So Many Books; So Little Time
The
Politics & Prose Book Review
Issue #2, May
2008
Welcome to the second edition of our occasional online book review. We have picked out some of the recent books that we have especially enjoyed, both fiction and nonfiction, in hardcover and paperback.
All of the prices below are the retail price. We will offer them at 20% off through the end of June.
Fiction In Paperback
DANCING TO ALMENDRA By Mayra Montero (Picador, $14)
A Cuban writer now living in Puerto Rico, Mayra Montero has written a charming and off-beat story of a Cuba about to be changed forever. A young and callow reporter, Joaquín Porrata, is assigned to find out what happened to a hippopotamus that escaped from the Havana zoo and was shot to death. In his efforts to follow the story, he finds that somehow the hippopotamus is linked with the killing of Anastasia in the hotel barber shop in New York. He follows the story to an upstate New York mafia convention.
Meanwhile, he has fallen in love with a woman from the carnival, Yolanda, who lost her arm when her former partner, a magician, ran his sword through her during a supposed magic trick. We hear both Joaquin’s and Yolanda’s voices, and the writing is so full of humor that we forget that the noir characters are all slightly unbelievable.
Dancing to “Almendra” is translated by the masterful Edith Grossman, who makes the book sound as though it had been written in English.
•Carla
Cohen
FIELDWORK By Mischa Berlinski (Picador, $14)
Try this new novel about an unlikely subject: anthropological field work in northern Thailand. The story has all the ingredients of a great narrative: an exotic locale, an unusual story, love—and hate.
Like Jonathan Foer in Everything is Illuminated, Berlinski makes himself the fictional narrator. Thus, Mischa, a slacker journalist, is traveling in Thailand when a friend tells him about an American anthropologist, Martiya van der Leun, who is serving a life sentence for murdering a missionary, Daniel Walker. But before the friend could arrange a meeting with Martiya, she committed suicide and left a note for him.
Fascinated, Mischa traces Martiya’s story from her childhood through her graduate studies at Berkeley, and then to her research on the Dyalo tribe in northern Thailand. He meets the Walker family, a large exuberant clan of missionaries who have been working among the Dyalo for decades. From Martiya’s perspective as an anthropologist, the Walkers have superimposed their worldview on to that of the traditional Dyalo people—thus threatening her professional and her personal life.
Note: in a first-rate discussion of literature and popular fiction, Stephen King discussed Fieldwork in Entertainment Weekly, April 6.
•Carla Cohen
THE LIZARD CAGE By Karen Connelly (Spiegel & Grau, $14)
This novel of contemporary Burma takes place almost entirely in a prison near Rangoon—an apt setting for a story about a country so isolated and repressed that there’s little to choose between the rat-infested jail and the city, swarming with Military Intelligence agents—“rats of daylight.” Karen Connelly, a Canadian poet, journalist, and activist, spent two years among the exiles and dissidents on the Thai-Burmese border. When she depicts scenes of breathtaking brutality, poverty, and starvation, she knows what she’s talking about. She also knows how important it is to talk about these things; as the book makes indelibly clear, silence and stories are matters of life and death.
The novel centers on Teza, a popular protest singer, sentenced to twenty years in solitary confinement. In his seventh year as the book opens, Teza practices Buddhist meditation to help him endure his ordeal (though he’s forced to violate the precept against harming other living things: lizards are often his only food), and the political narrative develops a strong spiritual element. Meant to relieve the suffering that is life, Buddhism is put to the test here as Teza, unable to speak, eat, or walk after his jaw and toes are broken in a beating, has literally nothing left but the breath he draws and releases.
Teza’s meditations do help him to endure his situation with dignity, and with detachment comes compassion, even for the jailers. If life is suffering, it’s also love, as Teza’s memories and dreams remind him. Connelly’s lyrical prose, so powerful in its descriptions of misery, is no less evocative of the world’s beauty. And in addition to Teza, she’s populated The Lizard Cage with vivid, fascinating figures: the angry, cruel jailers, as fearful and trapped as the prisoners; the orphan boy who lives at the prison, watching everything, saying little—a hardened survivor, but still just a child; Teza’s dissident brother, willing to use violence to free his country; and his mother, long suffering and morally rigorous.
