Book #72: The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood
January 31, 2014
This has been a bit of an overwhelming week for me. The least of my stress stems from my job. Although I work in a somewhat unconventional environment, and I have students with some very serious issues, I haven't felt a whole lot of job-related stress this past school year. This week had some challenges; the facility that treats the students is taking on more young men, and we had two new students to contend with today alone. Our last few new students haven't been the easiest to deal with, so I'm apprehensive about the upcoming onslaught of new ones who will be coming in in the next couple of months. But I work with very competent people who have experienced many changes in the facility's programming, and have weathered through, so I will follow their lead and trust that we'll make it through all right. I've found, in my few years of teaching so far, that when I've been faced with challenges, I've always done well to keep calm, step back, and think out a decent solution. It's served me well.
The bulk of my stress comes from the fact that my semester of grad school is officially underway. I'm doing an independent study (which actually ought to be very interesting, and my adviser will be allowing me to structure that to be as relevant to me as possible), and a teaching of writing course. The writing course is going to take up more of my time than I anticipated. I breezed through a similar course in my undergrad days, but with all of the readings and projects that we're expected to complete, I'm feeling a little freaked out. I went to the bookstore where my instructor had ordered the (many) books for our class (not the university's official bookstore, but some independent bookstore near the campus), I found only one that I needed; the rest had sold out. But now that I've had a little time to, again, step back and think things out, I'm feeling much more sure of myself. I got this. I can do this...even if I have to fake my way through some of it (hey, it's worked for me before).
Why do I mention all of this? Well, for one thing, I know that for a time now, I'm going to have to really be disciplined about sitting down and doing my reading. Even though I'm only doing this blog, and reading all of these books, for myself, I think it's just as important as the courses that I'm taking, and almost as important as my job itself. I think I've said it on this blog before: I'm never sorry when I take the time to read. When I waste time watching TV or whatever, definitely...but reading is never a waste of my time, even if a book is less than spectacular.
This is the second book I've read by Atwood; the first is probably her best known, The Handmaid's Tale. I read this during my student teaching, as it was a book that my mentor wanted me to teach to her (or, essentially, my) women's literature course. I found the premise that Atwood set up to be fascinating, but I was nagged by the fact that the world's population has been steadily growing, to a dangerous degree, and that a slowing down in the birth rate wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing...the world might secretly welcome it. The group of girls who read this book absolutely hated, and I was amused as I listened to their reasoning. They weren't very sophisticated readers, these girls, and they found the descriptions of sex to be too much. People are so conservative in Phoenix.
The Blind Assassin is grounded a bit more in reality; the most fantastic elements come from a story-within-a-novel (which was within this novel...meta) about a dystopian society on an alien planet, on which a young former slave (the "blind assassin" of the title...not at all a prominent character in the large scheme of the text) falls in love with a young girl who is set for sacrifice as their city is about to be invaded and destroyed. This story is started by a young, unnamed man (at least not in The Blind Assassin, the novella believed to have been written by the late Laura Chase), and he's telling it to his lover, who is unnamed in "Laura's" book but is really Iris, Laura's older sister and the actual author of the famous book.
Okay, so the plot sounds pretty convoluted, but over 524 pages it's not exactly confusing. Iris's novella (which she'd had published after Laura's suicide) is told in full in the book, intermingled with news stories related to Iris and Laura's family, the prominent Chases of Port Ticonderoga, which is somewhere in Canada. Atwood herself is Canadian; I don't feel like I've read much literature that takes place in Canada. Through Atwood's eyes, Canada isn't much different from the U.S.; the histories are even pretty similar, as the bulk of the story being told (as Iris, writing a memoir to be left for her friend Myra, or for her estranged granddaughter Sabrina) takes place during the Depression, and into World War II. The economy forces Norval Chase, Iris and Laura's famous, one-eyed war hero of a father, to close down his button factory (and other factories). Iris and Laura had been raised in isolation on their estate, Avilion. They were sneered at and despised by their poorer neighbors, and the children of the people who worked for their father. Iris and Laura only ever really had each other...and Reenie, their housekeeper (Myra's mother).
Laura, who is posthumously revered by the book that people believed she wrote before killing herself (which probably made the book much more famous than it would have been on its own, to be perfectly honest), was a strange one. As she was described as being so literal, so pious, so unflinching, so God-loving yet questioning, I had a feeling that she couldn't have written a story about a woman who is sleeping with an outlaw. Though she herself was in love with the outlaw in question; one Alex Thomas, a Communist who was accused of starting a fire and a riot at their father's button factory. They had met him, and been charmed by him, at a picnic. Laura, though four years younger than Iris, had known that they'd both fallen in love with him that day. She was so weird and so wise; I found myself thinking at one point that she might be called "autistic" today. I don't know. I admired Laura for being so brave and stubborn, and for being able to see the truth. Iris, her sister, didn't seem to have such insight or ability.
When the Chase factories failed, Norval Chase essentially sold his oldest daughter off to a greedy social climber, Richard Griffen. Iris came to learn that the Griffens (consisting of Richard and his sister Winifred, who is married though no husband is ever mentioned) were tolerated for their money, though Richard did eventually make a name for himself in politics in Toronto. Laura sees Richard as the monster who killed her father; they'd become business partners, than Richard had married Iris and had closed the factories in Port Ticonderoga. While Iris was on her honeymoon, her father drank himself to death. Though Laura's view on the situation might seem a bit extreme, she wasn't quite wrong.
Iris never felt like she belonged in her situation. Winifred was insincere, and later vindictive when Iris sneakily used her book to get revenge on her husband. When Laura comes to stay with Iris and Richard, Richard molests her...it was done at least once, on the boat the Water Nixie back in Avilion. That's the book on which Richard later kills himself. Laura slept with Richard to protect Alex Thomas; Richard had threatened to sniff him out and have him arrested, though it's uncertain whether or not he actually had any information on him. Laura got pregnant, she was sent away secretly, and Iris (pregnant with Alex Thomas's child; she finds him in Toronto one day on the streets, and they have an affair; the only details of this are in "Laura's" book) didn't know the truth until Laura returned years later. Even after everything Laura has been through, she holds out hope that she can be with Alex. When she finds out that he's dead (not that her sister had an affair with him, but that he died and she got the telegraph), she steals Iris's car and runs it off the bridge.
At that point in Iris's recollections, it hadn't been confirmed that she had herself written The Blind Assassin. But by the time she describes finding out about Laura's death, I think, if Laura had written it about Iris and Alex (because I had figured out long before then that the book was about them, and not about Laura and Alex, or any other combination), that's not possible...she'd only just found out about their affair. Iris does confirm it herself. She does this for Sabrina, not for any fame or fortune herself; though she'd had money at some point in her life, she's not very wealthy when she's old, at least not in the sense that she has much to leave when she dies. So it's assumed that she never got much money for her successful book, and she allows dead Laura to have the fame and the admiration. Their relationship was so much easier to understand once I figured out that Iris had written the book. In a way, I almost felt that Iris was giving the affair with Alex to Laura. Aimee, Iris's very confused and troubled daughter, had been sort of right; she was the baby of the two people in The Blind Assassin, but her true mother wasn't Aunt Laura after all. Iris believes that sharing the truth with Sabrina, who probably knew her own mother's version of the truth all her life, will help her granddaughter to make a fresh start, to be able to shape her own identity.
But in a way, Iris shaped her own sister's identity after death. She attributed her own story, a somewhat risque (for the time) story with some foul language (enough to cause a stir at the time), to her sister. It completely changed the way that people viewed Laura Chase. The Blind Assassin didn't really represent Laura at all. Laura, on her own, was a pretty unique, but very troubled, person. I don't know if I can agree with Iris putting Laura's name on the book; not that it was poorly written (I found the actually story of the blind assassin, the one that Alex tells to Iris, and then they disagree about the ending, to be the best part of this book), but it didn't represent what Laura was all about. Laura would have left with Alex; she would not have kept coming around in her expensive clothes, drawing attention when Alex was trying to deflect it. Well, it's not like it was represented as being autobiographical, but the fact that it was published after the supposed author's suicide had obviously led some people to that idea (including Richard, it seems; he killed himself not because Iris had another man's child, but because he believed Laura really had written the book about herself; he'd loved her in a perverse way). Right or wrong, I can sympathize with Iris. She always tried to do what was right; I don't necessarily see the issue with her sleeping with Alex, because I knew that Richard was an asshole (I could see him raping Laura from a mile off, that wasn't a surprise) and that he was only using the Chase sisters to advance socially, as they were an old and established family and the Griffens were not.
I enjoyed the structure of this book. I wasn't always drawn in to Iris's later musings (though that was before I started to put the pieces together), but in spite of the length, I felt like it was paced pretty well. I may read another work by Atwood some time; she's definitely a unique voice, and she's put out quite a number of novels (and even some books for children, according to the list at the end of my electronic edition). There's a small picture of her hanging in my classroom, in fact; she's one of many authors featured on a "great writers" poster that I've had since my first year of teaching, which features the likes of Shakespeare and J.K. Rowling and Salman Rushdie (still haven't read anything by him, by the way...). I think her spot as a "great" author is well deserved. And I'll say this for The Blind Assassin: it got me interested in vintage pulp fiction in a way that Quentin Tarantino never could.
Friday, January 31, 2014
Sunday, January 26, 2014
Book #71: On Writing
Book #71: On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft by Stephen King
January 27, 2014
Right now, the wind is howling at frightful speeds, as I sit here and look forward to yet another day off from work tomorrow. It's kind of funny, even though this is the fourth "snow day" we've had this year, none of them have actually been caused by snow. The first was for freezing rain; two others earlier this month for temperature, and I think that the very low temps expected for tomorrow are the reason for my impromptu three-day weekend. Apparently my district has set aside NO snow days this year, so I'm looking at being at work well into June. Oh, well. Summer runs kind of long for me, anyway, and I was kind of keeping my fingers crossed for a day off tomorrow. I'll probably still have my first session of my writing course tomorrow night, so I can spend some time tomorrow during the day making sure that I'm prepared.
So obviously, I read this book for said course. It was actually on a list of like five books on writing; naturally I chose to read the one by Stephen King. As I've mentioned in other posts, I think he's brilliant, so of course reading his take on writing, his approaches to it and his advice for any aspiring creative writer, was a special treat for me. I enjoy reading King when he's simply writing as himself. He used to (maybe still does?) write a regular column for Entertainment Weekly, and while I, as a senior in high school, was confused about why a horror writer would be consulted about popular culture, I found his commentaries entertaining. He maintains that same jocularity, the same personable tone, with this work. It was started before, and finished after, the infamous accident in 1999, when King was struck by a van while walking on a quiet Maine highway. He even writes about his experiences recovering from the accident...pretty gruesome. He's able to tie that in with his love of writing; how writing again helped to bring him out of his pain as his legs were healing. That's pretty admirable.
King is not a snob when it comes to literature or writing. He differentiates between "good" writing and "bad" writing, even using some published examples. But he judges a work on the quality of the writing itself, not on whether its trying to tell a profound story or whatever. Certainly this attitude shouldn't be surprising. In his works, his characters are often ordinary, everyday Americans. That's what I love most about his writing, the characters. He advises would-be fiction writers not to focus on plot when writing a story, but to take a situation and add characters...the plot takes care of itself.
I've dabbled in some creative writing. Nothing that I'm very proud of, though when I've shared my work, I've gotten positive feedback. I agree with King's advice about putting aside a completed first draft for several weeks and coming back to it with fresh eyes. When I've looked back on work that I've written not too long ago, I'm not exactly proud. But there are times when I'm like, "Wow, that sounded all right...I'm not horrible at this." I used to dream of being a famous writer when I was a kid, but that dream faded away a long time ago. I'm a competent writer, to be sure. I always have been, and I attribute that to the fact that I've always (excepting my teens, for the most part) read a lot. Even as a teen I probably read more than most of my peers, but not nearly as much as I did as a young child, or as I do currently. King advises writers to watch little TV, and to read instead; this is very, very good advice. I must say.
Certainly, if I were to embark on a serious writing endeavor (and hell, maybe I might at some point), I probably wouldn't do things exactly as King laid them out. But then, in this book, he never tried to sound like he knew-it-all. Well, you can't say he doesn't know his shit; after all, he's published many books, and has been enormously successful. He's modest about his success, mostly. He's in love with his own cleverness at times, which is an attribute that I usually can't stand in writers, but he's so open, so dorky, that you know he's not taking himself too seriously. I feel like Stephen King, having had the experiences he's had, isn't just wise about writing, but that he has the right attitude about life as well. I think I'm a bigger fan of his now after reading this.
Now, when thinking about how I would apply King's advice to my teaching of writing, I don't have as much to say. King wrote this book for people who wanted to make careers of writing; he even includes advice about how to find an agent or a publishing company. This advice was for people who want to write, which wouldn't be the majority of students in any school. But I do, again, like the idea of centering stories about situations. I kind of have the students to that in spurts already, like with their brief journal entries. But maybe at some point, I could have them expand on this. I was also validated by King's very obvious advice to write often. I have my students write every day...fuck, why wouldn't I? It's a writing class. Okay, that must seem really stupid and obvious, but I have to admit that my rather practical approach to the teaching of writing has raised some eyebrows. Not to get into it to much, but I've been advised (not by anyone with authority) to teach students writing out of a textbook. The only way to learn "the craft" (as King calls it; not "the art," though he does refer to it as an art form in the book) is to engage in it. The mechanics and stuff come in time. King has only a little to say on grammar and mechanics, but basically implies that people know it by instinct. If they can speak properly, they can write properly...it comes with application and continued practice, I guess. No, I know. I don't expect that any of my students would want to go on to become writers, and my goal isn't really to make them become professional authors. But to just have the skill of writing, to be competent in communicating in the written language, in very important. King's book is for people who wish to go beyond that; but, since my course is on the teaching of writing, I can see some things that I can get out of it to apply to my curriculum.
January 27, 2014
Right now, the wind is howling at frightful speeds, as I sit here and look forward to yet another day off from work tomorrow. It's kind of funny, even though this is the fourth "snow day" we've had this year, none of them have actually been caused by snow. The first was for freezing rain; two others earlier this month for temperature, and I think that the very low temps expected for tomorrow are the reason for my impromptu three-day weekend. Apparently my district has set aside NO snow days this year, so I'm looking at being at work well into June. Oh, well. Summer runs kind of long for me, anyway, and I was kind of keeping my fingers crossed for a day off tomorrow. I'll probably still have my first session of my writing course tomorrow night, so I can spend some time tomorrow during the day making sure that I'm prepared.
