Small Island by Andrea Levy

A friend of mine had the wonderful idea of starting a book club, and the first book selected was Small Island. The novel has two main characters - Gilbert, a Jamaican who volunteers for the RAF in WWII and tries to make it in England afterward, and Hortense, a Jamaican woman who becomes his wife for the chance to come with him. To a lesser extent, the book also traces two other lives - that of Queenie, an English woman who rents a room to Gilbert, and her husband Bernard. The characters are all given the chance to narrate in first person, and the the novel overall explores racism and the different motivations of affection.

It's on the whole an informative and well-intentioned book, and nicely bound. I'm hard pressed for other good things to say. Because everything is told in first person, the author has what my mother has not-so-charmingly titled "verbal diarrhea." No motive, thought, or impression of landscape is left unexplained. Jamaican and British accents make appearances, only to be replaced with flowingly-worded social commentary that the characters recite in their heads as they fight wars or cook dinner. And mysteriously, no organizing principles in the main characters are apparent by the end of the book, behind the mountains of their self-definition.

Perhaps the only part of the novel granted some ambiguity - and as a result, sparkle - is a connection between Gilbert, Hortense and Queenie in the form of Michael Roberts. He is Hortense's step-brother and love-object before he volunteers for the RAF and leaves Jamaica (following an indiscretion with a married white missionary woman), a one-time lover of Queenie when in London and the father of her child, and the reason that both Queenie and Hortense befriend Gilbert - since the two men look greatly alike. He is also the reason Hortense comes to England and the only spark of happiness in Queenie's English life, and as such a liaison between the worlds of black and white, colonial and Mother Country - the themes explored by the novel.

The racism in Jamaica, in the world of the book, is parochial, and malignant in a subdued way - Hortense, trained by British women in a Kingston teachers' college, sincerely judges people by shades of skin color and knows her place in the racial hierarchy, yet perceives of herself as comparable to whites in achievement. At the beginning of her teaching career, she thinks, "I hungered to make those children regard me with as high an opinion as I had for the principal and tutors at my college. Those white women whose superiority encircled them like an aureole, could quieten any raucus gathering by just placing a finger to a lip" - and does not realize the true origin of their authority is not available to her.

The racism in England, on the other hand, is of the "savages from the jungle" kind; it makes people shun, be afraid of, and want to violate, all at once, anyone non-white. Even Queenie, the only character open to interaction with Jamaicans because of her general compassion, and the timely appeance of Michael Roberts at her door when she was most lonely, repeats things twice for Hortense, assuming her dim-witted, and overcharges her black tenants as a sort of insurance.

American GIs, who make an ugly appearance, also bring the American brand of racism to the examination table. Here, blacks are not only assumed to be naturally unfit for society, they also require total and demonstrable physical separation from whites. When Gilbert, in RAF boy-in-blue uniform, sits next to Queenie in a movie theater with American GIs present, they start a riot demanding that he sit in the back with the African-American GIs, and end up shooting Queenie's father-in-law. The Americans make the British "they're not of our sort" approach seem benign by comparison.

So this juxtaposition of national attitudes was a very interesting part of the novel, and I would think the foundation for the book as well. The trouble is that the characters seem built to illustrate the point (which, I should note, is of course more complex than I've presented it), rather than act on their own to tear at the cloth of the point a bit, and show us their reactions and adaptations. Perhaps the fun thing to at our book club would be to come up with extra layers for the characters and explore how to make them more interesting and illuminating as residents of a world entrenched in racism in a myriad different ways.

I should also look over White Teeth, which treats similar subjects in what I remember to be a hugely more sharp, sarcastic and touching manner, to see if I can pinoint the reasons for the difference between the two books.

Alexandar Hemon

Alexander Hemon’s Nowhere Man is about a Sarajevan-born young man, Jozef Pronek, his life in Bosnia and then in Chicago. As the war in Bosnia unfolds and he is safely in the U.S., he tries to regain himself in a new life.

