Category Archives: ..Adult Readers
Children of Manzanar edited by Heather C. Lindquist
The PR materials that arrived with this remarkable title contains one of the most effective descriptions of the Japanese American imprisonment during World War II I’ve ever read: ” … this bleak chapter in American history, when Japanese bloodlines overshadowed American birthrights.” What a concise, solemn reminder during this 70th anniversary year of Executive Order 9066 when President Franklin D. Roosevelt authorized the imprisonment of 120,000 Americans of Japanese descent during World War II.
The powerful phrase is truncated from the book’s first chapter, “American Birthrights, Japanese Bloodlines” which introduces some of the imprisoned children – “more than 3,700 infants, toddlers, children, and teens” – who called Manzanar “home” from 1942 to 1945: “The civil liberties that should have been their birthright as American citizens were denied them during wartime. Their bloodlines marked them to be segregated from their non-Japanese peers and playmates. They left their homes, friends, and pets behind.”
Combining photographs culled from official government archives and personal collections with quotes from Manzanar’s children – most of them now in their 80s and 90s! – Children is richly dense with little known history in a single, slim volume. In addition to the Japanese American children are, surprisingly, photos and remembrances from some their Caucasian counterparts, the children of War Relocation Authority staff who lived mostly in a separate Administration Area. [Erica Harth, one of those non-Japanese Manzanar children, would grow up to become a lauded professor and author of Last Witness: Reflections on the Wartime Internment of Japanese Americans.]
Caught in the chaos of sudden uprootings and bleak conditions, societal – especially familial – structures suffered and even disintegrated. Children, in all their innocence, quickly adjusted: “They sneaked past the barbed wire to go fishing, played marbles in the dust, and formed lifelong friendships. They also saw their parents become powerless, witnessed systematic injustice, and faced an uncertain future. … [Y]oung people experienced Manzanar very differently than their parents and grandparents.” And here, you’ll find glimpses of some of their remarkable, diverse stories …
In addition to the stories, editor Heather C. Linquist weaves in little known details (with photos, of course) about Manzanar, including its Toy Loan Library, Hospital School (for children with health conditions or disabilities that did not allow them to attend the regular camp schools), the Children’s Village (run by social workers Harry and Lillian Matsumoto and home to 101 children, many of whom had been removed from West Coast foster homes and orphanages), and even experiences of resettlement and relocation after war’s end. Perhaps the most touching of all is a special spotlight on the now-annual Manzanar High School Reunion which, with its aging student bodies, since 2004 “has been billed as the ‘last one’ but we haven’t stopped yet.” True testimony to the resilience of children … even when bloodlines overshadowed birthrights.
Tidbit: Small world moment I must share … editor Linquist has Smithsonian history! She interned at National Museum of American History where she “discovered a love of exhibit planning and writing,” training she later used to develop interpretive exhibits at the Manzanar National Historic Site!
And, I have to note one minor numbers-related discrepancy: page 122 uses ’110,000′ as the number of Japanese and Japanese Americans relocated while page 133 uses ’120,000.’ I’ve seen both numbers in various places … just not usually in the same book. Perhaps I’m reading something incorrectly … feel free to enlighten me!
Update: Ask and ye shall receive. And I did! Numbers answer kindly (expediently!) provided by Alisa Lynch, Chief of Interpretation at the Manzanar National Historic Site: “This issue is how the people are counted and when. More than 110,000 were ’evacuated’ from their West Coast homes, but 120,313 were in WRA custody (i.e., in the ten camps). That includes nearly 6000 children born in camps, others who transferred in, 219 non-Japanese Americans, etc.” She even provides an easy-to-read visual on page 2 of the Manzanar/National Park Service handout which you can access by clicking here. Talk about oh so grateful, near-instant satisfaction!
