Skylight by Jose Saramago

Reviewed by Gillian Castellino

It is rare for an author's first novel to be published after his death, but that is exactly what happened with Jose de Sousa Saramago's novel Claraboia (or Skylight). Written in the 1950s, it was sent to a publisher who never acknowledged it, a fact which caused it's author to stop writing fiction until 1977. He did finally receive a response some 36 years after he sent it, which was also some 60 years after it was first written! By then, Saramago had already received the Nobel Prize for Literature and had also decided not to have the book published during his lifetime. Given the background, it is just as well that it was printed posthumously.

Translated into English by Margaret Jull Costa, the book is dedicated to the memory of Jeronimo Hilario, the author's grandfather, a landless peasant from Azinhaga, Portugal, whom the Nobel laureate described as "the wisest man I ever knew". 'Saramago' (which means 'wild radish' in Portuguese) is not the family name, but an insulting nickname given to his father and recorded on Jose's birth certificate by a village clerk, perhaps in error, possibly in a drunken haze, or may be as a prank. That, became his legal surname and not his actual patronymic 'de Souza'.

Skylight was first submitted for publication in 1953, when Saramago was 31 years old. In her preface to the novel, his wife Pilar del Rio - an acclaimed writer in her own right, explained that Skylight is a gateway into Saramago's later work. A map of what was to come.

Set in a shabby, working-class apartment building in Lisbon, in the 1940s, at a time when the dictator Salazar ruled Portugal, it is not a political novel, but one about "characters". There are 18 in all (ten of whom are women) and collectively they occupy six flats. In the male characters we find prototypes of those who populate Saramago's later novels, but his female characters are strongly nuanced as well.

The strongest character, opens the book. He is a "philosophical cobbler" in his eighties who is married to Mariana who in turn is "so fat as to be comical, so kind as to make one weep". The couple take in a young man, 28-year old Abel Nogueira, as a boarder and the two men, despite their age difference, bond over games of droughts and discussions on the meaning of life. These become a pretext for Saramago to present some scathing insights to the reader:

"Peace ... comes from dulling one's mind, which was what most people did... We all receive our daily dose of morphine that dulls our thoughts. Habits, vices, repeated words, hackneyed gestures, boring friends and enemies we don't even really hate, these are all things that dull our minds... The morphine of habit, the morphine of monotony."

"We won't become what we are meant to be in life by listening to other people's word or advice. We have to feel in our own flesh the wound that will make us into proper men. Then, it's up to us to act...'

The next next set of characters to appear in the book are four women, two elderly sisters Amelia and Candida and the latter's adult daughters Isaura and Adriana, who resembled "a sack of potatoes tied up in the middle". All four women have clearly known more prosperous times. While they grapple with the privations imposed by poverty, together they draw sustenance from a classical musical program over the radio, mealtimes spent together and shared confidences. As we become acquainted with their story, we become aware of a "a painful silence, the inquisitorial silence of the past observing us and the ironic silence of the future that awaits us." Repressed sexuality precipitates a sad and scarring lesbian encounter between the sisters, leading to secrets that settle heavily over the group.

Next, we are introduced to the diabetic Justina, her brutish husband Caetano and their dead daughter Mathilde. A story of hatred, misunderstanding, lust, different manifestations of psychological ugliness including marital rape and its consequences. Saramago has been criticized for his depiction of rape, especially the female perspective, which does not ring true.

The only 'single' in the building, Lidia, teetering on the brink of middle age, is the mistress of a much older businessman Paulino Morais who is already on the look-out for a younger replacement. There is a third player - Lidia's mother who shows up regularly for a hand-out. When Paulino finally replaces Lidia, she sheds "Just two tears. Because that's all life is worth." Then she pragmatically picks up her life - venturing out into the night in search of her next conquest.

