We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

We Need New Names questions the meaning of home and what our relationship to that is as we grow older. It's a coming of age story of a girl named Darling growing up in a make-shift town in Africa after her family were expelled from their home. She and her friends spend their days stealing guavas. They have a fierce sense of loyalty to each other and know who they are. Then Darling goes to live with her aunt in Michigan and must adapt into a new American identity. She has a sly sense of humour often having to stifle giggles and laughs while in her head she makes acute observations of those around her from a patronizing old white woman at a wedding to her vain aunt who walks endlessly on a treadmill to a bulimic girl who can't appreciate what she has. At the same time she loses touch with her friends back home and finds she can't connect with them anymore because she's left them and her country behind. Since she doesn't have a visa to legally remain in America she can't leave to visit Africa because she'd never be able to return to the US.

The way this novel is structured reminds me of one of my favourite books that I read last year – “We the Animals” by Justin Torres. [It's nice to read in this interview on the Caine Prize blog with Bulawayo that she's a fan of Torres] The narrator of that novel also speaks in the collective “we” for parts of the book as he and his brothers form a close pack. This closely mimics the psychology of an adolescent who finds a strong sense of identity in the collective of their close friends. But, of course, as the individual grows older they develop differently from those in their group and must find their own sense of self. Bulawayo is doing something slightly different in this novel, particularly later on in the book where in some chapters she speaks for a whole group of new immigrants who find themselves alienated from their native country in an alien land. In a merciless chapter called 'How They Lived' she bluntly lays out the perspective of immigrants who have come to America for economic opportunity and political stability. Strong emotions spill out onto the pages in a way that cannot be contained and is entirely justifiable. As she writes at one point: “What is rage when it is kept in like a heart, like blood, when you do not do anything with it, when you do not use it to hit, or even yell? Such rage is nothing, it does not count. It is just a big, terrible dog with no teeth.”

Identity is explored in other ways in the novel such as in a devastating chapter called 'Shhhh' where Darling is still living in Africa and her estranged father returns. He is concealed in her home as he's suffering from AIDS and her mother doesn't want the rest of the community to know. Staring at her father's face she observes “I know then that what really makes a person's face is the meat; once that melts away, you are left with something nobody can even recognize.” His illness has caused him to lose the strong, fired, hard-working man he once was so that he's become a stranger to his own daughter, someone she comes to resent and hopes will die so she can go out and play with her friends. In another chapter while concealed in tree branches Darling and her friends view a wealthy white couple's home as it's raided by armed revolutionaries. During an argument between the white man and the invaders, the white man objects that he was born in this country so it's as much his home as theirs. The philosophical questions linger in the background - What entitles a person to call a place home? Is a person's identity necessarily entwined with the land they live on?

Bulawayo has a sharp sense of observation and a merciless sense of humour. The book got me thinking about my own sense of split national identity since I grew up in America but have spent my whole adult life (since the year 2000) living in the UK. Of course, it's an entirely different situation given Darling has to contend with racial, linguistic, economic and political divisions. But I'm aware that there are parts of myself that have been lost since living for so long in an entirely different culture and there is also no way for me to ever really go home without arriving back as someone who is now in certain ways a foreigner. Even if you don't cross national boundaries the journey from adolescence to adulthood necessarily includes compromising parts of yourself to the idealized person you'd like to become. Our ability to adapt and change to new environments and societies allows us to survive, but it also makes us strangers to ourselves.  

Almost Tall by Vestal McIntyre

There are some short story writers who are so skilful I grin from ear to ear when I see they’ve published something new. Vestal McIntyre became one of them after I read his stunning debut – a collection of stories titled You Are Not The One. So when I saw he’d published this stand alone story Almost Tall I quickly bought it for my Kindle.

Dinah is an adolescent girl who travels from a provincial town in the American Midwest to her uncle’s New York City penthouse in order to attend a summer ballet school. Since her uncle Rick is often away at his job she is mostly left in the care of Rick’s partner Eddie – a monstrous socialite and pillow designer. Although naïve, she’s naturally suspicious and critical of the opinions and practices the colourful characters she meets in the city. She’s someone who has a great amount of desire but doesn’t quite know what she really wants. McIntyre is brilliant at portraying characters who stumble through social circles learning what they really want and, more importantly, what they really don’t want through careful observation and tentative interactions. His novel Lake Overturn was one of my favourite books of 2010. Almost Tall is an excellent short story particularly in the way it portrays Eddie’s shallow self-centeredness and Dinah’s friend Sunny with her burgeoning sexuality. It’s published by DailyLit who have the commendable and fantastic mission of delivering quality short stories to busy people.   