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2012 Continue reading
The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides
“To start with, look at all the books.” Thus opens Jeffrey Eugenides third and latest novel with another memorable zinger – most definitely three for three. Alas, the odds for what follows those fabulous first lines aren’t nearly quite as zingy. So far, Eugenides is averaging a new title about every nine years. The Virgin Suicides (1993) shocks immediately: “On the morning the last Lisbon daughter took her turn at suicide – it was Mary this time, and sleeping pills, like Therese – the two paramedics arrived at the house knowing exactly where the knife drawer was, and the gas oven, and the beam in the basement from which it was possible to tie a rope.” Too bad I felt like I had to slog through the rest of the shockers. The Pulitzer-winning Middlesex (2002) begins with another attention grabber: “I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.” Unlike Suicides, that proved to be an enormously rewarding read I’m still savoring.
So when Marriage hit shelves last fall, I got nervous; something about disappointing follow-up titles puts me in an irrationally foul mood for far too long. Eventually I succumbed to veteran David Pittu‘s narration stuck in my ears during one of my high-mileage running weeks. That the book itself remained unopened might give you a hint as to my final verdict.
Here’s the general gist: Three undergrads – privileged, well-read Madeleine; brilliant, unbalanced Leonard (whom Pittu inexplicably voices with a distracting Jack Nicholson-like growl); and regretful, searching Mitchell – spend four years at Brown, graduate (more or less), and attempt to establish themselves as young adults in the real world. Bland Madeleine never gets over her anxiety over being so normal. Mercurial Leonard succumbs to his genetics. Charming Mitchell travels the world trying to find himself. In case you were waiting, the marriage part of the plot doesn’t kick in until the last 70 or so of the hefty 400+ pages (I’ll be good: no spoilers here!).
Being a lit major might enhance your reading experience – you could, for example, enjoy deconstructing why semiotics becomes an embodiment for a professor’s midlife crisis (leather jacket and all!). Barring that, you could create quite the literary laundry list populated by just about every canonic dead white man and (thankfully) more than a few female counterparts; the book’s first paragraph alone includes Wharton, James, Dickens, Trollope, Austen, Eliot, the Brontë sisters, Lawrence, Levertov, and Colette … and, of course, given a protagonist named Madeleine, you’ll eventually find mention of Ludwig Bemelmans, as well.
In spite of all that erudition – “look at all the books” indeed!! – the triangulated life stories never move beyond the flat, printed page (and drones on for 15.5 hours stuck in the ears). Ah, well … at least I’ve got another eight years left to get over my foul mood of disappointment as I wait for that next Eugenides title – my current calculations have me convinced it should be remarkable.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, Nonethnic-specific
Ichiro by Ryan Inzana
A shape-shifting teapot which releases a mischievous tanuki when heated. A fatherless hapa Japanese American boy headed to Japan to stay with his mother’s father whom he barely knows. Two stories, two cultures, two vastly different worlds, all intertwine to create a fantastical adventure in Ryan Inzana‘s surprising, highly original Ichiro.
In a New York City subway, young Ichiro watches his Japanese American mother accosted by street youths with their racist comments of “chink-ee eyes” and “could blind her wit’ dental floss.” She doesn’t engage, merely moving away, assuming (hoping) that Ichiro’s headphones have kept him protected for the time being. Ironically, and sadly, Ichiro is learning a not dissimilar racism from his bitter American grandfather – having lost his son, Ichiro’s father, to war – directed at the diverse immigrants in their post-9/11 neighborhood.
Ichiro is not quite ready to visit his mother’s homeland where she will work and he will be left behind with his Japanese grandfather. In Japan, Ichiro doesn’t quite fit in either, clearly being more American than Japanese … and the local bullies know how to make him feel unwelcome. But his grandfather is patient and gentle, ready with both historical and cultural lessons and insight. Having survived WWII, he also explains a very different view of war and its aftermath to his unaware grandson.