•Laurie Greer
FICTION IN HARDCOVER
THE COMMONER By John Burnham Schwartz (Nan A. Talese, $24.95)
Author of Reservation Road, Claire Marvel, and Bicycle Days, Schwartz has written a novel of incredible beauty and maturity that explores the difficult transition a young woman of non-royal lineage makes when she marries the Crown Prince of Japan.
Schwartz takes his time, carefully and lyrically laying out Haruko’s early years. She is a good student and athlete, and enjoys the camaraderie of friends. The home in which she spends most of her childhood is lovely and familiar. While there are inevitable misunderstandings with her parents, Haruko never questions their devotion to her; her relationship with her father is particularly strong.
The relative freedom Haruko enjoys growing up clashes violently with the rigid, sheltered life of privilege she enters after her marriage; she is expected not only to adapt, but essentially to cast off her family and personal history. Furthermore, many of the very attributes that made her an attractive catch—her intelligence, strength, and individuality—are unsuitable for a properly deferential wife. While her husband tries to be kind to Haruko, his own upbringing makes it impossible for him to give her the support she needs. Eventually the pressure of the constraints, the bullying of the reigning empress, and the loss of Haruko’s sense of self combine to oppress her. She dutifully produces the heir everyone expects, then enters a deep depression.
Despite the formidable challenges, Haruko still tries to create a life for herself on some of her own terms. Particularly compelling is the relationship that develops between Haruko and her daughter-in-law, Keiko; history is set to repeat itself as the next Crown Prince hand-picks a commoner to join the imperial family.
Schwartz’s tale begins just before the Second World War, and is based on the life of the real Empress Michiko of Japan. Because we grow to care so deeply about the narrator, her story humanizes what might have been the “enemy” point of view during a turbulent time in history. The novel’s foundation is the proud tradition of a nation, Japan, which was forced into the modern era after a crushing defeat. Finishing the book, the reader contemplates whether the glamour of court life and the prestige of the world’s longest-running monarchy are merely the trappings of an institution that has outlived its relevance.
•Tracey Filar Atwood
HOMECOMING By Bernhard Schlink (Pantheon, $24)
Once again, Schlink writes movingly about ordinary Germans whose lives were transformed, if not destroyed, by World War II. In Homecoming the time period is longer and the story more complicated than was the case in The Reader. The theme of homecoming repeats like a motif in a musical composition throughout the novel.
Peter Debauer is seeking information about his identity, starting to ask questions that have never been made explicit. He lives with his mother, a secretary, who, while dutiful, is taciturn and unloving. As a boy, he spent summers in Switzerland with his grandparents, both of whom died when he was in college. They told him that their son, his father, was killed in the war, a fact he later begins to question.
When he finds a loving woman, he realizes for the first time the tenderness he has been deprived of. When he learns she is still tied to a man with whom she had a long relationship years before, he is shattered.
Homecoming describes Peter Debauer’s odyssey as he looks for the ending of a mysterious manuscript that his Swiss grandparents published many years before. He intuitively knows the answers will explain something about who he is. As with The Reader, Schlink is able to deftly combine character and ideas. He raises provocative questions about identity and fidelity with Homer’s epic as the leitmotif.
•Carla
Cohen
NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON By Pascal Mercier (Grove, $25)
Walking over a bridge in a rainstorm, on his way to teach class, Raimund Gregorius—”Mundus” to his students—spots a woman who he’s sure is about to leap to her death. He drops the assignments he’s been carrying and rushes to her aid. She accompanies him on his walk to school, and although it’s not clear what her intentions were, the incident jars Gregorius from his everyday routine. For the last 30 years he has, day in and day out, crossed that bridge and taught his classes—a pattern which has earned him the reputation as the most predictable person at the school. While he considers his life and what he has made of it up to this point, Gregorius encounters in a used bookshop the writings of a Portuguese aphorist whose ruminations speak to him directly. After some hesitation, he sets out to find the author of the little book whose thoughts so closely mirror his own.
