Month: July 2010

>The Beautiful Literature of the Indian Subcontinent, Part II

~ Clarissa ~ 1 Comment

I’m sure I don’t need to remind anybody about the existence of the inimitable Salman Rushdie. Sadly, more people know about the fatwah against him than have actually read his beautiful The Satanic Verses: A Novel.

If you were told that this novel is filled with hatred against Islam, don’t believe that. No book has taught me to respect Islam more than this one. The rage that informs this novel is not directed at Islam. It is rather addressed to the British Imperialism.

Rushdie possesses a sense of humor that is absolutely unique and this is what makes his books so great.

Other great books by this author inlcude Midnight’s Children: A Novel and Shame: A Novel.

Arundhati Roy is not only a fantastic writer but also a political activist. She is an author of a great novel The God of Small Things: A Novel but she has also written important political treatises, such as The Cost of Living, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire and Power Politics (Second Edition).

Sara Suleri was born in Pakistan and now lives in the US. This talented author of Meatless Days was my professor at Yale. She is the main reason why I know so much about the literature of the Indian Subcontinent and why I love it so much.

As a scholar of literature in English, she also wrote The Rhetoric of English India and Boys Will Be Boys: A Daughter’s Elegy.

Many of the very few pleasurable moments I experienced at Yale had to do with Professor Suleri and her great class on the Literature of the Empire.

I’m sure most of my readers have heard of Aravind Adiga, whose novel The White Tiger (Fifth Impression) has sold an incredible number of copies all over the world.

Adiga is a cosmopolitan in the true sense of the world. Born in Madras, he later emigrated to Sydney, Australia. Then, he went to Columbia University to get a degree in English literature. He also studied at Magdalen College in Oxford. Now, Aravind Adiga is living in Mumbai where he writes his beautiful novels.

His novel The White Tiger: A Novel (Man Booker Prize) won the Booker Prize in 2008 and became an international sensation. Adiga is an author of an unassailable integrity. His portrayal of India doesn’t shirk away from presenting his readers with the harsh realities of this country.

Adiga also published Between the Assassinations, a collection of interlinked short stories.
Shaila Abdullah is originally from Pakistan. Her novel has a lot in common with Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist that I reviewed recently (Part I is here and Part II is here.) It deals with the painful consequences of the tragedy of 9/11 for the New York based Muslims. The novel is beuatifully nuanced and very powerful.

>The Beautiful Literature of the Indian Subcontinent, Part I

~ Clarissa ~ 5 Comments

>In one of my recent posts, I mentioned my opinion that the best literature in the English language today comes out of the Indian subcontinent. Now I want to introduce you to some (just some for now, and maybe more later, because there are just so many of them) of my favorite authors who are Indian or Pakistani by origin. They live all over the world and create literature of unimaginable beauty and power. When I had to complete a Minor in English literature as part of my PhD program, I, of course, chose the literature of the subcontinent. Formerly, Great Britain had to rely on the colonies for its riches, its food, its clothes, its very subsistence and its economic hegemony. Today, the English-speaking world has to rely on the former colonies to provide it with culture and literature.
1. The amazing Bapsi Sidhwa was probably one of the first writers from India that I ever read. Cracking India: A Novel is a very powerful story of the Partition of India that took place after the Independence in 1947. The story is narrated by a Parsee girl Lenny in a way that is both touching and profound. Lenny is probably one of the most memorable characters of young girls that one encounters in literature. And I say this as somebody who sepecializes in the female Bildungsroman and has read many novels narrated by a similar narrative voice.

The movie Earth by Deepa Mehta is based on this book, and both the movie and the book are definitely worthy of attention.

If you are interested in the Partition and want to learn more about it, I definitely recommend this book.

2. Rohinton Mistry is a writer I love passionately. He was born in Mumbai but now lives in Toronto (a fellow Canadian, no less!). His A Fine Balance (Oprah’s Book Club) is a book a reread on a regular basis even though it is over 600 pages long. It is so beautifully written and the characters are so endearing that even if you never considered travelling to India, after this book, you absolutely will. If you are put off by this book being part of Oprah’s Book Club, don’t be. This writer is simply fantastic.