One night, Ichiro ventures out into his grandfather’s backyard where he’s set a trap to catch whoever – or whatever – has been stealing all the ripening fruit. When he startles a hungry tanuki, Ichiro is suddenly pulled into a completely different world … where all hell breaks loose – literally. He’s about to experience a war of his own … good guys, bad guys, and all the other characters in between …
The constant movement Inzana captures in his sweeping art quickly draws readers into his multi-layered story. Moments that might occasionally seem overly didactic to adult readers as Ichiro is forced to outgrow his simplified, childhood view of clear-cut right and wrong will probably go unnoticed by the book’s intended audience of middle grade and high school readers. In spite of the story’s swift pace, young readers will hopefully pause to give serious consideration to the all-encompassing tragedies of war, violence, collateral damage, in addition to everyday acts including bullying.
While Inzana entertains, he also gives warning. “What is the world coming to?” the final panel asks in full technicolor. Surely, with the future always encroaching, our youth will need to answer sooner than later.
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2012 Continue reading
River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey by Candice Millard
Being always a dozen or so titles behind, a confluence of certain events seem to need to happen for some posts to finally get from my brain to the … uh … the virtual world.
First things first: River of Doubt is absolutely riveting! But for me to tell you that, I had to be reminded to do so by sitting through two-plus soporific hours in a chilly theater last night watching (the usually enchanting) John Lithgow stumble and scream through a couple of decades of journalist Joseph Alsop’s life – Alsop’s grandmother, Corinne Roosevelt, was Teddy Roosevelt’s younger sister and appears sporadically throughout River. Then I opened an email this morning from a Smithsonian APA Program colleague about only reading fiction, so just to be contrary, here I am …
Teddy Roosevelt’s third bid for the presidency in 1912 was a spectacular failure. Having survived a sickly childhood by taking on impossible adventures out of sheer will, Roosevelt refused to quietly retire, and instead headed to South America to undertake what would be the greatest physical challenge of his life: to chart the unknown waters of what was then known as the Rio da Dúvida, or the River of Doubt, which winds through Brazil and eventually flows into the Amazon.
Former National Geographic magazine editor/writer Candice Millard tracks the grueling journey through journals, letters, and articles not only of the former President, but also of his tenacious co-participants, including Roosevelt’s son Kermit, Brazil’s most famous explorer and expedition co-commander Colonel Cândido Rondon, and legendary American naturalist and explorer George Cherrie. Before the expedition actually reaches the River (possible spoiler alert here), Roosevelt will have had to separate from the incompetent outfitter Anthony Fiala and the arrogant and racist Father John Augustine Zahm.
As much as the expedition’s human participants are the book’s heroes (and villains both), Millard’s most excellent adventures are enhanced by ever-so-graphic descriptions (or nightmares, if you will) of the flora and fauna throughout the uncharted territory (no spoilers here, ahem … except to mention that piranhas ain’t got nothin’ on candiru!).
With Paul Michael narrating, I found myself running the river trails with more than the usual alertness – hey, I’m in DC, I never know what sort of slimy surprise I might run into! Millard’s expert storytelling proves absolutely addictive – surely, the late President is shouting ‘bully!!’ for her debut effort from wherever his latest adventure might be.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2005 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Nonfiction, Nonethnic-specific, South American
The Artist of Disappearance by Anita Desai
How silly of me for waiting so long to read this, the venerable Anita Desai’s latest, when I’ve had the galley for almost a year (it pubbed last December). Instead, I’ve slogged through too many disappointing, tedious, nightmare-inducing titles when I could have been celebrating just how affecting great storytelling can be … my one regret is that the slim collection contains only three novellas, although that, too, is a much-needed reminder of quality over quantity.
Neither the book’s back-cover blurb nor the accompanying press release offers much information about the collection’s contents, except to reveal that the three stories are set in India “in the not-too-distant past,” followed by many (well-deserved) superlatives about Desai’s writing. To approach the stories knowing virtually nothing is truly a gift (so no spoilers here). I don’t think I’ve ever actually committed this cliché to print … but sinking into Desai’s quiet stories was a cleansing breath of fresh air after too many oppressive texts in a row. Allow me to share just these few thoughts …
“The Museum of Final Journeys” will leave you startled. A young man, new to civil service, begins his career in a remote town. What he finds in a once-glorious compound reduced to a pleading cry for help from its caretaker, will haunt him for decades with “Could I have done more?”