These seemingly unrelated incidents prompt the titular trek—the night train to Lisbon—and it opens a story that is grand, elegant, and full of surprises. The author Gregorius seeks is a doctor named Prado, a key figure in the Spanish Civil War, who fought against the Portuguese Fascist regime of António Salazar. Prado, though, has died by the time Gregorius arrives, so he must piece together Prado’s life through his surviving family and friends. One of the late author’s comrades refers to Prado as “the godless priest,” and the emerging portrait of Prado, a fierce intellect and devastating critic of the Church, is the story within the story of this novel. The Portuguese doctor was everything that Gregorius is not. His intellect and strength of character were called upon to serve a greater goal while Gregorius, a teacher of classical languages, dwells primarily in the past.
Ultimately, this journey is one of self-discovery for Gregorius. Breaking free from the quotidian repetition that had been his life as a teacher, he sees things freshly after inhabiting the world of the courageous but complex Portuguese rebel. Unfolding gracefully, the story is rich with philosophical questions and engaging personalities.
•Mark LaFramboise
PEACE By Richard Bausch (Knopf, $19.95)
Set in Italy in 1944, Richard Bausch’s stunning novel follows three American G.I.s on a reconnaissance patrol as, with the aid of an old Italian man, their guide, they search for retreating Germans. It’s a cold, wet, and miserable slog up a mountainside. The soldiers, Corporal Marson, their leader, a minor league pitcher before the war, field-promoted for bravery under fire; Joyner, a bigot and teetotaler who won’t stop itching and swears a blue streak; and Asch, a Jew, and the butt of Joyner’s crude jokes, are three of what was originally a twelve-man squad. Some of the members were killed and new ones were added, but these three men have in common that they witnessed their sergeant casually shoot a prostitute and later lie about the circumstances, and that they were chosen to follow the Italian guide up the mountain.
It’s a short book, only 178 pages, but aside from a few flashbacks to provide history on the three major characters, the action is contained in a single late afternoon and night as the men complain, fight with one another, and search for the contact they know will place them in mortal danger. There is a beauty in the sustained tone of Bausch’s prose that conflicts directly with the ugliness, pettiness, vulgarity, and violence he is describing:
It was almost full dark now. The cold was a dead immensity on them. It was as though they were moving through a film of ice, always climbing, weighted down by web belt and pack, and the bandoliers and grenades, slipping, fighting for air, following the old man, who seemed to have grown younger as the distance between him and the road increased.... Because the ground was so steep, there didn’t seem to be a way to rest without beginning the long slide back down. And all the while there was the unabating, remorseless, utter constancy of the rain.
The rain is the source of the soldiers’ constant discomfort, but it is also the rhythm that propels their footsteps and the nervous chatter that fills up the silence. When at one point they notice the silence and that it has stopped raining, it’s only a second’s pause before the rain turns to snow.
The book’s title, Peace, is not ironic, but peace is only present by its absence. There is little peace, but much tension. Peace is something hoped for, something remembered from the past. By the novel’s end Corporal Marson resolves a problem and feels for just a moment the peace that is promised by the title:
It was peace. It was the world itself, water rushing near the lip of the bank from the storms, the snow and the winter rain. He felt good here. He thought of home, and he could see it, that street, those people. He had found a way back to imagining it.
Peace is a somber and beautiful book. The hardships and terror these men felt bring out the greatest and lowest features of their characters. In the grander scheme of the war, they all knew, this night didn’t matter much. The war in Italy was practically over. The needlessness of their sacrifice contrasts with, but doesn’t undermine, the price they paid. The book is full of simple and stunning contrasts but none as powerful as this one.
