"A Long Donkey's Tail for Pinochet"

Here were the keys to my past. Nearby had been the old television station and the audiovisual department where I had begun my film career, and the drama school to which I had come from my hometown at the age of seventeen to take the entrance exam that decided my life's work. And it was here too that the Popular Unity demonstrations for Salvador Allende had been held in 1970 and where I had lived my difficult, critical years. I passed the movie theater where I saw the masterpieces for the first time. . . I forgot my clandestine situation and returned for a moment to being myself.

Miguel Littín, born in Chile to a Palestinian father and Greek mother, was a famed filmmaker appointed in 1970 by President Salavdor Allende as the head of Chile Films, "through (and against) which Chilean filmmakers sought to implement their theories of 'popular culture/popular power' by developing new production and distribution methods." Three years later, General Augusto Pinochet's military coup overthrew Allende's Popular Unity government and transformed Chile from a progressive democracy into a dictatorship. Littín escaped mass execution only through the serendipitous whim of a film-loving sergeant.

Twelve years later, Littín's name remained on a list of five thousand exiles absolutely forbidden to return to their homeland. He had settled with his family in Spain when he casually mentioned a dream of his to slip back into Chile and film a documentary about the underground resistance movement. More fundamentally, Littín longed to see his country again. It seemed no more than conversational brainstorming around the dinner table with friends until Italian director Luciano Balducci pulled him aside and told him that the "man you need," a high-ranking member of the Chilean opposition, was "waiting in Paris." After several months of adapting to his new identity as a bland, bourgeoisie Uruguayan businessman - a transformation that included weight loss, accent coaches, psychologists, and living for a time with his "wife" - Littín finally set off for Chile in May 1985 with three independent international film crews, each unaware of the existence of the other two.

"Early in 1986 in Madrid, when Miguel Littín told me what he had done and how he had done it, I realized that behind his film there was another film that would probably never be made," says Gabriel García Márquez in his introduction to Clandestine in Chile, the result of some eighteen hours of "interrogation" that "encompassed the full human adventure in all its professional and political implications, which I have condensed into ten chapters." Although the text itself is ultimately García Márquez's, he sought to preserve Littín's voice by utilizing the first person, employing Chilean idioms, and respecting Littín's opinions and thought processes even when they differed from his own. La adventura de Miguel Littín, clandestino en Chile was translated from Spanish by Asa Zatz.

Some of the historical and political background will already be familiar to anyone who has read the novels of Isabel Allende (herself a Chilean exile), such as The House of the Spirits, Of Love and Shadows, and the Eva Luna books. To begin with, there is the immense popular appeal of Isabel's uncle Salvador that unnerved the old aristocratic order and inspired their support of Pinochet's junta (portrayed by Isabel as Esteban Trueba's greatest and most tragic error), as well as the literary cult surrounding the late Nobel Laureate Pablo Neruda ("The Poet" in The House of Spirits), a Marxist who saw his hopes crushed on his deathbed in 1973. And it is hard not to hear Irene Beltran's lament for her lost country in Littín's many moments of nostalgia.

It is Littín's memories of old Chile that give Clandestine in Chile an oddly dreamlike feel, accentuated by its short length of only 116 pages. What is familiar is often friendly, especially when associated with one's happy childhood. But the juxtaposition of nostalgia against the threatening and unaccustomed aspects of a dictatorship, particularly the megalomaniacal attempts to alter the past (for example, removing the chronologically-ordered busts of presidents from the Palace Moneda to avoid having to include Allende), recalls Louis Breton's definition of Surrealism as two distinct realities welded together to form an uncanny union. Furthermore, Littín is literally, at the moment, not himself, having returned to his homeland after a period of years under a new identity that includes a new past in a foreign country. To complete the facade he has had to memorize the Montevideo buslines and have at hand several anecdotes about his classmates at High School No. 11, "two blocks from a well-known drugstore and one block from a recently opened supermarket." It is doubtful that Littín has ever actually been to Uruguay.

Chile now has its own masks as well: Santiago is a clean, orderly, ultra-modern capital designed to distract foreigners from the worsening conditions of the poor and the general discontent with the harsh government. At curfew everything shuts down and the silence of the big city is unnatural. Fear is always present: of the carabineros in streets, of the police checkpoints, and most of all, of being found out and the prospect of sharing the fate of Isabel's fictional Alba Satigny. Miguel Littín's response is to border on recklessness. He forgets his Uruguayan accent, uses old Chilean words, doesn't think before acting, loses some of his disguise, and refuses to leave even as the police close in.

But he did escape, just in time. The 105,000 feet of film shot by the three crews became the documentary Acta General de Chile, winner of several international awards that intensified global pressure on the Pinochet regime. Miguel Littín has since returned to Chile, where Augusto Pinochet died in 2006 at age 91 without ever having been convicted of single crime. Littín's most recent films have focused on the Palestinian diaspora. But the events recounted by Gabriel García Márquez in Clandestine in Chile may well have been his greatest and most dangerous adventure.

---

Gabriel García Márquez's Clandestine in Chile was The Wolves' reading selection for the month of December. Please feel free to join us for 2011! You can find the new book list here.

Past selections:

March: Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana
April: Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual
May: Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels
June: Gabriel Josipovici, Moo Pak
July: Kenzaburo Ōe, A Personal Matter Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!
August: William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain
September: Tomás Eloy Martínez, Santa Evita
October: Tobias Wolff, Old School
November: Ričardas Gavelis, Vilnius Poker

2010 Retrospective

I found this last year on Savidge Reads and it quickly became my favorite end-of-the-year meme. It also inspired me to track my 2010 reading, which you can find here, along with links to all my reviews.

How many books read in 2010?

54 total.

How many works of fiction and non-fiction?

All fiction (plays and novels) except for Zora Neale Hurston's autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road.

Male/Female author ratio?

Uh, only 16, plus one anthology (Beirut39) that was mixed. CRAP. And reading more female authors was one of last year's resolutions! Oh well, I only read 14 in 2009 so I guess that's sort of an improvement.

Favorite books of 2010?

Here. And women are well-represented! 5 out of 12 isn't too shabby.

Least favorite?

Oh gawd, GLENN BECK, with L.A. Candy coming in second, although they were also read for a Horrible Dare Challenge. For books I actually had expectations for: Quim Monzó's Gasoline (what was the point? am I missing something?) Octavia Butler's Fledgling (lame prose, vampire pedophilia), and Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age! by Nobel Laureate Kenzaburo Ōe (just plain didn't like it). Compared to the rest, Tender Morsels wasn't that bad (had some great passages) but . . . let's not go through that again.

Any that you simply couldn't finish and why?

Andreas Maier's Klausen. Nothing but dry recitation going on and on and on and on. . . Ended up giving it away to Sandra of Fresh Ink Books.

Oldest book read?

Dante's Purgatorio and Paradiso. 14th century! I am quite confident the memory of Glenn Beck will not last seven hundred years.

Newest?

