has half completed is confiscated by a nun, and she is expelled.  So terrible does she find this, that she doesn’t write again for twenty years, and when she does it is simply to tell this story.  As strange website catholicwriters.com tells us, she never again felt enjoyment of artistic expression.

I admired the writing here.  It is careful and evocative.  I also enjoyed learning about a long dead world.  And yet somehow I can’t say I really liked this book, for all it is so clearly deeply felt.  I guess it is just an example of the sad fact that your own painful experience is often just not all that interesting to others.  A good lesson for us all.

I’m staggered that this book not only got published, but has been highly praised.  It’s basically stream of consciousness chat from some millenial.  What I have deduced is that New York publishing must be full of people who are too old to be millenials and are worried that they may appear irrelevant.  Thus, they don’t want to come out and say, this millenial has no clothes.

 But I’ll go ahead and say it, because I definitely think this young emperor is most certainly super naked.  I get the idea of trying to be super close to the real by actually just writing down what you really said, but damn, what if what you actually said was dull or embarrassingly self-indulgent?

Perhaps actually the self-indulgence is actually what bothered me most.  I’m not usually acutely aware of my status as a developing world immigrant, but this book made me feel it.  I genuinely can’t imagine feeling that problems this minor deserve to be written up.  It’s a scale of entitlement to happiness that I am both annoyed by and envious of.

Less you think I am exaggerating, let me tell you that one of the most important conflicts of this book is when one girl buys the same dress as another girl.

Let’s end with possibly the only good paragraph in the book.  Well, I don’t know about good.  At least horrifying:

We are all specks of dirt, all on this earth at the same time.  I look at all the people who are alive today and think, These are my contemporaries.  These are my fucking contemporaries!  We live in an age of some really great blow-job artists.  Every era has its art form.  The nineteenth century, I know, was tops for the novel.  I just do what I an not to gag too much.  I know boyfriends get really excited when they can touch the soft flesh at the back of your throat.  At these times, I just try to breathe through my nose and not throw up on their cock.  I did vomit a little the other day, but I kept right on sucking.