2008 - The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the story of Oscar Cabral, an overweight, nerdy, and utterly atypical Dominican aspiring sci-fi and fantasy author who lives in New Jersey. It’s also the story of his sister, Lola, of his mother, Beli, of La Hija, who brought her up, and of the lives Oscar’s grandparents lead in the Dominican Republic under the dominance of dictator Rafael Trujillo.

The story moves back and forth in time, with different sections focusing on different characters and offering different points of view. Lola’s section is narrated in the first person, and it took me a while to realize who the other first person narrator was. And if this sounds confusing, don’t worry, it isn’t. The structure works perfectly the way it is. And the more you learn about the characters’ backgrounds and about the past, the more significant things become, the more power the story gains.

Reading this book taught me so much about the Dominican Republic. I knew there had been a dictatorship there for a great part of the twentieth century, but I had no idea about the specifics. I didn’t know any of the horrifying details – the genocide of the Haitians, the rape of young girls, the senseless brutality. The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is full of horror, tragedy, loss, death, unspeakable violence. But it’s also full of humour, life, energy, love, even hope. It’s a book that made me laugh and made me cry, both alternately and simultaneously.

Plus, it has just a touch of magic realism, which is something that always gives a book cool points in my book. Oscar’s family believes they are the victims of fukú, a very powerful Dominican curse. And plus there are the inexplicable apparitions of the Golden Mongoose.

And if all of this wasn’t enough, there are all the nerdy references: to the Twilight Zone, to comics, to Lloyd Alexander, to Ursula Le Guin, to the Sandman, to Dune, to The Lord of the Rings. How could I not love a book with sentences like “…and a guardedness so Minas Tirith in la pequeña that you’d need the whole of Mordor to overcome it” or “Closed his eyes (or maybe he didn’t) and when he opened them there was something straight out of Ursula Le Guin standing by his side. Later, when he would describe it, he would call it the Golden Mongoose, but even he knew that wasn’t what it was.”

There was just one tiny thing I had a bit of a problem with. At one point the narrator tells us:

At the end of The Return of the King, Sauron’s evil was taken by “a great wind” and neatly “blown away”, with no lasting consequences to our heroes; but Trujillo was too powerful, too toxic a radiation to be dispelled so easily. Even after death his evil lingered.

This made me wonder if perhaps we’d read different versions of The Return of the King. You can perhaps say that The Lord of the Rings doesn't leave too much room for ambiguity, and that Sauron is the ultimate one-dimensional villain. I don’t care, though, because the books are so completely awesome in so many other ways. You cannot say, however, that at the end the bad guys vanish and that all the terrible things that happened leave no enduring consequences. You really can’t. Taken out of contest, this passage could give you the impression that all the nerdy references are given in a mocking, superior, dismissive “look at how silly and unlike real life all this stuff is” tone. But that isn’t the case at all. I’d have been very annoyed and disappointed if it were. And it's exactly because that isn’t the case that I was surprised with that passage.

But anyway. This is a great book. One thing: there’s a lot of Spanish in the text. And I mean a lot. It made me wonder if readers who don’t understand it would feel lost and/or annoyed after a while, but raych said it didn’t happen. Most of the time the context does seem enough to make the meaning of what’s being said clear enough.

I feel like I’m doing a lousy job explaining what this book actually is about. But that’s because it’s about so many things. About immigration, about love and loneliness and longing, about living under a horrifying dictatorial regime, about parents and children, about loss, about death. I loved loved loved the very ending. The thing about the little unexpected intimacies. I can’t say more without giving too much away, but you know when you think you couldn’t enjoy a book more, and then the very ending makes you like it all that much more? I love it when that happens.

2004 - The Known World by Edward P. Jones

Set in the 1840’s in the fictional Manchester County, Virginia, The Known World is the story of Henry Towsend, a former slave who became a farmer and a slave-owner himself. The story is told in a non-linear way, with several flashbacks and flash-forwards. The main focus of the book are the events leading up to and following Henry’s death, but there are also episodes that take place several years before (concerning Henry’s life as a slave, for example, and how his parents saved money for years to buy his freedom) or after, and episodes that deal with many other characters – the other inhabitants of Manchester County, slaves and freemen alike. After Henry’s death, his widow Caldonia, an educated free woman of colour, is left in charge of the plantation, but very soon things begin to fall apart.

The Known World is a stunning book. It’s beautifully written, it’s subtle, it’s very moving, and it’s complex. It’s a book in which several tragic things happen, but it moves beyond being a parade of tragedies. It deals with race and gender, but it also goes beyond that. I’d say it’s the best book about slavery I’ve read so far, except it’s not so much a book about slavery as it is a book about several people caught up in a system whose full consequences are not easy to grasp.