Some of the chapters are narrated by first-person narrators who have different relationships to Jozef, and some are narrated in third-person, focusing on Jozef’s life alone. By the end of the novel you understand that all of these personalities hover around a singular person. In fact, in the first chapter (as occurred to me upon a second reading of the book and also of interviews with Hemon), one Jozef meets another Jozef. Showing Jozef through various eyes allows Hemon to give him an emotional sheen without discussing his feelings; the American Pronek is an observer of himself, not yet a person.

This fragmentation of the American Jozef is a main theme. The narrative of his pre-U.S. life is linear. It’s a heartfelt and smoothly written story of growing up – fighting as a boy, rebellion by starting a Beatles band, a numbing stint in the army. Jozef’s division (or multiplication) beings in Ukraine, where he is meant to be exploring his father’s heritage, as war is breaking out in Sarajevo. His life is narrated in the first person by a roommate, a Chicagoan with a Ukrainian father. (A possible third witness lurks in the hidden camera Josef identifies in their dorm room.) The American is jealous of Jozef’s ability to engage with life, to be happy.

This chapter offers a glimpse into the last days of Jozef’s pre-war nature, which nourishes on self, and the calm ennui of his Soviet existence. Once Jozef arrives in the U.S., the story begins to progress in spurts. Jozef no longer seems to know himself, feels he doesn’t have a place. Sitting on the couch of his first Chicago girlfriend, “… he imagined himself imagining himself in this room, dimly lit, waiting for a woman who could only know what he told her in his sloppy English and distorting accent. He saw clearly that who he thought he was and who she thought he was were two different persons. He imagined himself doubled, the two of them sitting next to each other on the damn sofa.”

In the very end of Nowhere Man, the story of his fragmentation reaches an apogee, even as Jozef himself is beginning to heal. The last chapter is a cauldron of people, events and facts, personified by the twisting life of a wily and cruel Ukrainian, taking place in Asia after the Russian Revolution. Though difficult for me to understand, it reminded me of the hotels in Murakami’s writing (isn’t it convenient that the four books I read a year are all just so similar!?), homes of all the nefarious origins for the events in the heroes’ lives, whether real or imagined, the personal-growing-into-the-political, and others. I really liked this parting of ways between the character, Jozef, and his characterization – even as the former finally begins to engage with his new world, the multitude of disruptive forces playing out within him are on full parade.

Here is the author’s explanation of the structure of Nowhere Man. “This is all dandy peachy, but the reality is that everybody expects my (and yours too) writing to be autobiographical and I had to deal with it in some way. So rather than ignore it, I decided to confuse it — hence the "I" of the third person narrator, who is not Pronek, but is closely related. He either imagines Pronek and the life he might have had, or completely imagines him. The third person narrative had to be ruptured, because the narrator is not disinterested, as he/she can never be truly disinterested. As for me, I think of Pronek as my double (or, better, I think of me as Pronek's double). Our lives are parallel, occasionally intersecting, but not identical. ... And his life is parallel to some other lives — most of the lives, I believe, are parallel, or have similar trajectories. To question the absolute "truth" of the self, I had to double the self, and doubling results in multiplication. It all sounds highfalutin (and probably pretentious), but it's a legitimate writing strategy. I'm interested in the world, past and present, not the souls or the selves. I'm interested in connections not the selfish isolation. I'm interested in human, historical networks, not self-containing, extemporal cells of individuality. [my emphasis] I'm interested in transformative possibilities of fiction, not depiction or description. There's a little manifesto.”

So Hemon’s purpose was to represent the interaction of a person in Jozef Pronek’s shoes and the word. (Gratuitous insert – p. 10 – “… I got off the bus across the street from a Chinese restaurant. New World, it was called, and it was empty, only a sign in the window saying FOR LEASE.”) He multiplies Jozef to avoid getting stuck in his “selfish isolation” or even in his nascent “connections” with the friendly and multicultural Americans of the novel – and this makes for a great and complex piece of writing! But the narrators also seem to show you that a person displaced by war can imagine a too-large variety not only of the places he could travel to, but also of the places he could have come from.

