The Namesake

Yesterday morning i finished The Namesake, by Jhumpa Lahiri.  Lahiri won the Pulitzer Prize in the year 2000 for her first book, a short story collection called The Interpreter of Maladies.  This woman is an amazing writer and, as you can see in the above photo, a raving beauty too.  how fair is that? G took the short stories to Denver with her for the holiday, or i'd be reading them right now.  she says they're fantastic.  i don't have time to devote to writing a review of this novel, the next two weeks are going to be singularly busy ones.  so, i refer you to Amy Reiter's review of it on Salon.com.  she doesn't really mention the heartbreak i felt several times in this book, so perhaps she didn't feel it.  the title character's  (Gogol Gangulis, named for the russian writer of stories) relationship with his father was the cause of my pain.  the immigrant parents, the first-generation children growing up torn between two cultures....Amy Tan has explored this great divide so beautifully in her books about chinese mothers and daughters...but here we have a look at it from an indian father and son's perspective. 

so many books, so little time.  therefore i try to read books i'm pretty sure i'll at least like, hopefully love.  it's a luxury, but it leads to boringly glowing reviews.  i loved this book.  i hope you do too.

He springs eternal

so now i have just read (in the NY Review of Books) Margaret Atwood's review of the Studs Terkel book i was talking about in the previous post and i heartily recommend that you do the same.  it gives another view of the book, and it's a nice piece of the kind of writing that only Atwood can pull off.  she manages wry, adulatory, and critical, all in one review.  she loves the book, she loves Terkel, (in fact, she says "If Studs Terkel were Japanese, he'd be a National Treasure.") but she manages to root out some flaws.  not fatal ones, not even close.  the fact that she makes me want to go right out and buy this book is the bottom line.

re Studs Terkel interview

I just posted an entry on my main, or other, or whatever, journal about a book.  well, about an interview with Studs Terkel about his new book.  so, should this be a post here as well?  here's the link to read my post on the windmills of my mind, and that's easy enough.  isn't it?  the lines blur....yes, it's a book post, but it's also a fairly political post.  or, w/o going to an intermediate site, here's the link to the interview itself!

"American Woman" by Susan Choi - Part 1

     This is a beautifully realized work,  writing that at times takes my breath away.  I have reread many parts of it, something I almost never do.  I am a gluttonous reader, racing through books, finishing one, starting another, with barely a moment's thought in between.  Though I have started, indeed almost finished, another novel in the past week, I keep coming back to this one.

     It is, in part, a fictional retelling of a story familiar to most Americans anywhere near my age.  It came to be known as "the Patty Hearst story," though Patty was only part of it.  The larger story was about young radicals in the Viet Nam war era, so full of idealism, ego, nameless fury and rebellion, that their actions often polarized feeling against them and against the very real ideals they championed (racial and economic justice, an end to the brutal war in VN, to name a couple).  In her review on Salon.com Laura Miller says of this novel that it "isn't merely a fictional retelling of the Hearst case.  Instead, it's that rarest of creations, a political novel that gives equal weight to its characters' inner and outer lives." 

     If you are very young or if you spent the 70's in a cloister, here is one site I found where an obsessional geek has assembled a massive amount of info on the case, including pictures. In American Woman we have the story of the "lost year" when Hearst and two members of the SLA, Bill and Emily Harris, went missing, into the radical underground of the time.  The point of view is that of Jenny Shimada, a young Japanese-American (based on the real-life Wendy Yoshimura), herself living underground in upstate New York.  She is a peripheral member of the radical network that delivers the three escapees from California into her safekeeping and it becomes her job to hide and care for these three very damaged, not to say deranged, young people in a lonely farmhouse near the Hudson.  

(Part 2 continues)

"American Woman" - Part 2

Her further impossible job is to persuade , encourage, them to write a book detailing their experiences.  They cannot focus on this project.  They sleep, smoke, drink vast quantities of wine, are delusional, amok, "undisciplined, and terrified, and aflame with self-pity."    