In “Translator Translated” – my personal favorite – two disparate schoolmates meet decades later, their professional lives converging over an obscure book. Their exchange will surely have you rethinking authorship, accessibility, and literary legacy – not to mention the nature of human relationships. Pay close attention to the unexpected shifts in point-of-view …
The final story, the eponymous “Artist,” is a labyrinthine exploration of our bonds – the ones in name only, and the ones we actually uphold – to family, friends, and even Mother Earth.
On the book’s final page, a character shouts, “‘That is what we need for a finish!’” And on this Friday-the-13th, I appropriate his sentiment with gusto: This is what I need to finish a mighty crazy week! Feel free to join me …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk, translated by Maureen Freely
In spite of its heft (500+ pages, or 20.5 hours if you let the perfectly-paced John Lee read to you), not much really happens in The Museum of Innocence. I’m adding here the requisite spoiler alert, but I’m fairly certain that most readers will guess the outcome lonnnggggg before the final pages.
In Istanbul in 1975, rich man Kemal (30) falls in love with poor distant relation Füsun (18). Kemal goes ahead anyway with his long-planned engagement to perfect partner Sibel; Füsun disappears. Kemal finally breaks off with Sibel, finds Füsun, waits eight years for her to dump her “fatso” husband (by going to her family’s home some four times a week). Füsun dies. Kemal builds a museum to her memory, filled with everyday objects from her life (4,213 cigarette butts alone!). He passes on April 12, 2007 [hence today's post] on what would have been her 50th birthday. A character named Orhan Pamuk authors the dead man’s obsessive story.
In supreme irony, that writer-character – ”chain-smoking twenty-three-year-old Orhan” – makes his first appearance at Kemal and Sibel’s lavish engagement party. Kemal disses the young man as “nothing special,” then dismisses the entire Pamuk table – “his beautiful mother, his father, his elder brother, his uncle, and his cousins” – as “tedious.” Four hundred pages (and some three decades) later, that tedious young man morphs into “the esteemed Orhan Pamuk,” whom Kemal chooses to “[narrate] the story in my name, and with my approval” – which might remind devoted Pamuk readers that this meta-Orhan announced he was writing a new novel titled The Museum of Innocence about half-way through the real Pamuk’s Snow.
Kemal confesses on the second-to-the-last page of Museum that although he read Snow “all the way to the end,” it proved to be “a bit of a struggle” given his dislike of politics. Snow‘s protagonist Ka even gets a quick mention in Museum as meta-Orhan laments over the public’s accusations of misrepresentations in his work – which might make you consider why Kemal would choose this Orhan as his mouthpiece. Apolitical a character as Kemal might be, Museum merely glosses over class, East/West identity, restrictively gendered mores, the nature of literature (and so much more), for the numbing details of Kemal’s fixated stalking and skeezy kleptomania. By book’s end, perhaps we can just blame this meta-Orhan for all the novel’s weaknesses.
When I lamented over my grave disappointment to an erudite literary scholar buddy (because I knew he’s a huge fan of Pamuk’s Snow), he mentioned the post-Nobel curse that’s plagued other great writers like J.M. Coetzee; he also admitted he never finished Museum. Pamuk won the 2006 Nobel Prize in Literature; his gorgeous Nobel Lecture, “My Father’s Suitcase,” makes for a heartfelt antidote to Museum. Interestingly, an actual museum is apparently still planned to open in a building that Pamuk bought in 1999 in the Çukurcuma neighborhood of Istanbul, where much of the novel is set.
Which means .. if, after you’ve read Museum, and still haven’t had enough of this obsession, rest assured, your entry is guaranteed on page 520.
Tidbit: I can’t believe this turned up in my inbox less than an hour after I hit ‘publish’ for this post: The Innocence of Objects – Pamuk’s catalog of the objects in his real-life Museum (!) – debuts this fall! The timing feels surreal!
