Things Fall Apart

The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has a put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.

Things Fall Apart, considered the classic of African literature, is all about context. Nigerian author Chinua Achebe was born into a Christian family -- his father was one of the first Christian converts in his home village when the missionaries first arrived -- and after receiving a degree in English literature, Achebe decided to use English -- the "language of the colonizers", for which he was derided by fellow Africans -- to write a novel about the effects of colonization; for the first time from an African perspective. Things Fall Apart is written in three sections: the first is precolonization, in which the protagonist, Okonkwo, is building his power and reputation in his village of Umuofia; in the second, after an accident, Okonkwo and his family are banished to another village for seven years (and witness the arrival of the first missionaries); and in the third, Okonkwo returns home to find the missionaries have won many converts and the colonizers have set up their own government with foreign laws and harsh punishments. Since Achebe was both a Christian and an African -- and since he wrote this book in 1958, just as England was pulling out of Nigeria -- he writes with understanding of each side in the confrontation and the result is a non-judgemental record of what occurred.

The writing in Things Fall Apart seems almost simple, and although Achebe had apparently studied all the "important" English literature of his day, there are no literary tricks or flourishes here, and apparently, that is what's considered its genius: dismissing the written Igbo language (which was invented and imposed on the Igbo people by the colonizers; an artificial mish-mash of all Igbo dialects that Achebe found too wooden for literature), Achebe used the English language to approximate the rhythms and circuitous nature of his first tongue. If I had something to compare it to, perhaps I would also recognise the genius of this, but like I said it just came off as simplistic, which is odd for a book about people who were apparently great orators.

Having spoken plainly so far, Okoye said the next half a dozen sentences in proverbs. Among the Ibo the art of conversation is regarded very highly, and proverbs are the palm-oil with which words are eaten. Okoye was a great talker and he spoke for a long time, skirting round the subject and then hitting it finally.

What Things Fall Apart does wonderfully is to paint a picture of what village life was like before the missionaries came (and this isn't totally pre-contact: this is the Victorian Age and, as villagers have guns, I'm assuming they have traded with Europeans before). Okonkwo represented the ideal of masculinity:

Okonkwo was clearly cut out for great things. He was still young but he had won fame as the greatest wrestler in the nine villages. He was a wealthy farmer and had two barns full of yams, and had just married his third wife. To crown it all he had taken two titles and had shown incredible prowess in two inter-tribal wars. And so although Okonkwo was still young, he was already one of the greatest men of his time. Age was respected among his people, but achievement was revered. As the elders said, if a child washed his hands he could eat with kings. Okonkwo had clearly washed his hands and so he ate with kings and elders.

Okonkwo was powerful, a warrior, and although he ruled his compound with fear and terrible beatings, he was capable of forming close bonds with his family. The relationship of the villagers to the land -- and their attendant animistic worship -- assured their survival through feast and famine, and when disputes arose, a council of elders would convene a tribunal. These were a people who obviously enjoyed a rich culture, knew justice, and although they often went to war against neighbouring villages, their ties to their own clansmen were sacred. The Igbo of this village are far from savages in need of salvation (and part of Achebe's purpose here was to respond to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness which Achebe found "bloody racist"). 

                                                      

On the other hand, not every villager thrived in their society and it was easy enough for the missionaries to first convert the weak and the outcasts. Achebe is careful not to describe these missionaries as evil (he was a Christian himself, after all) and, by remaining neutral to the events as they happen, the reader is free to assign blame or approval where fit. For example, as the Igbo of the fictional village of Umuofia were a superstitious people -- and allowed themselves to by ruled by a mysterious Oracle -- they would leave all newborn twins to die in the Evil Forest, and although Achebe is neutral about this practise pre-missionaries, it's hard for a reader to be neutral about it; when the missionaries condemn the practise, it's hard not to agree with them. On the other hand, when the new district government imposes British law on the villagers -- with corrupt members of distant and incomprehensible clans used as their messengers -- it's hard to see justice in it.

There is much more to Things Fall Apart than I saw at first blush, and as I like to read about books nearly as much as I like to read the books themselves, this was an interesting experience for me. I would not blame a reader, however, who wants to judge a book solely on what's between the covers, and for that reader, this might prove to be a simple or uninteresting tale.

One More Thing: Stories and Other Stories

One More: Thing Stories and Other Stories by B.J. Novak is a lot of stories (60+) of varying lengths and quality for which I was probably not the perfect audience. I 'd think Millennials (or at least those who thought that Novak and Mindy Kaling were hip and relevant on The Office -- instead of narcissistic minor characters) would probably relate better than I did to stories about the pitfalls of modern dating or better understand the compulsion to post pictures of every meal one eats online. But while this wasn't a perfect win for me, there was much I did enjoy in this collection.

