Percival Everett

Percival Everett by Virgil Russell

Percival Everett is a black writer who teaches at USC. He does not like to be seen as a black writer because it is limiting, and reflects more on the person who sees him as a black writer than it does on him. I applied for Bread Loaf this year, hoping to attend his workshop, but life got in the way and Bread Loaf will go on without me. I wanted to learn something about identity and freeing myself of expectations of others based on my name, ethnicity, gender and experience.
I managed to learn all of that from reading his book with a seemingly circular title. Everett’s book is inspired by Finnegans Wake and the collective unconscious of the American, touching on slavery and lynchings, rebellion and independence. The book begins with a visit by a son to an aging father in a retirement community.The father suggests that the son write a book that he, the father, has already started writing in the voice of the son, describing in the first chapter, the drive to the center, the conversation with the father in which it is suggested that the visit might be the last. After that, it is no longer clear who the narrator is, and it does not matter. We live in ideas and memories, of the wife who left the old man to live in Canada, of childhood and fatherhood and war and history, interwoven with the present.
A demented widow of a mathematician, a mathematician in her own right, befriends the narrator. They belong to a group which dines together, true love is promised, and more importantly, the friendship is couched in respect.  A friend Billy, also Virgil Russell, who dines with them, has stolen and hidden what could be lethal medication. During a search for the medicines by the guards, a framed photograph of Billy’s grown daughter falls to the ground, the glass shattering, and Billy dies soon after, presumably of a broken heart. In a coup reminiscent of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the other residents steal a car and flee.
The narrator has read Joyce and Jung, and is quietly, darkly black, a fact never revealed directly. It should not be relevant, but it is, to me, because I want to embrace the otherness and the power of its perspective.
I have to read this book again, slowly. What a treat.

Naipaul and Gandhi: Area of Darkness

Gandhi and Naipaul   

Naipaul explains why Gandhi failed. Gandhi, as we well know, was born in India and educated in England. He practiced law as a barrister in South Africa for 20 years where he began a civil rights movement and returned to India at the age of 44 as a leader in the struggle for independence. Gandhi’s experience in South Africa lent him distance and objectivity which the other leaders like Nehru, Sardar Patel and Jinnah lacked. Naipual is similarly objective.

Gandhi found untouchability appalling, he could not abide the caste system, and traded suit and tie for dhoti and bare feet. He could deal with the British: The salt march and the days of prayer and fasting were simply brilliant; passive resistance and the search for truth were legal and harmless, at least on the face of it; his arrests for subversion made the actions of British government indefensible to its own subjects.

The others in the Indian National Congress would join Gandhi in jail and support the cause of independance, but why would any leader want to clean a toilet? That job was destined for the harijans, the people of God as Gandhi renamed the untouchables. Naipaul understands well Gandhi’s struggle and his failure to change Indians who were rooted deeply in prejudice, communalism and caste. South African Indians unlike Indians in India could clean their toilets: Gandhi could not have imagined the resistance he met.

Naipaul in Area of Darkness describes his relationship to a time-locked India as captured in his grandfather’s memory and transmitted by oral history as a sacred homeland. Naipaul came to India in the early 1950s and faced bureaucracy first hand: his opened whisky bottles were confiscated by customs and in those times of prohibition, he required more than one signature from more than one office to get back what was rightly his. A doctor’s letter certified that alcohol was medically necessary to prevent withdrawal symptoms. Naipaul persisted where others might have given up,  perhaps he really needed that alcohol. Naipaul spent a summer Srinagar in Kashmir where he lived beside the Dal lake in a small unofficial hotel. The owner of the hotel wanted to be credentialed and inspected by the board of tourism, and he induced Naipaul, a foreigner and writer, to go to the office of tourism to plead his case, which he eventually does, successfully. 

Naipaul, an agnostic, joined a pilgrimage, a few days walk in ice and snow from Anantnag to see the ice lingam of Shiva, the phallus that is rejuvenated every winter. He comments on the open air toilet that is an integral part of the route: Indians shit everywhere. There are very many Indians and everyone has to shit, lotta at hand but never a spade. This is what Naipaul sees:  Indians lack a civic sense, pollute rivers, drinking water, and suffer from water borne diseases. Untouchables no longer carry night soil in the city, but they clean our toilets and we tell ourselves that it is karma. Between the time of Gandhi’s return and Naipaul’s first visit, not much had changed.