Even now as I’m writing this post, I have to fight off the temptation to leave it and go read Rohinton Mistry yet again. 🙂

3 Amitav Ghosh is an Indian-Bengali author who, in my opinion, writes in the most lyrical voice of all the writers I have mentioned so far. I absolutely love his Sea of Poppies,set in 1838 against the backdrop of the Opium Wars, and his equally great The Shadow Lines that takes place in the 60ies and deals with issues of national and cultural identity.

Amitav Ghosh seems to be able to write pretty much in any genre he approaches with equal success. Be it a Bildungsroman, a historic novel, an epic, he always creates works of literature that capture your imagination for years to come.

4. Of course, I know that the Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, and not in the Indian Subcontinent. I also know that he is rumored to be a very condescending, mean individual and a total male chauvinist. However, nobody writes about the post-colonial experience better than this writer. He is a descendant of Indian immigrants to Trinidad, and that’s why I feel he belongs on this list.

When I first read Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas and his biographical The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel, I could not believe that this writer from Trinidad described my Ukrainian post-colonial experiences so well. It was from Naipaul that I learned how post-colonial experience transcends ethnic, national, religious, and linguistic borders.

Unlike so many of the contemporary writers who simply butcher the English language with no compunction, Naipaul cultivates an inimitable style that is incredibly beautiful. If you are looking to improve your writing style in English, look no further than this great writer.

(To be continued. . . I’m only just getting started here, my friends.)

>Mystery Fiction of Summer 2010

~ Clarissa ~ 1 Comment

>As I mentioned before, I’m a huge fan of the mystery genre. This summer, several of my favorite mystery authors released their new books. In this post, I will share my impressions of these new mysteries.

1. Tess Gerritsen writes very hardcore detective mysteries. For some reason that I haven’t yet been able to identfy, American female mystery authors write books filled with scenes of unimaginable cruelty, torture and all kinds of horrors in a way that no male writer has been able to equal. You often encounter the following type of sentence in Gerritsen’s work:

Entrails glistened in her gaping abdomen, and her freshly thawed flesh dripped pink icemelt into the table drain.

Or the following:

THE MAN’S LEGS were splayed apart, exposing ruptured testicles and the seared skin of buttocks and perineum. The morgue photo had flashed onto the screen without any advance warning from the lecturer, yet no one sitting in the darkened hotel conference room gave so much as a murmur of dismay. This audience was inured to the sight of ruined and broken bodies.

If you are not bothered by these quotes and like really suspenseful mysteries about serial killers, check out Gerritsen’s The Apprentice (Jane Rizzoli, Book 2)or The Keepsake: A Novel. This summer, Gerritsen released her new Ice Cold: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel. In my opinion, this is maybe her most suspenseful novel so far. The ending, however, is a bit disappointing. There is also a lot less gore in this novel, probably because of the new TV series based on Gerritsen’s books.

2. Lisa Gardner is another mystery author who writes really hardcore stuff about serial killers,
child abusers, and scary stuff like that.

Her new Live to Tell: A Detective D. D. Warren Novel is probably her best novel so far. Many people say that they find the setting of this new novel (a pediatric psych ward for psychotic and sociopathic children) too disturbing. So beware: this book, as well as any book by Tess Gerritsen are not for the squeamish.

If you don’t feel disturbed too easily, though, this is a great mystery that is suspenseful, engrossing, and makes you want to gulp it down in one sitting.

3. This is a new author I only just discovered. The Dark Vineyard: A mystery of the French countryside is only the 2nd novel in Martin Walker’s mystery series featuring Bruno, a police officer from a small French village of St. Denis.

The Dark Vineyard: A mystery of the French countryside is as unlike the hardcore mysteries of Tess Gerritsen and Lisa Gardner as anything you can imagine. Even though it is a novel about a crome being investigated, it’s a lot more centered on the very French joie de vivre (enjoyment of life). Characters in this novel share endless bottles of wine, engage in the wine-making and wine-selling process with glee, prepare delicious meals, and start numerous love affairs.