I listened to the audiobook, and that was a double-edged sword: Novak himself is an entertaining narrator and, with the help of some of his friends (Kaling, Rainn Wilson, Katy Perry, et al), some of these stories were more like mini radio plays, and that's probably where Novak's strengths lie (as he was not just an actor on The Office, but a writer/director/executive producer). The stories are very visual -- with many specific details about characters' appearance, clothes and expressions -- and the actors doing the reading bring the dialogue to life (in the story "The Man Who Told Us About Inflatable Women", Novak is narrating and says something like, "It wasn't what he said but the way he said it that stuck with us", and Rainn Wilson is chuckling meaningfully over Novak, and that made me smile, and that would have been lost if I had been reading a hard copy). On the other hand, with 63 stories told in only 7 hours, some stories ran to many pages, some to just a page or two, and some were like the following:

"Marie's Stupid Boyfriend"

No one didn't play the guitar "on principle". Either you can play the guitar, or you can't.
You don't "don't".
Remember him?

Or:

"The Literalist's Love Poem"

Roses are rose.
Violets are violet.
I love you.

And as an aside: that second short story (?) was the only part read by Emma Thompson and I was more intrigued by imagining the process by which she was asked to contribute -- and wondering how much of a hassle it was for her to record three mere lines -- than I was interested in the poem (?) itself. And that was the problem with the audiobook: every time a new story began, I had no idea how long it would last, and where there were several short short stories in a row, I found the experience to be incredibly jarring.

There were stories that I particularly enjoyed like: "Julie and the Warlord" (about a first date between a couple who met on a match.com-type site, and in between flirting and agreeing on the pointlessness of flourless chocolate cake, Julie discovers that her date is an actual African warlord); "No One Goes to Heaven to See Dan Fogelberg" (an interesting vision of the afterlife); "Wikipedia Brown and the Case of the Missing Bicycle" (which I found to be a whip-smart -- if too brief -- commentary on what society has lost by crowd-sourcing knowledge); "The Comedy Central Roast of Nelson Mandela" (which not only perfectly captured the voices of people like Sarah Silverman and Jeffrey Ross but turned out to have something profound to say as well); and "Kellogg's (or: The Last Wholesome Fantasy of the Middle School Boy)", which I liked for a lot of reasons, but not least of all for this:

The Battle Creek, Michigan, headquarters of Kellogg's looks like a spaceship built to look like a pyramid that was then hastily converted into a public library during a period of intergalactic peace. It looks exactly as you would hope it would look.

And since the narrator then encourages the reader to look it up, here's the Kellogg's headquarters (pretty much as described):

                                                     

On the negative side, there were too many celebrity-centered stories -- that may be of more interest to Millennials as well? -- and while I was intrigued by imaginary peeks into the home life of John Grisham and Confucius, the stories about Johnny Depp, Kate Moss, Tony Robbins, Elvis Presley, and Chris Hansen seemed to have nothing universal to say and were about celebrities for the sake of being about celebrities. There was probably something I was missing about the point of so many stories being about lotteries (or bingo). And some stories might have seemed profound to Novak but were boring and pointless to me (like "If I Had a Nickel" -- that lays out in detail how to make an industry out of collecting a nickel every time you spill a cup of coffee -- or "The Market Was Down" -- that anthropomorphises the stock market and explains what "brings it down").

Novak starts each story with a fairly intriguing idea, and if I had one major complaint, it's that nothing was ever fully developed; these are not so much short stories as sketches. I understand that Novak was paid a seven figure advance for two books, and I'm actually hoping his next effort will be a novel -- he is an interesting writer line-by-line and I would love to see him use the longer form. There were some five star stories here and some two star stories, and with the uneven listening experience colouring my judgement, I need to settle on a three star overall rating.

Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)

Mallory was reading to me a list of classic books the other day -- determining which ones I've heard of and trying to select one for a school project -- and when she got to Three Men in a Boat, I asked, "What's that one?" She told me that the description on her list said, "Probably the funniest novel in the English language", so I promptly made a trip to the library (of course). Written in 1889, this may have been the funniest book of its time, but of all time? Although it's more than a strictly comic novel, I did find this line:

It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.

Who knew that joke was that old? Based on a real boat trip up the River Thames that Jerome K. Jerome took with two friends (to say nothing of the dog), this book is part travelogue, part memoir, part history book, and part farce. As the book has never been out of print, it is apparently still popular for modern rowers to retrace the three men's route, with the added bonus that every pub and inn mentioned in the book still exists.
     
                                           

The comedy in Three Men in a Boat tends toward slapstick, but told in a mock serious tone. The following (assembling a tent over the rowboat at night) could have been right out of an I Love Lucy or Three Stooges script, and I was repeatedly impressed by how ahead of its time the comedy felt in this book (I found it funnier than anything in Dickens, for example):

It looked so simple in the abstract. You took five iron arches, like gigantic croquet hoops, and fitted them up over the boat, and then stretched the canvas over them, and fastened it down: it would take quite ten minutes, we thought.

That was an under-estimate.

We took up the hoops, and began to drop them into the sockets placed for them. You would not imagine this to be dangerous work; but, looking back now, the wonder to me is that any of us are alive to tell the tale. They were not hoops, they were demons. First they would not fit into their sockets at all, and we had to jump on them, and kick them, and hammer at them with the boat-hook; and, when they were in, it turned out that they were the wrong hoops for those particular sockets, and they had to come out again.