So obviously, I read this book for said course. It was actually on a list of like five books on writing; naturally I chose to read the one by Stephen King. As I've mentioned in other posts, I think he's brilliant, so of course reading his take on writing, his approaches to it and his advice for any aspiring creative writer, was a special treat for me. I enjoy reading King when he's simply writing as himself. He used to (maybe still does?) write a regular column for Entertainment Weekly, and while I, as a senior in high school, was confused about why a horror writer would be consulted about popular culture, I found his commentaries entertaining. He maintains that same jocularity, the same personable tone, with this work. It was started before, and finished after, the infamous accident in 1999, when King was struck by a van while walking on a quiet Maine highway. He even writes about his experiences recovering from the accident...pretty gruesome. He's able to tie that in with his love of writing; how writing again helped to bring him out of his pain as his legs were healing. That's pretty admirable.
King is not a snob when it comes to literature or writing. He differentiates between "good" writing and "bad" writing, even using some published examples. But he judges a work on the quality of the writing itself, not on whether its trying to tell a profound story or whatever. Certainly this attitude shouldn't be surprising. In his works, his characters are often ordinary, everyday Americans. That's what I love most about his writing, the characters. He advises would-be fiction writers not to focus on plot when writing a story, but to take a situation and add characters...the plot takes care of itself.
I've dabbled in some creative writing. Nothing that I'm very proud of, though when I've shared my work, I've gotten positive feedback. I agree with King's advice about putting aside a completed first draft for several weeks and coming back to it with fresh eyes. When I've looked back on work that I've written not too long ago, I'm not exactly proud. But there are times when I'm like, "Wow, that sounded all right...I'm not horrible at this." I used to dream of being a famous writer when I was a kid, but that dream faded away a long time ago. I'm a competent writer, to be sure. I always have been, and I attribute that to the fact that I've always (excepting my teens, for the most part) read a lot. Even as a teen I probably read more than most of my peers, but not nearly as much as I did as a young child, or as I do currently. King advises writers to watch little TV, and to read instead; this is very, very good advice. I must say.
Certainly, if I were to embark on a serious writing endeavor (and hell, maybe I might at some point), I probably wouldn't do things exactly as King laid them out. But then, in this book, he never tried to sound like he knew-it-all. Well, you can't say he doesn't know his shit; after all, he's published many books, and has been enormously successful. He's modest about his success, mostly. He's in love with his own cleverness at times, which is an attribute that I usually can't stand in writers, but he's so open, so dorky, that you know he's not taking himself too seriously. I feel like Stephen King, having had the experiences he's had, isn't just wise about writing, but that he has the right attitude about life as well. I think I'm a bigger fan of his now after reading this.
Now, when thinking about how I would apply King's advice to my teaching of writing, I don't have as much to say. King wrote this book for people who wanted to make careers of writing; he even includes advice about how to find an agent or a publishing company. This advice was for people who want to write, which wouldn't be the majority of students in any school. But I do, again, like the idea of centering stories about situations. I kind of have the students to that in spurts already, like with their brief journal entries. But maybe at some point, I could have them expand on this. I was also validated by King's very obvious advice to write often. I have my students write every day...fuck, why wouldn't I? It's a writing class. Okay, that must seem really stupid and obvious, but I have to admit that my rather practical approach to the teaching of writing has raised some eyebrows. Not to get into it to much, but I've been advised (not by anyone with authority) to teach students writing out of a textbook. The only way to learn "the craft" (as King calls it; not "the art," though he does refer to it as an art form in the book) is to engage in it. The mechanics and stuff come in time. King has only a little to say on grammar and mechanics, but basically implies that people know it by instinct. If they can speak properly, they can write properly...it comes with application and continued practice, I guess. No, I know. I don't expect that any of my students would want to go on to become writers, and my goal isn't really to make them become professional authors. But to just have the skill of writing, to be competent in communicating in the written language, in very important. King's book is for people who wish to go beyond that; but, since my course is on the teaching of writing, I can see some things that I can get out of it to apply to my curriculum.
Monday, January 20, 2014
Book #70: Memoirs of a Geisha
Book #70: Memoirs of a Geisha by Arthur Golden
January 20, 2014
I had been trying to get my hands on a copy of this book since I started this blog. I've never seen the movie (I'd really love to, as I'm sure it would be visually stunning), but it's another one of those books that I've always meant to read. A woman who works for the organization that I teach for (I'm not really an employee of this same organization, but of the local school district; my students are residents on this treatment facility campus) had a copy, and it took her a while to get through it. But when she was finished, she kindly loaned it to me.
I'll start by saying that geisha are not exactly like prostitutes. True, they are paid for having sex with men...but at one point, Sayuri (the narrator of the book, the 'geisha' of the title) compares geisha to 'kept women' of Western culture, and that's probably closer to the truth. Geisha (that's both the plural and singular...didn't know that going into this) are cultural symbols; Sayuri at one point calls them 'playthings' of the men in power. But the men in power are their playthings as well, to some extent. Prostitutes are...well, prostitutes.
Typically, a young woman of standing in Japan at that time (I'm referring to the earlier part of the 20th century, including World War II) did not aspire to be a geisha. Mameha, Sayuri's 'older sister' (mentor geisha) once said that a geisha is a geisha because she has no choice. That was so with Sayuri. She'd come from a small fishing village. Her mother was very sick, and her fishman father was old, and had nothing to leave for his two daughters. Sayuri (then Chiyo, though her name would change when she became a geisha officially), as a young girl, was noticed by a local businessman, who basically convinced her father to sell her to an okiya (a small compound for geisha in a geisha district). Her older sister, not nearly so lovely, was sold off as a prostitute, and later ran away from Kyoto.
I found the time frame of this book to be off balance. Though the title of this book would make you think that it would focus on Sayuri's time as a full-fledged geisha, this is not really the case. More time is spent on her childhood, particularly her early years in Gion, suffering under Hatsumomo, the star geisha in her okiya. Hatsumomo is a fascinating character, and one thing that disappointed me about this book is that more is not explained about her past. I feel like I learned more about Nobu, Sayuri's almost-danna, then I did about Hatsumomo. Though they were enemies from the start (for Hatsumomo, whose position in the okiya was precarious because she was not an adopted daughter, was threatened by lovely young Chiyo with her strange blue/grey eyes), you would think that Sayuri would somehow learn more about how Hatsumomo came to be such a bitch. Yet her character isn't really fleshed out; she suffers a terrible, though somewhat unknown, fate, when her increasingly erratic behavior and her out-of-control drinking (as well as the fact that Sayuri had secured her place as the adopted daughter of the okiya, in spite of Hatsumomo's years of trying to sabotage her) gets her throw out on the street.
It's so cold. There is no love in this world. Sayuri is adopted by the woman she calls 'Mother' (though only because that's what everyone in the okiya, including her own adopted sister, calls her) because she makes a good living as a geisha. Mostly this is from being a popular entertainer. Most of her money would also come from her danna, the man who 'keeps' her. The man actually has to make a deal with the head of the geisha's okiya, and the local teahouses are also involved in this. When a geisha has a danna, she still goes out to entertain. Any time that she spends with men, as she pours their drinks, laughs at their jokes, performs dances for them or plays an instrument, is paid for, through the teahouse that is hosting. Geisha mean big business, and the entire community of Gion not only benefits from, but is dependent upon, the success of the geisha who work in the many teahouses there. I couldn't help but think, as Sayuri was regarding some of her patrons as her friends, that this was a strange sort of friendship. I mean, they paid her to spend time with them. It's not a bad way for a woman to make her money, and hey, I can't even really judge the sexual stuff (as Sayuri said, it's not really any different from being a 'kept woman,' besides all the other people involved in the negotiations). But to call these patrons friends...well, I guess I didn't see enough of Sayuri's time as an actual geisha to really buy into that.
I was definitely disappointed in the second half of the book, when I was so drawn into young Chiyo's plight. With some of the foreshadowing, I was led to think that the years of World War II would have a huge impact on Sayuri's life. Yet that part is so brief; for a few years, she's living outside of Kyoto and working for a kimono maker, who had been commissioned to sew parachutes for the Japanese army. Sayuri describes how the war changed her physically, but otherwise she seemed much the same. And from there, it's an abrupt rush to the end of the book, where Sayuri gets what her heart has always desired, but in a way that I found to be disappointing.
You see, I actually wanted Sayuri to end up with Nobu. I saw him as one of those curmudgeon with a heart of gold type of characters, and I am always drawn to those. I wanted the ever-perfect Chairman to not be perfect in some way; I didn't feel anything for this character one way or the other, though he was the one driving force in Sayuri's entire life. Ever since the day he'd comforted her when she was a young girl crying on the streets, she'd sworn that she'd become a star geisha and win his heart. Well, the Chairman had been scheming to get to her himself, until he saw his partner Nobu's interest in the young woman. That ending was explained kind of sloppily; I recall that Mameha, in taking Sayuri to the sumo tournament the day that she met Nobu, had done so with the express purpose of her meeting Nobu; yet the Chairman says that he had directly asked Mameha to help young Chiyo become a geisha for him. So I'm bothered enough by that detail that I just can't buy into that ending.
Plus, I thought that Sayuri's original assumption about Mameha's involvement was more believable. I can buy into Mameha having an interest in her rival's scapegoat, a pretty young girl with potential, and using that girl against her. Mameha was most interesting and real then. She was also very real when it was revealed that she'd been pregnant by her danna, a pig referred to as the Baron, three times, and had all of them aborted. Some pregnant geisha have their babies, but abortions are common with geisha. It's an embarrassing topic to discuss, somewhat taboo, but not a hot-button issue in their culture.
But besides those two moments, Mameha kind of is the 'little miss perfect' that Hatsumomo accuses her of being. I felt like, in spite of the length of the text, the characters in this book were not as well fleshed-out as they might have been. Golden went into detail about the characters physical appearances (Gion is full of ugly men with money and beautiful women), but other than Nobu or Sayuri herself, there were many things that I still wanted to know about most of the other important characters, such as Pumpkin or Mother. This story had a lot of potential, and while it was full of the interesting details that I look for in books that center around other cultures, I felt like this book was very off-balance. I'm sure the movie is magnificent, if they have kimono that are as beautiful as the ones described in the book, and cherry blossoms, and mountains and hot springs. Turning this book into a film was probably a dream come true for the production team, I'm sure.
January 20, 2014
I had been trying to get my hands on a copy of this book since I started this blog. I've never seen the movie (I'd really love to, as I'm sure it would be visually stunning), but it's another one of those books that I've always meant to read. A woman who works for the organization that I teach for (I'm not really an employee of this same organization, but of the local school district; my students are residents on this treatment facility campus) had a copy, and it took her a while to get through it. But when she was finished, she kindly loaned it to me.
I'll start by saying that geisha are not exactly like prostitutes. True, they are paid for having sex with men...but at one point, Sayuri (the narrator of the book, the 'geisha' of the title) compares geisha to 'kept women' of Western culture, and that's probably closer to the truth. Geisha (that's both the plural and singular...didn't know that going into this) are cultural symbols; Sayuri at one point calls them 'playthings' of the men in power. But the men in power are their playthings as well, to some extent. Prostitutes are...well, prostitutes.
Typically, a young woman of standing in Japan at that time (I'm referring to the earlier part of the 20th century, including World War II) did not aspire to be a geisha. Mameha, Sayuri's 'older sister' (mentor geisha) once said that a geisha is a geisha because she has no choice. That was so with Sayuri. She'd come from a small fishing village. Her mother was very sick, and her fishman father was old, and had nothing to leave for his two daughters. Sayuri (then Chiyo, though her name would change when she became a geisha officially), as a young girl, was noticed by a local businessman, who basically convinced her father to sell her to an okiya (a small compound for geisha in a geisha district). Her older sister, not nearly so lovely, was sold off as a prostitute, and later ran away from Kyoto.
I found the time frame of this book to be off balance. Though the title of this book would make you think that it would focus on Sayuri's time as a full-fledged geisha, this is not really the case. More time is spent on her childhood, particularly her early years in Gion, suffering under Hatsumomo, the star geisha in her okiya. Hatsumomo is a fascinating character, and one thing that disappointed me about this book is that more is not explained about her past. I feel like I learned more about Nobu, Sayuri's almost-danna, then I did about Hatsumomo. Though they were enemies from the start (for Hatsumomo, whose position in the okiya was precarious because she was not an adopted daughter, was threatened by lovely young Chiyo with her strange blue/grey eyes), you would think that Sayuri would somehow learn more about how Hatsumomo came to be such a bitch. Yet her character isn't really fleshed out; she suffers a terrible, though somewhat unknown, fate, when her increasingly erratic behavior and her out-of-control drinking (as well as the fact that Sayuri had secured her place as the adopted daughter of the okiya, in spite of Hatsumomo's years of trying to sabotage her) gets her throw out on the street.
It's so cold. There is no love in this world. Sayuri is adopted by the woman she calls 'Mother' (though only because that's what everyone in the okiya, including her own adopted sister, calls her) because she makes a good living as a geisha. Mostly this is from being a popular entertainer. Most of her money would also come from her danna, the man who 'keeps' her. The man actually has to make a deal with the head of the geisha's okiya, and the local teahouses are also involved in this. When a geisha has a danna, she still goes out to entertain. Any time that she spends with men, as she pours their drinks, laughs at their jokes, performs dances for them or plays an instrument, is paid for, through the teahouse that is hosting. Geisha mean big business, and the entire community of Gion not only benefits from, but is dependent upon, the success of the geisha who work in the many teahouses there. I couldn't help but think, as Sayuri was regarding some of her patrons as her friends, that this was a strange sort of friendship. I mean, they paid her to spend time with them. It's not a bad way for a woman to make her money, and hey, I can't even really judge the sexual stuff (as Sayuri said, it's not really any different from being a 'kept woman,' besides all the other people involved in the negotiations). But to call these patrons friends...well, I guess I didn't see enough of Sayuri's time as an actual geisha to really buy into that.
I was definitely disappointed in the second half of the book, when I was so drawn into young Chiyo's plight. With some of the foreshadowing, I was led to think that the years of World War II would have a huge impact on Sayuri's life. Yet that part is so brief; for a few years, she's living outside of Kyoto and working for a kimono maker, who had been commissioned to sew parachutes for the Japanese army. Sayuri describes how the war changed her physically, but otherwise she seemed much the same. And from there, it's an abrupt rush to the end of the book, where Sayuri gets what her heart has always desired, but in a way that I found to be disappointing.