This is a really calm, relaxed and fun mystery novel that will make you desperate to travel to France as soon as possible.

4. I already wrote about the incomparable Tana French here and here. I’m still hoping that one day she will dare to abandon the pretense of writing mysteries and start writing novels.

In her most recent book Faithful Place: A Novel, she more or less does just that. Only the most innocent of readers will not be able to guess who the murderer is very early in the book. But the identity of the killer is completely secondary here. What mattters is the author’s beautiful command of the English language and her talent for creating unique and engrossing characters. Tana French is masterful at creating a character who is a total jerk and making the readers cares what happens to him anyways.

5. Richard North Patterson became famous for writing really great courtroom dramas, such as Degree of Guilt, Eyes of a Child, Caroline Masters, The Outside Man, and others. Then, something happened  and he started writing incredibly boring and convoluted political thrillers. As a result, he lost a huge chunk of his fan base (including me).

Now, Richard North Patterson is trying to return to the courtroom drama genre that made him famous. In the Name of Honor would be good if only it weren’t so similar to a host of other books dealing with the same topic. Of course, if you never read another courtroom drama that has to do with soldiers who fought in Iraq, are suffering from PTSD, and are killing each other as a result, you might enjoy In the Name of Honor. However, after I read John Lescroart’s much better Betrayal (Dismas Hardy), I was pretty bored with Patterson’s book on the same topic.

Still, I’m glad this author is finally making his way back from the horrible political thrillers he kept writing for a while.

>The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid: A Review, Part II

~ Clarissa ~ 9 Comments

>In the aftermath of 9/11, the worst side of the US that Changez tried so hard not to see for so long starts coming out:

It seemed to me that America, too, was increasingly giving itself over to a dangerous nostalgia at that time. There was something undeniably retro about the flags and uniforms, about generals addressing cameras in war rooms and newspaper headlines featuring such words as duty and honor. I had always thought of America as a nation that looked forward; for the first time I was struck by its determination to look back. Living in New York was suddenly like living in a film about the Second World War; I, a foreigner, found myself staring out at a set that ought to be viewed not in Technicolor but in grainy black and white. What your fellow countrymen longed for was unclear to me—a time of unquestioned dominance? of safety? of moral certainty? I did not know—but that they were scrambling to don the costumes of another era was apparent.

As Changez learns to see the truth about America, he starts questioning his own role in the imperialist domination that this country strives to exercise over the entire planet. He realizes that he is complicit in every crime that he blames on the United States:

I was a modern-day janissary, a servant of the American empire at a time when it was invading a country with a kinship to mine and was perhaps even colluding to ensure that my own country faced the threat of war. Of course I was struggling! Of course I felt torn! I had thrown in my lot with the men of Underwood Samson, with the officers of the empire, when all along I was predisposed to feel compassion for those, like Juan-Bautista, whose lives the empire thought nothing of overturning for its own gain.

As this realization dawns on him, Changez begins to see the entire structure of the American society in an completely new way. His job at a prestigious Wall Street firm that has been such a source of pride (and an impressive income) for him takes on an entirely new dimension in Changez’s eyes:

I was struck by how traditional your empire appeared. Armed sentries manned the check post at which I sought entry; being of a suspect race I was quarantined and subjected to additional inspection; once admitted I hired a charioteer who belonged to a serf class lacking the requisite permissions to abide legally and forced therefore to accept work at lower pay; I myself was a form of indentured servant whose right to remain was dependent upon the continued benevolence of my employer. . . As a society, you were unwilling to reflect upon the shared pain that united you with those who attacked you. You retreated into myths of your own difference, assumptions of your own superiority. And you acted out these beliefs on the stage of the world, so that the entire planet was rocked by the repercussions of your tantrums.

Once he has arrived at this painful insight, Changez is compelled to reexamine and eventually change everything about his life.