Talk before sleep by Elizabeth Berg

Talk before Sleep  Elizabeth Berg

This is a work of fiction, in which a group for 4 women befriend Ruth, who is dying of advanced breast cancer. The narrative first person voice is that of Ann, a former nurse, now a married woman with a young daughter. The book is written in  present tense, with flashbacks in past tense, which is never easy to pull off. Charles Baxter gave a lecture on this subject at Bread Loaf a few years ago, in which he described the lushness achieved with superimposed timelines when the transitions don't cause whiplash. In this book, Berg uses white space to signal change in tense without merging the past with the present.

Ruth, a petite woman and an artist, leaves her husband and her teenaged son Michael, to see if she prefers to live alone. She is soon diagnosed with cancer. Her initial treatment is described partially in a flashback, and we learn that Ruth has had bilateral mastectomy. Ruth discovers that living alone in an apartment can be lonely and that running laundry for three is thrice as much fun, and wants to reunite with her family. Her husband meanwhile has found himself a new true love. Ruth decompensates and calls Ann to tell her she intends to commit suicide. Ann leaves her own family at the dinner table to help get Ruth into a psychiatric facility. Ruth is discharged a few days later after she attends a couple of AA  meetings.

This book explores brave territories: losing a friend to a nasty disease, making sacrifices to be an effective friend and what it means to be present. At one point in the book, Ruth raises her shirt to expose her chest and jokes that her chest is flat, like a back, which is more shocking than funny.  We are not sure exactly where the novel is set.  Place is mainly internal in this novel, though there is a description of a night slept under the stars in a sleeping bag, and several references to bars, diners, restaurants including McDonald's. Ruth liked her fries better when they were cooked in beef fat, and despite a terrible illness, she still manages to enjoy men, more perhaps than Ann does.

One cannot but be affected by the closeness of the women, Ruth worrying about how Ann will survive and whether will she have friends. Ann appears to neglect her own little family and moves in with Ruth. Ann and Ruth do share a couple of kisses, and I can appreciate the potential for romance had there been more time, had Ruth not had cancer, but then Ann wouldn’t have had to move in with her. Ann recognizes that Ruth is slipping away. Ruth reconnects with an old flame and throws him out only when she accepts that she will die soon. L.D., one of Ruth’s friends, is firmly in denial, and wants to channel the power of positive thought into achieving a cure. Sarah, another friend, helps Ruth find a nice spot to be buried in.

Ruth thwarts plans for a local burial when she decides to go home to her only brother Andrew in Florida so that  she can die with her family around her. Her parents are long dead in a car crash, and we have seen little of Andrew in the novel, so this is unexpected. Ruth flies to Florida, escorted by her son Michael who returns to be with his father. Ruth dies off the page, in a hospital. Everybody, including Ann’s husband and daughter, and Ruth’s friends attend the funeral, Ann returns to be with her own family at the end, and we see grief as another exacting illness.

This book has moments of honesty and humor, and I can why it has done so well. Berg manages to bring ordinary people to life, and these people die just as they live, wanting, needing, giving, withholding,  taking, all lonely despite their friends and intimacies.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo

Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo


    I grew up in Bombay, and I read about the city, as much to keep up with its changes as to keep my roots watered. Katherine Boo is a staff writer for the New Yorker, and spent three years doing her research for this non-fiction book in the Annawadi slum near Mumbai’s international airport.  Annawadi could be described as an island of cardboard and plastic shanties in a cesspool of fecal and industrial waste surrounded by drains blocked by carcasses.
   
     The book starts with a crisis to hook the reader.... Abdul Hussain  is running from the police and hiding in the dark, now chewing his nails, perhaps unwisely since this threatens to be a cliff-hanger.  Abdul Husain, a teenager, is accused of setting Fatima, a one-legged woman on fire. The victim, a hysterical woman and a part-time whore, expected to be only slightly burnt when she doused herself with kerosene and lit a match. The backstory follows, all anyone could ever want to know about Annawadi, Abdul’s family, garbage collection and recycling.