You see, I actually wanted Sayuri to end up with Nobu. I saw him as one of those curmudgeon with a heart of gold type of characters, and I am always drawn to those. I wanted the ever-perfect Chairman to not be perfect in some way; I didn't feel anything for this character one way or the other, though he was the one driving force in Sayuri's entire life. Ever since the day he'd comforted her when she was a young girl crying on the streets, she'd sworn that she'd become a star geisha and win his heart. Well, the Chairman had been scheming to get to her himself, until he saw his partner Nobu's interest in the young woman. That ending was explained kind of sloppily; I recall that Mameha, in taking Sayuri to the sumo tournament the day that she met Nobu, had done so with the express purpose of her meeting Nobu; yet the Chairman says that he had directly asked Mameha to help young Chiyo become a geisha for him. So I'm bothered enough by that detail that I just can't buy into that ending.
Plus, I thought that Sayuri's original assumption about Mameha's involvement was more believable. I can buy into Mameha having an interest in her rival's scapegoat, a pretty young girl with potential, and using that girl against her. Mameha was most interesting and real then. She was also very real when it was revealed that she'd been pregnant by her danna, a pig referred to as the Baron, three times, and had all of them aborted. Some pregnant geisha have their babies, but abortions are common with geisha. It's an embarrassing topic to discuss, somewhat taboo, but not a hot-button issue in their culture.
But besides those two moments, Mameha kind of is the 'little miss perfect' that Hatsumomo accuses her of being. I felt like, in spite of the length of the text, the characters in this book were not as well fleshed-out as they might have been. Golden went into detail about the characters physical appearances (Gion is full of ugly men with money and beautiful women), but other than Nobu or Sayuri herself, there were many things that I still wanted to know about most of the other important characters, such as Pumpkin or Mother. This story had a lot of potential, and while it was full of the interesting details that I look for in books that center around other cultures, I felt like this book was very off-balance. I'm sure the movie is magnificent, if they have kimono that are as beautiful as the ones described in the book, and cherry blossoms, and mountains and hot springs. Turning this book into a film was probably a dream come true for the production team, I'm sure.
Sunday, January 12, 2014
Book #69: Me Talk Pretty One Day
Book #69: Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris
January 12, 2014
The title of this book (a collection of short, humorous stories about various events or periods in the author's life) always made me think that it was a sad tale about a child with a speech impediment, or one who came from a remote region who aspired to rise in society, who faced many obstacles along the way. Yeah, I was pretty far off the mark.
This isn't the first Sedaris text that I've read. I read When You Are Engulfed in Flames not long after it was published; my father had a copy of it (he's not much of a reader, but I could see how he would be drawn to this work), and I read it on and off during a week-long trek to Flagstaff for my freshman year of college, with my bratty brother and a rented van full of my shit. I don't remember much about the individual pieces in the other book, but I do remember my reaction to it. I found myself thinking that Sedaris sounded like a prick, that he was too clever. Cloying, really. I read some of it again a couple of years later, when I was cat sitting at a neighbor's apartment; I found myself thinking that she would have that book, and I picked it up, and my opinion hadn't really changed.
So I was, of course, hesitant to read this one, but since I'd always been intrigued by the title, I gave it a shot. My feelings were still there for the first couple of stories, but overall I enjoyed this work, especially when Sedaris was describing awkward situations that everyone could find themselves in, and adding a sense of profundity to them. I guess this is most evident in the short piece "Big Boy," when, during a party at a friend's home, he goes to the bathroom and finds an enormous turd that won't flush, and he's so embarrassed that he finds a way to get rid of it...even though it wasn't his. Very funny, especially since everyone has found themselves in an equally awkward social situation (if not involving a turd, then something else equally disgusting or embarrassing); yet Sedaris also reflects that that situation, that need to get rid of the turd because of the impression that it might give the other party guests about him, says something about himself personally. That was probably my favorite piece in this work.
I enjoyed Sedaris most when he was describing his family (like his father, who hoards produce; or his sister, who grew up a dreamy artist). I didn't realize until, like, ten minutes ago that comedienne Amy Sedaris is his sister; they've even collaborated on writing together. Amy Sedaris has an extensive filmography, but she's not quite as famous as the likes of Tina Fey. She's also beautiful, even in her 50's, though many of the characters she's portrayed have been hideous in some way or another. In "A Shiner Like a Diamond," Sedaris describes his sister as being the most beautiful one in the family, and I believe she'd take that title in about any family. And, in the story, she, as a young New Yorker, was photographed with makeup that made her look like she'd been severely beaten; this was her own choice for a magazine shoot. She also tricks her shallow father by wearing the bottom half of a fat suit on a home visit, causing him to freak out whenever she put any food in her mouth. I also found myself interested in Sedaris's mother, and the relationship that he had with her, which (if I recall) is delved into in a little more detail in When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Sedaris describes her love of napping more than once, but never in a way that seems bitter; it's funny to imagine her spending her days curled up with her dog, rather than tragic.
I also enjoyed Sedaris's descriptions of his time in Paris with his boyfriend Hugh. Especially amusing were the descriptions of his abusive French teacher; the title of the book comes from a conversation between some of the other international students, and written in translated English, Sedaris does make them sound like ignorant folks from the backwoods. I found myself thinking that Sedaris might have made a whole book just centered around the his experiences in France (as he did spend several summer months there over the course of many years before spending an extended time in Paris). The whole book isn't really tied together by any underlying theme; while the title can also be connected to the first story, as Sedaris describes months spent working with a stony speech therapy teacher on his lisp, there's no connection between all of the stories besides Sedaris himself. They mostly chronological, first starting with his childhood and ending in his 40's, but otherwise...I don't know, I feel like there should be more of a theme.
Now, I appreciate Sedaris's self-deprecating humor. The guy wouldn't have a career if he took himself too seriously; he makes his money on looking at his life through such a lens. But one thing that did bother me about this book was the almost nonchalant way that he described his out-of-control drug addiction in the story "Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist" (during his addiction years, he was involved in the trendy, revolting "art" scene in Raleigh); I also found it kind of disturbing that his parents were attending his insane "performances" rather than dragging his ass to rehab. Maybe I was bothered by something similar in the other book...but obviously, he came out of it one way or another and has had a successful career, so who am I to judge the thinking process of his loved ones? Or maybe he still does hard drugs (pot and even alcohol are one thing, but speed and meth is something else entirely); I don't know enough about Sedaris's personal life to know a thing about it. From the descriptions of his time in Paris, I wouldn't think that would be the case; I would assume (hope) that it's something he left behind him.
I remember thinking before that Sedaris came across as kind of elitist. But I didn't really get that vibe in this book; when he stuck up his nose at people in his stories, he was either out of his mind on drugs (and therefore in a very wrong headset in the first place), or he was, in my view, correct in his attitudes. Like with the ugly Americans on the train in Paris, or the obnoxious woman from North Carolina who tagged along on a visit to New York with one of his friends; these people were clearly detestable. Plus, Sedaris shows his mettle with his descriptions of the blue-collar jobs that he held between stints in college; he works to make his way, even if he tries to work as little as he possibly can to get by. Hey, at least he's honest.
I was listening to NPR around the holidays, as I found the music played on public radio to be less cliched than what had been playing on the local mix station's Christmas playlist (which had been going since well before Thanksgiving). NPR had a segment of short Christmas stories, and one was read from Sedaris's Holidays on Ice collection. It was about a time he'd been working at a mall Santa station (maybe as a photographer or an elf or something, I didn't catch that detail) and he saw a crying little girl being scolded by her mother as she wanted to get a delightful picture of the girl on Santa's lap. This caused Sedaris to reflect on the falseness of supposed "happy" memories in pictures, or of the Christmas season in general. When Sedaris's humor hits on truth like that, that's when he's at his best. His experiences would tell you that he's no smarter than anyone else, that most of his experiences in life haven't been any more spectacular than anyone else's (though his time in Paris is more than enviable), but that's what makes his perspective all the more intriguing and important.
January 12, 2014
The title of this book (a collection of short, humorous stories about various events or periods in the author's life) always made me think that it was a sad tale about a child with a speech impediment, or one who came from a remote region who aspired to rise in society, who faced many obstacles along the way. Yeah, I was pretty far off the mark.
This isn't the first Sedaris text that I've read. I read When You Are Engulfed in Flames not long after it was published; my father had a copy of it (he's not much of a reader, but I could see how he would be drawn to this work), and I read it on and off during a week-long trek to Flagstaff for my freshman year of college, with my bratty brother and a rented van full of my shit. I don't remember much about the individual pieces in the other book, but I do remember my reaction to it. I found myself thinking that Sedaris sounded like a prick, that he was too clever. Cloying, really. I read some of it again a couple of years later, when I was cat sitting at a neighbor's apartment; I found myself thinking that she would have that book, and I picked it up, and my opinion hadn't really changed.
So I was, of course, hesitant to read this one, but since I'd always been intrigued by the title, I gave it a shot. My feelings were still there for the first couple of stories, but overall I enjoyed this work, especially when Sedaris was describing awkward situations that everyone could find themselves in, and adding a sense of profundity to them. I guess this is most evident in the short piece "Big Boy," when, during a party at a friend's home, he goes to the bathroom and finds an enormous turd that won't flush, and he's so embarrassed that he finds a way to get rid of it...even though it wasn't his. Very funny, especially since everyone has found themselves in an equally awkward social situation (if not involving a turd, then something else equally disgusting or embarrassing); yet Sedaris also reflects that that situation, that need to get rid of the turd because of the impression that it might give the other party guests about him, says something about himself personally. That was probably my favorite piece in this work.
I enjoyed Sedaris most when he was describing his family (like his father, who hoards produce; or his sister, who grew up a dreamy artist). I didn't realize until, like, ten minutes ago that comedienne Amy Sedaris is his sister; they've even collaborated on writing together. Amy Sedaris has an extensive filmography, but she's not quite as famous as the likes of Tina Fey. She's also beautiful, even in her 50's, though many of the characters she's portrayed have been hideous in some way or another. In "A Shiner Like a Diamond," Sedaris describes his sister as being the most beautiful one in the family, and I believe she'd take that title in about any family. And, in the story, she, as a young New Yorker, was photographed with makeup that made her look like she'd been severely beaten; this was her own choice for a magazine shoot. She also tricks her shallow father by wearing the bottom half of a fat suit on a home visit, causing him to freak out whenever she put any food in her mouth. I also found myself interested in Sedaris's mother, and the relationship that he had with her, which (if I recall) is delved into in a little more detail in When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Sedaris describes her love of napping more than once, but never in a way that seems bitter; it's funny to imagine her spending her days curled up with her dog, rather than tragic.
I also enjoyed Sedaris's descriptions of his time in Paris with his boyfriend Hugh. Especially amusing were the descriptions of his abusive French teacher; the title of the book comes from a conversation between some of the other international students, and written in translated English, Sedaris does make them sound like ignorant folks from the backwoods. I found myself thinking that Sedaris might have made a whole book just centered around the his experiences in France (as he did spend several summer months there over the course of many years before spending an extended time in Paris). The whole book isn't really tied together by any underlying theme; while the title can also be connected to the first story, as Sedaris describes months spent working with a stony speech therapy teacher on his lisp, there's no connection between all of the stories besides Sedaris himself. They mostly chronological, first starting with his childhood and ending in his 40's, but otherwise...I don't know, I feel like there should be more of a theme.
Now, I appreciate Sedaris's self-deprecating humor. The guy wouldn't have a career if he took himself too seriously; he makes his money on looking at his life through such a lens. But one thing that did bother me about this book was the almost nonchalant way that he described his out-of-control drug addiction in the story "Twelve Moments in the Life of the Artist" (during his addiction years, he was involved in the trendy, revolting "art" scene in Raleigh); I also found it kind of disturbing that his parents were attending his insane "performances" rather than dragging his ass to rehab. Maybe I was bothered by something similar in the other book...but obviously, he came out of it one way or another and has had a successful career, so who am I to judge the thinking process of his loved ones? Or maybe he still does hard drugs (pot and even alcohol are one thing, but speed and meth is something else entirely); I don't know enough about Sedaris's personal life to know a thing about it. From the descriptions of his time in Paris, I wouldn't think that would be the case; I would assume (hope) that it's something he left behind him.
I remember thinking before that Sedaris came across as kind of elitist. But I didn't really get that vibe in this book; when he stuck up his nose at people in his stories, he was either out of his mind on drugs (and therefore in a very wrong headset in the first place), or he was, in my view, correct in his attitudes. Like with the ugly Americans on the train in Paris, or the obnoxious woman from North Carolina who tagged along on a visit to New York with one of his friends; these people were clearly detestable. Plus, Sedaris shows his mettle with his descriptions of the blue-collar jobs that he held between stints in college; he works to make his way, even if he tries to work as little as he possibly can to get by. Hey, at least he's honest.
I was listening to NPR around the holidays, as I found the music played on public radio to be less cliched than what had been playing on the local mix station's Christmas playlist (which had been going since well before Thanksgiving). NPR had a segment of short Christmas stories, and one was read from Sedaris's Holidays on Ice collection. It was about a time he'd been working at a mall Santa station (maybe as a photographer or an elf or something, I didn't catch that detail) and he saw a crying little girl being scolded by her mother as she wanted to get a delightful picture of the girl on Santa's lap. This caused Sedaris to reflect on the falseness of supposed "happy" memories in pictures, or of the Christmas season in general. When Sedaris's humor hits on truth like that, that's when he's at his best. His experiences would tell you that he's no smarter than anyone else, that most of his experiences in life haven't been any more spectacular than anyone else's (though his time in Paris is more than enviable), but that's what makes his perspective all the more intriguing and important.
Friday, January 10, 2014
Book #68: Mockingjay
Book #68: Mockingjay by Suzanne Collins
January 10, 2014
One night about a week ago, I psychotically stayed up late and put together my list of the 75 books that I aim to read for this year. Obviously, I've been able to check a few off already. I made the list tentatively (with pencil), but I am excited about the titles that I've included. Mockingjay was near the end of the list (not that I'm going in any particular order), but I ended up starting it when I was still at home during the cold snap, this being the only hard-copy novel that I haven't read on my bookshelf. I'd written before, in my post about Catching Fire, that I was hesitating to start this last book in the Hunger Games trilogy. But I wasn't disappointed.
It is tragic, though. The whole thing started not because Katniss wanted to bring down the Capital, but only because she wanted to save her sister from the Hunger Games. She did it all to save Prim's life. And (spoiler), Prim doesn't end up surviving. Ouch! Collins puts her heroine through hell in this last book, but in the messed up world of Panem, that's about right. Remember, these books take place a long time in the future. The society had to rebuild itself after destroying itself initially (typical theme of dystopian works, future society being fucked up because of our mistakes now), and while many of their technologies have exceeded what we have today (especially when it comes to weapons and objects of torment; that was seen during the Games in the other two works, and is seen now in the midst of war and in descriptions of prisoners' torments), they are primitive in many ways. At least, I want to believe that these violent, ruthless people are primitive, though looking around me, I know that such greed and terror exists in our world. It's something worth remembering that the important decisions made in history, even those done for good, have been motivated by either money or power (or both). Knowing this, it makes the actions of President Snow, and President Coin from District 13, too frighteningly realistic.