      A gentle artist conflicted about her own past as a bomber, missing William, her jailed lover/mentor/teacher, outcast and lonely to the bone, Jenny finds herself chatting with people, doing things she knows to be dangerous, "introducing herself to the hardware-store owner, the train conductor, the librarian.  Compensating, she knew, for her strangeness - not just her strangeness to this town, but her lone Asian face...Sometimes she longed for a companion...A confidante, to make sure that she didn't break down and confide in the plumber."

     The Patty Hearst character is called Pauline, and ultimately this is the story of how she becomes that longed-for companion and confidante,  of the friendship that develops between the lonely philosophical Jenny and the confused and frightened Pauline.  During the difficult months of isolation, the two women live a slow dance of growing trust, painted in exquisite brush strokes:  small moments of daily life, absurd moments of revolutionary posturing, bloodsoaked moments of terror.  After a robbery planned by the outlaws goes awry and results in a murder, Jenny and Pauline go on the lam  in an ill-planned journey with no clear destination.  

     During this odyssey of backroads Americana Jenny and Pauline form a bond of sisterhood, which strengthens in the months they live together in what turns out to be the journey's end:  home, the Bay area, the place they both fled, the place they go to earth.  That after their  track-down and arrest Pauline betrays Jenny and their avowed sisterhood is not really a surprise, but it is a betrayal that hurts on many levels.

(Part 3 - the last one, really - continues)    

"American Woman" - Part 3

     My question when I finished the book was:  Who is the "American Woman" of the title?  Pauline?  or Jenny?  I feel it refers to them both, but that it is far more a reference to Jenny.  So, I was pleased to discover, in a Publishers' Weekly interview with Choi, that I am right.  She says:  "I don't think there's a single answer.  I guess the obvious 'American Woman' is Pauline, with her towering American pedigree, but I actually think of Jenny as being more truly that person.  People seem to view her as such a weird, foreign element, yet she was a California native."  An important part of Jenny's California pedigree is her father, detained in Manzanar with his parents as a young man, a fighter in his youth, now a bitter disillusioned old man who cannot condone her radicalism, but who loves her and wants her to survive and find a life for herself.  In the last section of the book we hear Jim Shimada's story, one that needs retelling in this new age of fear, this new era of distrust and distancing from those who don't look like "us."  The story of the Japanese internment camps is a shameful one, that has affected both Jim and Jenny, and is, I think, an integral part of Jenny's search for identity, place, peace.

     I keep wanting to quote long passages from the book.  Originally I did quote several.  And then I took them out.  Alone, torn from its integral place in the book, the quote loses its power.  These are not epigrams or aphorisms, they are organic parts of the whole.  Having read Miller's conclusion in the Salon.com review I must end with it, because I realize there is no way I could say it better.

"American Woman feels organic, not constructed;  it's a mature, fully realized work that does everything a novel should do and seldom does in this day and age.  It shows us the ways that character can be destiny, the big and the little forces that control our lives, the possibility that our worst choices will ultimately seem worth it, and the strange and circuitous paths by which a soul as lost as Jenny Shimada's can find its way home."

the bookstores of my youth

bitch magazine (after the site opens click on the link and you'll be there) has an article on the history of the feminist bookstore, which is kind of the history of the second wave of feminism, in a way.  in my lost youth the women's bookstore was the heart of the community, the place you went when you hit town to scope out the scene, meet people, make connections.  every good town had one of these, and i visited many of them.  i came to know the women who owned or ran them, so that when i got to Albuquerque my first stop would be Full Circle Books;  when i was in Austin it was Book Woman first, then Whole Foods, and then it felt like home.  when we lived outside of Boston we spent our mad money at New Words, in P'town it was Now Voyager.  i even worked at Now Voyager for a summer....talk about having your finger on the pulse!  of these stores only Book Woman is still alive and functioning as a place you can find books you won't find anywhere else.  when i was in Austin in august i dropped over $80 (on mostly paperbacks, so it was some books!) at Book Woman on things i knew i wouldn't see in Barnes and Noble.  visit this store's website, and when you're looking for that elusive book:  women's history, poetry, fiction, photography, philosophy, mystery by and about women, consider ordering from them instead of Amazon.com.