Can literary fiction increase your social skills?

This blog article in the NY Times cites a recent study by social psychologists which found people who read literary fiction are shown to have more empathy, social perception and emotional intelligence. Pam Belluck concludes that this will naturally lead people who read literary fiction as opposed to popular fiction to have better social skills. I wouldn’t necessarily make this leap. In my experience most people who read literary fiction are fairly socially withdrawn and awkward interacting with people in real life (myself especially). Whereas people I meet who read popular fiction tend to be more vibrantly social and at ease in crowds. It’s more of a division in personality types I think. Though I agree that literary fiction is more likely to increase your empathy because, as the article says, it literally puts you in someone else’s shoes to see the world from a different perspective. Also, literary books tend to present the world as a more complex nuanced place whereas popular literature tends to present the world from one point of view where people are quite clearly split into good or bad.

By the way, I love Louise Erdrich’s funny reactions to the study. The lady clearly has a good sense of humor.

Harvest by Jim Crace

Have you ever finished a book and you know it’s affected you on some deep subliminal level because you have very vivid dreams that evening? This has happened to me before when I read the fantastic nightmarish graphic novel Lost Girls by Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie. I think with that book the dreams were instigated by Gebbie’s powerful drawings. It’s happened again with Harvest and in this case I think it’s because of Crace’s masterful use of language and his subject matter.

This tale is narrated by Walter Thirsk, a long-time resident of a very small and isolated agricultural community. Crace uses almost lyrical language to describe the pastoral pleasures and hardships of farming wheat. There’s a tremendous unity felt for the small group of residents in their annual harvest with its hard work and traditional ceremonies. He doesn’t over-romanticise or shirk from the gritty realism of this rural life describing how there is also domestic strife, meagre eating when crops go bad and terminal disease due to lack of medical care. Nevertheless, the residents labour and subsist in a way that is largely harmonious and connected to the land. Then intruders arrive. There are two types. The first is a small group of three wanderers whose motives are unknown. The community seizes them when they seem threatening and subject them to punishments. The second is the cousin of the lord of the community who has come to claim the land as his own and transform it into a pasture for sheep. The residents react to these intruders in very different ways. The actions of intruders and residents ultimately lead to the disintegration of the community altogether.

While Thirsk has lived in the community for a long time, having married and lost his wife who is a local resident, he is still an outsider and this viewpoint gives Crace the advantageous position of describing village life from both an intimate and a more objective perspective. Walter bears witness to the unravelling of the age-old life in the community over the course of little more than a week. The story speaks to how we are both bound to each other through necessity in order to subsist and the ways in which we are inevitably in opposition with one another through greed and the desire to dominate – the land, resources, each other. I connected with this on a really personal level having wanted for many years to live in an intentional community called Twin Oaks in Virginia which seeks to, as much as possible, live in a way that is self-sustaining within the larger society. The book speaks of the pleasures and perils of living in a way that is so removed.

So now about my dream. I was being held captive by a small group of people in a bleak fortress with many rooms. I tried to escape from my captors running through multiple corridors and climbing over a high fence studded with barbed wire. I woke up feeling very unsettled so to calm myself I watched a film before getting back to sleep. The movie I randomly picked to watch was ‘You’ve Been Trumped’, the story of Donald Trump’s ambition to build a world-class golf course in Aberdeen despite the Scottish residents’ objections and environmentalists’ protests. The politicians and police force are influenced by Trump and leave the residents helpless to stop their land from being bulldozed and developed with most of Trump’s promises of enhancing local life going unmet. Watching this it struck me that this is the same story of Harvest. Rural residents get bullied out of the homes they’ve lived in for generations due to the strategic plans and despotic nature of more powerful outside individuals/groups. By grabbing land, stripping resources and oppressing vulnerable residents, “progress” continues to march on and the weak are winnowed out. After finishing watching the documentary I fell back asleep and this time I was the oppressor. I dreamed I was working to force people out of their homes pushing old women aside and brutalizing the inhabitants. I woke up shaken and disgusted with the thought that I could be an oppressor as well. It’s in all of our natures to dominate and destroy in order to enhance the possibility of our own survival. It’s impressive how Crace deals with this subject matter with such style and power that he can speak of universal truths through the lens of one small lost community.