It’s not easy to capture all the emotional complexities that slavery must have involved, but Edward P. Jones seems to have done just that. And I say “seems” because I’m still not sure that any of us can really grasp all that must have been involved. Looking back now, from the safety of historical distance, it’s easy to forget that these were people doing such things to one another, and so of course that all kinds of feelings would have been involved. Feelings that weren’t easy to label, feelings that weren’t always what they were supposed to be. From the part of masters and slaves alike.

Then there’s of course the question, how could an ex-slave ever become a slave owner? This book doesn’t really answer it (is there an answer?) but it deals with it in a manner that never becomes simplistic:

"Henry had always said that he wanted to be a better master than any white man he had ever known. He did not understand that the kind of world he wanted to create was doomed before he had even spoken the first syllable of the word master."

The week before I started The Known World I had to read a few chapters from James Walvin’s Black Ivory: A History of British Slavery for a project, and then I ended up reading the whole thing because the book was too good, too well-written and too informative, for me to put it down. I found that reading The Known World and Black Ivory side by side increased my understanding and appreciation of both books. While one gave me the facts, the other gave me the human realities behind them. The actual human lives. I want to share with you a passage from Black Ivory that perfectly describes what we see in The Known World:

"Overseers and drivers in the Southern cotton fields were presumable no more or less inhuman, kind, sadistic or tolerant than their counterparts in the previous century in the Caribbean. It was the system which debased and corrupted. Doubtless it attracted its fair share of low life; of men, like men on the slave ships, not noted by their humanity or feelings. But even the most considerate of men generally found themselves debased by slavery. In so tainted a system, it was difficult for anyone in a position of authority not to be dragged down into slavery's corrosive mire. Whatever the management's ideal (and there were plenty of whites who sought to pursue it), the reality was much coarser, much cruder, less human."

The Known World is an honest, haunting and thought-provoking look at slavery and all that it involves. Edward P. Jones created a world in which everything has multiple shades of grey. This is a book that will stay with me for a long time, the kind of book that the more I think about, the more I like. Highly recommended.

1979: The Stories of John Cheever

"These stories seem at times to be stories of a long-lost world when the city of New York was still filled with a river light, when you heard Benny Goodman quartets from a radio in the corner of the stationery store, and when almost everybody wore a hat. Here is the last of that generation of chain smokers who woke the world coughing, who used to get stoned at cocktail parties and perform obsolete dance steps like "the Cleveland Chicken," sail for Europe on ships, who were truly nostalgic for love and happiness, and whose gods were as ancient as yours and mine, whoever you are."

From the Preface

This almost 900 pages long tome contains over sixty stories, originally published between 1947 and 1978. Most of the stories are about upper middle-class suburban families, and are told from a male perspective. Don’t be fooled, though. There is much more here than stories about rich people drinking martinis. These are subtle stories, stories that show us the hidden corners of our lives. When the narrator of “The Worm in the Apple” asks, What was at the bottom of this appearance of happiness? he is asking the question with which a great deal of these stories deal.

Cheever’s stories are stories that make us ask ourselves how happy we are. They are stories that make us confront our demons, our hushed fears, our secret shames. They are stories (like "The Cure” and “Seaside Houses”) full of quiet despair. They are stories that catch us unaware, stories that change us.

When reading Cheever, sometimes a word might strike you as odd, and it is only later that you realize that it hints at something whose whole significance is later revealed. The pace, the cadence, the phrasing – in his stories, all is deliberate and precise. His command of language is masterful. His irony is wonderful, and he is exquisite at making humour and tragedy go hand in hand. Often he will deliberately misdirect your attention at the beginning, so that the story’s real aim may sneak at you and catch you fully disarmed. Reading this collection made me gain a new appreciation for short stories. Cheever is one of the masters of the form.

John Cheever is supposedly a realistic writer, and yet often in his stories bizarre things take place – bizarre things that remain unexplained. “The Lowboy” begins as a story about sibling rivalry and turns into a ghost story; in “The Enormous Radio”, a woman gets a radio that can be used to eavesdrop on hers neighbour’s conversations; “The Music Teacher” gives you a glimpse of the mysterious, the horrific, through what may or may not be the use of black magic by a husband who wishes to subdue his wife. And even when nothing that could be called supernatural is happening, Cheever’s stories are often unusual because they show people at their most bizarre.

