Herta Müller: "who, with the concentration of poetry and the frankness of prose, depicts the landscape of the dispossessed"
Unfortunately the following doesn't have any subtitles, but if you know German ...
Who is Herta Müller? Here are some links worth looking up:
Times Online: Profile: Herta Müller, scourge of Ceausescu – and his heirs
BBC News: Herta Mueller, who has been awarded the Nobel prize for literature, is the 12th woman to win the award.
New York Times: Herta Müller Wins the Nobel Prize in Literature
Herta Müller: 2009 Nobel Prize for Literature
Thursday, October 8, 2009
A Bend in the River - Wendy's Review
Sunday, October 4, 2009
Nobody’s going anywhere. We’re all going to hell, and every man knows this is in his bones. We’re being killed. Nothing has any meaning. That is why everyone is so frantic. Everyone wasn’t to make his money and run away. But where? That is what is driving people mad. They feel they’re losing the place they can run back to. – from A Bend in the River, page 272 -
Salim, an Indian man living on the East Coast of Africa, sets out to make a life at a small village at a bend in the river in the interior of Africa. He arrives there, following the old slave trails, shortly after the town has won its independence in 1963. The town is in shambles with a poor economy and hardly enough food to feed its people. Yet, Salim stays and builds a business. He is joined by a family servant named Metty and befriends a couple named Shoba and Mahesh. He also attempts to mentor a bush woman’s young son, Ferdinand. As the years roll by, the new President of this nation dumps money into building a University and “domain” where the rich white people live. In the background are always the soldiers and rumblings of war. Salim has a briefly passionate yet violent affair with a white married woman, and at one point is arrested for dealing in black market ivory.
V.S. Naipaul’s book A Bend in the River is perhaps one of the more depressing books I’ve read. Although the town is never named, it is most likely set in Zaire (currently the Democratic Republic of the Congo) during the rule of Mobutu Sese Seko in the late 1960s and early 1970s. At that time there was a great deal of social and political upheaval and violence. Naipaul’s protagonist, Salim, narrates the novel and spends much of his time philosophizing about the role of women in relationships, the political and military climate of the region, his own lack of direction, and the difference between modernized people and the bush people. The problem with this internalized dialogue was that I never felt connected to any of the characters. It was as though Salim was merely telling us his tale (with very little plot).
The themes of A Bend in the River include the view of the outsider (foreigner) vs. the insider, and African rage in response to colonialism. When a mild-mannered priest who is teaching in the town (and has created a museum of bush and tribal mementos) is brutally murdered and decapitated, the townspeople barely cease their every day routines in order to pull his mangled body from the river. Naipaul uses the river and its floating heaps of water hyacinths as symbols of the relentless changes moving through Africa.
Always sailing up from the south, from beyond the bend in the river, were clumps of water hyacinths, dark floating islands on the dark river, bobbing over the rapids. It was as if rain and river were tearing away bush from the heart of the continent and floating it down to the ocean, incalculable miles away. But the water hyacinth was the fruit of the river alone. The tall lilac-coloured flower had appeared only a few years before, and in the local language there was no word for it. The people still called it “the new thing” or “the new thing in the river,” and to them it was another enemy. – from A Bend in the River, page 46 -
This was my first V. S. Naipaul novel – and I had hoped to love it. Instead I found myself growing bored with Salim’s theorizing. The book crawls at a snail’s pace. It is perhaps the longest short novel I have ever read. I also did not appreciate the negative characterization of all the women in the book. Salim (and nearly all the men in the book) frequent the brothels, and Salim at one point theorizes: But if women weren’t stupid, the world wouldn’t go round (from page 186). He later brutally attacks and beats his mistress whose response is to climb into bed and open her legs to him. The one seemingly normal relationship between Mahesh and Shoba is harshly criticized by Salim.