But they would not come out, until two of us had gone and struggled with them for five minutes, when they would jump up suddenly, and try and throw us into the water and drown us. They had hinges in the middle, and, when we were not looking, they nipped us with these hinges in delicate parts of the body; and, while we were wrestling with one side of the hoop, and endeavouring to persuade it to do its duty, the other side would come behind us in a cowardly manner, and hit us over the head.

But Three Men in a Boat, being primarily a travelogue, also takes many opportunities to wax on about various settings, sometimes in the purple prose popular in Jerome's day:

They awe us, these strange stars, so cold, so clear. We are as children whose small feet have strayed into some dim-lit temple of the god they have been taught to worship but know not; and, standing where the echoing dome spans the long vista of the shadowy light, glance up, half hoping, half afraid to see some awful vision hovering there.

And sometimes the prose and setting is used to moralise:

The Cistercian monks, whose abbey stood there in the thirteenth century, wore no clothes but rough tunics and cowls, and ate no flesh, nor fish, nor eggs. They lay upon straw, and they rose at midnight to mass. They spent the day in labour, reading, and prayer; and over all their lives there fell a silence as of death, for no one spoke.

A grim fraternity, passing grim lives in that sweet spot, that God had made so bright! Strange that Nature’s voices all around them—the soft singing of the waters, the whisperings of the river grass, the music of the rushing wind—should not have taught them a truer meaning of life than this. They listened there, through the long days, in silence, waiting for a voice from heaven; and all day long and through the solemn night it spoke to them in myriad tones, and they heard it not.

And sometimes, Jerome makes surprisingly poignant observations:

Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd?

But, this book is mostly about the laughs, and they can be found in unexpected places. At one point, after Jerome was fantasising about being present at King John's signing of the Magna Carta, I flipped back to the chapter summary and spotted this:

                                            

Three Men in a Boat is an odd duck to pin down, and being quite short, I'm happy to have read it; to have filled in this gap in my knowledge of classic novels. I smiled at many one-liners (Everything has its drawbacks, as the man said when his mother-in-law died, and they came down upon him for the funeral expenses), but for a contemporary (meaning: funny to the modern reader) take on the same milieu (deadpan-funny-travelogue), I'd be more likely to recommend Tony Hawks' Round Ireland With a Fridge (while stopping short of recommending one recreate Hawks' pointless journey. Rowing up the Thames sounds like a much nicer holiday.)

Brave New World

O wonder!
How many godly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't.
                                        —William Shakespeare, The Tempest

This was a reread for me (why did everyone who saw me with this book say, "Haven't you read that before?") and I suppose since everyone has read it, everyone knows the basic premise of Brave New World: About 600 years from now, after a devastating Nine Years War full of terror and anthrax bombs, a world government is put into place. Through genetic manipulation, the population is engineered to fulfill the tasks of their preordained castes, and through hypnopaedia, the population is conditioned to accept the imposed values of their society. As adults, people are discouraged from solitary pursuits, and as a result of their conditioning, spend leisure time devoted to consumerism, group sport, free sex (including mandatory orgies), 4-D movies called "feelies", and the consumption of soma -- a drug that brightens mood, aids sleep, or enables a mental holiday, depending on dosage. When a "savage" from a New Mexico Indian Reservation is introduced to the totalitarian society, both he and the people that he meets are innately repulsed by the other.

Orgy-porgy, Ford and fun,
Kiss the girls and make them One.
Boys at one with girls at peace;
Orgy-porgy gives release.

Now, I reread Brave New World at this time because in Liberal Fascism, author Jonah Goldberg warned that this is the future that we're blindly marching towards. And as Goldberg also stated each time he invoked Aldous Huxley, many people read this book and wonder, "What would be so wrong with that?"

The world's stable now. People are happy; they get what they want; and they never want what they can't get. They're well-off; they're safe; they're never ill; they're not afraid of death; they're blissfully ignorant of passion and old age; they're plagued with no mothers or fathers; they've got no wives, or children, or lovers to feel strong about; they're so conditioned that they practically can't help behaving as they ought to behave. And if anything should go wrong, there's soma.

That doesn't actually sound so bad, but even Huxley himself makes it clear that his vision of the future here is a dystopia, not a utopia, and in Brave New World Revisited -- which he wrote in 1958 and which was included in the edition that I read -- he despaired that his vision was coming true even quicker than he foresaw and hoped to warn society against sleepwalking towards a future of conformity, loss of freedom, and the mindless pursuit of the trivial and degenerate. Huxley's warnings about imminent overpopulation (and, in particular, his predictions about the overbreeding of the wrong sorts of people) -- which is the lynchpin of his argument -- now seems quaintly outdated in the same way that Marx wasn't right about the imminent revolt of the working class, so it's tempting to dismiss all of his fears out of hand. 