Another family group comes next. They are Anselmo, an armchair football enthusiast, his wife Rosalia and their nineteen-year-old daughter Maria Claudia (also known as Claudinha). Pretty, self obsessed and inexperienced, Claudinha is encouraged by her parents to boost the family income by working for Paulino Morais - a move initially encouraged by Lidia who wants to win the goodwill of her neighbours. When it is almost too late, Claudinha realises that her employer sees her as a potential new mistress. She is now faced with a quandary - to back out and risk unemployment and destitution or to capitulate and risk her good name and integrity.

The last family group in this parade of characters are Emilio, a salesman, who is in a loveless marriage with his Spanish wife Carmen. Both are tied together by their trusting little son Henriquinho. Frustrated and abusive, both Emilio and Carmen wish desperately to be released from their marriage. Then Carmen and Henriquinho take a trip to Spain and Emilio gets a taste of the freedom he craved. It's uncertain how their story will end.

Though written in conventional style and language, Skylight underlines the compromises and inanities that are part and parcel of everyday life. Saramago's ending - the closing dialog between Silvestre and Abel is clear about the fact that "anything that is not built on love, will generate hate". The brand of love recommended is "lucid love" as opposed to the other unnamed but clearly drawn examples of love illustrated within the novel. Then comes the final line - "The day when we can build on love has still not arrived." Make of that what you will.

Original post on Healing Scribbles.

The Pearl by John Steinbeck

Reviewed by: Gillian Valladares Castellino

"The music of the pearl drifted to a whisper then disappeared". 

That is the last line of The Pearl.  As far as 'hooks' go, Steinbeck could not have chosen a better one to reel in a reader who tends to read last lines of books before first ones. A little gem of a book, The Pearl begins with the promise of extolling the virtues of a simple life. It delivers something quite different: an invitation to examine ugliness, beauty, inequality, greed, randomness, basically all the complexities that underpin human lives. All this and more, delivered in under one hundred short pages.

Reviews of The Pearl are quick to point out that the novella is not one of Steinbeck's critically acclaimed works despite the fact that it has been a textbook for American middle and high-schools for many years and is thought to have influenced Hemingway to write The Old Man and the Sea (1952).  The story was first published in 1945, in the Woman's Home Companion, where it was called 'The Pearl of the World.'  It is claimed that some versions are entitled 'The Pearl of La Paz.' Also, a line of thought that suggests that the novella was penned as a result of Steinbeck's interest in the teaching of Carl Jung, specifically the issues of "human greed, materialism and the inherent worth of a thing".

The best introduction to the story is in Steinbeck's own words ...

"as with all retold tales, that are in people's hearts, there are only good and bad things and black and white things and good and evil things and no in-between anywhere.
If this story is a parable, perhaps everyone takes his own meaning from it and reads his own life into it..."

So what is the novella about?  Set around the turn of the last century, in colonial Mexico, specifically in the rural town of La Paz on the Baja Penninsula, it is the story of Kino, a young Mexican-Indian pearl diver, his partner Juana and their baby Coyotito. The plot line of the story is simple, but that is not it's point at all. It's significance and beauty lies in the "telling". 

The story begins as follows: Kino, a simple fisherman, his wife Jauna and son Coyotito live an idyllic existence until the little boy is stung by a scorpion. The town's doctor refuses to even see the child as the parents are poor. Kino in desperation dives for and retrieves a large valuable pearl. "The essence of pearl mixed with essence of men and a curious dark residue was precipitated. Every man suddenly became related to Kino's pearl and Kino's pearl went into the dreams, the speculations, the schemes, the plans, the futures, the wishes, the needs, the lusts, the hungers of everyone, and only one person stood in the way and that was Kino, so that he became curiously every man's enemy.....The poison sacs of the town began to manufacture venom, and the town swelled and puffed with the pressure of it....But Kino and Jauna did not know these things.  Because they were happy and excited they thought that everyone shared their joy.....in the incandescence of the pearl the pictures formed of the things Kino's mind had considered in the past and had given up as impossible."

Without giving too much more away, let it be said that the finding of the pearl becomes a transformative event in the most foul and tragic sense of the term. After the tragedy devastates Kino and Jauna, they throw the pearl back into the depths of the ocean.