The English translation of Mathias Énard's Zone was released December 14, 2010 but the French original was published in 2008. Newest book period goes to Karen Tei Yamashita's I Hotel, which came out in May 2010.

Longest and shortest book titles?

Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf. Several one-worders tie for shortest: Purgatorio, Paradiso, Zone, Antwerp, Fledgling, Gasoline, Shiver. Narrowing that down by letters: Zone.

Longest and shortest books?

If you count Lord of the Rings as one big novel (as I believe Tolkien intended it to be), then that's 1,031 pages. I Hotel was 592 but that's also multiple novellas. For longest unified novel, Jesse Kellerman's The Genius clocks in at 548 pages.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow is Enuf was the shortest book at only 64 pages. (It's a play, or "choreopoem" as she calls it.) Short Title winner Zone was also fourth longest at 517 pages.

How many from the library?

15 as opposed to only about 4 last year. Of course, I actually work in a library now!

Any translated books?

Only 25 books read in English. 6 of those were British, 1 was Australian, and 1 was Kenyan.

Most-read author this year, and how many books by that author?

If you count Lord of the Rings as 3 separate novels, then Tolkien wins. If not, then Dante, Naguib Mahfouz, Roberto Bolaño, Tennessee Williams, and Virginia Woolf all tie with 2 each.

Any re-reads?

No. There's just too much new stuff out there I haven't read yet.

Favorite character of the year?

I can't say I have any, probably because I tend to bond with books as a whole instead of particular individuals. I had to think pretty hard to come up with that list of Top 10 Characters I'd Like to be Best Friends With.

What countries did you end up visiting?

So many! My authors hailed from Italy, Egypt, Argentina, Japan, Iceland, Colombia, Germany, France, Finland, Chile, Spain, Poland, Kenya, Lithuania, South Africa, Great Britain, Saudi Arabia, and the Czech Republic. The Beirut39 anthology featured Arab writers from all over Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East.

What books wouldn't you have read without someone's specific recommendation?

I'm guessing anything read solely for a Horrible Dare Challenge doesn't count, although Maggie Stiefvater's Shiver wasn't all that bad as far as YA paranormal romance goes. There was also Tender Morsels but we all know how that one turned out.

What authors were new to you in 2010 and you now want to read more works of?

Michal Ajvaz, definitely. Monika Fagerholm has a sequel to The American Girl called The Glitter Scene, I believe. Naguib Mahfouz is a given, since I'm participating in a Cairo Trilogy read-along.

What books are you annoyed you didn't read?

I am very annoyed that Barnes & Noble did not carry a single book on my Christmas list which means I will not be reading any of them anytime soon. SERIOUSLY? But I did get Stieg Larsson's The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (reading now) so that wasn't a total bust.

Did you read any books you have always been meaning to read?

I finally got Laurel K. Hamilton's Guilty Pleasures read. It's the first book of the Anita Blake series and I'm waiting to read more before I do any reviewing. I also finished Purgatorio and read Paradiso thanks to another read-along hosted by Richard.

Photo by James Merrell.

Top 10 Books of 2010

My complete list of favorites actually comes out to twelve. Note that seven of them are literature in translation and all except one are international. There's a whole world of great books out there and I am so happy to have the opportunity to read and write about them!

12. Véronique Olmi, Beside the Sea (trans. Adriana Hunter - French)

The most depressing topic imaginable and all too vivid yet so horribly compelling.

11. Roberto Bolaño, Nazi Literature in the Americas (trans. Chris Andrews - Spanish)

It's Roberto Bolaño. DO I REALLY NEED TO ELABORATE?

10. Ngũgĩ wa Thiongo, Petals of Blood

A Marxist epic and howl of protest against the corruption of post-colonial Kenya. Heavy-handed but gripping.

9. Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse

Like Bolaño above, this one's pretty self-explanatory. I really need to get this reviewed.

8. J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord of the Rings

The books and the movies are equally awesome.

7. Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North (trans. Denys Johnson-Davies - Arabic)

A reverse Heart of Darkness about an African going to England and inspiring some dark worship of his own. Gives the original Kurtz a run for his money.

6. Ingrid Winterbach, To Hell with Cronjé (trans. Elsa Silke - Afrikaans)

A sparse but heartbreaking story of two friends in the Second Boer War. In the face of nature's eternal immensity, their struggle is ultimately insignificant.

5. Monika Fagerholm, The American Girl (trans. Katarina E. Tucker - Swedish)

Takes place in Finland, despite the title. Postmodern Scandinavian Gothic about growing up in the seventies and the mystery of the lost American Girl.

4. Mathias Énard, Zone (trans. Charlotte Mandell - French)

Ties with Beside the Sea as the year's saddest book. Genocide, war, greed, corruption, rape, torture, etc.

3. Karen Tei Yamashita - I Hotel

Students, professors, artists, filmmakers, poets, musicians, laborers, community organizers. Lists, comics, plays, free verse, interviews, photos, audiovisual transcripts, flights of magic realism, mythology, and real history. Welcome to San Francisco in the sixties!

2. Michal Ajvaz, The Other City (trans. Gerald Turner - Czech)

Hands-down one of the most imaginative works I have ever had the pleasure to read. A stunning achievement.

1. Philippe Soupault, Last Nights of Paris (trans. William Carlos Williams - French)

Paris! Modernism! The Roaring Twenties! French Surrealism! THERE IS NO WAY I COULD NOT HAVE ENJOYED THIS.

---

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish. This meme was created because we are particularly fond of lists at The Broke and the Bookish. We'd love to share our lists with other bookish folks and would LOVE to see your top ten lists!

Each week we will post a new Top Ten list complete with one of our bloggers' answers. Everyone is welcome to join. If you don't have a blog, just post your answers as a comment. Don't worry if you can't come up with ten every time . . . just post what you can!

"He alone would set their course for them, not the revolution, the times, or the rest of humanity."

She did not understand how her heart could answer this appeal, how her eyes could look beyond the limits of what was allowed, or how she could consider the adventure possible and even tempting, no - irresistible. . . Deep inside her, imprisoned currents yearning for release responded to this call in the same way that eager, aggressive instincts answer the call for a war proclaimed to be in defense of freedom and peace.

Naguib Mahfouz (1911-2006) was an Egyptian writer and winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature. Published as بين القصرين or Bayn al-Qasrayn in 1956, Palace Walk (translated from Arabic by William M. Hutchins and Olive E. Kenny) is the first volume of his seminal Cairo Trilogy that follows the lives and fortunes of three generations of the al-Jawad family from 1919 to 1944. The trilogy is set among the streets of Mahfouz's childhood and, like many of his works, is deeply concerned with the political and social history of Egypt in the twentieth century.