For contrasting views about what modern writers think of the vision of Brave New World, here's a dissenting viewpoint from The New York Times  in 2013 (but it is interesting to read in the comments section that most readers think that this article is off the mark) and an article from The New York Post  in 2012 that thinks Huxley was a visionary. To me, putting Brave New World into context like this is far more interesting than simply reading the novel on its own, and insofar as Huxley was considered a great thinker of his time, I think that was his intent (and forgives the less than perfectly literary constructions of his book). Even if Huxley didn't impeccably envision the near future (although Jonah Goldberg and Kyle Smith of The Post might make compelling parallels), Brave New World certainly extrapolates a logical progression from what Huxley identified as the problems of his time, and if they have any resonance with modern readers, we would do well to sit up and take notice.

The Silkworm

Hard to remember these days that there was a time you had to wait for the ink and paper reviews to see your work excoriated. With the invention of the internet, any subliterate cretin can be Michiko Kakutani.

I hadn't heard of Michiko Kakutani before, but as I am at minimum a subliterate cretin with an internet connection, I discovered her smackdown of J. K. Rowling (did NY Times book critic Kakutani actually kill Harry Potter?), and this tempest in a teapot is wonderfully illustrative of the strange territory in which Rowling (or, if one prefers, Robert Galbraith) set her second murder mystery: in the elite, rarefied and backbiting literary community of London, England. Quite aside from the mystery and its solution, The Silkworm reads like a settling of scores (which is, of course, ironic because it's about a book whose intent is to settle scores among the literary community) and one needs only to read the most popular quotes on goodreads to get the tone:

“The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.”

“...writers are a savage breed, Mr. Strike. If you want life-long friendship and selfless camaraderie, join the army and learn to kill. If you want a lifetime of temporary alliances with peers who will glory in your every failure, write novels.”

“We need readers,” muttered Daniel Chard. “More readers. Fewer writers.”

In addition to making unflattering characterizations of editors, publishers, agents, and authors, there is also much ink here about the snobbery of those authors who write capital-l Literature (you know, those who get invites to the Booker dinners) and the dismissal of those who merely write popular fiction. By sharing the majority of the plot of the very Literary book-within-the-book, Bombyx Mori, Rowling was able to skewer the pomposity of such a work with the snobbish authors' own weapons: dense allegory, metaphors, and literary allusions that don't add up to much at all. I had to repeatedly squint to avoid eye damage from the sparks flying off the sharpening axe. 

But happily, Rowling/Galbraith has written a compelling mystery. The murder is gruesome, there's a large cast of plausible suspects, and even though the most damaging evidence is given straight to the reader fairly early on, I hadn't solved it before the reveal (and like in all the best mysteries, I didn't feel cheated -- the solution wasn't hidden from me, just shuffled in with the mass of extraneous evidence). If The Silkworm had been just about the murder and the detective work that led to the murderer, I would have been much more satisfied, but…

Once again, I found that there was just too much backstory for Cormoran Strike and Robin Ellacott -- and while these are two characters that I find really interesting, I just want less of the melodrama of their personal lives (has Strike finally gotten over his long-term relationship with former fiancée Charlotte? Will Matthew ever approve of Robin's job? Tune in next week…) I also found it too convenient that The Silkworm introduced a number of Strike's old friends; people who can be called upon to run errands and pull strings (and advance the plot…) And I was downright annoyed when, nearing the end of the book, Strike told Robin his theory of the crime (without telling the reader) and then I had to follow along helplessly as they re-interviewed people onstage and collected evidence offstage -- evidence that wasn't revealed until the final chapter. What I did like was the way that Robin played a more central role in the detective work this time and her relationship with Strike hits just the right note of professional camaraderie -- I sincerely hope that Rowling is never tempted to start a romance between them (but, I suppose that as with Harry and Hermione, she's proven before that she can write platonic intergender friendships).

In the end, The Silkworm feels a bit bloated and written to fulfill some revenge agenda of Rowling's own. As with The Cuckoo's Calling, I'm not 100% certain that this book would have been a bestseller without the J. K. Rowling name attached, but despite my tepid reaction to this series so far, that name is enough to keep me interested. 

"Why?" asked Strike heavily. 

"Why what?" said Robin, looking up at him. 

"Why do people do this?" 

"Blog, you mean? I don't know...didn't someone once say the unexamined life isn't worth living?" 

"Yeah, Plato," said Strike, "but this isn't examining a life, it's exhibiting it."

Okay, so I'll never be Michiko Kakutani, but in this exchange, Rowling takes a swipe at readers like me, too. If this is exhibitionism, I guess I need to own it.

Tracks

We started dying before the snow, and like the snow, we continued to fall.

Tracks is exactly my favourite kind of book: a fresh viewpoint on history that blends fact with poetic language, imprinting both my mind and heart with an author's voice and vision. In this case, the time is early 20th century, the place is the Anishinabe Reservation in North Dakota, and author Louise Erdrich uses a blend of magical realism, Catholic mysticism, and Native mythology to reinterpret the accepted narrative of western expansionism.

As Tracks opens, the year is 1912, and after surviving the genocide that forced the Anishinabe onto a reservation that represented a fraction of their former traditional lands, those who also survived the "pox and fever" were now succumbing to consumption in unbelievable numbers.