Serious Readers vs Casual Readers

Over the weekend I went to a lovely wedding down in Ascot. At these events you inevitably chat to people you don’t know so I met some really nice family and friends. I got talking to one lady about books and almost immediately she started in enthusiastically about The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - a great novel I thoroughly enjoyed. However, she didn’t seem to understand when I repeatedly told her I’d read the novel because she kept insisting she’d lend it to me. Also, seemingly it’s the only book she’s read in the past few years. This is a dilemma which I find comes up now and then in social situations. I meet a casual reader who enthusiastically recommends a popular novel I’ve either read or that I’m not interested in and pushes with all their might to lend it to me because I’m a “book person.” I love getting book recommendations and talking about books, but it baffles me when more casual readers want to flog the latest Dan Brown on me. Part of me wants to turn around and drop The Luminaries or some other great big weight of a novel on their laps and say “Give me a call when you finish this!”

I think when people don’t read very much they don’t have anything to measure it against so are invariably positive about what they’ve patiently read through. Plus if you’ve spent some time reading something it’s more difficult to dismiss it as a dud because you don’t want to admit to yourself/others that you’ve wasted your time. Reading a bad book or a book that fails in some essential ways isn’t necessarily a waste of time (especially for writers) since it’s helpful to see what’s gone wrong. But casual readers seem more inclined to read for pure entertainment value and this is where it gets socially awkward. I mean, how many months will I have to hold on to a well-worn copy of Fifty Shades before sheepishly giving it back and politely saying I never got around to it?

Do any other serious readers out there have this dilemma when speaking with casual readers about books? Or am I being horrifically snobbish?  

May We Be Forgiven by AM Homes

A friend of mine is currently judging a book prize and May We Be Forgiven is one of the books up for consideration. He asked me for my opinion of it so it gave me a good excuse to get to this book I've been meaning to read all year. When I saw AM Homes read from it on the shortlisted authors' panel at the Woman's Prize for Fiction reading at the Royal Festival Hall earlier this year I enjoyed the funny engaging tone of the book. At the heart of it this book is about a man named Harry who has been emotionally sidelined all his life and feels a little detached from both his past and his current actions because of this neglect. He's been overshadowed by his successful brother George who always belittles him. However, at the beginning of the novel George has a sort of breakdown leaving Harry to pick up the pieces. Through a string of misadventures Harry gradually develops a new idea of what a family is – and it's not necessarily those you are bound to by blood, but people who really appreciate you for being you.

Homes does an impressive job analyzing the disillusionment of the 'American Dream' in this book and I really like how it trashes the idea of the traditional nuclear family. I've always felt the image of the perfectly balanced family - a sort of leftover from the 50s - has had a haunting effect on what the majority of society socially aspire to in creating a balanced happy life - like this is a model where any deviation should be stamped out. So the way in which this image is imploded from the very beginning leaving the brother to gradually construct a non-traditional family based on personal values rather than society's image is really effective and builds to a really tender emotional resonance. However, I felt the style at times to be somewhat distancing when it would lapse into scenes which felt farcical like in one scene where the authorities set up a sting operation to seize George who is with an Israeli with an ipad and the narrator brings cookies as bait. Sometimes it felt as if Homes is mocking the characters with corny race jokes like when Harry remarks what a good Jew a Chinese woman is when she asks him for a big donation. For some reason moments like this felt more jarring to me than some other scenes I found actually funny like the family's longstanding feud about the correct way to make matzoh balls and scenes of miscommunication like when Harry returns home from the hospital at one point after having a stroke. He tells a lawyer over the phone he had a small event and the lawyer replies he hopes it was pleasant. This kind of mis-fired understanding resonates because it shows the day to day breaks in communication we frequently experience in small ways because we function inside our own heads so much and let most of our interactions become routine. Like when the narrator comments, "Hard not to be surpised, when the bulk of conversation goes like this: 'Paper or plastic?' The loss of the human touch scares me." This seems to be speaking to what Homes is really trying to get at throughout the book – a sort of breakdown in genuine connections replaced with very modern sorts of substitutions that blanket emotion: online hook up sex with random strangers… food as something to be gorged upon rather than nourish.

In this novel people seem to inhibit their feelings continuously until they burst out sporadically like one scene where a boy named Ricardo’s aunt spews out her dissatisfaction with her life and when Harry's nephew Nate has an outburst after meeting an organ donor recipient. At the beginning the priorities of the narrator are all perverted like it’s more important knowing the calorie count of brownies than discussing what’s happening with his troubled brother. Homes seems to be using the narrator as a conduit who represents this dissociation – someone living perpetually in the present who literally can’t recall the past but by charging forth he makes connections with people he values and who value him in a way that his brother, mother and father never did (their frequent put-downs and insults towards him having ground him down to make him feel worthless).