Though short in length, The Pearl deals with three major themes - First, the destructive role of greed. Second, the part that fate and human intention/action play in shaping individual lives. Though human beings may focus on and work towards specific goals, fate often intervenes in an apparently random manner and changes everything. The third theme is colonial society's oppression of native cultures. The novella depicts the arrogance, condescension, self-centredness, greed and dismissiveness that colonizers displayed towards the natives. This behaviour has a negative effect on its targets, transforming them from innocent, pious, pure societies into perverted extensions of the colonizer's mentality. Yes, despite the folkloric beauty of its prose, this is a very dark tale.

Recurring motifs in the book are nature imagery and Kino's songs, especially 'The Song of Evil' vs 'The Song of the Family'. These two motifs are used throughout the narrative to progress the plot and develop the themes.

There are also three main symbols used in the story. These are: the pearl (obviously), the scorpion (which precipitates the action) and finally Kino's canoe, which represents native cultural heritage and the spiritual understandings implied within them. Though undervalued in colonial society, for Kino, his canoe underpins who he is, providing both a means of livelihood and a means to find the pearl of great value. It's destruction foreshadows the shattering of his own innocence.

Original post on Healing Scribbles:
http://jillvc-artstuff.blogspot.com.au/2015/10/the-pearl-by-john-steinbeck-and.html

The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz

Reviewed by Gillian Valladares Castellino

Set in Eastern Europe in the period just before and after the Second World War, Czeslaw Milosz's The Captive Mind probes the effect that Stalinism on the minds of people affected by it. The book was written in the early 1950s and translated into English by Jane Zielonko.

Milosz was born in Lithuania in 1911 and educated in Wilno (the Polish name of what is now called the city of Vilnius) and Paris. Wilno was a Polish city between 1920 and 1939 and Milosz studied there during this period. He was already a published writer when Germany invaded Poland in 1939 and became active in the Resistance. Later, he became a diplomat in post-war Poland and was stationed in Washington and Paris. In 1951 he defected to the West, living briefly in Paris before emigrating to the US where he became a Professor of Slavic languages and Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980 and died in 2004.

The book itself, is made up of nine chapters. The first three set out the structure against which the book can be understood by readers who are physically and culturally situated outside Eastern Europe. The next four chapters describe the coping mechanisms that four different intellectuals (writers specifically) used to deal with the ethical dilemmas that they faced on a daily basis when living in the "people's democracies" in Eastern Europe. The next chapter concerns the framework within which life developed in the Eastern Bloc and the final chapter focuses on the unique case of the Baltic states including Milosz's childhood home of Lithuania.

The Captive Mind is not an easy or entertaining book. The tone and style is dry, heavy, humorless, replete with convoluted thought structures - a tad like life in the "people's democracies". It is clear that Milosz intended it to be that way, he suggests as much in his preface, but that doesn't make it any easier for a reader who is tempted to turn away, after all the situation is now history, the book is a slog and life is short. Well, it is worth resisting that urge.

The book begins with a quotation: When someone is honestly 55% right, that's very good and there's no use wrangling. And if someone is 60% right, it's wonderful, it's great luck, and let him thank God. But what's to be said about 75% right? Wise people say this is suspicious. Well and what about 100% right? Whoever says he's 100% right is a fanatic, a thug, and the worst kind of rascal.  - An Old Jew of Galacia

If this summarizes Milosz's point of view, the book's preface sets out his rationale for writing it: Despite being aware of the dismantling of personal freedom in his homeland he rejected the push to emigrate, as that represented exile, sterility and inaction to him. Consequently he had to live through five years of Nazi occupation and the establishment of the Stalinist Russian regime in Poland. As a writer he experienced first-hand the moral challenges that "Socialist Realism" posed. To him, it came with the demand that he "cease to look at the world from his own independent viewpoint, to tell the truth as he sees it, and so to keep watch and ward of society as a whole." Instead, it required him to make "all judgement of values dependent on the interest of the dictatorship." This was not a benign dictatorship but one in which "human sufferings are drowned in the trumpet-blare: the orchestra in the concentration camp, and.." the narrator "as a poet, had a place already marked [for him] among the first violins" provided that he paid the price - obedience.

