Stephen Elliot

I've been looking forward to writing about Looking Forward to It: or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the American electoral process for a while. It's pretty great! Also great is the cover of it, of a crowd of a political supporters with weird-looking tree men in suits interspersed, all carrying signs with question marks on them. (A funny contrast to a book edited by Stephen Elliot I read recently, called Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction, on the cover of which a similar rally crowd holds signs, one of which says, "Edited by" and another, "STEPHEN ELLIOT." So I guess some voters know what they want.)

It opens via a picture of Elliot, a soda drink, and Howard Dean half-turned in the background, and it begins wonderfully, "It's been a long, boring summer and it's only July. July 2003, to be exact, nearly a year and a half before two people you would never invite over for dinner, and probably wouldn't even want to live in your town, will come head to head in the 2004 presidential election." The book continues in similar fashion - funny, inquisitive and based in a personal perspective you rarely find in writing about politics.

Now, when I say "personal," I don't necessarily mean Elliot's. I'm still on my way to reading his other books, which it seems are in part autobiographically based, but this novel makes such a point of being Elliot's as narrator's account of his travels around the country tailing various presidential candidates and their campaigns (well, his acquaintance with George Bush is masterfully fearsome but at best long-distance) that I immediately began to search for the fictional margins of this travel tale.

A first hilarious piece of proof comes on p. 2, when Elliot meets a photographer who'll accompany him on the trip. "Stefan's smiling a little because he lives in Washington, DC, and probably knows how all of this is going to turn out. What he doesn't know is that I'm writing for a magazine that doesn't carry photographs."

I probably also had this reaction because his writing reminded me a lot of Sergei Dovlatov's, who wrote all his books from a first-person who continually changed between the different books, losing wives, picking up dogs and children, perhaps a labor camp warden while in the army, perhaps escaping the army by being a champion boxer. This technique, though it was probably more than that, and added a layer of estrangement that was a unique means of writing about the unexciting predictable perversities of Soviet life. And by binding all of Dovlatov's writing into a single continuing work, it allowed uncertainty and a multiplicity of perspectives into fiction when un-straightforwardness wasn't exactly in demand. Moreover, Elliot's and Dovlatov's humor is uncannily similar.

It seems there are a number of purposes in the book. One is to give an actual picture of some of the candidates, mainly on the liberal side, and see what game it is they think they're playing and how they try to win. Another is to give a sketch of the clusters of different voters, and why the game plays out as it does. There is some analysis of the electoral institutions like caucuses and how to talk about health care (yes, I'm using the word institution lightly.) And last but not least, there is the theme that is Stephen Elliot, an itinerant writer for magazines, easy going and charming but afraid of and bothered by the people he's interacting with in his pursuits, with a violent girlfriend named Wilhelmina somewhere which may be his home.
TBC

Philip Gourevitch

From an interview with Gourevitch -
"As a writer, and we'll talk in a minute about your book on Rwanda, it seems that your challenge is to move from the general notion, the general concept: What is justice? What is the nation state? What is a country? Questions that the people whose stories you tell ask in the course of your conversation. But at another level, you focus in on the detail, the real human being named Paul, for example, in the Rwanda story. Tell us about that movement as a writer from the general to the specific. Anything in particular?"

PG: "I think André Gide said it perfectly well: expressing the general in the particular, the particular in the general, that is the drama of our lives, and he was speaking as a writer. It's not hyperconscious. The one has to contain the other and vice versa. To talk about the general generally, to me it's simply boring, it's simply inaccurate and I don't trust it, I don't know what it means. People will say, well you know Rwanda the nation state, the da da da ... I don't know what we're talking about here. What are we talking about? What is the lived experience of that? What are the political calculations of that? Who's making that happen? On the other hand, if you just go to people's stories and the journalistic cliché, putting a face on the catastrophe, then there's this idea almost like a postage stamp. Then you're saying: here's the general and here's one individual. But it's not one individual. You have to develop the relationship between an individual and an ongoing public course of events. And that is the issue that most interests me in writing, that place where the private lives of individuals intersect with massive historical public events, and the two become confused. And in some way, one loses a fully private life because of public events."

It's interesting, about the loss of the private life. You often want it, it's the essence of the fantasy of becoming famous, and having an exciting life as things happen to you and you discover yourself. But it's also the stuff of tragedy, and it takes years to recover from a few instances of losing control even when you're not sure that's what you've undergone.

Taking time off from non-profit work to write a murder mystery set in Laos

Just finished a book called The Coroner's Lunch by Colin Cotterill. It's a rather regular mystery novel, but a very rare book to read. First, it takes place in Communist Laos, in 1976. This is just a year after the success of a revolution which, according to the main character, Dr. Siri Paiboun, aimed to end the terrible corruption of the French and American years. Orchestrated by young idealists in the jungle, it has brought to the top some characters who spout things such as "Revolutionary consciousness is maintained beneath the brilliance of the beam from the socialist lighthouse. But people have a right to see the lighthouse keeper's clean underwear drying on the rocks." Yet the reader learns that there are good individuals in all walks of life, as a humorous and unlikely alliance of a coroner, a policeman, a politburo member, Hmong shaman and Vietnamese doctor uncover the dirty dealings of the head of a nascent secret police/death squad sort of operation.