I do like how she uses simple declarative sentences to effectively underpin the sense that the central character doesn’t understand his own motivations. It’s effective, but I think I prefer some short stories by Homes that I’ve read more than this novel. She can create a very evocative powerful scene quickly yet the effect in this novel is shuffling through a whole slew of these scenes so fast I found it sometime disorientating and distancing. In her book of short fiction Things You Should Know, Homes wrote a very good story about Nancy Reagan living a spooky isolated existence in her old age where she chats on a former first ladies' online forum that’s very funny. She seems to find something really powerful and resonant invoking American figureheads as guiding beacons for people’s values. I also found it somewhat distracting at times how heavily Homes marks out how she's in dialogue with other writers by making references to authors - Don DeLillo popping up in some scenes and naming a law firm in the novel after a combination of Saul Bellow titles and the spectre of John Cheever popping up in a parking lot. I guess it’s kind of fun but feels a little pretentious and heavy-handed.

May We Be Forgiven is a really interesting and entertaining read. Comparing it against other books on this year's Woman's Prize shortlist, as a novel I think Kingsolver's Flight Behavior stands up as something which keeps up a steadily paced narrative which develops and mounts to a whole piece rather than disjointed scenes. But reading this novel has made me want to go back and read more of Homes short fiction. 

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki

Zen Buddhism and quantum physics make happy bedfellows in this entertaining deeply-personal intelligent novel. You might think dealing with such grandiose subject matter might make this more of a scholarly diatribe than a moving story, but Ozeki writes a skilful engrossing narrative about an adolescent girl named Nao who grew up in California and finds herself taken back to live in her parents’ native country Japan. The book is very reminiscent of the movie Never Ending Story because alternating between chapters where Nao tells her story are chapters about a woman named Ruth living in a remote location in British Columbia who discovers Nao’s confessional letter washed up on a beach. Ruth becomes obsessed with the girl’s story which she realizes was written some years ago and sets about trying to track down what happened to Nao. I was equally gripped by this shy, awkward girl’s fate as she navigates the horrendous abuse from her fellow schoolmates, attempts to deal with her suicidal father and develops a reverence for her 104 year old great-grandmother who is a Zen nun and radical female author living in a mountain temple. I became so involved I started to resent somewhat the sections about Ruth and wished that it was only Nao’s story. However, this structure gives the author the opportunity to muse upon the nature of time and tease out a lot of philosophical quandaries.

The book does get you thinking a lot - especially once you start contemplating quantum physics and you learn how very strange the world is at the subatomic level. Does our awareness of the space around us actually change how matter functions on this level? If time is a matter of perception is it always relative? Does each of us have a unique “superpowah” that can be harnessed to help us deal with challenges we encounter? Questions like these gathered at the back of my mind while reading this book, but didn’t detract too much from the central story of Nao trying to find her way and uncovering the story behind her scholarly uncle who is inducted into military service and forced to become a kamikaze pilot. What I did find distracting was the occasional footnote or invitation to see the appendix. Normally I enjoy this bit of extra information and the process of flipping back and forth through a book, but some of these asides brought me out of the story more than add to it. Some people might find the more fantastical elements towards the end of the book difficult to take, but I think they add a touching way of connecting the stories and leaping over space/time.

This novel did partially inspire me to start this blog making me want to put my story out there for whoever might come across it and take what they want from it. I think Nao’s story touches upon feelings of isolation and the ways in which we seek out meaningful communication on deeper levels not often available on a person to person level. Many of the characters feel a deep loneliness and Ozeki shows how this functions in different circumstances. Obviously Nao’s being venomously ostracised from her school leaves her feeling deeply alone but also her father who finds himself out of work wandering alone at night, her mother who takes refuge at an aquarium watching jellyfish in a tank all afternoon, her uncle conscripted into military service who is compelled to write his philosophical thoughts in French at his hostile boot camp to conceal his true feelings from those around him and Ruth herself in a tight-knit rural community which is portrayed as stifling as it is supportive. We feel alone so often whether surrounded by people or not, but this novel gives a refreshing sense of being connected across time and through the power of written language.