Hamid is just beginning as a writer and this is only his second novel. There is a certain heavy-handedness that sometimes comes through in his writing. From time to time, he fails to recognize the moment when the writer should stop explaining himself and let the readers draw their own conclusions. He is also still searching for his own voice, and that’s why there is quite a lot of V.S. Naipaul in the way he constructs his sentences and builds his plot. Still, these little flaws can be forgiven to an author who can create a book as beautiful as The Reluctant Fundamentalist.

In the recent decades, the writers from India and Pakistan have produced the best literature in the English language of anybody on the planet. Moshin Hamid is a wonderful addition to the pantheon of great writers from the region who keep literature in English alive.

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Moshin Hamid: A Review, Part I

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

Moshin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a really good book. I can’t imagine how I have gone so long without discovering this great writer. When the book came out in 2007, it apparently awakened a lot of strong emotions in the readers. In many cases, this strong emotional response obscured the beauty and the importance of this book.

The plot of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is quite simple. Changez, a young Pakistani who was educated at Princeton and worked on Wall Street, is telling his story to a nameless American he meets in a restaurant in Lahore. Changez is both fascinated and repelled by the America that offered him an education and a lucrative job but at the same time, made his life intolerable in a multitude of ways. Changez’s uneasy relationship with America is mirrored by his equally painful involvement with a woman called Erica. (As you can see, Hamid is quite heavy-handed with the way he names his characters. He makes his Erica-America parallel so obvious that it becomes annoying.)

When Changez first arrives in the US, he discovers that the opulence that surrounds him in his Ivy League school and his Wall Street job makes it difficult to maintain the same vision of national identity that he brought with him from home:

For we were not always burdened by debt, dependent on foreign aid and handouts; in the stories we tell of ourselves we were not the crazed and destitute radicals you see on your television channels but rather saints and poets and—yes—conquering kings. We built the Royal Mosque and the Shalimar Gardens in this city, and we built the Lahore Fort with its mighty walls and wide ramp for our battle-elephants. And we did these things when your country was still a collection of thirteen small colonies, gnawing away at the edge of a continent.

As much as Changez prides himself on his people’s glorious past and enjoys contrasting it with the recent historical origins of America, he has to rely on his American success to gain access to a social class his family was expelled from in Pakistan. For a while, Changez manages to swallow all the instances of discrimination he experiences. He also studiously avoids noticing the suffering of people who lose their jobs as a result of his professional activities. The reward for being an obedient little cog in the Wall Street machine is too high.

But then 9/11 comes and Changez cannot maintain his state of obliviousness any longer. His initial reaction to the events of 9/11 is complex, ranging from contentment to shame, and he explores it honestly. In the US, everything that has to do with 9/11 has been transformed into a holy cow of sorts. Any attempt to analyze what happened and how one reacted is branded as anti-American. Hamid’s book received a lot of criticism for daring to discuss 9/11 in a way that is a little more profound than the official narrative. Unfortunately, those who insist that the only valid narrative of 9/11 is the simplistic one sold to us by George W. Bush don’t realize that they are not doing us all any service by denying this hugely traumatic event the right to be explored in all its facets.

>Noam Chomsky’s Hopes and Prospects: A Review, Part II

~ Clarissa ~ 12 Comments

The fact that the two main candidates in the 2008 Democratic primary were a woman and an African American were a welcome sign, Chomsky acknowledges, that the country has managed to get at least somewhat civilized. Still, we cannot expect the joy from this reality to keep us perennially blind to the numerous ways in which Obama has not been living up to his promise. Chomsky reminds us that “Obama’s message of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ offered a virtual blank slate on which supporters could write their wishes.” And write we did, only to be disappointed in most of our expectations.

Chomsky points out that we do not elect politicians based on what policies they will promote. Rather, we vote for whomever presents us with the best PR campaign. Of course, we conveniently forget that after our candidate gets elected s/he will have to pay for the expensive campaign by servicing corporate interests and screwing us, the hardworking folks who put them in power. This is precisely why politicians have been working so hard to destroy the education system in the US. If you keep people in a state of permanent ignorance, you can feed them soap operish melodrama instead of real political discussion. Gossiping about Bristol Palin’s engagement and gushing ver the puppy Obama bought for his daughters is much easier than educating oneself on what it is that the Congress does and what the Supreme Court is responsible for. (As I discovered to my complete horror last semester, none of my 80 students had the slightest suspicion of what the role of SCOTUS might be).

