Tag Archives: Family
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
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
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
Return to Sender by Julia Alvarez
Here’s a rather unique literary coincidence: Julia Alvarez‘s Finding Miracles ends with an uncle missing the grandmother’s wedding because of hemorrhoid surgery. Return to Sender begins with the mention of another uncle (in a totally unrelated story) suffering through a hemorrhoid operation. Try and find two books to repeat that experience!
Oh, but I digress …
In Return to Sender, two different families meld into each other, initially from circumstance, and then with heartfelt connections. Tyler Paquette, 11, is shocked to learn that because of his father’s debilitating accident, the family is hiring three Mexican migrant workers (who are brothers) to help run the family farm in Vermont. With them arrive three young daughters; the oldest, Mari, is Tyler’s age, and will soon enough be in his sixth-grade class. Tyler is even more troubled to realize that the Cruz brothers – as competent, reliable, and farm-saving as they will prove to be – are also illegal immigrants. Interwoven with Tyler’s story, are Mari’s letters to her missing mother. Many months ago, Mari’s mother left the family when they were still living in North Carolina to visit her ailing mother in Mexico, and seemingly disappeared somewhere between there and here.
Over the months, the Paquette and Cruz families blend: Tyler and Mari become especially supportive friends; the girls help alleviate Tyler’s grandmother’s paralyzing loneliness after losing Tyler’s grandfather; and Tyler’s parents are gratefully relieved that the Cruz brothers have returned the family farm to full function. Of course, challenges are plenty, too: Mari is targeted at school as an outsider; enough disgruntled townspeople speak out loudly against the illegal workers; immigration raids are not uncommon; and the Cruz family finally learns the fate of the mother.
Alvarez is certainly working with a difficult, timely topic and, while readers will have no doubt as to her own views, her characters openly express battling opinions. The children are certainly the most effected: Tyler’s love of his country and the need to respect his country’s laws are painfully questioned; Mari, as the only sister not born in the U.S., faces a precarious future as she worries about the possible deportation of her parents and uncles, and the challenges her sisters will face if they are forced to live a very different life in the family’s Mexican village. Alvarez thoughtfully offers no easy solutions.
Alvarez won the 2010 Pura Belpré Medal winner for narrative with this title; the prestigious Pura Belpré Awards from the American Library Association ”is presented to a Latino/Latina writer and illustrator whose work best portrays, affirms, and celebrates the Latino cultural experience in an outstanding work of literature for children and youth.” The strength of Alvarez’s story is clearly in the individual relationships created and cemented by people with vastly disparate backgrounds. Beyond the official rules and regulations, beyond borders, beyond the headlines, are two friends who share a love of the stars, whose families and lives converge long enough to establish a lasting, human bond.
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Published: 2009 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
Escape from Camp 14: One Man’s Remarkable Odyssey from North Korea to Freedom in the West by Blaine Harden
Escape from Camp 14 is the most devastating book I have ever read. Perhaps the resilience of youth got me through the aftermath of learning about slavery, the Holocaust, even Iris Chang’s now-classic The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust, the title I previously held as the most horrific testimony of inhumanity.
More recently, I cried through 2010 National Book Award nonfiction finalist Barbara Demick’s Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. I ignorantly questioned the veracity of the torturous conditions in Adam Johnson’s recent, deservedly bestselling novel The Orphan Master’s Son. I paid attention to headlines about North Korea’s potential nuclear threats and the succession of Kim Jong Eun to the mythic Kim Dynasty.
But nothing prepared me for the odyssey of North Korean Shin Dong-Hyuk as told by journalist Blaine Harden, former Washington Post bureau chief for East Asia, Eastern Europe, and Africa. Shin, who changed his name “after arriving in South Korea, an attempt to reinvent himself as a free man,” is the only known North Korean who was born in a prison camp to have escaped and survived.
Shin’s story is vastly different from that of other survivors; as Harden chillingly reveals, it doesn’t fit “a conventional narrative arc [of survival]” which includes a loving family, a comfortable home, a sense of community governed by moral principles, from which the protagonist is brutally torn. In utter contrast, Shin began his life barely human: his prisoner parents were arbitrarily paired by guards to breed, whatever offspring they produced would become slaves who would work and die in Camp 14, considered “[b]y reputation … the toughest” of the country’s six known camps.