Readers: Adult
Published: 2009 (United States) Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, .Translation, Turkish
20th Century Boys (vol. 20) by Naoki Urasawa, with the cooperation of Takashi Nagasaki, English adaptation by Akemi Wegmüller
Manga addict though I am, I DO try to keep manga posts spaced out, so I don’t look TOO panel-dependent (even though I am!). But right now, I can’t contain my effusive excitement over the latest volume of 20th Century Boys – which hit shelves yesterday! – because it’s one of the most heart-thumping in the series thus far! Clearly I’m not alone in my groupie devotion: the Boys won the Eisner Award (the Oscar of comics) for Best U.S. Edition of International Material – Asia in 2011.
Oh, holy moly, or I suppose that should be “Holy Mother”! As Yukiji, Otcho, Yoshitsune, and Kanna plot their next move against the Friend (and it’s major!), Yukiji insists that Kanna needs to finally see her “Holy Mother” Kiriko. So convinced is Yukiji about the needed reunion, she’s even managed to actually track Kiriko to a Japanese address … in a place called “Frogdoom.” Maruo heads over there to make first contact … where he finds childhood buddy Keroyon and the very best soba noodles ever. Really, it makes perfect sense!
Meanwhile, Kanna, Otcho, and Yukiji arrive at the Friend’s fortress, where an insider is waiting to get them through the checkpoints. Kanna gives her elders the slip, and confronts the Friend face-to-uh … head wrap bandage thing (see cover, ahem). Alien space ship, an invincible robot, bully twins gone straight (or not), a deathly race between fatal virus vs. humanity … who is going to win this round?
Once you open that first page, you won’t be able to stop until you’re forced to – what a bummer that back cover comes so soon! Then you’ll have a mad wait until June (for vol. 21) and August (for the finale – sniff, sniff – that will be vol. 22). Talk about testing my patience!
To check out all the previous volumes of 20th Century Boys (which you should) – please click here.
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2012 (United States)
20 SEIKI SHONEN © Naoki Urasawa/Studio Nuts
Original Japanese edition published by Shogakukan Inc. Continue reading
Princess Knight (vols. 1-2) by Osamu Tezuka, translated by Maya Rosewood
With all that swashbuckling fun, Princess Knight – recently available in full, in English translation, in two volumes – is seemingly one of the godfather of manga’s more goofy stories. Up in heaven, God’s in the process of deciding gender for each about-to-be-born baby, assigning a girl heart or a boy heart just before sending them down to earth. Mischievous angel Tink (a nominal nod to Tinkerbell?) decides one such baby “look[s] like you’d be a boy anyways!” and stuffs a blue heart in its mouth … but seconds later, God decides she’s going to be a girl, and suddenly she’s both. Uh-oh. So God orders Tink earthbound with the gender-bender baby to retrieve the boy heart if she turns out to the girl God foretold.
Down in earthly Silverland, the queen is about to give birth. She needs to bear a son to carry on the royal line, or else the throne will be stolen by an evil relative. Princess Sapphire enters the world, but in a stuttering mistranslation, a prince is announced to the assembled kingdom. The young royal grows up as Prince Sapphire (at least to the public) – even though she bears an uncanny resemblance to Disney’s animated Snow White. She’s the epitome of princely power, but give her a flouncy gown and a hefty wig, and she morphs into the most graceful and elegant stranger who (of course) captures the heart of Prince Franz Charming from the nearby kingdom of (what else?) Goldland.
But all is not well in the fair lands. Duke Duralumin is determined to install his less-than-competent son (named Plastic!) on the throne. Duralumin’s henchman Lord Nylon will do anything to get rid of Sapphire. Meanwhile, Madame Hell wants Prince Franz for her own daughter, the goddess Venus decides the hapless prince should actually be hers, and a handsome young pirate falls in love with Sapphire and vows to do her bidding. Through it all, Tink must try to keep Sapphire safe, long enough to return that errant heart to heaven.