Al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, an affluent merchant, is known to his friends as a generous and jovial womanizer with a large capacity for alcohol. At home, however, he rules his family as a stern patriarch in the most conservative Muslim tradition. His wife, timid Amina, accepts his authority without question, despite her literal imprisonment in the home even as al-Sayyid Ahmad spends night after night carousing on the town. Yasin, age twenty-two, is his son by a previous marriage that ended in divorce after Yasin's mother refused to submit to him. His four children by Amina are Khadija (20), plain-faced but sharp-tongued; Fahmy (19), a bright and serious law student; Aisha (16), a blond beauty; and Kamal (10), who is playful and mischievous. Much of the story is concerned with the family's day-to-day domestic doings, from the marriages of the daughters to Al-Sayyid Ahmad's active social life and many lovers. But as Egypt begins to increasingly agitate for independence from Great Britain and English soldiers appear in the streets, events start precipitously downhill to a final, disastrous climax.

Richard's post made an observance so obvious I nearly headdesked. I was thinking and thinking of how to link the family's private lives to the tumult of the outside world. I instinctively grasped the connection but Palace Walk is such a large book with so much going on that I wasn't sure where to begin. It turns out that the extreme male privilege that characterizes the al-Jawad household could also mirror the oppression of Egypt as a whole under British imperialism. To that I would add the weight of tradition, which also grants Al-Sayyid Ahmad almost complete control over the lives of his adult sons, including whether or not they marry or divorce or participate in the independence movement. The personalities of Amina and Al-Sayyid Ahmad, meanwhile, are warped to a pathological extent. Amina is the very definition of a doormat, even assuring her husband at one point that, "My opinion is the same as yours, sir. I have no opinion of my own." And the two sides of Al-Sayyid Ahmad are so divergent it's a wonder they co-exist in the same individual.

Both the sons and daughters strain under their father's repressive rule, yet it's the women who stand out more because their situation is so over-the-top. When Fahmy asks his father about marrying a neighboring girl, and when a friend of his asks for Aisha, Al-Sayyid Ahmad's immediate reaction in both cases in OMG HAS HE ACTUALLY SEEN HER OMG OUR HONOR! It's Handmaid's Tale-level patriarchy, only not made up. Holy Taliban.


The general impression is that these women have never known anything different. But there is something subtle lurking, in contrast to an otherwise exposition-heavy book. There is a scene with Amina on her rooftop garden at the very beginning that stayed with me throughout the rest of the story.

The roof, with its inhabitants of chickens and pigeons and its arbor garden, was her beautiful, beloved world and her favorite place for relaxation out of the whole universe, about which she knew nothing. As usual at this hour, she set about caring for it. . . Then for a long time, with smiling lips and dreamy eyes, she enjoyed the scene surrounding her. She went to the end of the garden and stood behind the interwoven, coiling vines, to gaze out through the openings at the limitless space around her.

She was awed by the minarets which shot up, making a profound impression on her. Some were near enough for her to see their lamps and crescent distinctly, like those of Qala'un and Barquq. Others appeared to her as complete wholes, lacking details, like the minarets of the mosques of al-Husayn, al-Ghuri, and al-Azhar. Still other minarets were at the far horizon and seemed phantoms, like those of the Citadel and Rifa'i mosques. She turned her face toward them with devotion, fascination, thanksgiving, and hope. Her spirit soared over their tops, as close as possible to the heavens. Then her eyes would fix on the minaret of the mosque al-Husayn, the dearest one to her because of her love for its namesake. She looked at it affectionately, and her yearnings mingled with the sorrow that pervaded her every time she remembered she was not allowed to visit the son of the Prophet of God's daughter, even though she lived only minutes from his shrine.

She sighed audibly and broke the spell. She began to amuse herself by looking at the roofs and streets. The yearnings would not leave her. She turned her back to the wall. Looking at the unknown had overwhelmed her: both what is unknown to most people, the invisible spirit world, and the unknown with respect to her in particular, Cairo, even the adjacent neighborhood, from which voices reached her. What could this world of which she saw nothing but the roofs and minarets be like? A quarter of a century had passed while she was confined to this house, leaving it only on infrequent occasions to visit her mother in al-Khurunfush. Her husband escorted her on each visit in a carriage, because he could not bear for anyone to see his wife, either alone or accompanied by him.

Note that her moment of imaginative freedom begins in the context of her religion (a safe place) and moves gradually from spiritual to living transcendence (from safety to the outright forbidden). Nor is her name mentioned for the rest of the chapter, as though Amina now stands for a universal Egyptian "she" looking out through the screens and walls of suffocating custom and, just for a moment, stretching her mind (the only part of anyone that's ever truly free) to encompass something more. I was reminded very strongly of a similar, famous scene in Jane Eyre:

Anybody may blame me who likes, when I add further, that, now and then, when I took a walk by myself on the grounds, when I went down to the gates and looked through them along the road; or when . . . I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim sky-line: that I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit, which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen: that then I desired more of practical experience than I possessed; more of intercourse with my kind, of acquaintance with variety of character, than was here within my reach. I valued what was good in Mrs Fairfax, and what was good in Adèle; but I believed in the existence of other and more vivid kinds of goodness, and what I believed in I wished to behold. . .

It is vain to say human beings out to be satisfied with tranquillity: they must have action: and they will make it if they cannot find it. Millions are condemned to a stiller doom than mine, and millions are in silent revolt against their lot. Nobody knows how many rebellions ferment in the masses of life which people earth. Women are supposed to be very calm generally: but women feel just as men feel: they need exercise for their faculties and a field for their efforts as much as their brothers do; they suffer from too rigid a restraint, too absolute a stagnation, precisely as men would suffer; and it is narrow-minded in their more privileged fellow-creatures to say that they ought to confine themselves to making puddings and knitting stockings, to playing on the piano and embroidering bags. It is thoughtless to condemn them, or laugh at them, if they seek to do more or learn more than custom has pronounced necessary for their sex.

Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own, sees this passage, with its sudden break to the crazed laugh of Grace Poole, as indicative of a defect in women writers of the time arising from society's refusal to allow them the full range of human experience. "[Charlotte Brontë] will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot." Amina's passage likewise cuts off abruptly with the reassurance that she is "neither resentful or discontented, quite the opposite." Much as I disagree with Woolf's characterization of Brontë's "deformed and twisted" writing (I think she was overreaching to prove her own point), you can also make an analogous observation of Amina's character, which seems increasingly Stepford Smiler-ish as Palace Walk progresses. Emily's post makes frequent comparisons to the domestic dynamics of Jane Austen (whom I've never read) and discusses how women contribute to their own oppression. Amina later becomes the harshest critic of Yasin's poor wife, Zaynab, who was only married to him after he was caught trying to rape Umm Hanafi the black maid and his father decided it was time he got some legitimate release.

(Umm Hanafi is basically, in American terms, a mammy: a middle-aged black woman with no family of her own who spends her entire life raising and caring for the light-skinned ruling class. When Yasin later tries to rape Nur, another black maid who waits on Zaynab, it's hard not to picture the white plantation son forcing himself on one of his African-American slaves. Now granted, Umm Hanafi is actually, you known, allowed to leave the house, but this also signifies that she is not afforded the "protection" given to wealthy Arab women. Author Kola Boof, who is of Egyptian Arab and black Sudanese descent, writes about race relations today in Africa and the Middle East here and here.)