Shin experienced no familial bonds. His mother was nothing more than competition for food. He barely saw his older brother and father. He described himself “as a predator who had been bred in the camp to inform on family and friends – and feel no remorse.” Preying equaled survival. Only much later would Shin learn the criminal history of his family: “The unforgivable crime Shin’s father had committed was being the brother of two young men who had fled south during [the Korean War]… Shin’s unforgivable crime was being his father’s son.”
At 4, he witnessed his first execution. At 6, he watched a classmate beaten to death for having five grains of corn in her pocket. At 14, he survived heinous torture, then witnessed his mother being hung and his brother shot. At 22, he lost a finger as punishment for dropping a sewing machine.
At 23, on January 2, 2005, Shin climbed over the electrified corpse of his fellow escapee, and began a labyrinthine journey toward freedom. His own slight body bears innumerable scars of mutilation. When he escaped, he knew virtually nothing of the outside world, yet he miraculously traversed North Korea, China, South Korea, and finally made his way to the United States.
To call Shin’s adjustment to his new life “difficult” is grave understatement: “’I escaped physically … I haven’t escaped psychologically.’” Defectors understandably suffer from a myriad of clinical symptoms including post-traumatic syndrome, paranoia, paralyzing survival guilt. Shin struggles at an even more basic level: “’I am evolving from being an animal … [b]ut it is going very, very slowly.’”
As horrific as Shin’s ordeals have been, “’Shin had a relatively comfortable life by the standards of other children in the camps,’” a former camp guard and driver told Harden. Others have endured “worse hardship.” Compounding such stomach-churning news is the realization that “[t]he camps have barely pricked the world’s collective conscience.” They hold 200,000 prisoners according to the U.S. State Department and several human rights groups; they have lasted twice as long as the Soviet Gulag, and 12 times longer than the Nazi concentration camps. Google Earth provides high-resolution satellite photographs “to anyone with an Internet connection.” Amnesty International has documented new construction in the camps as recently as 2011.
A book without parallel, Escape from Camp 14 is a riveting nightmare that bears witness to the worst inhumanity, an unbearable tragedy magnified by the fact that the horror continues at this very moment without an end in sight. Inspired by Harden’s front-page Washington Post story in December 2008 – the article from which this book originated – a reader addresses a chilling question to all of us: “’High school students in America debate why President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t bomb all the rail lines to Hitler’s camps … Their children may ask, a generation from now, why the West stared at far clearer satellite images of Kim Jong Il’s camps, and did nothing.’”
Review: Christian Science Monitor, April 2, 2012
Readers: Adult
Published: 2012 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Nonfiction, Korean, North Korean
Finding Miracles by Julia Alvarez
Sandwiched between sister Kate and brother Nate, Milly Kaufman is the only adopted child of their Jewish father and Mormon mother. She began life with the name Milagros (as in ‘miracles’), until she was claimed as an infant by parents working with the Peace Corps in a troubled, never-named Latin American country. While the family has always been candid about her birth, 16-year-old Milly just wants to fit in with the rest of their small Vermont town.
Milly’s faraway past arrives at school one day with the appearance of new student Pablo Bolivar, a refugee from her birthcountry. She overcomes her initial discomfort when their families begin to spend more time together, and Pablo proves to be a gentle, thoughtful soul who, in spite of his youth, has seen too much of a violent, troubled world.
As both families grow closer, Milly wonders more openly about her own history. When she inadvertently finds out that her wealthy grandmother’s revised will treats her differently from the other grandchildren, her concept of family shifts – and, for the first time, she’s ready to find out who she really is.
When new elections allow the Bolivars to return to their home country that summer, Milly decides to accompany them, even as her parents worry – her sister Kate most of all – that they are losing their little girl. Buffered by the extended Bolivar clan – especially by Pablo who becomes her guide, confidante, and more – Milly learns of her country’s horrific history … to which her own past is inextricably linked.