Notwithstanding the desire to continue to live among his own people and write in his own language, he could not capitulate and so "won his freedom" by defecting. When cushioned by safety, the drive to tell his story and explain the thought processes of his people, resulted in the book. He is very well aware that a reader who operates in a society where the pressure to conform is not accompanied by the threat of liquidation, torture and death, cannot begin to understand the mindscapes that develop when people are forced to accept bizarre and terrifying circumstances in the 'normal' course of their daily lives. The book was intended to be a "battlefield" in which Milosz would describe his enemy, follow the enemy's logic and copy his reasoning, so that in doing so, he could demonstrate how the mind slowly "gives way to complusion from without".

In 1932, an almost prophetic book entitled Insatiability was published in Warsaw. Though fictional, it envisaged a situation very similar to that which occurred in Eastern Europe after the Red Army crossed into Poland. As the event was occurring in September 1939, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, the book's author slit his wrists. Milosz borrowed the central plot device from Insatiability. This was a "pill" called "Murti Bing". It was used as a metaphor for both (1) the conformist thinking people adopted to survive the imposition of Stalinist "dialectical materialism" and also for (2) the mind-numbing effects of consumerism in the West.

So what is "Dialectical materialism"? It is a term coined in 1887 by Joseph Dietzgen a German Marxist and was adopted as the official philosophy of the Soviet communists. In essence it states that political and historical events result from the conflict of social forces and can be interpreted as a series of contradictions and their solutions. The conflict is seen as caused by material needs.

Milosz's issue was not with the concept itself, but with the way in which it was interpreted and implemented by Stalinists, specifically that it "creates social and political conditions in which man ceases to think and write otherwise than is necessary". What this really means is that any work of art, that did not support the socialist system was viewed as worthless and its creator as untrustworthy ie as a threat that had to be removed. Since survival itself was at stake in these circumstances, how did the intelligentsia cope under the system?

To tease out the array of camouflage masks used to endure the situation, Milosz borrows the concept of "Ketman" (a term described by Gobineau in his book Religions and Philosophies of Central Asia). The word "Ketman" is a corruption of kitman, a term used in Islamic jurisprudence to refer to secrecy or concealment and is a sub-field ofhiyal (the science of deception or legal trickery). The premise of "Ketman" is that one must "keep silent about one's true convictions if possible" and to derive a sense of satisfaction or pride from having deceived others of one's true thoughts and inclinations. There are seven different types of "Ketman" described by Milosz and these are: national ketman, the ketman of revolutionary purity, aesthetic ketman, professional ketman, sceptical ketman, metaphysical ketman and ethical ketman - all variations on the same theme. Though the person practising ketman realises that he lies, for certain types of intellectuals living under constant tension and watchfulness, practising ketman and the mind games that implied, provided a "masochistic pleasure", a form of "self-realisation against something".

To further explain how "real" people adapted, Milosz described four different writers with differing histories. Though he called them Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta, their identities were so thinly disguised that have been established to be:

• Alpha, the Moralist : Jerzy Andrezejewski
• Beta, the Disappointed Lover : Tadeusz Borowski
• Gamma the Slave of History: Jerzy Putrament
• Delta the Troubadour: Konstanty Ildefons Galczynski

In the penultimate chapter, Milosz analysed the regime's judgement of the different classes in society, the strategy to be used to deal with them and the institutions they revered, particularly the Church which was a force to be reckoned with in Catholic Poland.

In the final chapter, Milosz detailed the fate of the Baltic people, the systematic brutalisation that reduced them from being members of self-sustaining rural communities to depleted "eternal slaves" in the Gulag.