In some stories, like “The Country Husband” and “The Season of Divorce”, there is no big transformation at the end. Things resume normality, and yet you get a glimpse of the turmoil hiding just below the surface. The interesting thing is that rather than being unsatisfying, this only makes the stories more powerful, more unsettling.

As in all collections – especially ones this long – some stories are better than others. I wasn’t as fond of the last third of the book as I was of the first two. At some point Cheever developed a slight obsession with Italy, and his Italian stories didn’t do much for me (not because of the setting, of course, but simply because I didn’t find them as good). Then again, some of the best stories, like “The Swimmer” or “The Geometry of Love”, are to be found in the last third of the book.

I know that the sheer size of this book is intimidating. But if you find yourself at a library with some time in your hands, pick it up, sit down, and read a story. It probably won’t take you too long – the stories average ten pages. Then put it back on the shelf and do the same another day. Perhaps you will, like me, find yourself irresistibly drawn to Cheever’s world – a world in which there’s more to things and people than meets the eye.

Click here to read a short essay by Michael Chabon about the story “The Swimmer”.

2000: Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri

Interpreter of Maladies is a collection of nine short stories that all involve Indians – some immigrants in America, some in their homeland. A lot of these stories deal with displacement and isolation, but, needless to say, you don’t need to be Indian, or to be an immigrant, to be able to relate to the emotions they convey. All you need is to have experienced loneliness, loss, longing, intimacy, sorrow or joy in the many ways in which they come – in short, all you need is to be human.

Using a language that is subtle, precise, and disarming in its simplicity, Jhumpa Lahiri writes about unhappy couples, happy ones, affairs, a child’s perception of war, youth and old age, emptiness, satisfaction, frustration, dreams both lost and come true.

Most of these stories really touched me. The first, “A Temporary Matter”, is about a couple whose baby was born dead, and who now have to deal with their grief and with the increasing distance that separates them. When they get a letter warning them that the power will be cut between 8 and 9pm for a week due to some repair work, they begin to use that hour of darkness to tell each other things they had been holding back, and thus to regain some of their lost intimacy. The story ends with revelations that change things forever, and it made me feel such loss on behalf of the characters. It did what the best fiction does – it put me temporarily in the skin of another.

In “Sexy”, a young American woman named Miranda is having an affair with a married Indian man named Dev. We experience all the longing, bittersweetness and ambiguity of her situation along with her, until, when babysitting a young Indian boy, she is told what the word “sexy” means to a child, and consequentially begins to see her relationship in a different light.

“Mrs. Sen's” is a story about homesickness and displacement. Through the perspective of an eleven-year-old boy named Eliot, we witness Mrs Sen’s struggle to adjust to a way of life that is different from everything she has ever known.

The last story, “The Third and Final Continent”, is about growing intimacy and finding a place to call home. The protagonist leaves India for England and then for America. Before going to America, he gets married. The marriage is arranged by his and his bride’s families, and his wife is to join him in American when her papers are ready. In the meantime, he rents a room at Mrs. Croft’s house, and is very surprised to learn that his landlady is 103 years old. It is in the presence of his elderly lady that he and his wife begin to overcome the awkwardness of being two strangers married to each other, and to truly become a couple.

Jhumpa Lahiri is clearly a writer of great perception, and of equally great precision. Nothing in her stories is overstated, and her wording is always exactly right. What really won me over, though, was how superb her characterization is. All her characters are painfully human. Interpreter of Maladies is well worth reading.

Nymeth's Books Read

Hello everyone! First of all I wanted to say that I think this is a great idea, and I want to thank 3M for this blog. I look forward to reading these books along with you.

I've already read the following 7 books:

• 2003 - Middlesex - Jeffrey Eugenides. I read this in 2003, and it became my all-time favourite book.
  
• 2001 - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon Reviewed here.
  
• 1999 - The Hours by Michael Cunningham Read in 2002.
  
• 1988 - Beloved by Toni Morrisson Reviewed here.
  
• 1983 - The Color Purple by Alice Walker Reviewed here.
  
• 1981 - A Confederacy of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole Read in 2003. This remarkable, hilarious and bittersweet novel is another one of my favourites.
  
• 1961 - To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee Reviewed here.
  

I might not be able to make much progress in the Pulitzer Project in the next few months because I have a few challenges to finish until the end of the year, but these are the next Pulitzers I plan on reading:

• 2007 - The Road by Cormac McCarthy
  
• 2004 - The Known World by Edward P. Jones
  
• 1979 - The Stories of John Cheever
  
• 1966 - Collected Stories by Katherine Anne Porter