By then, we thought disaster must surely have spent its force, that disease must have claimed all of the Anishinabe that the earth could hold and bury. But the earth is limitless and so is luck and so were our people once.

This speaker is Nanapush, an Anishinabe who, at 50 in 1912, is considered an elder of the decimated tribe. He is speaking to his granddaughter many years after the events of the book; attempting to explain the actions of her mother (Fleur Pillager) that led to their alienation. The chapters alternate between his point-of-view and that of Pauline Puyat; an orphan of mixed blood who has her own opinion of Fleur and who makes very different choices about how to survive in their changing world. Fleur, the last living member of her own family, could be considered the main character of Tracks, and it's interesting that her actions are only described in the third-person; interpreted by two such different characters. As consumption gives way to famine and influenza -- and as pressure is put on the remaining Anishinabe to sell off their land to logging companies -- this era is truly post-apocalyptic to the tribe; a people who must decide if survival means clinging to traditional ways or assimilating into the culture of their overlords. (And "post-apocalyptic" isn't hyperbole: if an alien invading force did to all of humanity what white settlers did to the Anishinabe tribe, the term "post-apocalyptic" would probably be considered a mild term.)

That is, broadly, the plot but it's the writing that had me hooked throughout this book. The book is set on the shores of Lake Matchimanito and here is a description of the water monster who lives in its depths; a creature that all Anishinabe mothers warn their daughters against:

(Misshepeshu) appears with green eyes, copper skin, a mouth tender as a child's. But if you fell into his arms, he sprouts horns, fangs, claws, fins. His feet are joined as one and his skin, brass scales, rings to the touch. You're fascinated, cannot move. He casts a shell necklace at your feet, weeps gleaming chips that harden into mica on your breasts. He holds you under. Then he takes the body of a lion, a fat brown worm, or a familiar man. He's made of gold. He's made of beach moss. He's a thing of dry foam, a thing of death by drowning, the death a Chippewa cannot survive.

Fleur Pillager, who takes up solitary residence on a remote shoreline of this lake, is a fascination to her tribe because she seems to have tamed Misshepeshu and assumed some of his powers:

She messed with evil, laughed at the old women's advice and dressed like a man. She got herself into some half-forgotten medicine, studied ways we shouldn't talk about. Some say she kept the finger of a child in her pocket and a powder of unborn rabbits in a leather thong around her neck. She laid the heart of an owl on her tongue so she could see at night, and went out, hunting, not even in her own body. We know for sure because the next morning, in the snow or dust, we followed the tracks of her bare feet and saw where they changed, where the claws sprang out, the pad broadened and pressed into the dirt.

In contrast, Pauline enters the white man's world, and as an end-of-life caregiver, has her first ecstatic experience when she witnesses her first death:

I stood when she was gone and called the others into the room, surprised at how light I felt, as though I'd been cut free as well. I hooked my hands on a chair, just to hold steady. If I took off my shoes I would rise into the air. If I took my hands away from my face I would smile. A cool blackness lifted me, out of the room and through the door. I leapt, spun, landing along the edge of the clearing. My body rippled. I tore leaves off a branch and stuffed them into my mouth to smother laughter. The wind shook in the trees. The sky hardened to light. And that is when, twirling dizzily, my wings raked the air, and I rose in three powerful beats and saw what lay below…I alone, watching, filled with breath, knew death as a form of grace.

I'm not usually a fan of magical realism -- where there are no natural laws, there's very little at stake -- but using Native mythology and Catholic mysticism (saints were always levitating and Pauline surrenders to the church more and more as time goes by) as both contrasting belief systems and as established belief systems (millions of believers agree to the facts of each system: that people can fly when in communion with their gods) removes the actions from the realm of magic and makes them perfectly logical (in the context of the story). While Tracks could have had a bitter or hectoring tone, it's playful from Nanapush's point-of-view, and Pauline's story is one of a descent into madness -- it's a story of survival that gives equal value to the different choices that the people felt they had to make.

Tracks was interesting to me on so many different levels and, as it's apparently a part of a cycle of books by Erdrich, I'll be revisiting these characters as soon as I can.

I had read one book by Louise Erdrich before (The Master Butcher's Singing Club) and it was so mundane to me that it took me a long time to pick her up again -- and I am so glad that I did; Tracks dovetails nicely into my reading interests and extends my knowledge in an area that is of great importance to me -- Native History. After reading Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and thinking that I understood how the Indian treaties in the U.S. were finally settled, it was shocking to me that the Anishinabe -- after all of the health and space pressures they had survived -- were expected to pay a yearly tax on their allotments, and as a result, white men were taking over the land that they couldn't help but default on. It's a wonder they have survived at all.

A concept that I couldn't fit into my review was how the character of Nanapush (as well as the unmentioned Margaret) was a classic trickster of Native mythology, and I actually didn't mention it because I didn't pick up on it until I read this essay on Tracks. I'm happy to end my thoughts with that author's conclusion about this book:

 One aspect of the trickster is that he lives by his wits. While other people were losing their wits, such as Fleur to anger, Pauline to Christ, Eli to love medicine, and other Indians to alcohol, Nanapush and Margaret remained clear-minded. It was their comfortability with chaos and their ability to access it to create new ways of being in the world that allowed Nanapush and Margaret to not only survive, but to thrive.