So I'm torn a bit. After Katniss (spoiler) kills President Coin rather than a convicted President Snow after the rebels have won the war (as I predicted she would), she is confined for several weeks, months, in her old room where she used to stay in the Capital awaiting the start of the Games. She is deemed mentally unstable, and much of her behavior in this book would support that. And yet, she's the one who makes the most sense. Haymitch, my favorite character in the series, sees that, as he enables her to kill the corrupt Coin. President Coin had seemed the lesser of two evils; a strict leader in District 13, she ran a tight ship but nonetheless seemed to be fighting for the right side. But she, like the Capital, used Katniss; Katniss became known officially as the Mockingjay, a symbol for the rebels' cause. Now, all through the last book, I found myself hoping that Katniss would get on board with the "cause," not understanding her hesitation. But I see it all now. Katniss only ever wanted to just live her life. She just wanted to live in peace, with her family, with everything that she needs and perhaps not much more. She just wants to survive. She's offended when she hears Peeta and Gale agree to this assertion about her when they think she can't hear them, but they are right. And there's nothing wrong with it. If we were all like Katniss, just wanting to live in peace, but able to fight back when threatened, the world of today would be better off, and Panem wouldn't seem so possible.
Anyway, so Katniss is confined, and while she's in torment (mourning the death of her sister, who was killed by Coin's orders with a bombing; everyone was led to believe that Snow had ordered it; not knowing what's happened to anyone she loves), she begins to hate the human race. She sees how evil wins the day, in the end; the heroes only win in stories. Though she's mostly out of her mind at this point, I found myself agreeing with her. Maybe I'm mostly out of my mind (haha?), but I don't have a very favorable opinion of the human race in general. However, I do believe that we are making strides forward, not back; though power and money are still the deciding factors, they don't necessarily have to be evil in themselves. So I was disappointed that, while we saw a very real, raw side of Katniss during her confinement, that we didn't see the events outside of those walls. That was just lazy on Collins' part, I think. Or, perhaps it's naive of me to think that Katniss would be able to explain the truth, and to convince them that following the mistakes of history (Coin had proposed having a new Hunger Games with children from the Capital, which sealed her fate at Katniss's hand) was wrong. Well, at least in the end things did come out for the better. A competent leader from District 8 was elected President, and Katniss and Peeta (the right choice, all things said and done) settled in to a life together in District 12. A peaceful life, but one in which they both have terrifying nightmares for years to come.
So, not a super rosy ending. Haymitch goes back to drinking, having been deprived while they were all in hiding in District 13. Peeta is still haunted by being tortured while being held prisoner, and Katniss's nightmares never end. So many decent characters died, and it was just too sad of an irony that Prim went. But I can appreciate that Collins kept it real, for the most part. Panem is a fucked place. There are lukewarm endings, full of hope, but much sadness. I love getting to see the inside of the homes of people in the Capital, gaudily decorated apartments with streets that are just are garish. At one point, it's noted that most people in the Capital are drowning in debt; it should also be noted that they didn't have any freedom and rights, just lives full of vapid fun...as long as they toed the line. The crazy political structure of Panem is fascinating, and I had always been curious to know more about the people of the Capital, whose lives are so different from the people in the Districts.
One thing I should put here, though. I don't get how Snow (as he admits to Katniss during their one conversation in the book, the one that alerts her to Coin's evil ways) was so convinced that Katniss was the actual threat in the situation. Sure, she was getting pretty close to his mansion with just her squad of soldiers trained in District 13, but how could he think that she, a teenage girl, was the one to focus on? He had bombed 13; he knew she was there. Did he really not think to go after the people in charge there, who had kept their underground, completely independent society alive (if not thriving) for so long? Dumb ass! But it seems that his failing health may have had something to do with his poor decisions. It also seems that he was focusing much attention on torturing his victims from the Games (the ones, like Peeta, who hadn't gotten away) then on making good decisions in the war. He gave up too easily; or rather, he was too easily blind-sided. So I didn't buy into that whole deal. After all, though Katniss was the face of the rebellion, he as well as anyone knew the power of propaganda. Why was he so susceptible to it?
Besides that nagging detail, the trilogy was wrapped up neatly enough, for the fact that questions were basically answered. I found it entertaining, moving along at just the right pace for the most part, and full of intriguing details (like the crazy ex-stylist in the Capital who had had herself surgically altered to look like a tiger), but it also presents some dark, difficult, and real questions. I have to admit, I have not seen any of the movies, but I believe that the first one is available on my Netflix (though I love the shows, I feel like hardly any movies that I actually want to watch are on there). Second one's still in theaters, I guess, but I could wait on that. I'm not real big on spending all that money to go to a movie. Damned if I haven't been able to help imagining Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss throughout my entire reading of the trilogy, anyway.
January 10, 2014
One night about a week ago, I psychotically stayed up late and put together my list of the 75 books that I aim to read for this year. Obviously, I've been able to check a few off already. I made the list tentatively (with pencil), but I am excited about the titles that I've included. Mockingjay was near the end of the list (not that I'm going in any particular order), but I ended up starting it when I was still at home during the cold snap, this being the only hard-copy novel that I haven't read on my bookshelf. I'd written before, in my post about Catching Fire, that I was hesitating to start this last book in the Hunger Games trilogy. But I wasn't disappointed.
It is tragic, though. The whole thing started not because Katniss wanted to bring down the Capital, but only because she wanted to save her sister from the Hunger Games. She did it all to save Prim's life. And (spoiler), Prim doesn't end up surviving. Ouch! Collins puts her heroine through hell in this last book, but in the messed up world of Panem, that's about right. Remember, these books take place a long time in the future. The society had to rebuild itself after destroying itself initially (typical theme of dystopian works, future society being fucked up because of our mistakes now), and while many of their technologies have exceeded what we have today (especially when it comes to weapons and objects of torment; that was seen during the Games in the other two works, and is seen now in the midst of war and in descriptions of prisoners' torments), they are primitive in many ways. At least, I want to believe that these violent, ruthless people are primitive, though looking around me, I know that such greed and terror exists in our world. It's something worth remembering that the important decisions made in history, even those done for good, have been motivated by either money or power (or both). Knowing this, it makes the actions of President Snow, and President Coin from District 13, too frighteningly realistic.
So I'm torn a bit. After Katniss (spoiler) kills President Coin rather than a convicted President Snow after the rebels have won the war (as I predicted she would), she is confined for several weeks, months, in her old room where she used to stay in the Capital awaiting the start of the Games. She is deemed mentally unstable, and much of her behavior in this book would support that. And yet, she's the one who makes the most sense. Haymitch, my favorite character in the series, sees that, as he enables her to kill the corrupt Coin. President Coin had seemed the lesser of two evils; a strict leader in District 13, she ran a tight ship but nonetheless seemed to be fighting for the right side. But she, like the Capital, used Katniss; Katniss became known officially as the Mockingjay, a symbol for the rebels' cause. Now, all through the last book, I found myself hoping that Katniss would get on board with the "cause," not understanding her hesitation. But I see it all now. Katniss only ever wanted to just live her life. She just wanted to live in peace, with her family, with everything that she needs and perhaps not much more. She just wants to survive. She's offended when she hears Peeta and Gale agree to this assertion about her when they think she can't hear them, but they are right. And there's nothing wrong with it. If we were all like Katniss, just wanting to live in peace, but able to fight back when threatened, the world of today would be better off, and Panem wouldn't seem so possible.
Anyway, so Katniss is confined, and while she's in torment (mourning the death of her sister, who was killed by Coin's orders with a bombing; everyone was led to believe that Snow had ordered it; not knowing what's happened to anyone she loves), she begins to hate the human race. She sees how evil wins the day, in the end; the heroes only win in stories. Though she's mostly out of her mind at this point, I found myself agreeing with her. Maybe I'm mostly out of my mind (haha?), but I don't have a very favorable opinion of the human race in general. However, I do believe that we are making strides forward, not back; though power and money are still the deciding factors, they don't necessarily have to be evil in themselves. So I was disappointed that, while we saw a very real, raw side of Katniss during her confinement, that we didn't see the events outside of those walls. That was just lazy on Collins' part, I think. Or, perhaps it's naive of me to think that Katniss would be able to explain the truth, and to convince them that following the mistakes of history (Coin had proposed having a new Hunger Games with children from the Capital, which sealed her fate at Katniss's hand) was wrong. Well, at least in the end things did come out for the better. A competent leader from District 8 was elected President, and Katniss and Peeta (the right choice, all things said and done) settled in to a life together in District 12. A peaceful life, but one in which they both have terrifying nightmares for years to come.
So, not a super rosy ending. Haymitch goes back to drinking, having been deprived while they were all in hiding in District 13. Peeta is still haunted by being tortured while being held prisoner, and Katniss's nightmares never end. So many decent characters died, and it was just too sad of an irony that Prim went. But I can appreciate that Collins kept it real, for the most part. Panem is a fucked place. There are lukewarm endings, full of hope, but much sadness. I love getting to see the inside of the homes of people in the Capital, gaudily decorated apartments with streets that are just are garish. At one point, it's noted that most people in the Capital are drowning in debt; it should also be noted that they didn't have any freedom and rights, just lives full of vapid fun...as long as they toed the line. The crazy political structure of Panem is fascinating, and I had always been curious to know more about the people of the Capital, whose lives are so different from the people in the Districts.
One thing I should put here, though. I don't get how Snow (as he admits to Katniss during their one conversation in the book, the one that alerts her to Coin's evil ways) was so convinced that Katniss was the actual threat in the situation. Sure, she was getting pretty close to his mansion with just her squad of soldiers trained in District 13, but how could he think that she, a teenage girl, was the one to focus on? He had bombed 13; he knew she was there. Did he really not think to go after the people in charge there, who had kept their underground, completely independent society alive (if not thriving) for so long? Dumb ass! But it seems that his failing health may have had something to do with his poor decisions. It also seems that he was focusing much attention on torturing his victims from the Games (the ones, like Peeta, who hadn't gotten away) then on making good decisions in the war. He gave up too easily; or rather, he was too easily blind-sided. So I didn't buy into that whole deal. After all, though Katniss was the face of the rebellion, he as well as anyone knew the power of propaganda. Why was he so susceptible to it?
Besides that nagging detail, the trilogy was wrapped up neatly enough, for the fact that questions were basically answered. I found it entertaining, moving along at just the right pace for the most part, and full of intriguing details (like the crazy ex-stylist in the Capital who had had herself surgically altered to look like a tiger), but it also presents some dark, difficult, and real questions. I have to admit, I have not seen any of the movies, but I believe that the first one is available on my Netflix (though I love the shows, I feel like hardly any movies that I actually want to watch are on there). Second one's still in theaters, I guess, but I could wait on that. I'm not real big on spending all that money to go to a movie. Damned if I haven't been able to help imagining Jennifer Lawrence as Katniss throughout my entire reading of the trilogy, anyway.
Tuesday, January 7, 2014
Book #67: Macbeth
Book #67: Macbeth by William Shakespeare
January 7, 2014
As I write this, I have a stage production of Macbeth playing on the YouTube app on my phone. No reading of any Shakespeare work would be complete without a viewing of a performance. I've taught a couple of Shakespeare plays (Hamlet to a group of seniors; A Midsummer Night's Dream with a class of advanced 7th graders), and it's always included a read-aloud of the text, and a viewing of a production. How could it not? After all, Shakespeare was written to be watched on a stage, not to be read. But on the flip side, his word play is genius...that's what makes Shakespeare such a legend, and makes reading it on its own such a treat.
Whenever I've read Shakespeare in the past, it's always taken me a bit to get into the language before I can really start understanding what's happening. I didn't find this to be the case with this play, and I wondered why that was the case this time. Maybe I've read so many Shakespeare plays in the past that I can finally understand properly? While I've a ways to go from completing his works, I think I've gotten one essential work out of the way.
So Macbeth is one of Shakespeare most famous works. I was already familiar with the very basic premise, that Macbeth and his overly ambitious wife betrayed the king to get to the top, and that there were some witches involved. It's definitely one of Shakespeare's darker tragedies, but the end of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth doesn't feel sad like, say, the deaths of Othello and Desdemona. There really aren't any characters in this play who are totally redeemable, except maybe Macduff (who fights to help young Malcolm overthrow the traitorous Macbeth and reclaim his father's throne), and Banquo (though he also sought information from the witches, he didn't do anything to make his fortune come true...plus, he dies). You don't want Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to succeed, and you can see that, though the witches predict great things for Macbeth, his ambition will also bring about his doom.
It's interesting how often the dialogue references "being a man." Lady Macbeth emasculates her husband as often as she can, in order to drive him to action. Like, going to battle and proving his mettle there hadn't been enough proof that he was a man. But she always claimed that he could be "greater." And yet, with all the talk of "being a man," it is women who set the wheels into motion. Macbeth, on his own, had dreams and ambitions, to be sure, and he would have gone far; but without his wife to push him, he wouldn't have killed King Duncan, or seen to Banquo's death. And they both believed in what the 'weird sisters,' the three witches, had said about Macbeth becoming king.
The themes of treachery and ambition are nothing new in Shakespeare's work. The mystical elements, with the witches, is pretty unique; I read once that it's because the play is Scottish, and Scottish people of the day were superstitious and believed in such things, I guess. The witches don't have much stage time, but they are integral to the plot, and are some of the more famous characters in Shakespeare's works. The sighting of ghosts (as Macbeth is haunted by Banquo's spirit) can be seen in Hamlet, but otherwise that wouldn't be such a typical element of a Shakespeare play. Treacherous women, too, are not seen in the Shakespeare works with which I am familiar; Lady Macbeth is a unique character in herself. In the production that I'm watching, Piper Laurie (who is most famous for playing Carrie's creepy mama in the original film) is playing the evil lady, and her performance is deliciously devious. The is sexual, though Lady Macbeth desires to rid herself of her "weaker" feminine qualities (like, the conscience that would have kept her from preparing the scene of Duncan's murder). Strong female characters can be seen in some Shakespeare works, but strong and evil, though common in other works, is unique for Shakespeare in this play.