    The accident-turned-suicide was witnessed by Fatima’s young daughter, a minor character whose psychological trauma seems irrelevant to this book focused on corruption, despair and injustice in the setting of poverty. The reward for the reader’s persistence comes late in the book when  Abdul’s father and sister are acquitted in a trial, but Abdul’s own trial is still awaited. Abdul is portrayed as a deep character, one who considers the difference between water and ice: Ice is pure whereas water is easily contaminated, and he would be like ice, not bear false witness nor sell stolen recyclables.

     Boo brings the smells of the slum to life, and then the reader wants to breathe but cannot. Here is a particularly stifling paragraph from near the end (page 218 in my paperback edition).

    The new judge was severe and likely to find the Husains guilty, the special executive officer said. Fortunately, Fatima’s husband was willing to take back the case. He would cancel his testimony and the testimony of his late wife, upon which the trial would shut down. The price for ending the trial would be two lakhs -- more than four thousand dollars.
    The special executive officer seemed to be banking on the ignorance of slum dwellers: that the Husains wouldn’t understand that the case against them was a criminal one, brought by the state of Maharashtra, and that Fatima’s husband didn’t have the power to call it off, no matter how much the Husains paid.

    The author’s American perspective is evident: She does not mention the currency of the two lakhs, Indian rupees, but she does offer an equivalent in dollars, US dollars presumably. The Husains and Fatima’s husband do not think in terms of dollars. To state that the equivalent figure of four thousand per the exchange rate does not signify the enormity of the amount: a non-documented worker in the US could pay off a debt four thousand dollars by saving for, say, six months or a year. To a poor man in India, two lakhs or 200,000 rupees would be as crushing as 200,000 dollars, the labor of twenty years or longer, worse than having a home foreclosed under the threat of bankruptcy. To compare this sum to $4000 is to trivialize the burden and disrespect it, like telling a starving woman you know her pain because you’re on a diet.

    Boo’s book could well have been condensed to a decent four page article in the New Yorker. It misses the touch of an editor, the word feral is used four times to describe pigs and dogs, and the book is overpopulated by under-employed characters, much like the slum itself. In a writing workshop, this book would be faulted for not sounding authentic even though the events described might really have happened. I think of the author as an amateur field biologist wielding a magnifying glass and exclaiming, “Look at these grubby little creatures, they have brown wings but don’t fly!”  I would not know, for instance, whether Abdul prefers his peanuts with diced onions and green chillies or coriander leaves. At the end of the book, I wish I could empathize with its people rather than pity their plight and shudder.

    The consciousness of this non-fiction book is limited in part because the author has had to depend on translators, and to an equal extent because her characters are well-guarded. In her attempt to stay objective, Boo appears safely distant. This book could be accused of being voyeuristic or of belonging to the genre of poverty porn. I remind myself that it was on the NYT best seller list, won the LA Times Book Prize and the PEN/ John Kenneth Galbraith award. Ambassador’s Journal, written when Galbraith was Ambassador to India at the time of John Kennedy and Jawaharlal Nehru, is a brilliant work, funny and compelling, informative of the workings of two governments in the face of border incursions by China. Now, that is a book I would recommend.
   
   

The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

The Alchemist  Paulo Coelho

Two months ago, I pulled The Alchemist off the shelf as part of the read-the-books-I've-been-meaning-to effort, grateful for its small size.

The first page is brilliant: Narcissus is in love with his reflection in the pool and falls into it and drowns. The pool misses him, not for his looks which she never did appreciate, but for her inability to see herself reflected in his eyes. Nice twist there, but it has nothing to do with the rest of the book, except perhaps that the main character is narcissistic.

This is a simple tale of a shepherd boy who lives Spain in a time before cars but after churches. The boy decides to leave his family and acquires a small flock of sheep (if a subtle metaphor was intended here, it doesn't work). He wanders, letting his  flock graze, sells wool and occasionally kills and eats one of the sheep. After a night of disturbing dreams in a crumbling church, he encounters a gypsy who prophesies that he will get rich (she wants 10% of his wealth, payable later,  really, I'm not making that up). He knows that the universe will make his dreams come true if only he will believe in his dreams and not abandon them. Ah, I wish I could be so trusting.