I saw the women's situation as only one aspect of a society on the brink of some major upheaval. Even the male-dominated push for Egyptian independence involves head-on confrontation with traditional figures, right down to Fahmy's defiance of his father. There are some real undercurrents here and it will be interesting to see how they play out in Palace of Desire and Sugar Street. Al-Sayyid Ahmad is already conservative even by the standards of his day. The encroachment of modernity on his pious household should be interesting, to say the least.

In terms of its prose, Palace Walk differs quite a bit from 1967's Miramar in its more formal tone and emphasis on exposition. Mahfouz both shows and tells to an equal extent. I'm not sure how to describe it exactly - both narrative voice and dialogue have a sort of stiff, timeless quality to them that lacks any distinct voice or realist spontaneity. Almost awkward at times despite a few wonderful passages. Reading the first half would have been a chore if I wasn't fascinated (and repelled) by the portrayal of a foreign culture. The last part is carried entirely by the mounting intensity of the political climate but for 498 pages overall, I can definitely see some readers giving up or skipping ahead (there were some areas where I just skimmed). I have to admit that a thousand more pages of the al-Jawad family is pretty daunting, but I'm all for it.

---

The Cairo Trilogy read-along is being hosted by Richard of Caravana de Recuerdos. Our schedule is:

December 26-27, 2010: Palace Walk
January 30-31, 2011: Palace of Desire
February 27-28, 2011: Sugar Street

The Story of Zora

I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows with a harp and a sword in my hands.






Zora Neale Hurston was an anthropologist and leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance. But by the time of her death in 1960 she had fallen into obscurity. Her novels were disparaged by other African-American literati, who were primarily male, for their use of black dialect (long a contentious issue - see minstrel shows and Mark Twain) and focus on individual (particularly female) self-empowerment instead of pressing racial issues. Not until the publication of Alice Walker's article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston" in the March 1975 edition of Ms. magazine did Hurston finally receive the recognition she deserved. Her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, was published at the height of her popularity in 1942.

I have read Their Eyes Were Watching God twice (first on my own, second for a book club) and saw that saccharine Oprah movie starring Halle Berry. Learning about Hurston's life illuminated quite a bit of it, starting with Eatonville, Florida, America's first all-black incorporated township and main setting for Watching God. Dust Tracks on a Road opens with the history of its founding in the 1880s by the black citizens of the Town of Maitland (itself founded only a decade previous by two former Union officers). Hurston grew up there and her father even served as its mayor for a time. Today, Eatonville stages a Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities each winter. (Actually, Zora claims, in Dust Tracks, that she was born in Eatonville but that that is not true - she is a native of Alabama.)

Zora's mother died when she was thirteen. Her father quickly remarried a real-life Evil Stepmother who more or less kicked his eight children out of the family home and stopped paying Zora's school tuition which resulted in her expulsion. (Years later, Hurston would come close to killing her in a fistfight.) Drifting from one domestic job to another, Zora eventually fell in with a traveling theater company, working as a personal assistant to a young white soprano. When she finally returned to high school she was twenty-six but somehow successfully posed as a sixteen-year-old girl. (I'm twenty-five and there is no way I could ever get away with that.) She would maintain the facade all her life, claiming to have been born in 1901 instead of 1891. She naturally presents herself as a typical teenaged student in Dust Tracks in the Road, even going as far as to brag about her and her female classmates' stealing of college boys for dances. Moving right along. . .

Zora attended Howard University and then transferred to Barnard College, a women's school where she was the only black student. She was thirty-six when she received her B.A. in Anthropology. Working with Franz Boas of Columbia University, she traveled extensively throughout the American South and Caribbean collecting black folklore and participating in local religious ceremonies. The recollections of her years in the field are vivid and closely tied to her portrayal of rural African-American life in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Among the backwaters of Polk County, Florida she became acquainted with the lively but dangerous world of itinerant laborers and was nearly killed in a saw-mill jook by the jealous lover of one of her male sources. Luckily, Hurston had had the foresight to befriend one Big Sweet, a formidable woman who knew her way around a knife fight, and lived to tell the tale.

Hurston would later attract considerable controversy for her views on segregation and Brown v. the Board of Education. Specifically: she supported the former and denounced the latter. Her reasoning was that living apart had allowed African-Americans to build up their own societies, their own language, and their own music, all of which she loved and which formed the basis of her fiction. Inspired by her research, Hurston was also instrumental in bringing authentic gospel singing to the New York stage. Still, despite their foundation in a deep knowledge and appreciation for African-American culture, Hurston's views in this regard are unfortunate.

It doesn't help that Dust Tracks on a Road seriously downplays the era's open, virulent racism. We're talking about a time, designated by some historians as the "nadir of American race relations," when the KKK ran free and Congress couldn't pass an anti-lynching bill to save its life. Hurston's interactions with white people are depicted as wholly amicable, even in the South outside Eatonville. Now here's where it gets sticky - as a white woman living in the twenty-first century, it is most certainly not my place to "correct" a black woman's book about her own life in the early twentieth century. But I could not help but observe a strong chord of paternalism in some of the relationships between Hurston and her white contemporaries, particularly in her younger years. For example, the "observers" of Eatonville, her time as a maid and depiction of one household's "mammy," and even her relationship with Miss M-, the soprano she worked for who became one of her closest friends. In the book itself, the dynamic between her and the latter makes sense since Hurston writes herself as ten years younger than she really was, which would have made twenty-year-old Miss M- at least five years her senior. Or could Hurston deliberately have created this younger-older sister vibe for the purposes of reinforcing her own myth that she was born in 1901? That's the trouble with autobiographies and memoirs - "We are what we pretend to be," as Kurt Vonnegut once said.

(I just kept thinking back to Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll and the latent violence of the seigneurial society.)

From an historical standpoint, it's very jarring how just about the only time racism comes up is when Hurston was working for a black-owned barbershop in Washington, D.C. that catered to white politicians. A black man came in for a shave and was kicked out! (The paternalism also seemed really strong here - in my opinion, anyway. There's an exchange between a white journalist and a black porter that would likely be considered highly problematic if related by a white author.) We could have united as a race and nobly stood up for him, Hurston writes, but reality is, everyone's gotta earn a living. It's the main motivation of the human race - pull yourself up, take what you want, conquer, move forward. She had a certain amount of disdain for "Race" men and women, who allegedly "make whole careers" out of "Race Consciousness," as she believes individual people are much too varied to be represented as a single bloc. I do agree with her to an extent, but I also don't think it's possible to tackle issues of oppression from a strictly individual standpoint. Reality is, people are marginalized due to factors like race, gender, disability, sexuality, and so forth, and are likely to share experiences with other members of their communities.