REASONS TO GO ON LIVING

forthcoming books: 

Anne Tyler,  The Amateur Marriage  (january)

Robert Crais, The Forgotten Man  (i'm an elvis cole/joe pike addict)

P.D. James,  The Murder Room

Amy Tan,  The Opposite of Fate  (not a novel, a collection of pieces. her novel was interrupted by a bad bout with lyme disease, from which she is still suffering)

 

books are not life, but then...what is?

perhaps you are thinking of me as the world's slowest reader.  what about American Woman ? you say.  will i ever finish?  will i ever say anything about the book?  and so on.  no, actually i am a fairly fast reader, way above average.  i'm just overburdened with reading things like grammar tests, essays from intermediate ESL writing class, inept summaries of texts from the beginning ESL reading class, memos from the department heads, newsletters from the department of adult education.  stuff like that.  eccchhhhhh. 

however, i did finish American Woman,  several days ago.  i'm into Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake  now.  not very far into it, and not likely to get there any time soon.  i'm doing an extra writing class tomorrow.  it's a four-hours-once-a-week class, friday mornings.  they've already lost one week's worth thanks to hurricane isabel and they'll lose another one next week for the thanksgiving holiday.  i feel that this leaves them at a disadvantage - so, we're going to meet to do some catch-up work in the library tomorrow. that, with yard work, grocery shopping and laundry, will take care of the weekend.  i also insanely picked up three movies after i left school today.  when do i think we'll watch three movies?  sleep is about abandoned during the week, maybe i'll give it up on the weekend too. 

American Woman   was a book to think about for a long time.  and i am.  thoughts will eventually be typed in this space after some gestation. 

what i've been reading

to procrastinate making up a test for my Beginning Grammar class, i thought it would be fun to put up a list here of the books i have particularly enjoyed during the past year or so.  this list sounds better than i am...my actual reading also consists of a lot of dreck,  mainly in the form of mindless murder mysteries. 

 so, in no particular order:

Changing Planes    -   Ursula K. LeGuin
Crescent      -       Diana Abu-Jaber
Bangkok 8    -   John Burdett
Child of my Heart    -   Alice McDermott
The Lost Garden   -   Helen Humphreys
Middlesex    -   Jeffrey Eugenides
The Master Butchers' Singing Club    -   Louise Erdrich
#1Ladies Detective Agency    -   Alexander McCall Smith
The Secret Life of Bees   -   Sue Monk Kidd
Summerland   -   Michael Chabon
Unless, a Novel    -   Carol Shields
The Frederica Quartet:   Virgin in the Garden,  Still Life,  Babel Tower,  A Whistling Woman    -   A.S. Byatt
Ten Little Indians    -   Sherman Alexie

                                   

hope? or destruction?

oh no.  browsing through blog of a bookslut just now, i discovered that Girl with the Pearl Earring   is being made into a movie.  this was one of my favorite books of the past several years, and i have given it to everyone whom i know  would appreciate it.  such a quiet perfect still-life of a book, such a self-contained-universe dutch-master kind of book....can it become the same kind of movie?  or will it be one i will have to avoid in terror?  this is the first mention of this i have seen.  anyone know anything more about this?  who's directing, has it been cast yet, and with whom if so?   

more on joan didion

ah, the freedom and release of friday afternoon.  friday evening now, dark and chilly.  the wild winds have died down at last, leaving the yard strewn with oak branches, deep drifts of oak and maple leaves.  we are lucky to have had no power outage, no serious problems from this storm of wind.

just wanted to put a note in here to those who might be interested in diane johnson's review of Where I Was From  in the New York Review of Books.  unfettered by 2500 character restraint, ms. johnson can far more fully expound on the themes of didion's book. she does a very thorough and eloquent job too, i have to say.  she ends up calling it a "heartbreaking essay," a judgment with which i must agree.

and i can't wait to have that limit removed.  yes, it's tightened up my writing.  okay, thanks.  now, i can't wait to be unbound.