Here is a list of invented names and home countries that Jozef Pronek gives to the people whose homes he canvasses working for Greenpeace. It has the air of aimlessness and wandering, but shot through with displacement not just of the spiritual kind, but of the physical also. “To a young couple in Evanston who sat on their sofa holding hands, Pronek introduced himself as Mirza from Bosnia. To a college girl in La Grance with DE PAW stretching across her bosom he introduced himself as Sergei Katastrofenko from Ukraine… To an old couple from Romania in Homewood, who could speak no English and sat with their hands gently touching their knees, he was John from Liverpool… To a bunch of potbellied Christian bikers barbecuing on a Walgreen’s parking lot in Elk Grove Village, he was Joseph from Snitzlland (the homeland of the snitzl.) To a woman in Hyde Park who opened the door with a gorgeous grin, which then transmogrified into a suspicious smirk as she said, “I thought you were someone else,” he was Someone Else.”

A few other things. My first impression in reading this book was of its verbosity. Hemon seems to feel every noun deserves a minimum of two adjectives. Yet I quickly stopped noticing this, once Hemon started getting into dialogue, and also once the momentum of the novel picked me up. Unlike Gary Shteyngart (to whom my thoughts leapt reluctantly at the beginning of the book), Hemon’s style of writing betrays discipline and thought, not the sensation of following a trail (of often interesting ideas) through a sloppy glutinous swamp. Moreover, I learned that Hemon learned to write in English by reading Lolita and looking up every unfamiliar word in a dictionary.

Nowhere Man is Hemon’s his second book. The author was born in Sarajevo and, like his protagonist in the book, was in the US on a work-related visit when the war in Bosnia began. He stayed in Chicago, was eventually reunited with his parents, but gave up writing in Serbo-Croat, or Bosnian, for the duration of the war.

Finally, here is some of his thinking on the subject of political fiction. “I'd also say that literature is inherently utopian — and any utopian project is a political project — inasmuch as it has an implicit ambition to show that there's more to the world than these appearances of reality. Even the worst of suburban literature cannot concede that this is it, this is as good as it will ever get. That inherent necessity not to settle for the simple reality of what appears to be the world goes directly — if often inadvertently — against the political propaganda perpetuated by the government in power and the consumerist propaganda (which always claims that a perfect world is just a purchase away) perpetuated by the corporations whose happy, profitable existence is assured by the government. So yes, I'm a political writer…”

Elliot-edited Stumbling and Raging: Politically Inspired Fiction

I read Stephen Elliott’s edited collection of “politically inspired fiction,” Stumbling and Raging, a while ago but am finally getting around to writing about it now. (Honestly, since I subscribed to the New York Times, my book reading has gone down a large drain. Still, it’s much healthier for me to read a newspaper than fiction on the way to work in the mornings – it doesn’t stick me in an alternate reality where answer-that-email imperatives lose out to daydreaming.) In the introduction, Elliott writes, “Fiction can get closer to truth because it can follow events to their natural conclusions and exhibit case histories in a unique way with access to the participants’ inner voice. And I believe that writers are the voice and thoughts of their time…”

There were a couple of stories I really enjoyed. One is “How little we know about cast polymers, and about life” by Ben Greenman. It’s a lightly absurdist story narrated by a man on an assassination mission pretending to be a traveling cast polymer manufacturer. The mood is conspiratorial and silly, there are unexpected players in the game, and eventually the narrator falls into a trap as well (this in the course of four pages.) As his adventure is unfolding, Terri Schiavo is being battled over on television, and the story models its rarefied irrationality on public discourse around the woman.

Greenman does a really good job juggling the two storylines while smashing them into one story bit by bit. For example, after describing the Schiavo case, he throws in the ridiculous details of his narrator’s persona: “I can’t say any more, to be perfectly honest. I may have information about the case, or a person or persons involved in the case, that would reflect badly on other people – people in power – and that’s why I’m relieved that I have at least something to report from that long day of traveling. It’s a distraction, a story about traveling, but it can be a compelling distraction, especially when it could possibly involve a man clasping his hands together, saying “Madre de Dios,” humming a snatch of Carmina Burana, and then moving his hands to the back of his head, where instinct led him to believe that he might catch whatever blew out.”