Emigration gave Milosz the gift of penetrating dual vision, ie, the capacity to see and understand simultaneously, the inner workings of two widely disparate cultures, the Communist East and the democratic West. Inspite of this, The Captive Mind is a sobering read. The experience of living in a besieged nation and the consequent mental trauma that entailed seemed to suggest to Milosz that a chasm existed between him (the Eastern Bloc intellectual and poet) and his (presumably Western reader). This can be summed up in his closing remarks.. "Many people spend their entire lives collecting stamps or old coins, or growing tulips. I am sure that Zeus will be merciful towards people who have given themselves entirely to these...pointless diversions. I shall say to him: 'It is not my fault that you ... gave me the gift of seeing simultaneously what was happening in Omaha and Prague, in the Baltic states and on the shores of the Arctic Ocean. I felt that if I did not use that gift my poetry would be tasteless to me and fame detestable. Forgive me."

Original post at: http://jillvc-artstuff.blogspot.com.au/2015/09/the-captive-mind-by-czeslaw-milosz.html

Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter by Mario Vargas Llosa

Reviewed by Gillian Valladares Castellino

I first became aware of Mario Vargas Llosa's book Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter when going through Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi. Later that year (2010), Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature and I bought some of his books. They remained unopened on one of our bookshelves until earlier this year, when a chance item on my news feed piqued my interest. Mr Llosa had apparently blasted the New York Times for publishing what he described as "slanderous and perfidious" gossip culled from The Daily Mail. A quick trawl through Wikipedia revealed that his book Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter was based partially on actual events in his own life.

Out came the book, which proved to a wickedly funny account, rich with "effervescent rhetoric" (to quote one of Llosa's own phrases) - of events that transpired in the 1950s when a certain young Peruvian journalist (who was then only 18-years-old) fell head-over-heels in love with his aunt (by marriage), Julia. This was scandalous for the times as Julia was fourteen years his senior and a divorcee.  The book traces the trajectory of their courtship and subsequent marriage and the outrage it provoked within their extended family in Lima. Llosa had dedicated the book to Julia Urquidi Illanes who had been his first wife, whom he married against a backdrop of facts which were remarkably similar to those played out in the book. Where did fact end and fiction begin?

Told with sly wit and a mega-dose of disarming honesty, the book sketches the personalities and reactions of each friend and family member who was impacted by the relationship.  Though an irreverent, comic, rollicking read, its appeal begins to crumble when you realize that it is not merely a work of fiction, but in many ways an expose of  the lives of real people and many of these stories were not handled sympathetically. That said, Llosa's honesty and courage as a writer allows an apparently untrammeled look into the mind, heart and libido of a very typical eighteen-year-old male who was totally oblivious to the reverberations his actions would have on his own life and those of the other main characters in this dramatic episode.

Clearly, even though the book was first published some decades after the actual events, in 1977, the real Julia, who died in 2010, was deeply hurt by its content and retorted with a book of her own What little Vargas forgot to write (also titled My Life with Mario Vargas Llosa), which gave her version of the story. Some reviewers have dismissed it as a diatribe against the Nobel Laureate.

Julia Urquidi's book identified the other main protagonist  in the book - the scriptwriter. Running in parallel with the main narrative (the romance), is the story (and the 'scripts') of the Bolivian scriptwriter Pedro Comacho. According to Urquidi, the character was based on a real Bolivian writer - Raul Salmon. That was an inflammatory assertion, because though there was some overlap between the characters - Salmon had been a very successful radio serial writer around the same time that Llosa had been news editor of Radio Panamericana, his resemblance to Pedro Camacho ended there. Pedro was depicted as an eccentric, a person who, though he produced a prodigious quantity of work, never read. The only English language material available on Raul Salmon, written by Don Moore in The Journal of the North American Shortwave Association and claimed that Salmon, who died in 1990, had been the owner and manager of Radio Neuva America (one of Bolivia's largest radio stations), he was also the former mayor of La Paz, a one-time student of political science at George Washington University in the US and had worked briefly in London, for the BBC.  