Hurston did lead an unconventional and successful (in 1942) life, achieving and experiencing far more than many women of that age, regardless of race, ever did. And she did this in spite of some considerable setbacks that would have ruined others. Through her constant reading she maintained in her mind a vision of a world where she knew belonged - that of intellectual growth and stimulating friendships - and did everything within her power to earn her place there. So perhaps it is not surprising that she came to the conclusions she did about individual self-reliance since that so clearly worked for her. But this is still 1942, however, and Hurston had yet to encounter the troubles that would knock her back into obscurity. She never sold many books, to begin with, and was falsely accused of molesting a ten-year-old boy in 1948. Although she was able to prove she was in Honduras at the time the alleged incident took place, the scandal caused irreparable damage. She spent the last decade of her life as a substitute teacher and writing freelance articles that demonstrated strikingly reactionary opinions (coming from an African-American, no less) regarding segregation. Zora Neale Hurston died in 1960 in St. Lucie County Welfare Home in Florida and was buried in an unmarked grave.

You can argue that Hurston's steadfast faith in her own individual power failed her in the end. But I have to hand it to her - she stuck to what she believed in despite the criticism and seems to have remained true to herself throughout it all. Many writers fall of the radar in their lifetimes for a variety of reasons and earn the recognition they deserved only after their deaths, including Hurston's contemporaries H.P. Lovecraft and F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose works I also enjoy. While it's easy to pity her the end of her life, everything turned out right in the end and Hurston has regained her rightful place as a major American and African-American woman author of the twentieth century.

Merry Christmas!

So what books did Santa bring me? A $25 Barnes & Noble giftcard, which I shall spend tomorrow. I also received a pair of Bose speakers for my laptop and MP3 player, a 76-piece toolkit (?!) from my dad, and new pajamas. My sister received D.M. Cornish's Foundling from me.

I hope everyone enjoyed their presents and has a happy holiday season.

Top Ten Books I Hope Santa Brings

My mom will probably give me her credit card like she did last year, so I may well be getting all of these.

10. Dracula, A Longman Cultural Edition by Bram Stoker (eds. Nina Auerbach and David J. Skal)

Dracula is one of the few horror books to be honored by inclusion in the Norton Critical Edition series. . . This 100th-anniversary edition includes not only the complete authoritative text of the novel with illuminating footnotes, but also four contextual essays, five reviews from the time of publication, five articles on dramatic and film variations, and seven selections from literary and academic criticism. . . Especially fascinating are excerpts from materials that Bram Stoker consulted in his research for the book, and his working papers over the several years he was composing it. The selection of criticism includes essays on how Dracula deals with female sexuality, gender inversion, homoerotic elements, and Victorian fears of "reverse colonization" by politically turbulent Transylvania.

9. The Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras (trans. Barbara Bray)

Disaffected, bored with his career at the French Colonial Ministry (where he has copied out birth and death certificates for eight years), and disgusted by a mistress whose vapid optimism arouses his most violent misogyny, the narrator of The Sailor from Gibraltar finds himself at the point of complete breakdown while vacationing in Florence. After leaving his mistress and the Ministry behind forever, he joins the crew of The Gibraltar, a yacht captained by Anna, a beautiful American in perpetual search of her sometime lover, a young man known only as the "Sailor from Gibraltar."

(I read this awhile back and loved it. But I still don't own it!)

8. Paradiso by Dante (trans. Robert M. Durling)

Robert Durling's spirited new prose translation of the Paradiso completes his masterful rendering of the Divine Comedy. Durling's earlier translations of the Inferno and the Purgatorio garnered high praise, and with this superb version of the Paradiso readers can now traverse the entirety of Dante's epic poem of spiritual ascent with the guidance of one of the greatest living Italian-to-English translators.

(I already have the first two Durling translations of The Divine Comedy.)

7. 30 Days of Night by Steve Niles (graphic novel)

In a sleepy, secluded Alaska town called Barrow, the sun sets and doesn't rise for over thirty consecutive days and nights. From the darkness, across the frozen wasteland, an evil will come that will bring the residents of Barrow to their knees. The only hope for the town is the Sheriff and Deputy, husband and wife who are torn between their own survival and saving the town they love.

6. The City & The City by China Miéville

The city is Beszel, a rundown metropolis on the eastern edge of Europe. The other city is Ul Qoma, a modern Eastern European boomtown, despite being a bit of an international pariah. What the two cities share, and what they don't, is the deliciously evocative conundrum at the heart of China Mieville's The City & The City. Mieville is well known as a modern fantasist (and urbanist), but from book to book he's tried on different genres, and here he's fully hard-boiled, stripping down to a seen-it-all detective's voice that's wonderfully appropriate for this story of seen and unseen. His detective is Inspector Tyador Borlu, a cop in Beszel whose investigation of the murder of a young foreign woman takes him back and forth across the highly policed border to Ul Qoma to uncover a crime that threatens the delicate balance between the cities and, perhaps more so, Borlu's own dissolving sense of identity. In his tale of two cities, Mieville creates a world both fantastic and unsettlingly familiar, whose mysteries don't end with the solution of a murder.

(This sounds exactly like a Czech novel I read and loved called The Other City.)

5. Anonymous Celebrity by Ignacio de Loyola Brandao (trans. Nelson Vieira)

What if a man were so shallow that he couldn't believe his life had meaning unless he was loved and desired by millions of people? What if everything he learned from his television, from the movies, from what he heard on the radio, was treated as an absolute and incontrovertible truth? And what, then, if this man was amoral, cunning, and willing to lie, seduce, and kill to save himself from anonymity?

With an army of consultants, a library of "howto" manuals, and an endless variety of product placements at his behest, the hero of Anonymous Celebrity sets out to become king of his own little world—which unfortunately turns out to be the same one the rest of us live in. Equal parts Nabokov, All About Eve, and Big Brother, this is a bawdy, irreverent indictment of our self-absorbed culture of celebrity, where to be anything less than famous means being something less than human . . .

4. The Complete Fiction of Nella Larson

Nella Larsen's subject is the struggle of sensitive, spirited heroines to find a place for themselves in a hostile world. Passing is the story of a light-skinned beauty who, after spending years passing for white, finds herself dangerously drawn to an old friend's Harlem neighborhood. In Quicksand, a restless young mulatto tries desperately to find a comfortable place in a world in which she sees herself as a perpetual outsider. Race and marriage offer few securities here or in the other stories in a collection that is compellingly readable, rich in psychological complexity, and imbued with a sense of place that brings Harlem vibrantly to life.

(Click here for Emily's review.)