Together, the two stories reinforce each other’s nonsensical content, but the result is not heavy-handed, as are often parodies of political discourse, and the construct holds up really well. Makes me want to write a story using the same structural skeleton (though given my stylistic ability, it’ll probably be called “How little we know about writing.”)

Haruki Murakami

I read Murakami's novel slowly, one every few months, because I know soon they'll run out and there will be no more Murukami novels to read. Already, there may be only one left. Given the vitality of my memory, however, as soon as I finish the last I'll be able to begin the first again, unencumbered.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World seems more explicit that some of Murakami's other works. It features a scientist who explains the main character's dilemmas to the character, because in this book the character isn't even aware of them himself. In other books, usually the protagonist slowly draws himself into an awareness of loss, or a curious absence of feeling, and even more slowly mobilizes to remedy it. Here, he is not only told the mechanical - or rather neurophysiological - circumstances of his condition, but he is under a time constraint in figuring out what he wants to do about it.

There is also less eating in this book. (This is clearly my important insight.) Usually when Murakami shows you the hollow, well-lit order of the protagonist's life, eating is a large element. However, since the eating is of Japanese things that I find delicious, I probably become more emotionally invested in the character's vegetative state than the author intends. Well, it may also be that I relate somewhat to that state of mind. Anyway, in this book the 'condition' is so engrained in - in fact programmed - into the character that he has no access to it on his own, no need to sit in a well or a kitchen or a snowed-in cabin in order to come to terms with it. The novel seems a lot more dark because Murakami's taken away his character's agency to such an extent. I see proof for my little insight here in that he serves up this nihilistic tale with a side of absurd Indiana Jones-like adventure, such as pursuit by goblinish fishy beings who eat rotted humans in the Tokyo sewers.

The authors' thinking about the macro dynamics governing his characters' lives in modern Japan/world also appears more clear. In Hard-Boiled Wonderland, "The System" and "The Factory," totalitarian organizations battling for control of the country's information streams, turn out to be two sides of the same coin. Although this representation made the idea more clear to me, I have to say I really like Murakami's other sketches of the shadowy governors of modern life - such as when they run hotels that extend underground or infiltrate WWII. They're just ridiculously original and visceral.

The internal world of the protagonist is also painted more clearly in this book. It is actually a city - it reminded me a lot of Calvino's Invisible Cities. Since I am on the subject of references, does every author, at least once is his/her lifetime, reference the story of Molloy counting the stones in his pocket? I may be imagining this, but the opening scene in Hard-Boiled Wonderland, where the narrator counts the coins in his pockets using his left and right brain separately, seems to reference that scene from Molloy but also to take it a step further - the narrator is on the surface hyper-aware of what he's doing, using his brain beyond its original capacity, but of course as it turns out, his mind and the scientist who programmed it are manipulating him beyond anyone's expectation.

So it was kind of exciting to read this book because it cleared a lot up for me about Murakami's fictional world. Now I'll reread his other books and see what I take away differently. Although I know I won't stop thinking about this one because of its ending. The protagonist decides to stay in his subconscious, "the Town" in the novel, because he thinks it's the only way to reconcile his world and mind again. But the Town is a creation of the scientist, who actually interpreted the protagonist's subconscious, translated its mass into a story, and programmed it into the protagonist as an alternative mind pattern. So does this mean that the character needs such an intermediary translation, that the original world of his head is not accessible at all on his own? Does this make the ending of Murakami's other novels, on the surface more optimistic attempts to sort things out in the real world, futile?

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…

Note on Foundation Pit

Rereading my earlier posts, as I've already done at least 15 times since this blogging contraption is still new to me (and my vanity pleads with me to keep revising awkward passages) I realized I didn't mention the most exciting thing about this book.