Salmon was reported to have taken umbrage at the suggestion that the character of Pedro Camacho was modeled on him. Understandably so. Camacho was portrayed as an eccentric maladaptive character whose radio serials won him a large loyal audience addicted to the florid, imaginative mish-mash of Peruvian life which he dished out virtually continuously. Camacho himself physically assumed the roles he wrote about, wearing false mustaches, rabbinic beards, surgeons caps, even women's clothing as he channeled his characters into typewritten scripts. His themes included incest, marital deceit, mental breakdowns, deficient offspring, unconsummated love, the brutalizing effect of poverty and were a pageant of the different social types and classes in mid-twentieth century Peru. Overwork, resulted in a mental meltdown and his characters, their attributes and the serials within which they were originally contained, began to bleed into one another until his faithful listeners deserted him in droves and he wound up in an asylum and later as a faded impoverished "caricature of the caricature he had been". Because Llosa had based the main narrator's character loosely on his own and the other main character on Julia Urquidi, some readers began to assume that Pedro Comacho was a somewhat faithful representation of Raul Salmon and this borders on libelous.

Some reviewers suggest that the book can be viewed as Llosa's "homage" to the two people who shaped his artistic and personal life.  There are elements of sympathy and even empathy in his portrayal of Julia - sections of the book clearly show her generosity, clearheaded thinking and selflessness in small ways.  The squalor and tragicomedy of Camacho's circumstances are handled with compassion devoid of sentimentality. Notably, Salmon, on whom the character of Camacho was based, certainly did not have a squalid life.

All this "forensic rhetoric" aside, what can one come away with after reading Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter? I for one turned to the movie version of the book. Made in 1990, Tune in Tomorrow, starring Keanu Reeves as Mario, Barbara Herschey as Aunt Julia and Peter Falk as Pedro (whom Hollywood in its infinite wisdom renamed 'Pedro Carmichael' instead of 'Pedro Camacho'!!!) Let it suffice to say that despite the questions and qualms it raised, I preferred the book. Candid and entertaining, it provided the lingering sense of having been invited into the hearth and heart of a living breathing Peruvian family, who allowed their magnificence and failings to be on view. For wit and courage alone, salute!

Original Post at Healing Scribbles:
http://jillvc-artstuff.blogspot.com.au/2015/09/reviewing-aunt-julia-and-scriptwriter.html

The Storyteller by Mario Vargos Llosa

Reviewed by Gillian Valladares Castellino

Mario Vargas Llosa's Nobel Prizewinning novel, The Storyteller begins in the 1950s, in a small Florentine gallery, where a Peruvian writer (one of the two main narrators), chances upon a photograph of a tribal storyteller deep in the Amazonian jungle. On seeing the photograph he is gripped by the feeling that he knows this individual. More specifically, that the storyteller is his old college buddy Saul Zuratas. He begins to reminisce about the conversations he and Saul had as students, searching for clues that would corroborate his hunch. Saul's most distinguishing feature was a disfigurement - a massive, ugly birthmark that covered the right side of his face. As a consequence of it, he was nicknamed Mascarita (or Mask Face) and was exposed to a constant barrage of horror, revulsion, unkindness and even abuse from random strangers. He never seemed to mind any of it. That, coupled with the fact that he was raised by a devout Jewish father and had a Creole mother, set him apart from his peers.

On a field trip to the depths of the Amazonian jungle, with the Department of Ethnology (with which he was studying), he became acquainted with an indigenous tribe called the Machiguenga, a people for whom "God is air, water, food, a vital necessity, something without which life wouldn't be possible." The tribe holds a strange fascination for him. He debates the effects of modern civilization on them with his friend, insisting that "taking away their gods and replacing them with our own, an abstract God who's of no use to them at all in their daily life... is damaging." These realizations trigger a change in him which culminated in his turning his back on the modern world, eventually erasing his identity within it and transforming himself into 'El Hablador' (the storyteller) within the tribe.