The biggest disappointment of the Obama’s presidency has been, of course, his Economic Advisory Board. As Chomsky points out, it was packed by the poeple who engineered the economic crisis and then bled the government dry to compensate themselves for that. Chomsky is right, of course. I remember this sinking feeling I experienced as soon as Obama surrounded himself by criminals like Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers (a vile prick, if there ever was one), Timothy Geithner, Alan Greenspan, etc. It was the best indication we could have received that the only change we could expect would be for the worst. Of course, even Obama’s feeble attempts to rein in the robber bankers immediately resulted in threats to withdraw funds from his future campaigns. Ultimately, the responsibility rests with us, the voters, to educate ourselves about what the candidates actually stand for and insist that they carry out the will of the people. As good as this plan sounds, something tells me we have neither a hope or a prospect of it working out any time soon.

Chomsky offers a very bleak but an undoubtedly correct vision of Obama’s position on warfare and torture. As we all remember, a lot of Obama’s supporters preferred him to Hillary Clinton because of his opposition to the Iraq war. Understandably, we also believed that his position on torture would be in opposition to the barbaric practices adopted by the US starting in the 80ies. Chomsky departs from this hopeful attitude that has blinded many of the American progressives to the sad realities of Obama’s real position on these issues. What Chomsky says in this part of this book is something that no one wants to hear. However, his analysis in this part of the book is unassailable. After all his anti-war and anti-torture rhetoric, Obama has failed to deliver any actual change in these areas.

>Noam Chomsky’s Hopes and Prospects: A Review, Part I

~ Clarissa ~ 75 Comments

>I’m not usually a huge fan of Chomsky but his new collection of essays Hopes and Prospects is really good. The first part of the book deals with Latin America. Chomsky outlines the colonial past and present of Latin American countries and their valiant efforts to rid themselves of neo-imperialist domination by the United States. He states correctly that today’s struggles of Latin American countries (Bolivia, Argentina, Venezuela) to oppose the depredations of the US-inspired version of globalization offer hope for the rest of the world.  He is also absolutely right in pointing out that “Latin America is not merely the victim of foreign forces. The region is notorious for the rapacity of its wealthy classes and their freedom from social responsibility.” Here, Chomsky echoes Eduardo Galeano’s classic work Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent that decades ago offered a brilliant analysis of how Latin American power elites sold out their own countries to the predatory forces of the US neo-liberalism.

Chomsky states that the drive to imitate their Northern neighbors in ostensible consumption of Westernized goods and services has been the main cause of Latin American failure to achieve real as opposed to formal independence from colonial domination. Today, Chomsky points out “Latin America has real choices, for the first time in its history.” And this is great news for the entire planet.

In the second part of the book, Chomsky analyzes the influence that the imperialist mentality in the US exercises over the discussions of the US military presence in Iraq. I was particularly pleased to see that Chomsky decided not to follow in the footsteps of most liberal commentators in their refusal to see that Russian imperialism is in no way “better” or more justified than the US imperialism. Chomsky qualifies Putin’s actions in Chechnya as “murderous”, which they most definitely are. I only wish that more progressive analysts dared to depart from the tendency to praise everybody who opposes the US regardless of the atrocities they perpetrate. It is definitely right that the US imperialism and Russian imperialism should be discussed together since there are glaring similarities between them.

Chomsky then segues into what I consider the weakest part of the book: the discussion of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. As usual, Chomsky’s analysis of the issue is one-sided and biased. Israelis are all villainous nationalists and religious fanatics, while the Palestinians are without an exception languishing and tolerant victims. While Chomsky is right in suggesting that the Israelis do everything they can to make sure the conflict continues, he forgets to say that so do the Palestinians. When he describes the Israeli “information campaigns to instruct the world on its errors and misunderstanding, arrogant self-righteousness, circling the wagons, defiance . . .  and paranoia,” he avoids mentioning that this exactly the pattern adopted by every single nation-state with a very weak and diluted national identity (Russia is a great example of precisely this kind of paranoid nation building. Closer to home, so is the US.)