After a misadventure in Northern Africa in which he sells his sheep and loses the gold to a con artist, he helps a merchant sell crystal to tourists and expand his business and diversify it to include tea, served in little goblets which are also for sale. He earns money, decides not to buy more sheep, but travels instead to see the pyramids where he expects to find treasure, following another dream. Many dreams in this book.  He joins a caravan, stops at an oasis, falls in love, gets through a battle between warring tribes, and meets an alchemist. He then has another dream which tells him to return to that church of strange dreams in Spain. He breaks a wall in that church when he returns, which is not so hard to do since it was crumbling in the first place, and finds gold, lots of gold.

Why do I feel so cheated, so spiritually bankrupt after reading this book? Could there be more to life than finding gold? The Alchemist has a five star review on Amazon and has been described as a modern day version of The Little Prince. I will not agree with that, but ten million readers couldn't be wrong.

A M Homes: This book will save your life.

Review: This Book Will Save Your Life. A.M. Homes. Penguin 2006.

    This book is about Richard, a rich and lonely man who trades online and lives a sterile life with terminal numbness. All is not well until he experiences pain that takes him to the hospital: he cannot describe or localize his pain, nor can he say how long he has been aware of it. He enters life after this medical and spiritual emergency, with the initial step of buying donuts for himself and for a homeless man who enters the shop while he is there.

    “Have a nice day,” Richard calls after him, annoyed that the guy didn’t say thank you.
    The man turns around. “Have a nice day. I’m homeless. What does that mean? ‘Have a nice day.’ Go fuck yourself.”

    Richard rescues a horse at a sinkhole near his house with the involvement of a newly discovered neighbor, a movie star with a helicopter, and finds himself on the news. Richard’s house on a hill, decorated with paintings of value, begins to collapse and he must move out for his safety. He rises from his soul dead existence untouched by human contact, barring functional interactions with a housekeeper, trainer and nutritionist, to become human if not superhuman. He awakens to the suffering of the world around him and begins to relate to every sentient being he encounters, including a crying woman at a grocery store.

    The transformation is plausible in part because the novel is set in Los Angeles, where the real meets the unreal, artifice meets art at every intersection.  LA is at the heart of the novel, and while I don’t like to think of a place as a character, I have to say that LA functions as one. I could imagine that this book could be set elsewhere and still succeed because of the human truths it contains. Written in present tense, close third person, the point of view shifts at times to capture events or perspectives outside Richard’s realm of experience. These shifts appear when necessary with only slight disruption of the fictive dream.

    Lusardi, a fake psychologist- internist from Yale directs him to a meditation retreat, where Richard sits on a cushion, a gift from his neighbor, and listens to Joseph, the teacher, hold forth on “The talk about the dog.” (This was possibly the best page in the book, a perfect metaphor that crashes into pure dissonance.)

    It has to be to some degree a play on the words, “dog”/ “God”. It is a talk about joy, about pleasure, about the irritation of the flea, the pleasure of scratching, the lure of the bone, the compulsion to bury it, the tug of the collar, the master’s pull, the freedom to run, to fetch the ball and bring it back to the master. Joseph speaks of the relationship between master and disciple, between student and teacher......
    The story of the dog is hopeful, but the story of the master and disciple feels like a manipulation, a head game, something Richard wants none of.

    Richard thaws out into a decent man, true to himself, unafraid to take on an agent who sexually assaulted his son, yet vulnerable in the face of his son’s rage. He evolves into a Boddhisatva. Like Forrest Gump, he has close encounters with famous people like Gerald Ford and Bob Dylan, rides around in John Lennon’s Bentley and magically spreads joy and fixes problems. At the seemingly apocalyptic end, he is still afloat on a rectangle of Styrofoam with a cell phone and a dog, connecting wirelessly to his son, still present for him. He also carries in a plastic bag a typescript of a friend’s novel about redemption and transformation.
   
    This is a book that could save a life or, at least, inspire one. If I weren’t so amazed, I’d be envious.

Shanti Reads

I thought I would start this year off with book reviews, my take on what I'm reading, what I like and what I don't, what I learn, and which perils  I want to avoid.  However, the year started before I was ready, but April 14 is Tamil new year, an excellent date to launch a new blog.

 I want to read good sentences, and I cannot suffer bad grammar. Nearly half my reading is based on books about India or by Indian writers. As an imperialistic Indian, I extend India to include the entire subcontinent.

Many of you followed my blog from France. Let me know if you want me to take you off my list. I will not ask you why.

Happy New Year to you, Tamils and the rest.