Mahesh was my friend. But I thought of him as a man who had been stunted by his relationship with Shoba. That had been achievement enough for him. Shoba admired him and needed him, and he was therefore content with himself, content with the person she admired. His only wish seemed to be to take care of this person. He dressed for her, preserved his looks for her. I used to think that when Mahesh considered himself physically he didn’t compare himself with other men, or judge himself according to some masculine ideal, but saw only the body that please Shoba. He saw himself as his woman saw him; and that was why, though he was my friend, I thought that his devotion to Shoba had made him half a man, and ignoble. – from A Bend in the River, page 197 -
So, I guess, according to Naipaul’s protagonist … a man cannot be a man and be devoted to the woman he loves. Huh? Maybe I should not have been surprised to read this from Wikipedia:
Naipaul credits an extramarital affair for giving A Bend in the River and his later books greater fluidity, saying these “in a way to some extent depend on her (i.e., his mistress). They stopped being dry.”
If you haven’t guessed it by now, I am not going to recommend A Bend in the River. Scholars have credited this book with being one of the books to read about Africa. I would argue that a novel which has little plot, little story, reads like a tedious monologue from a textbook, and insults women is not one too many readers want to waste their time on. My recommendation for an amazing novel set in the Congo would be The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver (read my review).
Naipaul won the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature in 2001 and was short listed for the Booker Prize for A Bend in the River in 1979, but he’s not getting any awards from me!
3m's Progress
Friday, September 11, 2009
Here is my progress so far (18 laureates):
2003 - J.M. Coetzee
- Life & Times of Michael K (review)
2000 - Gao Xingjian
- Buying a Fishing Rod for my Grandfather (review)
- Beowulf, (translator)
1990 - Octavio Paz
- A Tale of Two Gardens
- Lord of the Flies
- One Hundred Years of Solitude
1978 - Isaac Bashevis Singer
- Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories (review)
- Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair (review)
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich
- Thousand Cranes (review)
- East of Eden
- The Grapes of Wrath
- Of Mice and Men
- Independent People (review)
1954 - Ernest Hemingway
- The Old Man and the Sea
1946 - Hermann Hesse
- Siddhartha (review)
1938 - Pearl S. Buck
- The Good Earth
Tortilla Flat, by John Steinbeck (Wendy's Review)
Monday, August 24, 2009
What is a paisano? He is a mixture of Spanish, Indian, Mexican and assorted Caucasian bloods. His ancestors have lived in California for a hundred or two years. He speaks English with a paisano accent and Spanish with a paisano accent. When questioned concerning his race, he indignantly claims pure Spanish blood and rolls up his sleeve to show that the soft inside of his arm is nearly white. His color, like that of a well-browned meerschaum pipe, he ascribes to sunburn. He is a paisano, and he lives in that uphill district above the town of Monterey called Tortilla Flat, although it isn’t a flat at all. – from Tortilla Flat, page 2 -
Danny, the hero of John Steinbeck’s novella Tortilla Flat, is a paisano. When he inherits two small houses in Tortilla Flat, his friends soon discover that living beneath a roof is preferable to sleeping in the woods. Pilon, Pablo, Pirate and his pack of friendly dogs, Joe Portagee, and Jesus Maria soon move in with Danny. Together, they commit petty theft, drink far too much cheap wine, and engage in a number of sexual liaisons with the town women. They also develop strong friendships with each other – friendships based on a common philosophy that material goods are not what create happiness, and freedom comes in choosing to live unencumbered by traditional social mores. The paisanos are loyal to their comrades over all else.
Based loosely on the tale of King Arthur and the Knights of the Roundtable, Steinbeck’s classic novel explores the growing friendships of the paisanos and their skewed view of morality. They often steal from their neighbors, yet unselfishly assist those in need; they are quick to come to the rescue of the local women, but do not deny themselves sexual gratification. They share stories to help teach each other the lessons of life. Steinbeck clearly loves this scrappy band of brothers and with humor and sensitivity he creates memorable and likable characters. At times, Tortilla Flat feels like a collection of short stories or parables.
Steinbeck sets Tortilla Flat during the Depression era in a town just outside of Monterey, California and with his signature style captures the flavor of that time period and geographic area.
It will not surprise anyone that I thoroughly enjoyed Tortilla Flat. I have long come to recognize Steinbeck as an astute writer who crafts his characters with detail and empathy. Although this novella has a different feel and style from his better known novels such as East of Eden or The Grapes of Wrath, it is of the same high quality. In less than 200 pages, Steinbeck succeeds in drawing the reader into the world of the paisano and leaves her wanting for more.