The book traces the trajectory of this transformation, not just in terms of events, but in terms of insights that occurred to Saul as he interacted with the tribe. The interesting aspect of the book was how Llosa chose to delineate the process of change. There is a limited description of events to progress the plot, instead Llosa created a second narrator who is a kind of tribal being or consciousness embodied in a person called Tasurinchi who is a repository of tribal stories and folklore. His thought and speech patterns are very different from those of modern people. Interspersed between folklore, personal anecdotes and dream-like sequences of seemingly illogical thoughts and correspondences are insights and nuggets of truth and wisdom which modern man has "forgotten".

As the story develops, Tasurinchi morphs into Jehovah-Tasurinchi giving us the first clue that Saul is somehow involved with this "being". Jehovah-Tasurinchi, integrates into the narrative Saul's experiences of injustice, exile, alienation and difference and eventually becomes "El Hablador". Speaking of the process, he says, "I became a storyteller after being a listener. It happened without my willing it, little by little. Without even realizing it, I began to find my destiny... I discovered it myself." His acculturation into the tribe is complete.

In charting Saul's transformation, Llosa touches on a range of themes including globalization and its dis-empowering impact on indigenous populations, the pros, cons and practicalities of cultural hybridization and cultural nomad-ism. These threads weave their way through the narrative creating a rich tapestry of images and insights that demand a second or even a third reading to reveal their subtleties.

As he spends time with the Machiguenga, Saul intuitively develops an understanding of the wisdom inherent in primitive cultures, but this is not based on the 'noble savage' stereotype that so often underpins writing on these cultures. There is a certain lyricism in the way in which Llosa charts this: "Go on listening, carefully, respectfully... after a while the earth feels free to speak. It's the way it is in a trance, when everything and everyone speaks freely. The things you'd least expect speak.".... One and all have something to tell...Some things know their own story and the stories of other things, too; some know only their own. Whoever knows all the stories has wisdom, no doubt."

He simultaneously discerns a framework within which to make sense of the reactions he experienced because of his disfigurement or "otherness". There is poignant vulnerability in the phrases Llosa chooses to express this - "To look like a demon or a little devil and be only a man... must be both the work of evil and a misfortune and that's just what it is, I'd say... Only their outside is that of a monster, inside, they're still pure, no doubt about it..."

As he assimilates these thoughts, he begins to see parallels between the Amazonian nomadic tribe and the Jewish people - "Yet despite so many misfortunes, that people didn't disappear. In spite of its sufferings, it survived. It wasn't warlike, it never won wars, yet it's still here. It lived dispersed, its families scattered through the forests of the world , and yet it endured. Greater people, warriors, strong peoples, ... peoples who seemed indestructible, all went. Disappeared that is to say. No trace of them remained in the world, nobody remembered them.... Those survivors, however are still about. Journeying, coming and going, escaping, alive and walking. Down through time, and through all this wide world too."

Then his understanding evolves further and Saul is able to discern the psychology that underlies oppression - "Was it hated because it was different? Was that why, wherever it went, peoples would not accept it? Who knows? People don't like living with people who are different. They don't trust them, perhaps. Other customs, another way of speaking would frighten them, as though the world had suddenly become confused and dark. People would like everyone to be the same, would like others to forget their own customs... violate their own taboos and imitate theirs. If it had done that [targeted minorities] would have disappeared. Not one storyteller would have survived to tell their story."

Reflecting on all this, Saul comes to understand of the effects of forced acculturation and why he rejects it. - " I used to think: A people must change. Adopt the customs, the taboos, the magic of strong peoples...It wasn't true... Who is purer or happier because he's renounced his destiny.... I ask you? Nobody. We'd best be what we are. The one who gives up fulfilling his own obligation so as to fulfill that of another will lose his soul... It may be that when a person loses his soul the most repulsive beings, the most harmful predators, come and make their lair in the empty body..." In grasping all this, Saul realizes what his own deep needs are and why they matter to him. In fact, why they matter to us all.

Original Post at Healing Scribbles: http://jillvc-artstuff.blogspot.com.au/2015/08/thoughts-on-storyteller-by-mario-vargas.html