3. Our Lady of the Assassins by Fernando Vallejo (trans. Paul Hammond)

This slim, cynical novel by a well-regarded Colombian writer is an unsparing exploration of Medell¡n, Colombia's second largest city and the infamous stronghold and resting place of drug lord Pablo Escobar. The narrator is a "grammarian," who has recently returned to his hometown after many years abroad and discovers it has become a living nightmare, where music blares constantly, funerals are less important than soccer matches and a wayward glance is likely to get you killed. In a virtually unbroken dramatic monologue, the narrator recounts a love affair he once had with Alexis, a teenage hitman who carries out revenge killings for rival drug gangs. Post Escobar, the hitmen are disorganized and undisciplined, and they wreak havoc on the city, killing indiscriminately. Inevitably, Alexis too must die. But before he succumbs, he slays dozens of random people who cross his path including police officers, young children, pregnant women, taxi drivers. Vallejo is a vivid writer, and one with a talent for social commentary. He is keen to portray the hypocrisy of religion in a country where killers wear crucifixes, bless their bullets and pray not to miss, but his litany of atrocities, at first hypnotic, quickly becomes monotonous. Everyone in the story is so obviously doomed that by the time the grammarian takes up with Alexis's killer, it is impossible to work up much interest in their foreordained fates. Which may be Vallejo's point after all.

(Click here for Richard's review.)

2. Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño (trans. Chris Andrews)

"The melancholy folklore of exile" pervades this novel, which describes the divergent paths of three young Chilean poets around the time of Pinochet's coup. At university, the unnamed narrator and his friend are fascinated by a mysterious new member of their poetry workshop. Alberto Ruiz-Tagle is "serious, well mannered, a clear thinker," but his poems seem false, as if his true work were yet to be revealed. It becomes apparent that this is literally the case when Allende's government falls: as an Air Force officer for the new regime, he becomes famous for writing nationalist slogans in the sky. (The left-wing narrator, now in jail, reads them from his prison yard.) Bolano's spare prose lends his narrator's account a chilly precision—as if the detachment of his former classmate had become his country's, and his own.

(Alberto was originally a character in Nazi Literature in the Americas.)

1. The Skating Rink by Roberto Bolaño (trans. Chris Andrews)

Set in the seaside town of Z, on the Costa Brava, north of Barcelona, The Skating Rink oscillates between two poles: a camp ground and a ruined mansion, the Palacio Benvingut. The story, told by three male narrators, revolves around a beautiful figure skating champion, Nuria Martí. When she is suddenly dropped from the Olympic team, a pompous but besotted civil servant secretly builds a skating rink in the ruined Palacio Benvingut, using public funds. But Nuria has affairs, provokes jealousy, and the skating rink becomes a crime scene. A mysterious pair of women, an ex-opera singer and a taciturn girl often armed with a knife, turn up as well.

No, I haven't read enough Bolaño yet!

---

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish. This meme was created because we are particularly fond of lists at The Broke and the Bookish. We'd love to share our lists with other bookish folks and would LOVE to see your top ten lists!

Each week we will post a new Top Ten list complete with one of our bloggers' answers. Everyone is welcome to join. If you don't have a blog, just post your answers as a comment. Don't worry if you can't come up with ten every time . . . just post what you can!

". . . old recollections, dreams of bloodshed, of classes in conflict, books and pamphlets studied in secret meetings. . ."

"I won't believe a word of what you say. You're just mad because Mervat turned you down. And you don't believe any of this rubbish about socialism and equality. It's simply power. If you have power you have everything. And meanwhile there's no harm in preaching socialism and equality to others. Have you actually seen any of that gang walking around in poverty lately, like our lord Omar?"


I continue with my end-of-the-year Middle Eastern theme that began with Wolves of the Crescent Moon and will conclude with Naguib Mahfouz's Palace Walk next week for Richard's Cairo Trilogy read-along. 1967's Miramar, a short novel, is one of the Nobel Laureate's later works that deals with the social turmoil of post-Revolution Egypt. It was translated from Arabic in 1978 by Fatma Moussa Mahmoud.

Mariana is an aged society woman running a pension (boarding house) called Miramar in Alexandria. Still possessing an air of faded elegance, she often reminisces about the good life and her days as the queen of the salons. The first boarder, her old friend Amer Wagdi, is likewise preoccupied with his bygone time as a journalist in the heady final hours of Egypt's old order, when he mixed with powerful political figures and radical idealists. The third elderly boarder is Tolba Bey Marzuq, formerly a big landowner and prominent government official, now a bitter old man whose property was confiscated by the new regime. For all their past differences, Mariana, Amer, and Tolba are united by their advanced years and detachment from the uncertainty of the present.

Mariana's sole employee is a maid named Zora Salama, a headstrong young woman who fled her native village after her family tried to marry her off to a man decades her senior. She is the object of attention for the three young borders: Hosny Allam, a bored, self-indulgent country squire; Mansour Bahy, a melancholy radio announcer; and Sarhan al-Beheiry, a politically active accountant whose actions betray his true convictions. Despite Hosny's unwanted advances, Zora is having a secret affair with Sarhan, who one day turns up dead after being expelled from Miramar for fighting with a drunken Hosny. Meanwhile, Mansour is on a downward spiral due to a combination of love and politics.

Miramar is essentially a soap opera, as the publisher's copy promises. Yet I hate to describe it as such because it's really not trashy at all. Told from four separate perspectives (Hosny, Mansour, Sarhan, and Amer), it is instead a slice of life in a breezy city by the Mediterranean in the aftermath of great social upheaval. While the old folks seek company and security at the end of their lives, the young people (all under thirty) rush from here to there with seemingly no purpose. Amer can only recall the conviction of his youth while his successor, Mansour, falls just as hard and quickly as Sarhan the ostensible socialist. Hosny, alas, is the one left standing and he is by far the least sympathetic. A free-spending, speed-driving aristocrat with a penchant for prostitutes, Hosny is apparently the only one able to adapt to the new climate, thanks to his interest in purchasing a business from an owner nervous about the government's property seizures. The only characters with any real principles are Amer and Zora. Elderly Amer, however, is largely irrelevant, while Zora is strictly pragmatic (she wants to learn to read and find better work) and also powerless due to her gender, illiteracy, and lack of family ties.

All in all, Miramar is not optimistic when it comes to the success of Egypt's 1952 revolution. The same forces - class, money, male privilege - remain intact while the very people purported to benefit - namely, Zora - have seen little improvement. But given his careless lifestyle, it is doubtful if Hosny's success will last long or come to anything worthwhile. Perhaps Miramar is an expression of concern for a whole generation, despite Zora's hopeful ending.

Miramar is never gloomy, however. It is a fast, roundabout little book with a vivid sense of time and place and a believable cast. Frantic lives play out against a pleasant backdrop of white, beige, and sky blue with frequent visions of the sea and the tired grandeur of an old heiress's mansion. Founded in 331 BCE by Alexander the Great, Alexandria too is but a shade of its cosmopolitan past. Whatever happens, at least we'll always have Alexandria, the mute testament to history's ongoing march.

Click here for Richard's review.

"We are both lost in this strange and unfamiliar city."

In the desert you can see your enemy in front of you, he thought, and you can take him on in a fair contest. But the curse of the city, which is no different from Hell, is that you struggle against unknown enemies, enemies you can't see with your naked eye. Can we struggle against the firewood of Hell that devours us whether we are decent or wicked? I don't think so.