The Coroner's Lunch does a pretty good job of staying on the political fence as far as people are concerned. It is a little bit cheery, its characters reminiscent of the socialist realist children's literature I read from the Library of Adventures when I was little. Yet it's also fair, laughing at ideologized idiots, corrupt generals, and an education system that has monks-turned-teachers read printouts of Department of Education propaganda in lecture. Siri is a pretty complex character, irreverent and independent, yet a believer in progress for the new regime.

At the end, Siri gets the file the unlucky security organ has kept on him over the years, and finds his wife's suicide note - which he's never seen. A passionate revolutionary who left French university for the jungle, she killed herself out of depression for the failure of her struggle a few years before its consummation. Yet she writes that more than that, she killed herself because this political disappointment deprived her of the ability to appreciate and love her husband. As a way of getting at the dangers of singlemindedness, I like this scheme a lot.

So overall, I liked this book a lot. It also gave me some insight, albeit from a foreigner’s perspective, to a country I don't know much about. It’s pretty fun to hear Siri wonder why all Vietnamese are named Tran, and have a character commit suicide after listening to Thai radio, which attempts to propagandize the Lao back into the capitalist fold, explain the genetic reasons for the ugliness of Lao communists.

It’s amazing, too, that this was written by an Englishman. Here's a description I found of the author: "Colin Cotterill has spent twelve years in the Southeast Asian region, He has taught and trained teachers in Laos, Thailand and along the Burmese border. He is a writer and cartoonist for various publications and has produced and directed a forty program TV series for Thai national television. But his new life, and his most valuable contribution to the region, is his work in child protection. This work he now does full time." Can this be me, someday?

The one strange thing in reading the book was the absence of fear. Cotterill repeatedly makes the point that being forced to voluntarily dig a ditch on a Saturday is the most dangerous externality of the Lao communist regime. People get jailed for listening to Thai broadcasts, and there are “chicken counter” spies all over the place, yet characters can be somewhat honest about their political opinions. Conversations like the following just seem odd:
“I hope you aren’t insulting the judiciary. I could report you for that.”
“I’ve got nothing against the judiciary.”
“Good.”
“Just the arse that’s representing it.”
Is this possible? How do even quasi-communist regimes institutionalize themselves without extensive repression?

This is what the author says in an interview - "I've spent a lot of time sitting around with people who lived through that period," he said, "both people who were in the jungles and in the caves with the communists; and people who were in Vientiane, fearing the communists. All sitting around together, talking about things like this. We spent many long nights, telling stories. When you get a communist and a noncommunist sitting down together discussing those days, it's very amicable; there doesn't seem to be any aggression. These are two people who were forced to be enemies, I suppose, by foreign aggression. The Laos are very much victims of history.”

Makes me want to learn more. (Incidentally, I am discovering that much of what I learned in college about institutions, and state development, is evaporating from my head. Pretty frightening.)

Feast of the Goat

So there's been a little very small break in my writing. Not that I haven't read things. Just a usual lapse in outward energy.

I read this book by Mario Vargas Llosa recently, on a whim, having bought it while idling away five minutes of pre-ferry time at a bookstore at Bowling Green. It's a novel in the context of Trujillo's dictatorship in the Dominican Republic, and impressively weaves together the lives of several people, including Trujillo, his assassins, and a Dominican-American whom he molested in her youth.

The stories are mostly disturbing, though some funny, and aim to understand how people succumb to obeying dictatorship, and its indignity, and also when they rebel. The seventy year old Trujillo is represented as lording over a fiefdom, playing with and manipulating his overloyal servants, taking their women as a proxy for governing, and justifying every continuing repression with the need to ward off a landing of the Marines (given Central American history, it’s an ironic element). It's very straightforward, but the insight is tremendous, very imaginative and showed me a lot about the country. And the multitude of lives involved makes it compelling.

So an example – there is a plot to assassinate His Excellency, and the chief general, Pupo Roman, is convinced to join it, though his conditions are such that he only acts once Trujillo is actually dead. It finally happens, and the general, though continually insulted by Trujillo in life and dreaming of revenge, freezes in absence of the habitual subordination. He lets the secret police run wild, eventually capture and torture him. He is still unsure why he’s doing what he’s doing. When on the verge of a prolonged death (months! Vargas Llosa does not skip the details, and I’m not sure how I feel about it) in the torture chamber, he fully assumes the role of dissident victim and dies almost fulfilled. Why? “’For love of my country,’ he [Roman] heard himself saying.” Yet one doubts he knows what he means.

Roman as a character represents really well the difficulty of making political and/or moral choices, at the right time, when one’s life order is at stake. He has no personal, internal, value system and this makes making a personally-significant political choice difficult. Then there is the (arguably) main character Urania Cabral. She makes her choice early on, leaving the country at fourteen for the US to escape memories of how her father, a minister disgraced with a Kafkaesque lack of explanation, sacrifices her to the Chief as a plea for forgiveness. Yet while studying at Harvard and working at the World Bank, she indulges an under-the-skin interest in reading Dominican history and can’t shake off her solitude. She possesses a very developed value system, but the circumstances of her life have made it extremely convoluted, and this warps her behavior. This makes you wonder to what extent a rigorous internal order is helpful in living at all.
I’ve gotten lost in my own analysis at this point. But these sorts of contradictions pervade the book, and the interesting characters coupled with a well-created reality make for a satisfying read. Plus now I know a lot about torture…