It is the most interestingly written, beautifully written, tender book. Somehow I read the English translation much faster than the original; the original is so unprecedented in my Russian-reading experience, that I could only take it in really slowly. Wow
0

Bulgakov

A couple of weeks ago, I read two plays by Bulgakov, Adam and Eve, and Bloody (or Red, I haven't figured out the translation) Island. They're both about people trying to be people in a world of political fanaticism. I was surprised to read in the introduction that Bulgakov had hoped Adam and Eve would actually be published, it was kind of his last attempt to survive as a writer in Soviet society. Writer in the sense not of writing quietly in the kitchen, but in the sense of being published and a part of public life. This play is about a couple who survive a chemical attack that kills off all of Russia, sometime in the 30s I think. They, and a few visiting neighbors, live because just minutes before they meet a professor who's invented an apparatus that protects people from this sort of attack. The professor is a disheveled man, the symbol of humanity of sorts, who loves only his dog, believes in pacifism and hates political ideologues. The husband in the couple, Adam, is exactly the latter, and the wife eventually becomes disenchanted with him, as they live in the woods while waiting for another survivor to find out if anyone else in the world has survived. She eventualy tries to leave with the professor.

So up to now, it's your regular Bulgakov fare (hehe, I've just unwittingly quoted something the NYT would write. I don't exactly know what Bulgakov is about.) The lone and gentle male genius, the caring woman, falling in love in a world without rules and leaving the other dirty world behind. What I meant by 'regular Bulgakov fare" is that this reminds me of another storyline of his. But then, in this play, the guy who had gone off to find survivors, comes back. It turns out the rest of the world has united in a communist federation, where gender equality rules, and Spaniards, Germans and Russians battle together (although, now that I think of it, who do they battle now?) Eve and her professor then come out as traitors, lacking the grandure of imagination and faith to have believed all will turn out ok after this little chemical holocaust.

The funny thing is that though they are forgiven - the professor did after all invent the cure - at the very end he is ordered to speak to the leader, on his liberation plane or whatever. And on one hand, I think Bulgakov intended this to say - everyone can come around to communism, just have mercy on those slow ones who don't right away, they're still useful. That's probably why he thought it might get published. But at the same time, it is a completely tragic end - the only people with humanity don't escape, they probably can't love each other in the future, and the professor might very well be told everything is fine and be sent to some camp in Perm' the next day (this is a conclusion someone familiar with Russian history in the 30s may draw.) This friendly international union of young Communists, as benign as Bulgakov paints it, is still imposed from the top (literally, since these people fly in on some sort of exciting plane) on every human in sight, leaving no personal choices to be made. And, moreover, the professor's dog is dead already, so really who cares about the future anyway.

It's interesting, this play seems similar to the two books I babbled about in the last post, but also it is very much a work of Bulgakov, where the life of dogs and sacred personal space are supremely important. Although I would be the last not to agree with these feelings, they are somehow different from Platonov's approach I think. The latter has more empathy for the desire to sacrifice, and to help others who are lost, at least through mindless companionship. Bulgakov then, is more like Nabokov. They are sort of aristocrats of the spirit, whose characters only need themselves and a loved one to exist in the world, not bothering others but understanding these others to be unable to engage with them or bring them happiness. I can't take sides in this debate I just imagined, both make a world of sense to me. I guess it's just interesting to find such fundamental differences in authors who at first glance write about the same thing, this oppression of the individual in the construction of the communist system, and even pass the same sort of judgment on it.

Platonov and Kazantsakis

It’s interesting, the similarity among books about the individual in the midst of political upheaval, usually orchestrated by callous people. Platonov (I’ve read only the Foundation Pit so far, though a number of times, and will write on it as soon as I understand what the hell I think about it) does it really well. In the Foundation Pit, which takes places in 20s Russia, he depicts a very awful reality being created. But he spreads complicity among all the characters, regardless of the amount of power they possess. [The characters are construction workers digging a foundation pit for a building to house socialism’s future inhabitants; also some peasants in a dreamy process of ‘de-kulakization’(?), a little girl and a couple of activists-administrators with fat wives or no wives because no one will take them.]