Beneath the adventurous, fast-paced, often comical façade, Tezuka adds more than a few heavy-duty layers: gender politics, equality and equity, class issues, questions of identity, definitions of morality, and more. Most interestingly, Tezuka takes on Christianity, perhaps more overtly than in any other of his works (certainly that I’ve read thus far). From gender identification as God-ordained and the possibility of ‘holy’ mistakes in the first chapter (daring!), to the mix-and-matching of a Christian God with ancient Greek deities, to crucifix-fearing evil characters (including Satan), to surprising representations of heaven and hell, Tezuka pushes one button after another … just to see what might happen. The result is a delightful, thoughtful challenge – visually, intellectually … and even spiritually.
To check out other titles by the godfather of manga on BookDragon, click here.
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2011 (United States) Continue reading
Sông I Sing: Poems by Bao Phi
April is National Poetry Month. Every once in a long while, even a poetry-dullard like me has a poetic WOW!-moment. Certainly I’m not alone … Bao Phi is a nationally-lauded performance poet, twice winning the Minnesota Grand Poetry Slam and twice winning poetry slams at Nuyorican Poets Cafe in NYC. He’s appeared on HBO Presents Russell Simmons Def Poetry (season 3, episode 6), and was a National Poetry Slam finalist in 2000. His poem, “Race,” was selected in The Best American Poetry 2006.
Given his credentials, that Sông I Sing is Phi’s first collection is somewhat surprising, as welcome as it is. [He did previously debut three chapbooks Last Name First (2005), The Way We Pay (2004), and Surviving the Translation: Collected Poems from 1993-2002 (2002).] Dedicated “for my Asian American people,” Phi’s work is racial, historical, political, sociological … most of all, even when he’s subdued and thoughtful, Phi is angry – powerfully, elegantly, justifiably angry.
Of the four sections, each prefaced by the words of a fellow ethnic writer (Lac Su, Julie Otsuka, Pablo Neruda, Joy Harjo, David Mura), the second and longest proves most resonating for its simplicity and complexity both. Titled “The Nguyễns,” Phi opens with a quote from Julie Otsuka’s astonishing When the Emperor Was Divine: “Who am I? You know who I am. Or you think you do … I’m the one you call Gook. I’m the one you don’t see at all – we all look alike …”
In the section’s 14 poems, all share the common Vietnamese name Nguyễn, they might have had a few similar experiences, but none of them ‘look alike’: Vu Nguyễn from Sacramento wants his revenge against Chavis Johnson “for pushing me down in ninth grade / and calling me gook”; Kaylee Nguyễn from Chicago who, as a chef, wants to tell you “that when I see the wilted attempts at vegan Vietnamese cuisine / made by white people in co-ops / I think of Britney Spears in an áo dài”; John Nguyễn who is serving out his ROTC in Iraq who insists, “let no one say I fought this war to make a better world / for our unborn children”; Katrina Nguyễn from New Orleans who “never heard my own name more often … [b]ut no one sees me”; Dotty Nguyễn from Dallas who pleads “Ask me anything, just don’t ask me / To stop calling you my mother”; and Vinh and Linda Nguyễn sharing a fire escape reminisce about going “to that f**ked-up poetry show / even when I told you I felt like watching spoken word / was like paying five bucks to get punched repeatedly in the face / and say thank you – .” Despite the anger, Phi surely knows how to laugh, too …
This week in DC is not unlike a Bao Phi-celebration. With the annual AAAS (Association of Asian American Studies) Conference in capital residence, you’ll have multiple public opportunities to see, hear, experience Phi in livetime:
- Wednesday, April 11 at 7:00 pm, at the University of Maryland Van Munching Hall with Ed Bok Lee (click here)
- Thursday, April 12 at 6:30 p.m. at The Big Hunt with Asian American Literary Review [AALR], Kaya Press, and Coffee House Press (click here)
- Saturday, April 14 at 12:30 p.m. at the National Portrait Galley of the Smithsonian Institution as part of AALR and APA Program’s “Asian American Portraits of Encounter Between Image & Word“ (click here for full schedule, 11:15 a.m. – 5 p.m.)