There are some lines in this play that I adore. When the bells are ringing in Act II, Scene II, as Macbeth is signaled to kill Duncan, he says of the bell, "Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell/The summons thee to heaven, or to hell." Wow! Earlier in the same scene, Banquo jokes with his son about the starless sky: "There's husbandry in heaven,/Their candles are all out." And of course, who can forget Lady Macbeth's line in Act I, Scene VII, when she is encouraging her husband to go through with the murder plot: "We fail?/But screw your courage to the sticking-place/and We'll not fail." Her first soliloquy in Act I, Scene V, she is calling up for her own courage: "...unsex me here/And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full/Of direst cruelty!" (This line would go along with what I was saying about gender roles in this play). Lady Macbeth has a number of memorable lines. I have no interest in acting, but if I ever had to choose a part from a Shakespeare play to perform, it would definitely be Lady Macbeth.
It's really no wonder that Shakespeare is still being read, like 550 years later. I believe I've commented before about how the themes of Shakespeare's works are timeless, and all that, so I won't really delve into that here. It's worth noting that in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Katie had her children read a page from each of two great books: the Bible, and the complete works of Shakespeare. She believed that having them do this would help them to develop intellectually, and it would seem that she was right. To some extent, if I ever have kids, I would want to expose them to great works like Shakespeare at an earlier age. His works are, as I've said, such an important part of the very foundation of our culture that they could be connected to almost everything.
January 7, 2014
As I write this, I have a stage production of Macbeth playing on the YouTube app on my phone. No reading of any Shakespeare work would be complete without a viewing of a performance. I've taught a couple of Shakespeare plays (Hamlet to a group of seniors; A Midsummer Night's Dream with a class of advanced 7th graders), and it's always included a read-aloud of the text, and a viewing of a production. How could it not? After all, Shakespeare was written to be watched on a stage, not to be read. But on the flip side, his word play is genius...that's what makes Shakespeare such a legend, and makes reading it on its own such a treat.
Whenever I've read Shakespeare in the past, it's always taken me a bit to get into the language before I can really start understanding what's happening. I didn't find this to be the case with this play, and I wondered why that was the case this time. Maybe I've read so many Shakespeare plays in the past that I can finally understand properly? While I've a ways to go from completing his works, I think I've gotten one essential work out of the way.
So Macbeth is one of Shakespeare most famous works. I was already familiar with the very basic premise, that Macbeth and his overly ambitious wife betrayed the king to get to the top, and that there were some witches involved. It's definitely one of Shakespeare's darker tragedies, but the end of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth doesn't feel sad like, say, the deaths of Othello and Desdemona. There really aren't any characters in this play who are totally redeemable, except maybe Macduff (who fights to help young Malcolm overthrow the traitorous Macbeth and reclaim his father's throne), and Banquo (though he also sought information from the witches, he didn't do anything to make his fortune come true...plus, he dies). You don't want Macbeth and Lady Macbeth to succeed, and you can see that, though the witches predict great things for Macbeth, his ambition will also bring about his doom.
It's interesting how often the dialogue references "being a man." Lady Macbeth emasculates her husband as often as she can, in order to drive him to action. Like, going to battle and proving his mettle there hadn't been enough proof that he was a man. But she always claimed that he could be "greater." And yet, with all the talk of "being a man," it is women who set the wheels into motion. Macbeth, on his own, had dreams and ambitions, to be sure, and he would have gone far; but without his wife to push him, he wouldn't have killed King Duncan, or seen to Banquo's death. And they both believed in what the 'weird sisters,' the three witches, had said about Macbeth becoming king.
The themes of treachery and ambition are nothing new in Shakespeare's work. The mystical elements, with the witches, is pretty unique; I read once that it's because the play is Scottish, and Scottish people of the day were superstitious and believed in such things, I guess. The witches don't have much stage time, but they are integral to the plot, and are some of the more famous characters in Shakespeare's works. The sighting of ghosts (as Macbeth is haunted by Banquo's spirit) can be seen in Hamlet, but otherwise that wouldn't be such a typical element of a Shakespeare play. Treacherous women, too, are not seen in the Shakespeare works with which I am familiar; Lady Macbeth is a unique character in herself. In the production that I'm watching, Piper Laurie (who is most famous for playing Carrie's creepy mama in the original film) is playing the evil lady, and her performance is deliciously devious. The is sexual, though Lady Macbeth desires to rid herself of her "weaker" feminine qualities (like, the conscience that would have kept her from preparing the scene of Duncan's murder). Strong female characters can be seen in some Shakespeare works, but strong and evil, though common in other works, is unique for Shakespeare in this play.
There are some lines in this play that I adore. When the bells are ringing in Act II, Scene II, as Macbeth is signaled to kill Duncan, he says of the bell, "Hear it not, Duncan, for it is a knell/The summons thee to heaven, or to hell." Wow! Earlier in the same scene, Banquo jokes with his son about the starless sky: "There's husbandry in heaven,/Their candles are all out." And of course, who can forget Lady Macbeth's line in Act I, Scene VII, when she is encouraging her husband to go through with the murder plot: "We fail?/But screw your courage to the sticking-place/and We'll not fail." Her first soliloquy in Act I, Scene V, she is calling up for her own courage: "...unsex me here/And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full/Of direst cruelty!" (This line would go along with what I was saying about gender roles in this play). Lady Macbeth has a number of memorable lines. I have no interest in acting, but if I ever had to choose a part from a Shakespeare play to perform, it would definitely be Lady Macbeth.
It's really no wonder that Shakespeare is still being read, like 550 years later. I believe I've commented before about how the themes of Shakespeare's works are timeless, and all that, so I won't really delve into that here. It's worth noting that in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Katie had her children read a page from each of two great books: the Bible, and the complete works of Shakespeare. She believed that having them do this would help them to develop intellectually, and it would seem that she was right. To some extent, if I ever have kids, I would want to expose them to great works like Shakespeare at an earlier age. His works are, as I've said, such an important part of the very foundation of our culture that they could be connected to almost everything.
Monday, January 6, 2014
Book #66: Never Let Me Go
Book #66: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro
January 6, 2014
The cold snap continues, as I look forward to another day off from work tomorrow. I probably won't do quite so much reading, but who knows? I'm doing what I intended to do, reading instead of watching TV or playing on my phone. I guess I could use some of this extra time to tidy up my apartment, but anyway...
I find myself once again very impressed with Ishiguro. I read The Remains of the Day just a few months ago, and was riveted by the story of a seemingly ordinary (some would even say dull) butler who delves, ever so reluctantly, into his past as he examines his life. I was again drawn into the story of Kathy and her friends from Hailsham (such a British name!). Never Let Me Go takes place in a kind of parallel universe, where since the mid-20th century (at least in England), the cloning of human beings has been possible. This has been done for the purpose of organ harvesting, naturally. This isn't revealed right away in the story, but it's easy to pick up on as Kathy recalls memories of her childhood at Hailsham. I maybe had a little help, as my YA literature instructor brought up this book after I'd done my presentation on Unwind (which went quite well, as I recall). Kathy, like all of the students at Hailsham, who range from about four or five to sixteen, is a clone, who has no parents, no family, no real home. Hailsham is their home.
As Hailsham is first described, it seems like an ordinary boarding school. The differences unroll gradually with Kathy's recollections. Right away, I was drawn to the fact that an adult Kathy (I'd venture to guess that she's made it to her very late 20's) refers to herself as a 'carer.' That's the sort of to-the-point job description that you'd hear in your typical dystopian work. In fact, I found many similarities between Unwind and this book, especially the (if brief) descriptions of homes for 'students' that were unlike Hailsham, that were places full of abuse and neglect for the children. But what struck me was the fact that none of these students seemed to fight back. Many of them, unlike the children at Hailsham, were made very aware of their purpose in life early on. All of them, regardless of where they came from, eventually have freedom to roam about the country. This is a necessity in Kathy's work as a carer, as she must drive to many different clinics and recovery centers to see to the 'donors' under her care. A carer is partially a care-giver for the 'donor,' but also an advocate for them, and a source of support. Because again, these people don't have families. The children at Hailsham were raised to depend on one another, encouraged to form friendships and even romantic relationships (though sex was discussed almost frankly, it was not encouraged on the grounds at Hailsham...that typically came for the students later on, like at the 'Cottages,' where they had minimal supervision). They are each other's family.
Kathy forms the strongest bonds with Tommy and Ruth. Tommy was once a very awkward kid. You know the type: really quick to anger, doesn't get along well with his peers, and his outbursts only cause him to stand out more. Kathy kind of helps him to calm down; a talk with Miss Lucy, a guardian at Hailsham who cared very much for the students at had their best interests at heart, also helped with this. Ruth was a girl in Kathy's same year, the type with a strong, very pushy personality. You know that type as well. Ruth is the kind of girl I would have been friends with in school, even best friends, for a while...but I eventually would have been alienated by her behavior. Kathy is, in the end, but I'm amazed how, at even a younger age, she was understanding of Ruth's feelings most of the time. Kathy has the advantage of hindsight as she recalls some of her 'rows' with Ruth, but even at the time, she's quite perceptive. And the way that Ishiguro describes his characters...he's obviously very perceptive as well. He clearly knows people; these characters seem so real, which makes their approaching doom all the harder to stomach.
Yet they don't rebel. They accept their fate, whether it's been pounded into their heads all of their lives, or if they slowly realized it after living in youthful ignorance. The head guardian at Hailsham, Miss Emily, and her partner, known to the students when they were young as 'Madame,' had been working hard to provide their students with a childhood. That's why the school seems so normal...at first. Students were encouraged to produce works of art, poetry, and such; this was to help Miss Emily and Madame prove to others that clones have souls, that they're not just a product of science. When the truth of it all, how they were more privileged than most, is revealed to Kathy and Tommy years later, they are surprised by this. Kathy was grateful for it; Tommy almost wondered if Miss Lucy had been right, and if they should have been more aware of what was coming.
Kathy and Tommy are in love, but don't fully realize it until near the end of Tommy's life. Ruth had always been the one romantically attached to Tommy, but he and Kath had a connection for years, one that was very evident in Kathy's memories. They are quite the star-crossed lovers, and in the end, they find that they have no hope of extending the little time that they have left to be together. This was sad enough in itself, but what really made me lose it was when Kathy was speaking to Madame. Years before, Madame had seen Kathy dancing to a romantic song called "Never Let Me Go" (by Judy Bridgewater...I gave it a listen on YouTube earlier), and had started to weep. Kathy, in her own mind, had been cradling a baby and crooning to it; Madame had seen a young girl, with a terrible fate, begging her safe life, her childhood, to hold on to her. The fact that Miss Emily and Madame spent their lives doing what they could for these students, who otherwise would have had miserable childhoods along with dismal adult hoods, is what really hit me. It now makes sense to Kath, why the donors who didn't go to Hailsham or the few places that were inspired by it, would be so eager to hear as much about it as possible. It makes me think of Mr. McGarrity, the saloon owner in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, who listened to Johnny talk about his family and imagine that they were his own. The donors, as they died, wanted to think of Kath's life instead of their own.
Though Kath and her friends had what could be called pleasant childhoods, they did show signs of missing an ordinary life. They were so far from the outside world (even in her adulthood, Kath is kept in the country with her work; cities like London are never even mentioned, perhaps may not even be a place that such like them would be interested in going, or allowed to go to) that they didn't really know, on a surface level, what they were missing. But, well, take Kath with her baby. One particularly poignant memory involved Ruth and pencil case. She claimed that it was a gift from Miss Geraldine, a favorite guardian among the girls. The guardians act much as teachers would in a boarding school. They teach the classes, provide support and guidance, see to their safety, and not as often, administer discipline. The guardians are mostly kind to the students; there are some favored over others, just as teachers would be. The kind of 'favors' that are bestowed on students are the types that teachers would give to favorite students: leniency with some minor rules, mostly. But to receive a gift from a guardian was stepping out of bounds.
Through some detective work, Kath found that Ruth had lied about the pencil case. When she brings it up, in a roundabout way, to Ruth, Ruth is visibly upset. Kath didn't seem so much to miss the love of a parent, but that's something that Ruth, instinctively, sought. The guardians did what they could; I quite imagine that for children living in residential treatment, or in foster homes or programs, there are people who work there who do their best by the children, but can only do so much. God dammit...in our world, the situation is even more sad for the fact that children with parents who should love and care for them are neglected. But I still feel for the students, even if they don't know what they're missing. After all, they do have each other; even after falling out after leaving the Cottages, Kath, Tommy, and Ruth are drawn back together again near the end. They have a bond as close, closer, than any natural brothers or sisters would have.
I feel like my emotional reaction to this book says something about how compelling these characters are. I like Kath all the more for the fact that she is so close with Tommy and Ruth, two characters who I would have shied away from, would have avoided. Kath has been a carer for almost 12 years, and as she's recalling these things from her life, she now has a deadline for when her time as a carer ends and her time as a donor (and the end of her life) begins. She doesn't seem to regret it; she almost looks forward to it. The life of a carer is exhausting; since donors are moved from center to center frequently, they're left to travel most of the time. Not that Kath has a home of her own; Hailsham is as close as she ever came. Not long before the end of the book, Hailsham was closed, and Miss Emily regretfully said that other places like it would follow, and all of the 'students' would have to go to the poor quality government homes. Kath knew in the end that, on some level, she was fortunate. Her childhood at Hailsham allowed her to have friends, and to know what love is. The tragedy is not that Kath's life will end, but that conditions for the 'students' to come will worsen. It makes me think, again, of real children in such situations; they are not born to be sacrificed for their organs, but an attitude about such children exists that they are hopeless. At least in our world, there is the hope that children in the right circumstances will be okay, can have good lives. In Kath's world, such hope doesn't exist...not even for a Hailsham student.
January 6, 2014
The cold snap continues, as I look forward to another day off from work tomorrow. I probably won't do quite so much reading, but who knows? I'm doing what I intended to do, reading instead of watching TV or playing on my phone. I guess I could use some of this extra time to tidy up my apartment, but anyway...
I find myself once again very impressed with Ishiguro. I read The Remains of the Day just a few months ago, and was riveted by the story of a seemingly ordinary (some would even say dull) butler who delves, ever so reluctantly, into his past as he examines his life. I was again drawn into the story of Kathy and her friends from Hailsham (such a British name!). Never Let Me Go takes place in a kind of parallel universe, where since the mid-20th century (at least in England), the cloning of human beings has been possible. This has been done for the purpose of organ harvesting, naturally. This isn't revealed right away in the story, but it's easy to pick up on as Kathy recalls memories of her childhood at Hailsham. I maybe had a little help, as my YA literature instructor brought up this book after I'd done my presentation on Unwind (which went quite well, as I recall). Kathy, like all of the students at Hailsham, who range from about four or five to sixteen, is a clone, who has no parents, no family, no real home. Hailsham is their home.