They all thoughtlessly labor at constructing an entirely messy future they call socialism. Because they can’t evaluate what they’re doing, they’re primitive and misguided; the results are deadly and hopeless. But somehow, Platonov manages to make me reluctant to blame them. Because they so willingly give themselves and their lives to what they think is the collective good, and also because they are clearly dissatisfied with the life around them. They resemble amnesia-afflicted sailors whom the revolution has cut off from the civilized world like a shipwreck, casting them onto an empty desert island. They can’t make the link between present and future, process and the end, understand that social building, unlike construction, can’t succeed on the bones of its constructors. Communism sucks, blah blah.

This book does something to me I can’t understand. Something about its world, created clearly to portray emerging Soviet society, seems very relevant to understanding the link between political events and personal life, it’s mesmerizing. It raises all these tingly questions about the worth of individual sacrifice for collective good, and what society does to people, and how the meaning of lives changes when people are at the edge of ordered social and political life.

I also read a novel by a Greek author, apparently famous, Nikos Kazantsakis. It’s about a priest in the Greek civil war, whose son leads the communist rebels, but whose village is on the other, the whatever, un-communist side. This priest admirably attributes all of his opinions to god, so both god and the priest come out very confused about who’s right in this war. After all, how can fratricidal killing lead to a unified beautiful Greece? The same question about means and ends.

Here, the priest just gets shot at the end though, for trying to arrange a truce, and deep insights are avoided. Still, it’s similar to the Foundation Pit in that everyone ends up at fault, they just don’t evoke any empathy. Instead of deep sadness upon finishing reading, I felt mainly disgust, the kind you feel when you read too much in the newspaper about foreign ethnic violence. The “ahh, people” response. The book is still powerful because of its message, that courageous people can rarely turn the tide of collective violent insanity because they’re not fanatics, but in a different way.

I don’t really have a point in this posting it seems. I should reread Doctor Zhivago because it’s the same sort of book. But reading all this sort of depressive literature about stifled lives in political turmoil, it makes me interested in reading more of the ‘success stories’ I guess. What does one read? Beckett, where lives are bravely stifled by personal turmoil alone? Or history books, where one can after all have positive outcomes for groups of people, if only through the aggregation error.

More on Power's "The Problem from Hell"

I have so many questions. Power writes that the US resisted, for decades, signing the Genocide Convention, or for that matter being a signatory to any international mechanisms for trying crimes that do not impede sovereignty, because these things are, as some Southern senator had put it, "vicious communist perversions." Basically, many American politicians do not want to expose Americans to being tried by an international court.

But at the same time, wouldn't it relieve the US of the regularly recurring pressure of humanitarian intervention in different parts of the world to have a court with its own mechanisms of deciding when genocide obtains? From Power's description of the American policy debate during every genocide, it seems the main issue is always whether to call the thing "genocide." Apparently, once the government does that, public opinion holds it accountable for intervening. If US policymakers were relieved of this power of nomenclature, and if whatever body that received it lacked the power to commit US troops, wouldn't that take some of the pressure off? Now that I've written this, I see how simple it is to interpret this idea as a horrible constraint on American Sovereignty.

But the picture Power paints is pretty awful. Basically, policymakers can always say, "we don't have proof it's genocide," do nothing because no "proof" within government ever gets collected unless the principals or whatever they're called order it, then argue they don't want to kill American boys and defuse the option of intervention by this mere mention of casualties. But she writes, there are many other means of influencing a country. Freezing bank accounts and travel of foreign dignitaries, trade sanctions (granted, maybe even more difficult that military action), simple diplomatic pressure and public censure, tracking movements of weapons within the country and publicizing it, and doing same with location of concentration or killing camps, bombing roads to such places after all. Also, I don't know anything about the international criminal court or the UN one, but don't they ever simply arrest people while killing is going on? With so much supposedly ethnicly-motivated violence, the arrest of one or two main instigators, these "ethnic entrepreneurs," can prevent so much. But musings of utopian international cooperation aside, why does the US so rarely deploy painless sanctions against other countries for humanitarian reasons?