•Mark LaFramboise
NONFICTION
THE DAY FREEDOM DIED By Charles Lane (Holt, $27)
Charles Lane, a journalist with the Washington Post, has written an important book about a little known incident in the history of the American South, one that reverberates today in the recent acquittal of three New York City police officers in the shooting death (50 bullets) of an unarmed man. Despite its savagery, the incident that occurred on Easter Sunday, 1873 had remained largely obscure until Lane’s thoroughly researched narrative. One of our booksellers at Politics and Prose grew up in Alexandria, Louisiana, about a fifteen-minute drive from the site of the 1873 massacre in Colfax, and knew little about it until now; it was never part of his American history courses.
Symbolically, the Colfax massacre marked the end of Reconstruction. Somewhere between 62 and 81 black men were deliberately slaughtered and three white men accidentally killed. Not one of the white men involved in the shootings was convicted of murder, although three were found guilty of conspiring to violate the black men’s civil rights, a verdict that was eventually appealed all the way to the Supreme Court. Lane, who studied law at Yale, first discovered this glaring injustice when he was covering the Supreme Court for the Washington Post. Basically, the Supreme Court overturned the convictions of the three white men on the grounds that the government had failed to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they had attacked the black men on account of their race with the intent to violate one of the specific rights under the Civil Rights Act. In effect, the ruling completely emasculated the Enforcement Act, and was the beginning of an era in which “the Supreme Court interpreted black people’s other constitutional rights almost out of existence.” By 1883, the Court had ruled that lynching was not a federal matter since a mob consisted only of private individuals.
In Colfax there still stands a twelve-foot obelisk memorial to the “Heroes...Who fell in the Colfax Riot fighting for White Supremacy.” In 1951 the state of Louisiana installed a plaque in front of the Colfax courthouse that says: “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 Negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873 marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.” Both monuments remain today. If enough people read Charles Lane’s account of this horrific event and its sad judicial history, perhaps the day will come when the residents of Colfax vote to remove these tributes.
•Barbara Meade
FORESKIN’S LAMENT By Shalom Auslander (Riverhead, $24.95)
You do not have to be Jewish to enjoy Shalom Auslander’s struggle with guilt and his fear of eternal damnation. Yes, it is hilariously funny, but at times I found it almost tearfully sad.
Auslander has conflated his own violent fundamentalist Jewish father with the God of the Old Testament. Veering back and forth between obedience and rebellion, Auslander sometimes challenges as many of the 618 commandments as he possibly can, while at other times trying to return to the safety and probity of Orthodox Judaism.
The book opens with Auslander living a “normal” life with his long suffering wife, Orly, in an Orthodox Jewish community across the bridge from New York. With the imminent birth of a son, he is faced with many decisions, not the least of which has to do with the title of the book.
Shalom Auslander has a distinctive voice which he uses to great advantage in this memoir.
•Carla Cohen
GANDHI & CHURCHILL By Arthur Herman (Bantam, $30)
Arthur Herman has written a masterful account of the brief intersection of the lives of Mohandas Gandhi and Winston Churchill, a historical moment that proved pivotal in the downfall of the British rule of India. Gandhi was born only twelve years after the ferocious Great Mutiny in 1857, an event which would mark both his and Churchill’s intellectual development.
Sixteen years later, a crisis known as the White Mutiny—an unsuccessful attempt by the Liberal Prime Minister, Lord Ripon, to loosen judicial laws to allow native judges to hear cases involving white defendants—caused another wave of racial hysteria among the British in India. Shortly after, the Liberal party was defeated, and the new ruling Tory cabinet included Randolph Churchill, the father of Winston, as secretary for India.