As Hailsham is first described, it seems like an ordinary boarding school. The differences unroll gradually with Kathy's recollections. Right away, I was drawn to the fact that an adult Kathy (I'd venture to guess that she's made it to her very late 20's) refers to herself as a 'carer.' That's the sort of to-the-point job description that you'd hear in your typical dystopian work. In fact, I found many similarities between Unwind and this book, especially the (if brief) descriptions of homes for 'students' that were unlike Hailsham, that were places full of abuse and neglect for the children. But what struck me was the fact that none of these students seemed to fight back. Many of them, unlike the children at Hailsham, were made very aware of their purpose in life early on. All of them, regardless of where they came from, eventually have freedom to roam about the country. This is a necessity in Kathy's work as a carer, as she must drive to many different clinics and recovery centers to see to the 'donors' under her care. A carer is partially a care-giver for the 'donor,' but also an advocate for them, and a source of support. Because again, these people don't have families. The children at Hailsham were raised to depend on one another, encouraged to form friendships and even romantic relationships (though sex was discussed almost frankly, it was not encouraged on the grounds at Hailsham...that typically came for the students later on, like at the 'Cottages,' where they had minimal supervision). They are each other's family.
Kathy forms the strongest bonds with Tommy and Ruth. Tommy was once a very awkward kid. You know the type: really quick to anger, doesn't get along well with his peers, and his outbursts only cause him to stand out more. Kathy kind of helps him to calm down; a talk with Miss Lucy, a guardian at Hailsham who cared very much for the students at had their best interests at heart, also helped with this. Ruth was a girl in Kathy's same year, the type with a strong, very pushy personality. You know that type as well. Ruth is the kind of girl I would have been friends with in school, even best friends, for a while...but I eventually would have been alienated by her behavior. Kathy is, in the end, but I'm amazed how, at even a younger age, she was understanding of Ruth's feelings most of the time. Kathy has the advantage of hindsight as she recalls some of her 'rows' with Ruth, but even at the time, she's quite perceptive. And the way that Ishiguro describes his characters...he's obviously very perceptive as well. He clearly knows people; these characters seem so real, which makes their approaching doom all the harder to stomach.
Yet they don't rebel. They accept their fate, whether it's been pounded into their heads all of their lives, or if they slowly realized it after living in youthful ignorance. The head guardian at Hailsham, Miss Emily, and her partner, known to the students when they were young as 'Madame,' had been working hard to provide their students with a childhood. That's why the school seems so normal...at first. Students were encouraged to produce works of art, poetry, and such; this was to help Miss Emily and Madame prove to others that clones have souls, that they're not just a product of science. When the truth of it all, how they were more privileged than most, is revealed to Kathy and Tommy years later, they are surprised by this. Kathy was grateful for it; Tommy almost wondered if Miss Lucy had been right, and if they should have been more aware of what was coming.
Kathy and Tommy are in love, but don't fully realize it until near the end of Tommy's life. Ruth had always been the one romantically attached to Tommy, but he and Kath had a connection for years, one that was very evident in Kathy's memories. They are quite the star-crossed lovers, and in the end, they find that they have no hope of extending the little time that they have left to be together. This was sad enough in itself, but what really made me lose it was when Kathy was speaking to Madame. Years before, Madame had seen Kathy dancing to a romantic song called "Never Let Me Go" (by Judy Bridgewater...I gave it a listen on YouTube earlier), and had started to weep. Kathy, in her own mind, had been cradling a baby and crooning to it; Madame had seen a young girl, with a terrible fate, begging her safe life, her childhood, to hold on to her. The fact that Miss Emily and Madame spent their lives doing what they could for these students, who otherwise would have had miserable childhoods along with dismal adult hoods, is what really hit me. It now makes sense to Kath, why the donors who didn't go to Hailsham or the few places that were inspired by it, would be so eager to hear as much about it as possible. It makes me think of Mr. McGarrity, the saloon owner in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, who listened to Johnny talk about his family and imagine that they were his own. The donors, as they died, wanted to think of Kath's life instead of their own.
Though Kath and her friends had what could be called pleasant childhoods, they did show signs of missing an ordinary life. They were so far from the outside world (even in her adulthood, Kath is kept in the country with her work; cities like London are never even mentioned, perhaps may not even be a place that such like them would be interested in going, or allowed to go to) that they didn't really know, on a surface level, what they were missing. But, well, take Kath with her baby. One particularly poignant memory involved Ruth and pencil case. She claimed that it was a gift from Miss Geraldine, a favorite guardian among the girls. The guardians act much as teachers would in a boarding school. They teach the classes, provide support and guidance, see to their safety, and not as often, administer discipline. The guardians are mostly kind to the students; there are some favored over others, just as teachers would be. The kind of 'favors' that are bestowed on students are the types that teachers would give to favorite students: leniency with some minor rules, mostly. But to receive a gift from a guardian was stepping out of bounds.
Through some detective work, Kath found that Ruth had lied about the pencil case. When she brings it up, in a roundabout way, to Ruth, Ruth is visibly upset. Kath didn't seem so much to miss the love of a parent, but that's something that Ruth, instinctively, sought. The guardians did what they could; I quite imagine that for children living in residential treatment, or in foster homes or programs, there are people who work there who do their best by the children, but can only do so much. God dammit...in our world, the situation is even more sad for the fact that children with parents who should love and care for them are neglected. But I still feel for the students, even if they don't know what they're missing. After all, they do have each other; even after falling out after leaving the Cottages, Kath, Tommy, and Ruth are drawn back together again near the end. They have a bond as close, closer, than any natural brothers or sisters would have.
I feel like my emotional reaction to this book says something about how compelling these characters are. I like Kath all the more for the fact that she is so close with Tommy and Ruth, two characters who I would have shied away from, would have avoided. Kath has been a carer for almost 12 years, and as she's recalling these things from her life, she now has a deadline for when her time as a carer ends and her time as a donor (and the end of her life) begins. She doesn't seem to regret it; she almost looks forward to it. The life of a carer is exhausting; since donors are moved from center to center frequently, they're left to travel most of the time. Not that Kath has a home of her own; Hailsham is as close as she ever came. Not long before the end of the book, Hailsham was closed, and Miss Emily regretfully said that other places like it would follow, and all of the 'students' would have to go to the poor quality government homes. Kath knew in the end that, on some level, she was fortunate. Her childhood at Hailsham allowed her to have friends, and to know what love is. The tragedy is not that Kath's life will end, but that conditions for the 'students' to come will worsen. It makes me think, again, of real children in such situations; they are not born to be sacrificed for their organs, but an attitude about such children exists that they are hopeless. At least in our world, there is the hope that children in the right circumstances will be okay, can have good lives. In Kath's world, such hope doesn't exist...not even for a Hailsham student.
Sunday, January 5, 2014
Book #65: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Book #65: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
January 5, 2014
I found a copy of this book (in excellent condition, perhaps never even read before) in the closet at my little school. It then sat on my desk for a couple of weeks (during winter break). I snatched it up before I left on Friday; I had a feeling that this cold snap coming in would lead to a cancelation on Monday. I was right! This three-day weekend makes up for the fact that my district opened on the 2nd, and since I'm still on break from my graduate coursework, I am eager to spend my extra time getting ahead on my reading.
I've been aware of this book for quite a long time. I don't know why I never read it before; I certainly feel like, in spite of the length, this text would have been accessible to me when I was as young as 11 or 12, the same age as Francie, the main character, when the book opens. It starts with a day in her life, a summer day in Brooklyn, as she and her brother Neeley scrap together money to spend and save a bit, as Francie visits the library (reflecting on her love of books, and her disappointment in the disinterest of the librarian), and as she has an evening at home while her father Johnny prepares his only suit (a worn out tuxedo) to go out for a night of work as a singing waiter. After the first part of the book, the rest of the lengthy text tells the story of the family from before Francie was born (Johnny and her mother Katie's first meeting), to when Francie is preparing to move out of Brooklyn with her family, as she gets ready to leave for college in Michigan and her mother prepares to remarry a much more stable man (Johnny having drank himself to death). I felt like this book, by far Smith's most celebrated, was just about perfect.
Smith shows the best and worst of Brooklyn (circa 1900-1918); in the first few pages, I was thrown by the blatant anti-Semitism displayed by the Catholic and Protestant Brooklynites. I especially found this interesting because the book was published when World War II was going on, and Americans definitely knew what was happening to Jews in Europe. The anti-German attitudes expressed in the text (with an adolescent Francie at one point stating that she does not like Germans, and that they basically are ruthless in their pursuit of what they want...well, during her time, and the time that the book was published, that wasn't technically wrong regarding the country and its leaders but not necessarily the people themselves) are worth noting as well. What is interesting here is that Smith herself was of German descent (Francie was not; Johnny was Irish, and Katie was Austrian). I wonder if her family was harassed during World War I, the way that Germans in Brooklyn were harassed (through this was not a focal point in the text, there is one scene in which some German revelers on New Years are heckled by some Irishmen). Though it's clear that much of Francie's life is based on Smith's, this changes in detail make me consider how Smith's work, even in seemingly small ways, was affected by the political atmosphere of the time. Since I've been teaching a high school course on American History this year, I've become more interested in and aware of such things. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was a best-seller in its time; the edition that I have, which includes some "extras" at the end, has an image of an advertisement promoting the purchase of War Bonds that was published in an early edition of the book. Just fascinating!
Some things about Brooklyn that Smith describes in the book, I think are still true today. Even back then, 100 years ago, Brooklyn was a large city by itself. Though Francie reflects that it has a small town feel that New York lacks (or maybe that was something that Smith said herself? I feel that Francie's appreciation for her hometown reflects that attitude). Brooklynites way back then had to worry about much of the same things that still concern them today, I well imagine: racially or ethically motivated violence, sex perverts and murderers. I mean, you can find that horrible shit anywhere today, of course, but it surprised me...I've always regarded "olden times" as being more innocent times. I guess where I live, that would be the case; I mean, I think of In Cold Blood, where a rural town was so innocent in the 1950's, until it was rocked by these murders. But in Brooklyn at that time, it would be a cause for alarm but not one that would take anyone as much by surprise. In one scene, Francie is accosted by a rapist and murder on the dark steps of her tenement home, and her mother proceeds to shoot him.
The people in Brooklyn, for the most part, are poor. Many of them are immigrants (this is before the "Great Migration," before there was a substantial population of black people and Hispanics in those places, I guess). Francie's parents both come from poor, uneducated immigrants, and neither of them reached the 8th grade themselves, having to leave school to work. Francie is forced into the same situation by the death of her father, and the birth of her younger sister Laurie. But Francie is fortunate; she's smart and shrewd. She first leaves her neighborhood school, full of mean children and abusive, disinterested teachers, and with the help of her father, is transferred to a nicer school several blocks over. I've noticed a theme of smart young characters leaving their situations and upgrading, and thereby giving themselves a better chance at success. The book drives the point home that education is important, that education is the key to success.
I wish that this was a book that I could share with my students, but I'm afraid that it was in the back closet for a reason. As I've noted, I have to be very very careful about what I use in my classroom. But I can at least teach them the lesson that the book tries to impart. I thought about my students, how many of them come from very difficult situations, and how many of them will have a label on them for a very long time for the mistakes that they've made. I want them to understand that with education, they can at least open up some doors for themselves. I imagine that the horrible teachers at Francie's first school, besides being sexually frustrated by their lack of options at the time, saw their students as being hopeless lost causes, as ignorant as their uneducated parents, and had long ago given up on them. That's sad. I don't work in the easiest teaching environment; when I explain to people where I work, I typically get a strange reaction. But while the future may already be bleak for some of the more (for lack of a better word) messed-up students, some of them have potential to make some contribution. And many of them want to. So I know that my responsibility is to give them some tools for making that happen, and helping them get the most out of their education while their in treatment. That's the kind of job that helps me to sleep well at night, that helps me to feel fulfilled. Even in this crazy messed up world, where kids can end up in such situations like my students have, or where young families like Francie's have to scrimp and save just to stay (often less than) adequately fed, I'm at least doing my small part to try to help things. I can't save the world, but I can contribute in my own small way.
The book ends with Katie preparing to marry Mr. McShane, a politician who was a self-man immigrant who'd been pining after her for years, but had waited until his sickly wife and her drunken husband had died and some time had passed before making his move. Life will be much easier for little Laurie than it was for her older brother and sister. Johnny's drinking had contributed to much of the family's issues. In spite of this, Francie loved her father. In truth, he wasn't a terrible person or anything. He loved his family; he was very lazy, though, and drank way too much. He gave all his wages to his wife, but spent all his tips on drinking (though I guess that was a family tradition among Katie's people, to let the working man keep his tips); he didn't take jobs frequently enough to keep the family well fed. But in spite of Laurie's obvious advantages early in life, Francie and Neeley still pity her. They found some joy in growing up with their beloved Papa, who loved to sing, and was so handsome and so friendly and well-loved by all. Yet Katie was forced to keep their building, and two others, clean to pay for their rent; she had to take odd jobs as well when Johnny wasn't working steadily. I found one section particularly interesting; entries from Francie's diary, kept when she was thirteen, frequent describe Johnny as being "sick." It is revealed in a later entry that Katie, reading the diary, made her change the word "drunk" to "sick" in previous entries. Brilliant.
I found the descriptions of the family's balancing of their little money to be interesting. I found it almost exciting, to see how they balanced it all out (sometimes unsuccessfully). Then I felt guilty; though I've been in situations (some not too long ago) where I haven't been able to make all the ends meet, I've never been in a desperate financial situation. Not desperate enough that I couldn't turn to someone for help. Still, to see that Francie and Neeley saw the good in it all as they were embarking on their new, and more privileged, lives, really showed that another message of the book is that money is not everything. It would have helped their situation, as Katie explains to her new fiance, but it wouldn't have made their lives better. Katie is a wise character, and hard-working. Though Francie doesn't get along with her, and knows that she loves her brother more, she sees that she is like her mother in all the right ways. Katie reflects at one point on a rich local family full of horrible people, and on a volunteer teacher who lives in squalor, and admits that the teacher has the richer, more fulfilling life. That's what makes her so determined to see her children educated, in spite of the odds.
I felt a connection with young Francie: her love of reading, and her general awkwardness around her peers. I also felt a connection with, and an admiration for, Aunt Sissy. For one thing, Sissy is my nickname in my family; it's been that since my teen years, when my younger half-brother couldn't pronounce my name. Sissy is the favorite aunt, and it's clear that Francie admires her. I get along very well with my nephews, and I like to think that they respect me the way that Francie always respected her aunt. I admire Sissy for her boldness, and for the fact that in a time when women were still pretty conservative, she was open about her sexuality. There's one scene where Sissy left a pretty box with the Nolan kids, advising them not to open it. The book doesn't outright state that the items in the box, which the children proceeded to tie to strings the put out the window for the whole neighborhood to see, were condoms, but it was somewhat implied (though I had to Google this to be sure). Sissy is shunned by her sisters for a time, but they eventually welcome her back, realizing that in spite of her moral failings (at least, as viewed in their conservative Catholic community), she had a good heart. Poor Sissy wanted a child, and after ten stillbirths from three different husbands, she proceeds to secretly adopt a child from a young girl who has gotten "into trouble" (it is later revealed that the child was her husband's very own). She later manages to have a baby who survives, having it in a hospital with a doctor (unheard of in the Rommeley family before that time). Sissy is also the first in the family to dismiss the popular negative view of Jewish people, as she enlists the aid of a Jewish doctor. Sissy, so loving and as generous as she could be in her own poor circumstances, is by far my favorite character in a book full of very likable characters. Hell, even Johnny is a likable, and also pitiable, character.