Yousef Al-Mohaimeed was born in Riyadh in 1964 and recognized in 2004 by the Egyptian Journalists Union and Diwan al Arab magazine for his contributions to Arabic literature. 2003's Fikhakh al-ra'iha (Wolves of the Crescent Moon), translated by Anthony Calderbank, is his first book to be published abroad.

Turad, a former Bedouin highwayman, is sitting in a bus terminal in an unnamed city, presumably Riyadh. Marred by a missing ear, he has spent the past several years drifting aimlessly from one menial job to another, often losing out to the cheaper labor of foreign migrants. Then another traveler hands him a file folder, believing it to be his. It contains documentation - investigative reports, diary entries, snapshots - pertaining to an orphaned boy, designated Nasir Abdulilah Hasan Abdullah, found as an infant two decades prior in a banana crate left near a mosque. His left eye was missing, likely torn out by a stray cat. Inspired, Turad will spend the next several hours reflecting on the intersecting lives of Nasir, a eunuch ex-slave named Tawfiq, and himself, as wandering outcasts caught up in the clash of tradition and modernity.

Al-Mohaimeed's sparse prose brings to mind the empty, harsh beauty of the desert recalled so fondly by Turad. Combined with the constant rotating motion of the narrative (from past to present, imagination to reality, first to third person) and the motif of mutilation, the result is an unsettling, dreamlike aura only accentuated by the book's short length (165 pages). But despite the tempting binary of romantic wilderness vs. soulless civilization, the single biggest driving force behind all their lives has been that of religion. Turad's invented story of Nasir's parents reveals a familiarity with the price of disobedience in their still-conservative society. Faith has also been used to justify (in many cultures) slavery and its accompanying abuses, and it was the retribution of a wealthy emir making the hajj that led to Turad's downfall. In fact, the title Wolves of the Crescent Moon refers to both the wolves that tore Turad's ear off and Islam itself (the crescent). At the very core of book, then, is that eternal, universal issue of people hiding behind God.

Although it seems simple enough on the surface, Wolves of the Crescent Moon is a complex, provocative look at how individuals navigate a culture in flux, where reality falls increasingly short of timeworn ideals (if they ever met in the first place). It is the common story of our time, as globalization and rapid change bring opportunities to some, tragedy to others, and disorientation to many.

"Predicting the Next Anita Blake Vampire Hunter Book"

By Sparky

Anita: Humpa humpa humpa HUMP HUMP

Asher: Pain pain woe, angst, no-one finds me shaggable anymore except Anita and Jean Claude and Narcisuss and absolutely everyone who sees me. Woe.

Anita: humpa humpa HUMP! *PING* oooh a new super power! It involves sex!

Jean-Claude: *is randomly blamed for whatever problems new super-power brings. Puts running an entire city full of vampires and world wide vampire politics on hold AGAIN, to deal with Anita’s issues*

Mother of all darkness: I AM SCARY!

[Continue Reading]

Damn, I keep hearing about how this series totally goes way downhill. I've only read the first book and loved how awesome and kickass she was! You know, the more I hear about this "ardeur" power she acquires, the more squicked out I get. So apparently Anita and all these men have no choice but to constantly have sex? That's not empowerment, that's . . . really rape-ish. *shudders*


TV Tropes, as always, has more information.

Top Ten Favorite Cozy Reading Spots

I like coffee. Coffee coffee COFFEEEEE! And I like art, creativity, cool atmospheres, and a laid-back vibe. So instead of doing a regular Top 10 list this week, here are photos of my favorite coffeehouses. I could spend hours at any of these places, just reading and enjoying a latte.


This one is currently the closest to me. It's a decent place, nice comfy chairs and tasty deserts, but lacks that special ambiance a coffeehouse must have. Nicely decorated but kind of blah. But it does have a bar-style table right against the front window, which is great for people-watching. Outdoor sidewalk seating is a plus too.


Although I've since moved away, I try to come back here whenever I can. A combo artist studio/cafe located on the first floor of an old house, the proprietoress was one of those fun older women with a quirky sense of style. The side porch was my favorite place during the summer, followed by the front yard, which was full of fun little tables and chairs and statuettes and suchlike.


I did not get to go here very often because it was a bit of a drive. Located in the same area as the above too, so I'm not sure when I'll see it again. But it RULED at coffeehousedom. Funky-colored walls, blue tin ceilings, and an upper level with old battered couches and all sorts of art magazines and alternative weeklies. Had a really cool painting for sale that I wanted but it unfortunately it was $1500.


They're noted for their live performances, which I have yet to see (hopefully soon). A bit of hike from my place, but well worth it. A big, loft-like space in an old brick building in an up-and-coming neighborhood, I especially enjoy their '60s-'70s retro decorating style. Borders on ironic kitsch - like that brass sailing ship light fixture affixed to the brick wall that would look stupid anywhere else. And the collection of old TV sets! One sweet place. I was there for almost three hours a few Sundays ago with Vilnius Poker.


Hooray, my favorite! A short bus ride away, right in the heart of downtown! I came here all the time in college! Low-key indie vibe and stocked with great artwork. I actually have their vintage-y menu on my kitchen wall.

If you can afford it, please consider purchasing fair trade coffee. It will mean a lot to the growers, most of whom live in developing countries and make little money for their hard work.

---

Top Ten Tuesday is an original feature/weekly meme created at The Broke and the Bookish. This meme was created because we are particularly fond of lists at The Broke and the Bookish. We'd love to share our lists with other bookish folks and would LOVE to see your top ten lists!

Each week we will post a new Top Ten list complete with one of our bloggers' answers. Everyone is welcome to join. If you don't have a blog, just post your answers as a comment. Don't worry if you can't come up with ten every time . . . just post what you can!

"Swords and axes. Whips and daggers. Give me liberty or give me death!"

I Hotel
By Karen Tei Yamashita
604 pages
Coffee House Press
May 2010






But use your imagination to what end? What's the point of this circus of Siamese twins fathered by a hapless outlaw? Come to America, and your children all come out hyphenated. Half this-half that. Nothing whole. Everything half-assed. And it's more complicated than that. One half trying to be the other half and vice versa. As they say, duking out the dialectics. Working through schizophrenia and assimilation. Poor man. These kids drive him nuts. He's taught them everything they know, but still they have no respect. They think they're supposed to be free in Asian America.

Karen Tei Yamashita, an instructor at the University of California-Santa Cruz, was born in California and has lived in Brazil and Japan. Her fifth novel, I Hotel, is an ambitious endeavor that brings to life the multifaceted creativity and activism of San Francisco's Asian-American communities during one of the most tumultuous decades in living American memory.

I Hotel is actually a compendium of ten novellas for each year between 1968 and 1977, all loosely connected to one another by the presence of the International Hotel. As Yamashita explains in her Afterward, the "I-Hotel," by the time of its demolition '77, was the crumbling home of elderly Chinese and Filipino men who had arrived in America decades earlier bursting with ambition, only to be thwarted by antimiscengenation laws, restrictive acts against Asian immigration, and the prevailing racism of the day. Perhaps due to its symbolic significance, the I-Hotel became the epicenter of the Yellow Power movement that took inspiration from the Black Panthers, global Marxism, and the period's explosion of civil rights movements. Yellow Power was diverse and decentralized, embracing political revolution, social justice, economic empowerment, and radical scholarship. Most activists did not know what their compatriots were doing, Yamashita found, and I Hotel is a suitably sprawling canvas nevertheless united by its characters' shared passion for change and the ever-present International Hotel.