Speaking as an Anishinaabe, I see this as a very positive statement. The comic vision of the Anishinaabe still survives to this day; it is one of the hallmarks of the culture. Erdrich falls squarely within this tradition. Writing from within the culture, Erdrich demonstrates how, living with the comic vision, the Anishinaabe cannot only survive but thrive in chaos, and so build a new world, based on the old but responsive to the new. Far from being alienated, I see Tracks as a realistic portrayal of the Anishinaabe apocalypse and statement of hope for the future survival of our people.

Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning

When fascism comes to America, it will not be in brown and black shirts. It will not be with jackboots. It will be Nike sneakers and smiley shirts. Smiley-smiley.

                                                                                                            ~George Carlin

I was given Liberal Fascism for Christmas and told that it is a "must read", so I read it and here's the short review:

Tired of having liberals hurl the term "fascist" at every conservative that they disagree with, author Jonah Goldberg makes the case that it is (American) liberals who can draw a straight line from their modern agenda (and methods) to the 19th Century Progressive Movement in Europe; the same movement from which the Communism of Stalin, the Fascism of Mussolini, and the Nazism of Hitler drew their own inspiration. So, "I'm rubber, you're glue…" and anyone who uses the f-word against conservatives is either a liar or self-deluded (because if anyone is a fascist around here…). There's a childish and partisan tone in this book, but if there's any important takeaway, it's that each of the following images is equally despicable:

                                           

There is a lot of history in this book, which I found to be interesting to varying degrees: Huey Long and Martin Heidegger make me sleepy, but the Weather Underground and Margaret Sanger were relevant enough to today's political climate for me to have appreciated a re-examination of their legacies (but with 50+ pages of footnotes, I don't know who would be diligent enough to fact check Goldberg's sources). Also, as Liberal Fascism was written in 2007, it already feels dated: Goldberg must have assumed that Hillary Clinton was going to cakewalk to the Democratic nomination for the 2008 presidential election because he spent a whole chapter taking her down (whereas Barack Obama got one small mention in a section about the racist roots of Chicago's community organisers). And I was uncomfortable with Goldberg's rhetorical style, with him constantly writing, "Reasonable people would agree…A fair-minded person would acknowledge…Of course I'm not saying that [insert liberal person or program] is displaying the kind of maniacal, racist fascism of a Hitler or a Himmler, but [he's/it's] fascist nonetheless...". 

I still don't know what I in particular was supposed to gain from reading Liberal Fascism, but here's what I did learn: "fascism" does not mean the same thing as "Nazism"; but since that's the inference when we use the word "fascist" to discredit our adversaries, can't we agree to just stop using it?

So, I guess this is where the long review begins. The first problem that I had with this book came right at the beginning: In the introduction, Goldberg says that even scholars disagree on an actual definition for fascism (but all do agree that it is a left-wing movement, so using it as an anti-conservative slur is never appropriate), so he makes up his own definition, which, obviously, seemed jury-rigged to define the kind of modern American progressive liberal that Goldberg is attempting to call out:

Fascism is a religion of the state. It assumes the organic unity of the body politic and longs for a national leader attuned to the will of the people. It is totalitarian in that it views everything as political and holds that any action by the state is justified to achieve the common good. It takes responsibility for all aspects of life, including our health and well-being, and seeks to impose uniformity of thought and action, whether by force or through regulation and social pressure. Everything, including the economy and religion, must be aligned with its objectives. Any rival identity is part of the "problem" and therefore defined as the enemy. I will argue that contemporary American liberalism embodies all of these aspects of fascism.

And the meanness that this book can stoop to came early also, as in this comment on the world's socialists' surprising support of entering WWI:

Even in the United States the vast majority of socialists and progressives supported American intervention with a bloodlust that would embarrass their heirs today -- if their heirs actually took the time to learn the history of their own movement.

I'd imagine that progressives think of the New Deal as a great achievement, but Goldberg is quick to point out that its pointy edges have been sanded off:

Under the New Deal, government goons smashed down doors to impose domestic policies. G-Men were treated like demigods, even as they spied on dissidents. Captains of industry wrote the rules by which they were governed. FDR secretly taped his conversations, used the postal service to punish his enemies, lied repeatedly to maneuver the United States into war, and undermined Congress' war-making powers at several turns. 

Goldberg's abiding point is that, because liberals were able to push through their progressive agendas during the great wars (under Wilson and FDR) unopposed, their great thinkers, like William James, spoke of needing "moral equivalents of war" and that is why, "the left has looked to everything from environmentalism and global warming to public health and 'diversity' as war equivalents to cajole the public into expert-driven unity".  The point is made (and I have no opinion as to its truth) that JFK was a leader straight from Mussolini's mold: handsome and virile; his "ask not what your country can do for you -- ask what you can do for your country" speech was a progressive call to national unity (and therefore, national submission to benevolent overseers); the Peace Corps was a paramilitary force intended to inculcate youth in progressive ideals; the Bay of Pigs and Cuban Missile Crisis were both engineered by Kennedy to produce the "moral equivalence of war" (even if he was squeamish about outright declaring war), in order to further remove decision-making power from the citizens' hands. 