This book was an absolute delight to read; it's so vibrant and true. I regret that I was never interested in this book, always dismissing it. I think I would have loved it just as much, if not more, if I'd read it years ago.
January 5, 2014
I found a copy of this book (in excellent condition, perhaps never even read before) in the closet at my little school. It then sat on my desk for a couple of weeks (during winter break). I snatched it up before I left on Friday; I had a feeling that this cold snap coming in would lead to a cancelation on Monday. I was right! This three-day weekend makes up for the fact that my district opened on the 2nd, and since I'm still on break from my graduate coursework, I am eager to spend my extra time getting ahead on my reading.
I've been aware of this book for quite a long time. I don't know why I never read it before; I certainly feel like, in spite of the length, this text would have been accessible to me when I was as young as 11 or 12, the same age as Francie, the main character, when the book opens. It starts with a day in her life, a summer day in Brooklyn, as she and her brother Neeley scrap together money to spend and save a bit, as Francie visits the library (reflecting on her love of books, and her disappointment in the disinterest of the librarian), and as she has an evening at home while her father Johnny prepares his only suit (a worn out tuxedo) to go out for a night of work as a singing waiter. After the first part of the book, the rest of the lengthy text tells the story of the family from before Francie was born (Johnny and her mother Katie's first meeting), to when Francie is preparing to move out of Brooklyn with her family, as she gets ready to leave for college in Michigan and her mother prepares to remarry a much more stable man (Johnny having drank himself to death). I felt like this book, by far Smith's most celebrated, was just about perfect.
Smith shows the best and worst of Brooklyn (circa 1900-1918); in the first few pages, I was thrown by the blatant anti-Semitism displayed by the Catholic and Protestant Brooklynites. I especially found this interesting because the book was published when World War II was going on, and Americans definitely knew what was happening to Jews in Europe. The anti-German attitudes expressed in the text (with an adolescent Francie at one point stating that she does not like Germans, and that they basically are ruthless in their pursuit of what they want...well, during her time, and the time that the book was published, that wasn't technically wrong regarding the country and its leaders but not necessarily the people themselves) are worth noting as well. What is interesting here is that Smith herself was of German descent (Francie was not; Johnny was Irish, and Katie was Austrian). I wonder if her family was harassed during World War I, the way that Germans in Brooklyn were harassed (through this was not a focal point in the text, there is one scene in which some German revelers on New Years are heckled by some Irishmen). Though it's clear that much of Francie's life is based on Smith's, this changes in detail make me consider how Smith's work, even in seemingly small ways, was affected by the political atmosphere of the time. Since I've been teaching a high school course on American History this year, I've become more interested in and aware of such things. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn was a best-seller in its time; the edition that I have, which includes some "extras" at the end, has an image of an advertisement promoting the purchase of War Bonds that was published in an early edition of the book. Just fascinating!
Some things about Brooklyn that Smith describes in the book, I think are still true today. Even back then, 100 years ago, Brooklyn was a large city by itself. Though Francie reflects that it has a small town feel that New York lacks (or maybe that was something that Smith said herself? I feel that Francie's appreciation for her hometown reflects that attitude). Brooklynites way back then had to worry about much of the same things that still concern them today, I well imagine: racially or ethically motivated violence, sex perverts and murderers. I mean, you can find that horrible shit anywhere today, of course, but it surprised me...I've always regarded "olden times" as being more innocent times. I guess where I live, that would be the case; I mean, I think of In Cold Blood, where a rural town was so innocent in the 1950's, until it was rocked by these murders. But in Brooklyn at that time, it would be a cause for alarm but not one that would take anyone as much by surprise. In one scene, Francie is accosted by a rapist and murder on the dark steps of her tenement home, and her mother proceeds to shoot him.
The people in Brooklyn, for the most part, are poor. Many of them are immigrants (this is before the "Great Migration," before there was a substantial population of black people and Hispanics in those places, I guess). Francie's parents both come from poor, uneducated immigrants, and neither of them reached the 8th grade themselves, having to leave school to work. Francie is forced into the same situation by the death of her father, and the birth of her younger sister Laurie. But Francie is fortunate; she's smart and shrewd. She first leaves her neighborhood school, full of mean children and abusive, disinterested teachers, and with the help of her father, is transferred to a nicer school several blocks over. I've noticed a theme of smart young characters leaving their situations and upgrading, and thereby giving themselves a better chance at success. The book drives the point home that education is important, that education is the key to success.
I wish that this was a book that I could share with my students, but I'm afraid that it was in the back closet for a reason. As I've noted, I have to be very very careful about what I use in my classroom. But I can at least teach them the lesson that the book tries to impart. I thought about my students, how many of them come from very difficult situations, and how many of them will have a label on them for a very long time for the mistakes that they've made. I want them to understand that with education, they can at least open up some doors for themselves. I imagine that the horrible teachers at Francie's first school, besides being sexually frustrated by their lack of options at the time, saw their students as being hopeless lost causes, as ignorant as their uneducated parents, and had long ago given up on them. That's sad. I don't work in the easiest teaching environment; when I explain to people where I work, I typically get a strange reaction. But while the future may already be bleak for some of the more (for lack of a better word) messed-up students, some of them have potential to make some contribution. And many of them want to. So I know that my responsibility is to give them some tools for making that happen, and helping them get the most out of their education while their in treatment. That's the kind of job that helps me to sleep well at night, that helps me to feel fulfilled. Even in this crazy messed up world, where kids can end up in such situations like my students have, or where young families like Francie's have to scrimp and save just to stay (often less than) adequately fed, I'm at least doing my small part to try to help things. I can't save the world, but I can contribute in my own small way.
The book ends with Katie preparing to marry Mr. McShane, a politician who was a self-man immigrant who'd been pining after her for years, but had waited until his sickly wife and her drunken husband had died and some time had passed before making his move. Life will be much easier for little Laurie than it was for her older brother and sister. Johnny's drinking had contributed to much of the family's issues. In spite of this, Francie loved her father. In truth, he wasn't a terrible person or anything. He loved his family; he was very lazy, though, and drank way too much. He gave all his wages to his wife, but spent all his tips on drinking (though I guess that was a family tradition among Katie's people, to let the working man keep his tips); he didn't take jobs frequently enough to keep the family well fed. But in spite of Laurie's obvious advantages early in life, Francie and Neeley still pity her. They found some joy in growing up with their beloved Papa, who loved to sing, and was so handsome and so friendly and well-loved by all. Yet Katie was forced to keep their building, and two others, clean to pay for their rent; she had to take odd jobs as well when Johnny wasn't working steadily. I found one section particularly interesting; entries from Francie's diary, kept when she was thirteen, frequent describe Johnny as being "sick." It is revealed in a later entry that Katie, reading the diary, made her change the word "drunk" to "sick" in previous entries. Brilliant.
I found the descriptions of the family's balancing of their little money to be interesting. I found it almost exciting, to see how they balanced it all out (sometimes unsuccessfully). Then I felt guilty; though I've been in situations (some not too long ago) where I haven't been able to make all the ends meet, I've never been in a desperate financial situation. Not desperate enough that I couldn't turn to someone for help. Still, to see that Francie and Neeley saw the good in it all as they were embarking on their new, and more privileged, lives, really showed that another message of the book is that money is not everything. It would have helped their situation, as Katie explains to her new fiance, but it wouldn't have made their lives better. Katie is a wise character, and hard-working. Though Francie doesn't get along with her, and knows that she loves her brother more, she sees that she is like her mother in all the right ways. Katie reflects at one point on a rich local family full of horrible people, and on a volunteer teacher who lives in squalor, and admits that the teacher has the richer, more fulfilling life. That's what makes her so determined to see her children educated, in spite of the odds.
I felt a connection with young Francie: her love of reading, and her general awkwardness around her peers. I also felt a connection with, and an admiration for, Aunt Sissy. For one thing, Sissy is my nickname in my family; it's been that since my teen years, when my younger half-brother couldn't pronounce my name. Sissy is the favorite aunt, and it's clear that Francie admires her. I get along very well with my nephews, and I like to think that they respect me the way that Francie always respected her aunt. I admire Sissy for her boldness, and for the fact that in a time when women were still pretty conservative, she was open about her sexuality. There's one scene where Sissy left a pretty box with the Nolan kids, advising them not to open it. The book doesn't outright state that the items in the box, which the children proceeded to tie to strings the put out the window for the whole neighborhood to see, were condoms, but it was somewhat implied (though I had to Google this to be sure). Sissy is shunned by her sisters for a time, but they eventually welcome her back, realizing that in spite of her moral failings (at least, as viewed in their conservative Catholic community), she had a good heart. Poor Sissy wanted a child, and after ten stillbirths from three different husbands, she proceeds to secretly adopt a child from a young girl who has gotten "into trouble" (it is later revealed that the child was her husband's very own). She later manages to have a baby who survives, having it in a hospital with a doctor (unheard of in the Rommeley family before that time). Sissy is also the first in the family to dismiss the popular negative view of Jewish people, as she enlists the aid of a Jewish doctor. Sissy, so loving and as generous as she could be in her own poor circumstances, is by far my favorite character in a book full of very likable characters. Hell, even Johnny is a likable, and also pitiable, character.
This book was an absolute delight to read; it's so vibrant and true. I regret that I was never interested in this book, always dismissing it. I think I would have loved it just as much, if not more, if I'd read it years ago.
Friday, January 3, 2014
Book #64: Absalom, Absalom!
Book #64: Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
January 3, 2014
First book of the new year! I set a goal on my Goodreads account to read 75 books this year...freaking insane, and probably not going to happen. But I made my goal of 50 so handily last year, and...well, it's supposed to be a "challenge," so why not? Anyway, this is the first full-length text that I've read by Faulkner. I've always found the title interesting, and having read the book, I can say that I have no fucking idea what it means. And so...
In some ways, this book is similar to Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros. It's the dramatic (really the stuff of Hollywood melodramas) epic story of a family in the South, before, during, and after the Civil War. It's told out-of-order, and from various perspectives. Quentin Compson, a young Harvard-bound student from Mississippi, gets sucked in to the story half a decade after the fact; it is implied in the chronology section at the end of the book that Quentin was so rattled by the events that unfolded (and was probably ill from the New England cold, since he obviously wasn't used to it or well equipped to handle it) that he died not long after telling the story to his college roommate, Shreve.
This book is not just about a family, though. I've stated before that one thing that I take from the books I've been reading is that living in the past, not letting things go and moving on, leads to a tragic life of misery and regret. That's clearly a message in this book, and not just for individuals like Rosa Coldfield, who still holds a grudge against Thomas Sutpen for insulting her. Okay, his proposition was pretty messed up. He first declared that he and Rosa, his dead wife's much younger sister, were engaged; he then proposed that he knock her up first, try for a boy, and if successful, he'd make her his wife. She left his once proud plantation, Sutpen's Hundred, in a huff, and held on to her rage against him for half a century, long after he had died.
It's Rosa's hunger for vengeance that brings Quentin into the mix. Although, the Compsons have always had some insider information about the strange, tragic story of the ruined Sutpens. For some reason that is never clear or explained, both of Quentin's paternal grandparents had the confidence of the Sutpens (both Rosa and Judith, her niece, confiding in the grandmother, and Thomas Sutpen himself in the grandfather). Quentin had already been hearing the incomplete details of the story from his father for years. On the one hand, he's grown weary of it (and that's completely understandable), though when Miss Rosa seeks his assistance, he learns far more, and delves into it much more deeply, than he ever wanted to.
Thomas Sutpen, the eccentric outsider who came to Jackson, Mississippi from parts unknown, is often referred to in the narrative as a "demon." But he's no more demonic than any driven person, and though his actions towards his children were deplorable (much worse than the insult to his sister-in-law), he was quite human. Quentin's grandfather knew, and so Quentin knew, that Sutpen came from ignorant mountain folk from West Virginia (though technically, as Shreve points out, West Virginia wasn't even a state yet by the time the Sutpens left it). When his family ended up living on the fringes of a huge Southern plantation, the young Sutpen was in awe of the plenty that the rich landowners had; hell, he was even jealous of the clothing worn by the slaves, and it was often observed in the text that the conditions of the "poor white trash" were worse than those of the field hands. Young Sutpen began to understand the Southern caste system when a slave at the plantation turned him away at the front door; he became determined to become the master of his own perfect, splendid Southern empire. The Civil War, and his own actions, brought about his ruin.
Sutpen leaves his first wife in Haiti because he learns, after their son Charles Bon is born, that she is part black. Of course, until the time of the Civil Rights Movement, a person who had any blood of African descent that could be traced would be considered "black," and subjected to the same treatment as all other black people. So Sutpen felt that he could not build his perfect Southern empire with his technically-black wife and child, so he paid them off and left them, sort of starting from scratch in Mississippi, where he married a white woman and had two white children, and a big plantation. He didn't have a great reputation in the area, being so mysterious and having such strange, backwoodsy ways, but he had the empire that he had dreamed of...for a while.
It isn't actually known for certain how Charles Bon came back into his father's life. Shreve and Quentin attempt to fill in this part of the story for themselves, imagining Sutpen's spurned wife as being bitter and seeking her own vengeance. They imagine a strange, maybe even miserable childhood for Charles Bon under her care, similar to the same kind of not-childhood that Miss Rosa had, as she was taught by her bitter aunt to hate the man who had tricked their family into allowing him to marry her sister. They don't know any of this about Bon for sure; it's all speculative. But it just goes to show how engrossed they've become in this story, even though most of the people involved died long ago. Anyway, they imagine that Bon's mother and some shady lawyer found out that Henry was attending the University of Mississippi at Oxford (the same school that Faulkner himself attended, in fact), and sent a too old Bon to school there to buddy up with his half-brother (whom he maybe didn't know was his half-brother at first?), and thus get revenge on Sutpen (maybe for money?). They don't even entertain the idea that Henry and Bon's meeting and friendship was a coincidence. While I'm not exactly fond of the idea of the spurned female character obsessing so much over the man that it takes over her entire life, she seems to be a common one in literature (and I think that this is familiar ground for Faulkner). And it does make more sense than having a 28-year-old Bon just happen to be attending the same little university as his own long-lost brother. But again, this isn't known for sure.