Mm, confusion. Reading about foreign policy, when you don't know that much about it, is a funny thing. It seems so simple, primitive and "shkurnaya" (have no idea how to translate this). At the same time, the multiplicity of powerful interests that intersect to make it render it complex, often ridiculous.

Samantha Power's "Problem from Hell"

I've been reading, on and off, Samantha Power's book on genocide ("A Problem from Hell": America and the Age of Genocide, 2002). Alberto, the professor I work for, asked me how I can stomach it, but the truth is, I have always used my reponse to human injustice, above the individual level, to jumpstart my concern for the world at all. That's part of why I studied political science. (If I hadn't discovered this pattern, I probably would have remained confused as I was in my freshman-sophomore years, and become a third-rate translator or something.) So in a way, this book falls onto well-developed receptors in my brain. Nonetheless, there are things wrong with this approach, I am sure. But apparently it enables me to read books on gassing and extermination - though mainly the political responses to these - when older men cannot.

So I had a few thoughts reading it today. I was reading about Iraq's genocide (this word has a fascinating history) of the Kurds, and that the US was reticent to confirm the killings for years. This was because Iraq was an ally against Iran at the time, in the late 1980s, just after the Iraq-Iran war. But Power alleges it was also because the US had invested immensely in Iraq in the 1980s, including through agricultural and other economic subsidies and not just weapons. And the Reagan administration, as well as many House members, had faith that these years of investment will "create a kinder, gentler dictator." Power attributes this belief to a tendency in diplomacy to "improve relations," but mainly to a desire to advance domestic US economic interests.

This has some interesting implications. How does a long-term provision of subsidies to Iraq by the US government entail the advancement of interests of US firms? Only when these domestic economic interests are mainly huge agricultural exporters, oil producers, etc. - all the types of large business that rely on foreign affairs policy to make money, and have good connections. They probably needed the US gov't to elicit cooperation from Hussein to work in Iraq, since it was a hugely state-controlled economy. This is nothing original really, but it's interesting how different was Reagan's and his administration's thinking on the Soviet Union almost at the same time. Any cooperation, and god forbid US assistance, was seen as weak-willed, naive and counterproductive. Yet Khrushev, or even Stalin since it was probably he who still ruled the SU in the Americans' historical memory - how do you compare him to Saddam in terms of brutality? Were their state machineries that different, or their methods of state building? It was probably important that Russia was largely closed economically, held no markets for US producers (except, I seem to remember, some agricultural exchange in the late years), and could not be convinced to open them.

I don't believe, really, in economic interest explanations of US foreign policy on their own, but boy they are certainly important. Especially if I think back to all I read - and forgot - about US in Central America. As for the other complementary explanations, my head starts swimming when I think about conceptions of diplomacy. Granted, I've never read or learned much about it. But ideas in foreign policy often seem to me extrapolated from micro-level human behavior, the Aristotle-like conceptions of world as family, friendship, or the stages of life or something like that. Based on these symbolic conceptions of "not angering," "appeasing," "challenging," which when you apply them not to people but to clans of politicians and bureaucracies, don't make sense. I guess I ought to read more political science about it, I think there's a large literature on signaling in international relations... Not that I would understand it

But also, to end this too-long post, the change of the American approach to Iraq makes more sense in light of the failure of the hopes for a gentler Hussein. (How stupid, in the first place! To think that people with socialist ideas about the economy, however silly, are life-threating, but blood-thirsty dictators swaddled in power may get better.) But it means that this revival of preemptive, strong-stick American foreign policy toward Iraq arose in reaction not to Carter's failures in Iran, or those in Vietnam, Russia, whatever, but in response partly to Reagan's - or, to be fair, everyone else's too, I don't know - blunders in Iraq not long ago. Maybe it was inconvenient to frame it this way, however, because Reagan was so famous for his sexy tough dealings with the Evil Empire.

This book of Power's is, on the whole, so impressive! Of course it's hypocrticial to be reading it now and know nothing about Darfur, but welcome to the reality of my 'intellectual pursuits.'