And again, liberals are not only wrong when they call conservatives fascist, but they should understand their own roots in order to learn from them:

The problems in liberalism today reside in liberalism today. The relevance of the past is that unlike the conservative who has wrestled with his history to make sure he does not repeat it, liberals see no need to do anything of the sort. And so, armed with the complete confidence in their own good intentions, they happily go marching past boundaries we should stay well clear of. They reinvent ideological constructs we've seen before in earlier times, unaware of their pitfalls, blithely confident that the good guys could never say or do anything "fascist" because fascism is by definition anything not desirable. And liberalism is nothing if not the pursuit of the desirable.

A little mean-spirited, no? A little, "I'm rubber, you're glue..."

But, like I said, there were ideas that I found interesting, like the reinvention of the Weather Underground from terrorists to hippy idealists. And I liked this section because it fit with my idea of the protagonist in Russell Banks' The Darling (an unapologetic agitator who had spent the 60s trying to bring down the bourgeois conformity of her parents' generation; through any means available). Which makes me think I should read more Russell Banks: his Cloudsplitter looks like an important in-depth picture of John Brown (who is of interest to me after reading The Good Lord Bird) and I keep coming across a recommendation for Continental Drift (even if I'm trying to avoid reading more books from The End of Your Life Book Club). And by the same token, the Black Panthers seem to have become sanitised through the lens of history (even if Michael Chabon painted them as murderous in Telegraph Avenue).

But I was even more interested in how so many of the modern liberal ideas (welfare state, minimum wage, abortion rights) had their roots in racist policies: Goldberg argues that the minimum wage was brought in to price blacks out of the work force ("If I must pay two dollars an hour, I'm not hiring you...") and welfare was intended to break up black families, and hopefully, stop them from reproducing. On this point, Goldberg says (and this statement doesn't have a footnote), "Today black children are less likely to be raised by two parents than they were during the era of slavery". I don't know if that's true or if it's significant of anything, but there it is. As for Margaret Sanger, I knew that she was the founder of Planned Parenthood (so, therefore, a liberal hero), but I didn't know that she was a racist member of eugenics societies and an elbow-rubber of the KKK; that she was vehemently anti-abortion, but when she decided that she would never get the necessary support to sterilise undesirable reproducers (read:poor black people), she made it her mission to distribute birth control to them, and even today, Planned Parenthood  have most of their offices in poor black neighbourhoods. (And Goldberg referenced Freakonomics here, pointing out that when the authors made the connection between 30 million abortions through the 70s-90s and the drastic drop in crime levels, they were careful not to point out that these would have mostly been black women having these abortions.)

What I was most interested in was how fascism relates to Canada, and although Goldberg doesn't give any of the history of fascism in Canada (although he does mention our avidity for eugenics and the sterilisation of undesirable reproducers), it's an interesting lens through which to view Pierre Trudeau, and even more pressingly, his son, Justin; our likely next leader. Pierre, of course, had that charismatic and virile Great Man persona (although, for the life of me, I don't understand the man's famous sex appeal), and he nationalised corporations, expressed anti-Semitic views, spent the country into debt, hobnobbed with Fidel Castro, and invoked the War Measures Act to suspend civil liberties during the FLQ crisis. I'm sure more parallels can be made, but that's a nice list that, by Goldberg's definition, would qualify PET as a bona fide fascist -- but just imagine the uproar by the Canadian left if that was stated publicly as a matter of fact? Just like in the U.S., it's every day here that I see the word "fascist" used against conservatives and against PM Harper, so the big picture of this book was interesting to me. As for Justin, he seems to have all the same ideas as dear old Dad, and famously, when he was asked if there's a nation he admires, Justin answered, "There's a level of admiration I actually have for China. Their basic dictatorship is actually allowing them to turn their economy around on a dime." And I actually have some sympathy for his premise, if not his actual words: It is very frustrating to see the parliamentary system block reforms or send bills off to endless committees and inquiries; the ability to enact an idea quickly would probably be the only upside of a "basic dictatorship" -- or would it? Twice in Liberal Fascism, Goldberg refers to Brave New World as the logical outcome of the progressives' agenda, and as he says both times, "What would be so wrong with a benevolent dictatorship that takes care of our every need and leaves us free to pursue our own visions of happiness?" I need to reread Brave New World...

And lastly, this book made me think of the G20 meeting in Toronto in 2010 that devolved into this:

              

             

At the time, it was the law-and-order police force that was denounced as the fascists, and while I have no desire to defend their most extreme methods, it was the balaclava-wearing rabble-rousers (those who were trying to disrupt the meeting of boring white men and create their own New World Order) who were acting like the very definition of fascists in the tradition of Mussolini, Hitler, and the Weather Underground. The takeaway from the book is that these terms matter.