At about the same time that the senior Churchill was embarking for Bombay, Mohandas Gandhi was boarding a ship in the same port to sail to England to study law, leaving behind his young wife. It was here, ironically, that he first encountered the Bhagavad Gita, one of the great texts of Indian culture, which would spiritually change him forever. Three years later Gandhi returned to India, but after the excitement of student life in London, daily life in his native land seemed tedious and numbing. The opportunity to escape his boredom came with the offer from two Indian Muslims to hire him to represent their cousin in collecting a large debt in South Africa. Again leaving his wife, this time with two young children, Gandhi set out for Durban, where he would discover the lash of white supremacy in a way he had never experienced it in England or British India. This was another life-changing experience, one that would lead him into political protest.
Meanwhile, the young Winston Churchill, a soldier in the British Army, escaped his capture as a POW by the Boers in South Africa, a feat that made him an instant celebrity. Returning to the battlefield as a reporter, he came within yards of Gandhi—for the only time in their lives—when Gandhi led a volunteer Indian ambulance service in the Boer war. This was the metaphorical intersection from which the two lives, one of the imperialist and one of the nationalist, would diverge for the next forty years.
Arthur Herman, a former professor of history at Georgetown and at Catholic University, has woven many threads through this amazing narrative. Among them are the various and subtle shades of racism, including that of the elitist Gandhi in South Africa, who looked down on the poor Indian laborers and native blacks. For his part, Churchill, during his years as colonial secretary, remained impervious to ethnic tensions as he redrew the map of the Middle East in 1921 to create the new state of Iraq out of disparate ethnicities of Kurds, Shiites, Sunnis, and Jews.
•Barbara Meade
THE LIFE OF THE SKIES: Birding at the End of Nature By Jonathan Rosen (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $24)
Rosen’s wide-ranging book is as much about thinking and feeling as it is about looking for and at birds. Or, as he might put it, birdwatching is as much about thinking and feeling as it is about tracking birds. A birder for over a decade, Rosen sees in his avocation a metaphor for almost all aspects of life, and finds that life’s daily demands, in turn, suggest analogies to birding. Rosen’s book isn’t a field guide (though he describes the habits and histories of several birds, and chronicles field trips to places as diverse as the Southern swamplands, in search of the presumed-extinct ivory-billed woodpecker, and to Israel to see cranes, owls, and hoopoes), but a meditation on living.
That’s a big subject. Rosen breaks it down into its constituent parts, writing about biology, spirituality, nature, and history. He profiles some of the iconic birders and naturalists such as Audubon and Theodore Roosevelt, Alfred Russel Wallace, Darwin, and E.O. Wilson, providing a mini-history of 19th- and 20th-century ideas about the wild. To the early explorers and scientists, studying birds meant collecting specimens—which meant killing the very creatures that so fascinated them. While Rosen characterizes this paradox as an innate human need to want to possess—even to the point of destroying—what inspires wonder, he returns to the matter repeatedly, trying to make sense out of various types of “hunting,” whether for the next bird on the list, a trophy for the wall, a transcendent experience, or a decent livelihood.
Inescapably, this story of birds and humans includes many chapters on species driven into extinction. Rosen laments the loss of the migrating flocks of Carolina parakeet that once blackened the sky and took three days to pass, but tries to be pragmatic about the need to balance human and natural interests. Ultimately, humans are part of nature, though whether one can be “simultaneously an environmentalist and a humanist….[is] the great question facing us today.”
“You don’t go birdwatching in a vacuum,” Rosen says, and his book bears him out. An enthusiastic reader as well as a birder, Rosen took his title from a prose poem by D.H. Lawrence which states that “birds are the life of the skies.” He buttresses his meditations with quotations from Emerson and Thoreau, and from poets such as Whitman, Dickinson, Frost, Wallace Stevens, and the Sufi mystics—among others. In one especially powerful passage, Rosen links Frost’s poem, “The Oven Bird,” to the ovens of the Holocaust, citing the poet’s question about “what to make of a diminished thing” to chilling effect. Not all the cited works are about birds, but Rosen gracefully turns them into reflections on the nature of humanity and on humans’ place and role in nature. This is a fascinating and eloquent book, at once an autobiography, travel narrative, work of literary criticism, natural history, and spiritual primer.
•Laurie Greer