Julia Alvarez, whose own turbulent family history in the Dominican Republic has inspired multiple bestselling titles (most notably How the García Girls Lost Their Accents and In the Time of the Butterflies), treads an uneven line in Miracles, shifting between something akin to a happily-ever-after fairy tale and shockingly gory nightmare.
The miraculous coincidences Milly experiences in her birthcountry (finding someone connected to her orphanage almost on arrival, for example) seem just too convenient. Her selfish grandmother (who comes with her own European Jewish family baggage) has too easy a redemptive turnaround. To the other extreme, the horrors Milly learns that are part of her personal history seem far too graphic and gruesome for a middle grade/young adult title, as well as just too jarring with the rest of the story.
Disappointments aside, Daphne Rubin-Vega (who also narrates Alvarez’s Once Upon a Quinceañera) will convince you to keep the ‘play’-button on, bestowing gravitas on Milly’s growing awareness. What might occasionally flounder on the page definitely gets a lift from her husky, emotive voice. Now you know your options, choose wisely.
Readers: Middle Grade, Young Adult
Published: 2004 Continue reading
Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie
I’ve been working through numerous ‘should-have-read-earlier’-titles lately, and Salman Rushdie‘s books always loom large as objects of fascination. After four attempts to read his The Enchantress of Florence (twice on the page, twice stuck in the ears narrated by Firdous Bamji whose recordings can make me choose a book more readily than the author!), I gave up and moved on (still feeling guilty) to Shalimar.
In spite of its hefty 400+ pages (or 18+ hours as lullingly read by Aasif Mandvi), Shalimar‘s story is relatively simple (spoiler alert!): boy and girl fall in love and marry, girl leaves boy for a powerful white man, girl bears lover’s daughter, boy vows he’ll kill the adulterers and any offspring, boy more or less succeeds.
Straightforward as it may seem, this is Rushdie, after all, and he needs to embellish his narratives with literary flourishes and historical displays. The boy – known as Shalimar the Clown for his acrobatic prowess – and the girl – Boonyi Kaul – enter the world on the same day with all sorts of baggage, least of all being the children of Muslim and Hindu families, who in spite of an intimate shared history, will be victimized by massacres all too prevalent in the volatile region of Kashmir.
The American ambassador to India, Max Ophuls, for whom Boonyi freely chooses to destroy her family, turns out to be a French Jew who lost his disbelieving parents to the Holocaust, but gained an unparalleled reputation as a Resistance hero (not to mention quite the spy-bedding legend). Meanwhile, revenge-filled Shalimar outgrows Kashmir, becomes an international resistance fighter-of-sorts himself, although his dangerous exploits earn him the additional moniker of terrorist.
The abandoned hapa daughter – who detests her name “India” – pays the price for her birthmother’s betrayal. Boonyi must relinquish the infant to the beleaguered Mrs. Max, who is determined to leave the exotic country (now that her husband is being shamefully ejected) with a little brown baby in her arms. As payment for her newborn, Boonyi is returned to her village where she realizes too late, she was truly free, so unlike the gilded cage into which she willingly trapped herself. India is carelessly brought up by her father’s wife in a posh London neighborhood, not even knowing she has a father until years later. Poor little rich girl is so tediously self-absorbed, she quickly sinks into caricature.
This fall, Rushdie debuts his long-awaited memoir, Joseph Anton (an alias he used which pays homage to two of his favorite writers, Conrad and Chekhov), in which he details almost a decade of life underground following the infamous 1989 fatwa issued by Ayatollah Khomeini. I bring this up here because I wonder if Shalimar, in part, was a ‘practice’ text for the true story Rushdie was not yet ready to write: the threatening religious conflicts, the safe house Ophuls tries to create, India’s later search for safety, all could have been taken – even indirectly – from Rushdie’s own experiences of trying to stay alive. Perhaps the surreal nature of what he endured ended up intertwined with the (too-many) unconvincing machinations in Shalimar. For now, since truth is often stranger than fiction, we’ll just have to wait and see how the real story fares …
Readers: Adult
Published: 2006 Continue reading
Filed under ..Adult Readers, .Audio, .Fiction, Indian, Indian American, South Asian, South Asian American
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