All you need to do is choose one … or more.
Readers: Young Adult, Adult
Published: 2011 Continue reading
What Is the What: The Autobiography of Valentino Achak Deng by Dave Eggers
First things first: Let’s try to clear up some of the oxymoronic labels. Although this title is classified as a novel written by Dave Eggers (he of bad boy-genius fame for his debut, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and, of course, the mini-empire that is McSweeney’s), it’s also got “Autobiography” in the title. Yes, Valentino Achak Deng is a real person. And all the proceeds from this book go to Deng’s eponymously-named foundation, established in 2006 to improve the lives of Sudanese in Sudan and elsewhere. Yes, it’s written by Eggers in first person, that is, in Deng’s voice. The book opens with an important preface, signed by Deng in 2006, in Atlanta: “This book is the soulful account of my life …” But he also explains, “… over the course of many years, I told my story orally to the author. He then concocted this novel, approximating my own voice and using the basic events of my life as the foundation. Because many of the passages are fictional, the result is called a novel … though it is fictionalized, it should be noted that the world I have known is not so different from the one depicted within these pages.” [An expanded preface, written a year later by Deng, is available online here.]
Given some of the recent memorably-outed memoirs (James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces probably being the most high-profile, Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea being the most devastating), perhaps Eggers wanted to be especially careful. His own Staggering Genius had some hiccups in spite of catapulting him into literary stardom: his sister Beth’s public comments about accuracy (and then her sort-of retraction, followed by her shocking, tragic suicide), and the fact that later editions added a lengthy pre-book of multiple sections including a preface that begins, “For all the author’s bluster elsewhere, this is not, actually a work of pure nonfiction. Many parts have been fictionalized in varying degrees, various purposes.” Which is all reason enough why this Autobiography gets classified as a novel; it even garnered a “fiction finalist” honor for the 2006 National Book Critics Circle Awards. So we’re all clear now, right?
With the labels figured out, readers may well wish this was fiction, given the horrific nature of Deng’s experiences, and even more so the inhumanity as we humans prey upon one another, again and again and again.
“I have no reason not to answer the door so I answer the door,” the novel beings. There Deng finds an African American woman, asking to use his phone because her car broke down. His Good Samaritan trust will get him robbed, beaten, gagged, and bound for many hours. He’ll sit through a careless interview with the distracted police. He’ll be kept waiting for hours in an empty emergency room. He’ll walk the many miles to his early morning job at a health club where he will be lectured for getting into a fight by his boss. All during this ordeal, he will recount his wrenching life story in bits and pieces, speaking silently to the too-many uncaring strangers he encounters.
Deng is one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. He escaped widespread death and destruction in his small village in Sudan, spent 13 years wandering then surviving the refugee camps in Ethiopia and Kenya, and arrived in the U.S. as a refugee with virtually nothing. For most of his young life, Deng did not know the fate of his family. He watched his friends just sit down and die. He witnessed unspeakable violence. He experienced deprivation and suffering for which words cannot suffice. And yet in the midst of the neverending nightmares, he also recalls laughing with his friends, falling in love, being part of a caring makeshift family-of-circumstance, and is blessed with an especially nurturing bond with a Japanese aid worker in the Kenyan camp who keeps extending his African stay until he can see Deng safely on his way to the U.S. Even as he finally escapes, Deng’s new American life is hardly easy (crime and even murder doesn’t disappear), and yet he manages to hold on to hope … and, as always, survives.
“Even when my hours were darkest, I believed that some day I would share my experiences with readers, so as to prevent the same horrors from repeating themselves,” Deng concludes. “This book is a form of struggle, and it keeps my spirit alive to struggle. To struggle is to strengthen my faith, my hope, and my belief in humanity.” Readers: take note … that word again – humanity. Share the story, grab this book, reclaim humanity.
Readers: Adult
Published: 2006 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, .Memoir, African, African American
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