Bon very briefly, sorta, courts, and kinda-sorta becomes engaged to Henry's sister Judith. She is not Sutpen's only daughter at home; he has a mixed-race daughter named Clytie, born of one of his, ahem, personal slaves when Sutpen was still building his estate. Unlike Bon, Clytie was able to grow up alongside her brother and sister, and was even on somewhat equal footing with them. But she was still technically a slave, at least until after the war, though she stayed at Sutpen's Hundred until she burned it to the ground, with herself, and an aged outlaw Henry, inside of it. Yep. 'Cause Henry finds out from his father that Bon is his brother; Shreve and Quentin imagine that Bon and Henry both knew it, became open about it after leaving Sutpen's Hundred together, not to return until after the war...when Henry would shoot him dead at the front gate. So Rosa went to Sutpen's Hundred one night, years and years later, to take Henry down, and she brought Quentin along with her to be her strong arm. Henry had been hiding out at his childhood home for just a few years, hidden and cared for by his older half-sister. Rosa found out for sure that he was there, and Quentin did, too. His world was pretty much rocked, and when he later found out about the fire, and Rosa dying without having satisfied her need for vengeance, that seemed to overwhelm him...even to kill him.
Sutpen may have told his son to kill his own brother. He may have simply left the desperate kid with no option. He refused to acknowledge Bon in any way (at least, according to Shreve and Quentin's speculations), and that was all Bon ever really wanted (again, according to the guys). So Bon was going to get his father's attention, once and for all. He was going to marry his own sister. Shreve and Quentin even imagine that Henry, who admired and cared for his brother so much, tried to reconcile it somehow, but obviously he could not. The fact that Bon was part black didn't seem to bother Henry at all; it made him no more or less conflicted about the whole situation. The college boys in the early 1900's, looking back on the whole messy situation, seem to feel that if Sutpen had only done right by his first son, the whole situation wouldn't have gone down like it did.
Sutpen met a violent end himself. A few years after the whole situation with Henry and Bon (his daughter left without any marriage prospects, to die an old maid while caring for Bon's son from his first, also mixed-race wife), Sutpen was cut down by his own right hand man, Wash Jones. Sutpen, desperate for one last go at a son, must have given the same proposition to Jones's young granddaughter that he gave to his sister-in-law. The girl, the only family member that Jones had left, became pregnant, and had...a girl. Jones kills Sutpen, then goes on to kill his granddaughter and the baby, and to get himself killed by the police.
The Sutpen line does not die here, because Bon's son Charles also had a child, by a very dark black woman (Faulkner's descriptions of her, or perhaps his characters' descriptions of her, are extremely racist). It's said that his son, Jim Bond, the last of the Sutpen line, is ignorant and wild...basically, like his white great-grandfather Thomas Sutpen was. He is the lone survivor of the whole situation, having gotten out of the house or not been in it when Clytie burned it down. Quentin and Shreve cannot even wager a guess as to Jim's whereabouts. He is all that is left of the Sutpen empire, down to 1% of what it had once been.
Wow! Pretty crazy situation. It's no wonder that, even though Quentin had been hearing the story all his life, it had captured his imagination all over again with the recent situations that had arisen around him, and with the retelling of it all to his roommate. Quentin and his friend are piecing the story together with all kinds of information; first, second, and third-hand, incomplete, some of it often repeated, and many questions still unanswered. Shreve is fascinated by the story, and he, being Canadian, sees it as being uniquely Southern, in a land of people living in the past and living with regret. Quentin grapples with his own feelings about the South at the very end. Shreve speculates that Quentin hates the South, is perhaps bitter about the fact that a story from so long ago can still ruin so many lives, that the Civil War can still affect the way that people see the world and behave towards others. Quentin denies it, but he "protests too much"; perhaps this is a reflection of Faulkner's own feelings of, I don't know, guilt or shame about his own Mississippi background.
It took me a bit to get into this book, but I found myself as absorbed in the Sutpens' story as Shreve the Canadian. But I also found myself feeling the way that I'm sure Quentin had his whole life, that it was sad how people like Miss Rosa couldn't let the past go, couldn't forgive and move on with life. But then, maybe someone like Miss Rosa simply didn't have a choice. Maybe she had to become a ghost. Faulkner writes in the text how, prior to the Civil War, women of privilege were bred to be delicate, helpless ladies. This made them helpless when the war struck and they were faced with unspeakable hardships. Still, Rosa and Judith and Clytie endured together at Sutpen's Hundred...could they really be so physically strong but so emotionally weak? Did the war beat the fight out of them? I'm most disturbed at the thought of living a life like Miss Rosa's: sitting around all day in all black, living on charity, watching and waiting for the opportunity to exact revenge...for half a century! Seriously, I would rather be dead. The hardships of the war and the first few years of the Reconstruction wouldn't be as bad as that. At least then you'd be fighting to survive, and that's something. But to sit around and dwell in the past...that's a life of nothing.
January 3, 2014
First book of the new year! I set a goal on my Goodreads account to read 75 books this year...freaking insane, and probably not going to happen. But I made my goal of 50 so handily last year, and...well, it's supposed to be a "challenge," so why not? Anyway, this is the first full-length text that I've read by Faulkner. I've always found the title interesting, and having read the book, I can say that I have no fucking idea what it means. And so...
In some ways, this book is similar to Caramelo by Sandra Cisneros. It's the dramatic (really the stuff of Hollywood melodramas) epic story of a family in the South, before, during, and after the Civil War. It's told out-of-order, and from various perspectives. Quentin Compson, a young Harvard-bound student from Mississippi, gets sucked in to the story half a decade after the fact; it is implied in the chronology section at the end of the book that Quentin was so rattled by the events that unfolded (and was probably ill from the New England cold, since he obviously wasn't used to it or well equipped to handle it) that he died not long after telling the story to his college roommate, Shreve.
This book is not just about a family, though. I've stated before that one thing that I take from the books I've been reading is that living in the past, not letting things go and moving on, leads to a tragic life of misery and regret. That's clearly a message in this book, and not just for individuals like Rosa Coldfield, who still holds a grudge against Thomas Sutpen for insulting her. Okay, his proposition was pretty messed up. He first declared that he and Rosa, his dead wife's much younger sister, were engaged; he then proposed that he knock her up first, try for a boy, and if successful, he'd make her his wife. She left his once proud plantation, Sutpen's Hundred, in a huff, and held on to her rage against him for half a century, long after he had died.
It's Rosa's hunger for vengeance that brings Quentin into the mix. Although, the Compsons have always had some insider information about the strange, tragic story of the ruined Sutpens. For some reason that is never clear or explained, both of Quentin's paternal grandparents had the confidence of the Sutpens (both Rosa and Judith, her niece, confiding in the grandmother, and Thomas Sutpen himself in the grandfather). Quentin had already been hearing the incomplete details of the story from his father for years. On the one hand, he's grown weary of it (and that's completely understandable), though when Miss Rosa seeks his assistance, he learns far more, and delves into it much more deeply, than he ever wanted to.
Thomas Sutpen, the eccentric outsider who came to Jackson, Mississippi from parts unknown, is often referred to in the narrative as a "demon." But he's no more demonic than any driven person, and though his actions towards his children were deplorable (much worse than the insult to his sister-in-law), he was quite human. Quentin's grandfather knew, and so Quentin knew, that Sutpen came from ignorant mountain folk from West Virginia (though technically, as Shreve points out, West Virginia wasn't even a state yet by the time the Sutpens left it). When his family ended up living on the fringes of a huge Southern plantation, the young Sutpen was in awe of the plenty that the rich landowners had; hell, he was even jealous of the clothing worn by the slaves, and it was often observed in the text that the conditions of the "poor white trash" were worse than those of the field hands. Young Sutpen began to understand the Southern caste system when a slave at the plantation turned him away at the front door; he became determined to become the master of his own perfect, splendid Southern empire. The Civil War, and his own actions, brought about his ruin.
Sutpen leaves his first wife in Haiti because he learns, after their son Charles Bon is born, that she is part black. Of course, until the time of the Civil Rights Movement, a person who had any blood of African descent that could be traced would be considered "black," and subjected to the same treatment as all other black people. So Sutpen felt that he could not build his perfect Southern empire with his technically-black wife and child, so he paid them off and left them, sort of starting from scratch in Mississippi, where he married a white woman and had two white children, and a big plantation. He didn't have a great reputation in the area, being so mysterious and having such strange, backwoodsy ways, but he had the empire that he had dreamed of...for a while.
It isn't actually known for certain how Charles Bon came back into his father's life. Shreve and Quentin attempt to fill in this part of the story for themselves, imagining Sutpen's spurned wife as being bitter and seeking her own vengeance. They imagine a strange, maybe even miserable childhood for Charles Bon under her care, similar to the same kind of not-childhood that Miss Rosa had, as she was taught by her bitter aunt to hate the man who had tricked their family into allowing him to marry her sister. They don't know any of this about Bon for sure; it's all speculative. But it just goes to show how engrossed they've become in this story, even though most of the people involved died long ago. Anyway, they imagine that Bon's mother and some shady lawyer found out that Henry was attending the University of Mississippi at Oxford (the same school that Faulkner himself attended, in fact), and sent a too old Bon to school there to buddy up with his half-brother (whom he maybe didn't know was his half-brother at first?), and thus get revenge on Sutpen (maybe for money?). They don't even entertain the idea that Henry and Bon's meeting and friendship was a coincidence. While I'm not exactly fond of the idea of the spurned female character obsessing so much over the man that it takes over her entire life, she seems to be a common one in literature (and I think that this is familiar ground for Faulkner). And it does make more sense than having a 28-year-old Bon just happen to be attending the same little university as his own long-lost brother. But again, this isn't known for sure.
Bon very briefly, sorta, courts, and kinda-sorta becomes engaged to Henry's sister Judith. She is not Sutpen's only daughter at home; he has a mixed-race daughter named Clytie, born of one of his, ahem, personal slaves when Sutpen was still building his estate. Unlike Bon, Clytie was able to grow up alongside her brother and sister, and was even on somewhat equal footing with them. But she was still technically a slave, at least until after the war, though she stayed at Sutpen's Hundred until she burned it to the ground, with herself, and an aged outlaw Henry, inside of it. Yep. 'Cause Henry finds out from his father that Bon is his brother; Shreve and Quentin imagine that Bon and Henry both knew it, became open about it after leaving Sutpen's Hundred together, not to return until after the war...when Henry would shoot him dead at the front gate. So Rosa went to Sutpen's Hundred one night, years and years later, to take Henry down, and she brought Quentin along with her to be her strong arm. Henry had been hiding out at his childhood home for just a few years, hidden and cared for by his older half-sister. Rosa found out for sure that he was there, and Quentin did, too. His world was pretty much rocked, and when he later found out about the fire, and Rosa dying without having satisfied her need for vengeance, that seemed to overwhelm him...even to kill him.
Sutpen may have told his son to kill his own brother. He may have simply left the desperate kid with no option. He refused to acknowledge Bon in any way (at least, according to Shreve and Quentin's speculations), and that was all Bon ever really wanted (again, according to the guys). So Bon was going to get his father's attention, once and for all. He was going to marry his own sister. Shreve and Quentin even imagine that Henry, who admired and cared for his brother so much, tried to reconcile it somehow, but obviously he could not. The fact that Bon was part black didn't seem to bother Henry at all; it made him no more or less conflicted about the whole situation. The college boys in the early 1900's, looking back on the whole messy situation, seem to feel that if Sutpen had only done right by his first son, the whole situation wouldn't have gone down like it did.
Sutpen met a violent end himself. A few years after the whole situation with Henry and Bon (his daughter left without any marriage prospects, to die an old maid while caring for Bon's son from his first, also mixed-race wife), Sutpen was cut down by his own right hand man, Wash Jones. Sutpen, desperate for one last go at a son, must have given the same proposition to Jones's young granddaughter that he gave to his sister-in-law. The girl, the only family member that Jones had left, became pregnant, and had...a girl. Jones kills Sutpen, then goes on to kill his granddaughter and the baby, and to get himself killed by the police.
The Sutpen line does not die here, because Bon's son Charles also had a child, by a very dark black woman (Faulkner's descriptions of her, or perhaps his characters' descriptions of her, are extremely racist). It's said that his son, Jim Bond, the last of the Sutpen line, is ignorant and wild...basically, like his white great-grandfather Thomas Sutpen was. He is the lone survivor of the whole situation, having gotten out of the house or not been in it when Clytie burned it down. Quentin and Shreve cannot even wager a guess as to Jim's whereabouts. He is all that is left of the Sutpen empire, down to 1% of what it had once been.
Wow! Pretty crazy situation. It's no wonder that, even though Quentin had been hearing the story all his life, it had captured his imagination all over again with the recent situations that had arisen around him, and with the retelling of it all to his roommate. Quentin and his friend are piecing the story together with all kinds of information; first, second, and third-hand, incomplete, some of it often repeated, and many questions still unanswered. Shreve is fascinated by the story, and he, being Canadian, sees it as being uniquely Southern, in a land of people living in the past and living with regret. Quentin grapples with his own feelings about the South at the very end. Shreve speculates that Quentin hates the South, is perhaps bitter about the fact that a story from so long ago can still ruin so many lives, that the Civil War can still affect the way that people see the world and behave towards others. Quentin denies it, but he "protests too much"; perhaps this is a reflection of Faulkner's own feelings of, I don't know, guilt or shame about his own Mississippi background.
It took me a bit to get into this book, but I found myself as absorbed in the Sutpens' story as Shreve the Canadian. But I also found myself feeling the way that I'm sure Quentin had his whole life, that it was sad how people like Miss Rosa couldn't let the past go, couldn't forgive and move on with life. But then, maybe someone like Miss Rosa simply didn't have a choice. Maybe she had to become a ghost. Faulkner writes in the text how, prior to the Civil War, women of privilege were bred to be delicate, helpless ladies. This made them helpless when the war struck and they were faced with unspeakable hardships. Still, Rosa and Judith and Clytie endured together at Sutpen's Hundred...could they really be so physically strong but so emotionally weak? Did the war beat the fight out of them? I'm most disturbed at the thought of living a life like Miss Rosa's: sitting around all day in all black, living on charity, watching and waiting for the opportunity to exact revenge...for half a century! Seriously, I would rather be dead. The hardships of the war and the first few years of the Reconstruction wouldn't be as bad as that. At least then you'd be fighting to survive, and that's something. But to sit around and dwell in the past...that's a life of nothing.
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