The Lizard Cage

I am eating an egg. He revises it.
I am eating my whole life.
Rain begins to fall, all at once, steadily, a wet broom sweeping out the sky. Fresh air billows into the cell. The rain has a mantra: egg, egg, egg, egg, egg.
With a fleck of yellow yolk stuck on his lower lip, Teza makes up a stupid joke.
What comes first, the chicken or the egg?
The political prisoner, of course.
He swallows as slowly as it's possible to swallow without choking. He revises it.
What comes first, the chicken or the egg?
The boy. Free El Salvador, who brought the political prisoner an egg from a bowl of mohinga.

The Lizard Cage was published in 2007, at a time when Burmese prisons were still full of political prisoners; mostly demonstrating students rounded up in a 1988 crackdown by the country's ruling generals (as mentioned in the book, it was these generals who changed the country's name from Burma to Myanmar in 1989, and even though some democratic reforms have taken place since 2011, it's still unclear whether it is considered "correct" for English speakers to acknowledge the name change; to acknowledge the authority of the generals' dictatorship). Since the famous dissident Aung San Suu Kyi was released from house arrest in 2010, there have been waves of amnesty for the other political prisoners, but this was a future hardly dreamed of in the bleak and brutal world captured in The Lizard Cage by author Karen Connelly (a Canadian who travelled extensively within Burma and based her novel on interviews and eyewitness accounts).

This is the story of -- primarily -- two characters: Teza, a protest singer who is in year seven of a twenty year prison sentence, currently held in solitary confinement, whose sanity relies on meditation and his communion with the ants, lizards, and a copper-coloured spider that visit his "teak coffin"; and a twelve-year-old orphan (known by various nicknames) who makes his home in the prison, performing errands for the right to live in a crude shack and hunt the rats that he trades to the prisoners for rice and other treasures. When their paths eventually cross, these two characters change each other's lives forever. Prison life is as horrible as the phrase "Burmese prison" might conjure -- with corrupt and sadistic warders, small amounts of barely edible food, sleeping on a concrete floor with a thin cover and bedbugs, brutal beatings, and sexual bullying -- but Teza and "Free El Salvador" both find ways to escape through the written word: Teza, by unwrapping scraps of newsprint from the filters of the cheroots he is allowed to smoke (which he ceremonially assembles into modernist poetry of a sort -- siblings existed remained boy flawlessly/loved despite everything rain understood -- before destroying the evidence of his contraband words); and the orphan, by examining the paperbacks he has collected, hoping to discover the key word that will unravel the mystery of reading for him. Just as Teza's songs have survived his imprisonment, both of these characters know that one white pen -- and the stories it might capture -- can be the most dangerous weapon within the prison walls.

As long as there is paper, people will write, secretly, in small rooms, in the hidden chambers of their minds, just as people whisper the words they're forbidden to speak aloud.

Between the prison scenes and Teza's memories of a Burma before the dictatorship, Connelly revealed a world to me that I hadn't given much thought to before. For this reason, The Lizard Cage is a very interesting novel and, since it was written during the height of the regime's power and brutality, it's a very important story to have captured. The scenes of beatings and sadistic characters wielding their authority were written powerfully, and it's easy to have one's emotions manipulated by a poorly-treated orphan, yet overall, I didn't find this to be a powerful novel, and it's hard for me to pin down what's missing. Like with books about the Holocaust or memoirs of childhood abuse, I often want to rate books higher just because I sympathise with the subject matter, but I can't deny that there was something imperfectly accomplished about The Lizard Cage, while admitting that I am happy to have read it. 

One small complaint: this book has quite a few photographs throughout it (pictures taken by the author over her years in Burma), and as this isn't something I've ever seen in a novel before, I found them a bit distracting; like I wasn't trusted to imagine a young Buddhist monk or a man in shackles. One picture of a table with an overturned stool is opposite a page where the orphan sees an overturned stool and spits at it and I had to wonder, "Did that picture come first and the author needed to work in the image? That image?" In another section, a very powerful inmate is described and it's explained that his nickname "the Tiger" comes from his many tiger tattoos. On the next page, there is a photo of a spindly man's legs, complete with amateurish tigers prowling their lengths -- and again, "Did that picture come first and inspire the character? Why doesn't it jibe with the mental image I was just given?" It was a strange (and distracting) editorial choice.

Bottom line: I am happy to have read The Lizard Cage and would recommend it to anyone who is interested in a peek into a Burmese prison during the years it was a pariah state.

Okay, I know that in my review for The End Of Your Life Book Club I said that the book discussions didn't "particularly convince me to read what they were reading", and that was primarily based on the perfunctory discussions that Will Schwalbe and his mother made about the books that I had read before. For some reason, I thought they made The Lizard Cage sound more intriguing than it is, but I guess that's because they were able to tie it to the importance of storytelling (pretty much the point of their book club) and Mary Anne's professional involvement with human rights. For these reasons, this might have been a more meaningful read to them, and again, I feel wary about following any more of their recommendations.