Chomsky’s discussion of nuclear proliferation is powerful and convincing, and I believe everybody should read it because it touches on some of the most important issues we confront today. The only objection I have to this part of his discussion is Chomsky’s insistence that there is no need to fear a nuclear attack from Iran because that would be suicidal and self-destructive. Chomsky forgets that these same statements were made about Germany 70 years ago: “Germany would not start a war, that would be suicidal and self-destructive.” And then a few years later: “Germany will not open up a second front, that would be suicidal and self-destructive.” We all know how those predictions went. Countries often act in completely self-destructive ways, which should be well-known  to Chomsky.

Starting from Chapter 9 of Part II, Chomsky offers a brilliant analysis of the 2008 presidential elections and the job Obama’s presidency has done since then. He points out correctly that both Democrats and Republicans are considerably to the right of the American population on many major issues, both international and domestic. Hence, it is not surprising that Obama’s tepid efforts to defend his intentions to introduce some kind of change don’t convince Americans any longer. Chomsky talks about how the American people have been brilliantly manipulated into being suspicious of public welfare programs that would be of invaluable use to themselves while supporting the “nanny state for the rich.”

>Tana French’s Faithful Place: A Review

~ Clarissa ~ 2 Comments

If you haven’t read Tana French’s  In the Woods and The Likeness: A Novel, then now is definitely the time to start acquainting yourself with this great author. With every new novel (and this is her third one) Tana French is showing signs of a creative growth that are nothing short of remarkable. I have been eagerly awaiting the release of her Faithful Place: A Novel and I’m happy to report that this novel will not disappoint either French’s fans or her new readers who are only now discovering her work.

Tana French is one of those really gifted female writers who seems self-conscious of her literary talent. As a result, she hides her capacity to write good novels behindsthe mask of a detective novel writer. Sure enough, there is always a murder in her novels, and the main chracter is some sort of a plice officer. However, people who come to her novels in search of a straightforward murder mystery often leave disappointed. French’s gift lies in writing about life, about the daily trials of being human. So if you want a murder mystery that will keep you guessing ntil the last page who the killer is, French is not your writer.

Tana French’s writing is beautiful. She has a way of describing modern-day Ireland that will leave you completely enamored of this fascinating country. In my opinion, nobody creates more powerful descriptions of today’s Dublin than this writer. French’s sentences are always beautifully constructed, the characters are incredibly well-crafted, and the plot lines are engrossing.

The best thing about Tana French for me is her capacity to create a very unique first-person perspective in every one of her novels. Each book is narrated in a voice that is very unique and absolutely unforgettable. Faithful Place: A Novel is very different in terms of its first-person narrator from French’s previous two novels. Her fans are used to this author creating very endearing, complex characters whom you cannot fail to admire. In this new novel, however, we encounter a very different kind of character. Francis Mackey is not an extremely attractive character, to say the least. He is self-involved, selfish, and often very mean. He tortures his ex-wife to punish her for moving on after their divorce, he is mean to his aging mother, and he thinks nothing of hurting his little daughter’s feelings just to run off and investigate an old girlfriend’s disappearance, he is a pretty lousy father, and a horrible brother to his siblings. He thinks nothing of intimidating and ssaulting witnesses, even when the witness in question is an overworked mother of three. He has been obsessed with his former girlfriend Rosie for twenty years and has never been able to get over her apparent desertion. In short, Frank is a character one is hard pressed to like.

It’s is a mark of a very good writer, however, to be able to make one’s readers care about the main character who is as difficult to admire as Frank Mackey. Tana French achieves that and more. The book is an absolute pleasure to read. As much as you might want to get to the solution of the mystery of Rosie’s disappearance and Frank’s painful relationship with his family, you will still want to linger over each beautifully written sentence.