Losing Carolyn

via a visit to sappho's breathing i have just found out that Carolyn Heilbrun died last month.  i feel a personal sense of loss at this.  she was one of the first feminist writers i discovered when i began my search for a new vision of a woman's universe.  her Writing a Woman's Life  is a feminist classic, which i will go find on my bookshelves and begin a memorial reading.  i'll miss the Kate Fansler mysteries, which Heilbrun wrote under the pseudonym of Amanda Cross.  I've read most of them and passed them on to sisters and friends.  according to the NYT obituary, and her son, she committed suicide.  not because of illness, but because she felt her life had reached its conclusion and wanted to maintain control over her final destiny.  i entirely understand this decision, but don't know that i could have the courage to implement it.  she was a strong woman, to the end.

a RIF on Scalzi's Project

i just paid a visit to john scalzi's internet weblog, Whatever, to check out what he's up to over there. and he's up to some good things.  the major one of which i think deserves a mention and a plug here in my new book journal.  becuz he's raising money over there for literacy.  specifically money to support a great outfit called "Reading is Fundamental."  my partner and i have been working with these people for several years now in various literacy programs we're involved in, and i can't toot their horn loudly enough.  we've seen kids as eager to choose books from a table of colorful picture and story books as any kid ever is to play a video game or eat strangely-colored cereal.  we've seen the pride and joy with which they curl up with their own new book, trace the pictures with their fingers, read the words if they're able, come ask to be read to if they're not yet.  most of the families we work with don't have much extra money, but once they see the effects of a book donated by RIF they start spending their own hard-earned dollars to buy their kids more books, and reading to them, and so more and more readers and book-lovers are created, and we can all rejoice in the continued life of literature. scalzi's offering some reading material for your donation, three original holiday pieces he's working on.  you only get to read them if you're on his list of donors.  so, get thee to Whatever and contribute the princely sum of $3.  it's a very good deal.

From the launch pad

musenla's ex libris  inspired my beginning this book journal. in it she mentions recently finishing jeffrey eugenides' Middlesex ,  a book i loved.  it's been too long since i read it to presume to write a review, but no one else i know has read it.  a little journal-to-journal book chat would be fun.  

the book i just finished is joan didion's Where I Was From,  a meditation on her deep California roots, CA "native" mythology in general, the myth of the crossing, the passage, the abandonment of so much in order to arrive on the golden shores.  and then the destruction of much of what was golden about those shores. ultimately, abandonment is what it's about.  the last section deals mainly with her mother's death, a rite of passage for most women, a crossing into ultimate adulthood, a mutual abandonment.  although my mother died over 20 years ago, didion's words about what we feel when our parents die resonate strongly:  "who will look out for me now, who will remember me as I was, who will know what happens to me now, where will I be from."  i think didion's mother's death has unmoored her from her own personal mythology, and led her to investigate the idiosyncratic CA ideals of individuality and freedom, coupled with the state's extreme reliance on the largesse of such institutions as the Southern Pacific Railroad and the federal government.  she sees "who will remember me as i was?"  as a major question for the long-vanished idealized CA, a golden dream that no longer is sure who will look out for it,  looking for the answer to "who will know what happens to me now?"   Californians may hope to have found an answer in the election of their new governor, but i think the only truth to be realized, for each of us, lies in this poignant sentence ending a passage of didion's trying to cope with a box of her mother's small possessions:  "There is no real way to deal with everything we lose."