Burma: The Lizard Cage by Karen Connelly

Thoughts: Sometimes you read a book that is good and meaningful and important but it doesn’t do a single thing for you. This book, about a political prisoner in a Burmese jail was like that. Something held me back from really melting into the story, into the characters, into the time and the place. Again, like earlier this month, I can’t say a single thing that didn’t work if we attack this book from a technical standpoint. It’s just me and this book aren’t going to be friends.

Rating: 3/5

I finished reading When A Crocodile Eats the Sun. Andrew Solomon has blurbed the back with what I put above: the unknowability of Africa. Seriously? Have we not moved past Heart of Darkness thinking of Africa yet? Moreover, it makes no sense while applied to his book written by an African about Africa in which he details stuff that happens in Africa to Africans. I am unclear as to how presenting data and stories about Africa contributes to unknowability; in my opinion, it contributes to the opposite, namely knowability.

I have been to Africa twice (Ethiopia and South Africa). Is it different than here? Yes. But I find everywhere is different than here. I even find parts of Canada different than here (Calgary is a lot different than the Maritimes, except for the large number of Maritimers out there working). Was it unknowable? Only in the sense that anything that isn’t your norm is unknowable for everyone. I’m sure if you took some of the people I met in Africa and dropped them here in New Brunswick, New Brunswick would be unknowable to them. Yet we don’t perpetuate the unknowability of Atlantic Canada around the world.

It also implies in the blurb that Philip Gourevitch also wrote about the unknowability of Africa, I am assuming in reference to We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families, which is also a book where it discusses Africa, specifically the Rwandan Genocide, in a very non Heart of Darkness unknowability fashion.

Are people so blinded they expect Africa to be unknowable? The internet tells me there are over one billion people living in Africa. I bet each one of them knows something about the place they live. Can we stop pretending that Africa is just this impermeable mass when we talk about it? Completely othering and, as I’ve said, it didn’t even apply to this book. Maybe blurbers just skim through. I’ve never blurbed (or been blurbed) so I don’t know.

The book I have out from the library now having finally finished yesterday‘s, smells like sun screen and beaches. It must have had a more interesting winter prior to now than me.

I never know what to do when I am reading a book that is, for all the ways you can think of “good” meaning, is good (good characterization, realistic dialogue, great pacing, intelligent story), but that I don’t like. Currently, I am reading Above All Things and while every word I read reinforces that this should be a great book, I am not enjoying reading it. I can say books are like people and sometimes you meet people and you’re just not friends, not matter how hard you try, but I want to enjoy books that are well written with engaging story lines, not feel like I have to slog through it before the library return date.

Con with Above All Things: It reminds me of my longer story, but my longer story is on my brain so everything reminds me of my longer story.

Pro: This quote

None of it seemed appealing, the parties where I’d stand off to the side, the dinners talking about how wonderfully proud I must feel.

As a wife of an academic of whom not one other academic at his new job has asked me what I do, I know how this feels. Although, if they did ask me what I did and I told them about letting my PhD to collect dust so I can be a writer with six stories published online, yeah, I doubt they’d think much more of me with that.

Should I quit? Should I keep going? If it’s a good book, maybe I’ll learn something even if it doesn’t feel like there’s any spark between us. Or maybe I should cut my losses and go re-read a book I know I love again to perk myself up.

There are the occasional times when I wish I had a degree in English so that I could articulate what makes a book good (although maybe being a book reviewer rather than an English major would be more appropriate for the task). So I put Sarah’s Key and Those Who Save Us, both big-name bestsellers, on one side of the good books about Nazism and The Kindly Ones and HHhH on the other side.

Hint: the bestsellers are on the wrong side of being good.

How to explain why the bestsellers aren’t good: They are simplistic. They are facile. They don’t challenge anything. People are evil. People are good. People are complacent. There’s an unending string of three or four word sentences that can be applied to them. They’re about making you feel good at the end.

This is a story I tell a lot. In fact, it is my primary, just shallowly below my consciousness reason for almost all that I do. In fourth grade, my teacher came in all upset and started telling us, what I later found out, was the big choice in Sophie’s Choice. My guess is that the movie had been on the night before. So my teacher is at the front of the classroom, visibly upset, proceeding to tell us that everyone of us in the class would have fought against the Nazis. She was convinced that every single one of us would have joined the resistance and fought to the bitter end.

Would we have? No. History suggests no. Even as a ten year old, I could see that this wouldn’t have been true. I think about this scene from my life more than is necessary. I think about how sure I was in the knowledge that my teacher was wrong, that we weren’t all great people, that most of us weren’t even good people. The bestsellers are my teacher telling us what we want to believe, that we are all kind and decent people. The bestsellers are fantasy. They aren’t about truth.

Are the others about truth? Not really. As Binet, author of HHhH says, we can dismiss The Kindly Ones as “Houellebecq does Nazism”, which is the most apt description of The Kindly Ones I have ever read and the second those words floated past my vision, I put down the iPad (reading on the kobo app) and cried “Yes!” aloud. Is HHhH any better, with it’s constant digressions and discussions on whether and how and whither the truth can be represented? Not really either. But are on the awkwardness of being just outside the truth. Both are unsettling. Both are unsatisfying but in the way that if they were to satisfy with a nice ribbon tied up in a bow on top, then they would be back to making me feel good at the end. Back to lying. Back to being popular and best sellers and maybe what we want to have happened, but what didn’t happen at all.

am reading along, everything going great, and then Boom dream sequence.

I hate dream sequences (obvious exception being my awesomely current favourite movie The Science of Sleep), but why, why, why, why, why do authors put dream sequences in their stories? It seems to be happening more or more or I guess I am drawn to books in which it happens more and more. What is the purpose of a dream sequence? To demonstrate something in the character’s subconscious in a round-about-way? Couldn’t that be put into the text in a less oblique way? Am I just jealous as many of my dreams involve me getting up and brushing my teeth and getting ready to do something dull like mop the floors?

If I ever write a dream sequence, remind me of this post, and then mock me mercilessly for being a hypocrite.

Spain: For Whom The Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway

Thoughts: This book is barely Spain. It could be lifted and reset in lots of different conflicts. But it does take place in Spain so we’ll count it as such.

This book is sparse. I like sparse. Every word is there for a reason and there can be no skimming because you can’t even sort of half-read and expect to understand what is happening two pages later.

That being said, this is a two hundred page novel stretched out to five hundred pages. It is so long. It is so slow. It is so boring. Everything in this book is about white, male, savior who knows more than the locals and bullies and cajoles them into doing what he “knows” to be right. There is no subtly with any of the characters except the American. The Spaniards are no more than cardboard cutouts that each illustrate some one word trait like “broken” or “virginal” or “well-meaning”.

The end, when they finally actually blow up the bridge, is good. But it takes four hundred dull pages to get there.

Oh and the schtick of writing like they are speaking Spanish but in English (lots of thees and thous, etc.). Gets old quickly.

Rating: 2.5/5

Israel: Someone to Run With by David Grossman

Thoughts: Good, not great.

Rating: 4/5

Mexico: Juan the Chamula: An Ethnological Recreation of the Life of a Mexican Indian by Ricardo Pozas

Thoughts: Interesting and short (100 pages) although one has to wonder why the author decided to sit in the middle between fiction and non-fiction. I think it may have been more forceful expanded and as fiction only.

Rating: 4/5