A jungle crow plays an important role in the plot of A Tale for the Time Being

Ruth Ozeki reading, discussing the novel and the touching influences upon writing it:

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

I approached this novel with some trepidation – not because of the 800+ page length necessarily (with the right book I love to get stuck in for a good long time in order to really live with the characters) – but because of the structure. Catton frames the book’s sections with the stellar and planetary positions of the time. I had a fear that this book would be based a lot on astrological signs, personalities based on planetary positions and the sort of new-age sign reading that I don’t know anything about or have any interest in. It seems to me anyone who makes judgements on people based on star signs are working with generalities which bear no relation to the unique qualities of the individual. If one were a geek on this subject matter I’m sure this book could be fruitfully read with astrology in mind as the characters are closely aligned with certain planets and discover how their paths cross based on celestial alignments. However, this isn’t necessary because more than anything it’s an engaging, intelligent, complex, great big thrilling yarn of a read. As I got really into the thickness of the book’s plot and its fascinating array of characters I was enthralled by its story of a New Zealand gold-mining town in the mid-1800s. Deceit, greed, ambition, sailing adventures, hidden fortunes, familial strife, swapped identities, reinvention of the self, wacky séances, dirty deals, murder, prostitutes, opium. This book has all that and more.

What’s most impressive is that Catton is able to write such a many-paged incredibly intricately plotted narrative with such a huge cast of characters while balancing them all at the same time and keeping the reader alert to who is who and what is happening when. That takes serious talent. Each character is richly described so as to make them distinctive and she leaves markers along the way to remind you who that character is and their place in the plot even if they drop from the narrative for a while. The author creates a fascinating array of well-realized distinct characters. However, the only character which I think she fails somewhat is Te Rau Tauwhare, a Maori guide and gem-stone hunter. When he comes on the scene I feel like some of her research shows itself a little too plainly as she describes his connection with his native New Zealand culture and she lapses somewhat into stereotype. However, the rest of the (predominantly male) cast are shown to have varied interesting personalities – especially Quee Long with his painful past and his determination to get revenge.

This is a fiercely intelligent book as well as being a really engaging read. Along the way the author sometimes drops in really intelligent concepts about human nature and the complex working of psychology. For instance at one point she ruminates that “although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done – a judgement that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.” The author is, of course, speaking of men and women but I think she writes “a man” because this novel is written in the style of a novel in its time period using lots of parochial turns of phrase. This quote suggests to me a really complex interplay between how we are seen externally from how we view ourselves from the inside and why we are always so continuously and unfairly harsh on ourselves.

Another fascinating quote I tripped on and read over and over was this thought about the power of desire in motivating our actions. “Reason is no match for desire: when desire is purely and powerfully felt, it becomes a kind of reason of its own.” Surely this explains why so many of our actions make no logical sense when viewed externally. But when they are driven by the burning desires we harbour within they take on their own unavoidable power.

The story is richly rewarding as the mystery of what happened to a dead hermit, a drugged prostitute, a missing affluent miner, a mysterious widow and a suspicious scarred captain is gradually revealed – mostly through the stories of a group of individuals gathered together for a secret meeting in a pub at the start of the book. I’m sure I missed out on some of the connections, but most of the novel’s intriguing questions are answered by the end in a series of succinct well-paced chapters. I can just imagine taking this book with me to my dream cabin in Maine to reread when I’m much older and getting even more out of the story. It is a door-stop of book so I was glad I read the kindle version as my wrists would probably be sore from the strain of holding it up for so long if I didn’t. Whether it will win the Booker prize this year I don’t know. I’m reading my way through the shortlist right now. But this book does stand as a monumental achievement in writing – especially as it’s only the author’s second published novel.

Welcome!

Okay so maybe the title of this blog is a bit overdramatic and self-pitying sounding. But I figure it’s time for me to start my own repository for all my thoughts and feelings about reading since I have so few people to share them with. Usually reading is a solitary activity and, while in the midst of a strong book you feel like you’re on an elevated cerebral plane, once you close those covers (or shut down your e-reader) there is no one there but you by yourself mulling over what you’ve taken in. Maybe my posts will prompt a discussion or debate or I’ll be challenged in a way I can’t be sitting here in a vacuum of my own thoughts. Or maybe no one will bother reading my posts. If nothing else this will give me a chance to catalogue my impressions of the books I read rather than putting the book I’ve just finished reading back on the shelf and coming across it years later wondering ‘Now what did I think of that book?’ I’ve already recorded my thoughts about books in one form or another for years in various book journals or joining in a book group or writing reviews on Amazon or reviewing books for an arts journal called Chroma’s book blog. I should have struck out on my own like this years ago, but there’s no time like the present so here it is. Thanks for reading.

By the way, this image is from one of my favourite films called Born Yesterday starring Judy Holliday – an extremely intelligent gifted actress whose life and career was tragically cut short. In this film she transforms from a ditzy superficial gangster’s girlfriend to a book worm who stands up for herself.