Highly recommended.
A Mercy by Toni Morrison
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Reviewed by Sandra at Fresh Ink Books
Fiction, 167 pages Hardcover
US (2008)
A seemingly short novel at 167 pages and narrated in lyrical language by several voices, A Mercy is in fact an intense and often internalized perspective on the effects of slavery on the human mind and heart. In colonial America of the late 1600s, life is harsh for most people and brutal for slaves. With disease, food shortages, and backbreaking work to contend with, the land is rugged and even the weather seems to conspire against you.
Our story centers around Florens, a young slave girl who been accepted reluctantly by a Dutch landowner to pay off a debt owed him. He was offered her mother but the slave mother begged him to take the daughter, thinking that Florens would have a better life with him than with her own brutal, rapist master. Viewpoint shifts as chapters are spoken in different voices, including those of Lina, an old Indian woman whose tribe has been wiped out by smallpox. Sorrow, a lone shipwreck survivor, Rebekka, the childless landowner's wife and Florens mother will all have their say here too. Each will speak in their own voice, something Morrison accomplishes better than most, revealing more about themselves than observation or simple narration could tell us.
Belonging is a strong thread throughout the story, being motherless and yearning for family and closeness, or being childless in the case of their mistress. Lina thinks of young Florens as "love-disabled" because of the way she tries to get close to her, and then to others, including a black freeman who rebuffs her for, among other things, having a slave mentality. There is so much here that the story seemed almost condensed to me. This is not a fast read for most, the story should be read slowly, the language is rich, almost dense at times, and needs to be savoured. But what a powerful story it is. And what it leads us to is the realization that what to some may seem like an act of mercy may in fact feel like an act of abandonment.
The Beggar by Naguib Mahfouz
Friday, July 3, 2009
Reviewed by Rose City Reader.
Published in 1965, The Beggar is, on the surface at least, the story of Omar’s midlife crisis. While less overtly political than Naguib Mahfouz’s other works, this novella takes on the biggest “political” issue of all – the meaning of life. Omar’s tale is a metaphor for the “midlife crisis” of modern Egypt, 17 years after its 1952 revolution, as both Omar and the country search for meaning after achieving worldly success.
The story reunites three childhood friends all engaged in the same struggle to find the deeper purpose of their adult lives: Othman was a bomb-throwing rebel back in their earlier days. Now, out of prison after 20 years, he is trying to adjust to an Egypt that has adopted the socialist ideals he fought for in his youth. He fights to channel his revolutionary zeal in a post-revolutionary bureaucracy.
Mustafa was an idealistic playwright who sold out and is now the host of a popular radio program sponsored by a snack food company. He embodies the discord between artistic endeavors and modern commerce.
Omar had been an aspiring poet with stars in his eyes, before he became a lawyer and real estate developer. Now, in his 40s, he is bored with his matronly wife and completely indifferent to his law practice. He cannot even get worked up over the news that the government is going to nationalize the apartment buildings he owns.
In an effort to recover from this enervating “illness, ” Omar seeks stimulation in the usual combination or wine, women, and song. His reprehensible behavior – abandoning his pregnant wife for a series of trysts with showgirls – demonstrates how the pursuit of mindless, easy entertainment can lead to ruin.
The title comes from a passage in which Mustafa questions whether Omar’s crisis is caused by “suppressed art.” Omar supposes that art may be the solution, but not the cause. Then both wonder whether they would be better off, metaphysically, if they were scientifically inclined, rather than artistically, because science would offer answers that art cannot. Mustafa concludes that they cannot find the solution to Omar’s crisis, stating, “Since there is no revelation in our age, people like you can only go begging.”
The biggest problem is not the content, but the presentation. Mahfouz’s writing style is difficult to follow. He changes verb tenses at random, he uses dialog without identifying the speakers, and he changes the point of view over and over. Often Omar is referred to as “he” and “you” and “I” all in the same passage or even paragraph. It is hard to tell if these are intentional techniques or translation problems, but they are distracting.
These technical problems aside, The Beggar is full to the rim with metaphors and moral issues. It would be a good choice for a high school English class as there is plenty to chew on for such a short book.
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