I-Hotel is in many ways comparable to John Dos Passos's The 42nd Parallel, as a multi-media chronicle of various individual Americans as they negotiate their era's trends and dynamics. The stories of assorted Chinese-, Japanese-, and Filipino-Americans – from their respective positions as students, professors, artists, filmmakers, poets, musicians, laborers, and community organizers – are revealed through lists, comics, plays, free verse, interviews, photos, audiovisual transcripts, flights of magic realism, mythology, and fragments of real-life quotes and documents interspersed throughout several of the narratives. The result is a panoramic, ground-level tour-de-force that gradually coalesces into something greater than the sum of its parts.

When it's all said and done, you might have a compilation of events, and you might have a story with meaning. Someone says, don't worry about the details, just get the story. Someone else says, get the details and the hard facts, and then you can build a case for a story. Someone says a good story might help you remember, but someone else says that everyone remembers differently. Everyone's got a version of the same story, or maybe there's no such thing as the same story; it's a different story every time.

The characters are different yet representative. The first novella focuses on a refined Chinese scholar, his youthful protégés, and their friend the Filipino cook, as well as the contradictions of Maoist China and its relationship to the Asian-American Left. The third, "'I' Hotel," centers on a conversation between a Black Panther and a member of the Red Guard Party in a Moscow hotel room. In "Int'l Hotel," three Japanese-American youths accompany a Modoc Indian to Alcatraz Island during the 1969 occupation, while a Chinese-American dancer dreams of uniting Peking Opera with avant-garde jazz to tell a story of life, identity, and history in "Aiiieeeee! Hotel."

For all their utopian hopes, however, the disparity between belief and reality seems to all but promise eventual disillusionment. Nevertheless, the legacy of Yellow Power is a broad one, says Yamashita, and includes Asian-American studies, law cooperatives, historians, educators, works of art and music, underground cooperatives, and drug rehabilitation programs. Furthermore, since many forms of oppression overlap (called "intersectionality" by sociologists), numerous activists also fought on other battlegrounds, such as feminism and disability rights.

Despite its size, I Hotel surges ahead quickly, its versatile storytelling preventing it from ever dragging or getting old. Part novel, part history text, Karen Tei Yamashita's brilliant, well-written, and well-researched achievement is the go-to book for anyone interested in Asian-American history, radical politics in America, the turbulent sixties, and grassroots activism. General readers, meanwhile, will have their eyes opened, a fact to which this reviewer can personally attest.

---

Review Copy

---

"Life in Vilnius is a giant poker game, played by madmen."

Then how can you explain humanity's structure, all the world's societies, all human communities, their aspirations and modes of existence? How can you explain that always and everywhere, as far as you can see, one idiot rules a thousand intelligent people, and they quietly obey? Whence comes the silent gray majority in every society? Would a person who wasn't kanuked think of vegetating in a soulless condition and say that's the way everything should be?

I am horribly late! The Wolves' discussion of Vilnius Poker, written by Ričardas Gavelis and translated from Lithuanian by Elizabeth Novickas, was to take place last Friday. But Thanksgiving, travel, and work all conspired to mess up my reading. The good thing about being late, though, is that this post is kind of like a TV Clip Show. The other Wolves have already covered this particular novel and said many of the things I wanted to say as well. Emily, for example, discusses the first section's "circular narrative" and how its repetition and use of recurring elements (i.e. dogs, cockroaches, scatological imagery, monstrous genitalia) take the form of a textual fugue. Both Isabella and I enjoyed the wild dream sequences and "lovely, crazy passages," although she ultimately disliked the book and gave up. And all four of us (including Sarah) were struck by the disturbing treatment of women, even after it became clear that the bulk of it was the product of the protagonist's diseased mind.

The character in question is one Vytautas Vargalys, a survivor of the Soviet gulags under Stalin. It is now the 1970s, and he has returned to his native Lithuania to work in capital city Vilnius as a librarian. It's an absurd position - he has been tasked with creating a digital catalog that he can't actually finish until the big library in Leningrad finishes their catalog. As his colleague, disgraced educator Martynas explains, it's more like they're collecting unemployment for being employed. The rest of the group under Vargalys's supervision is a quartet of women, including Stefa, who always seems to be underfoot, and gorgeous Lolita. So far so good.

Except that Vargalys is completely out of his mind, suffering from a combination of PTSD and raging paranoia. Demon shadow-people are taking over the world! He spends his days searching for evidence of Their existence in the books of his library, many of them banned from public view. Though he appears functional to others, he is completely consumed by nightmarish hallucinations and a never-ending loop of bizarre, obsessive delusions. (Sarah puts it very well: "The events of a single day and of Vargalys’ entire life are conveyed by him in a looping, seeming chaos. . . Vargalys zooms in and out repeatedly while maintaining a dizzying clarity.") They are dead-eyed imposters who proliferate by seizing the minds and bodies of healthy, thinking humans and turning them into mindless freaks. They will "kanuk" you - turn you into one of Them. They are legion and they will destroy anyone who even suspects of their existence.

Clearly this is in fact a madman's attempt to come to terms with life under a communist dictatorship - particularly one that came in from the outside (Russia). Vilnius Poker is also an enraged tirade against the oppression of the Lithuanian national spirit and the loss of its free heritage under Polish and then Soviet rule. Vilnius, apparently, is the Asshole of the Universe. Gediminas Tower, the symbol of Lithuania itself, is likened in Vargalys's mind to a impotent member. The very atmosphere is bleak and hopeless when not twisting in on itself like a series of funhouse mirrors - at one point, for example, Vargalys imagines himself trapped in an impossible maze of dingy corridors after pursuing his missing father like Alice's white rabbit. Kirkus Reviews compared Vilnius Poker to The Matrix and it's easy to see why. The real world as we know it is a facade for something deeper and darker - perhaps a reflection of communism's relentless emphasis on total equality and the destructive measures most regimes have taken ostensibly to achieve that equality (i.e. gulags, the Ukrainian famine). North Korea seems to have this down pat.

Out of our group, both Richard and Isabella gave up (Richard didn't even post) and Sarah came close. I don't blame them. Gavelis's prose is brilliant and vivid but there are still the issues of 1) the narrative repetition, 2) the constant shit/genitalia imagery and 3) Vargalys's disgusting views of women and sexuality. The last two derive from Vargalys having spent his formative years in a hellish, all-male labor camp, and No. 2 is more eye-rolling than anything else. But in the latter's case . . . to begin with, I'm going to give a trigger warning to anyone interested in reading Vilnius Poker. There are at least two rape scenes in Vargalys's section and other scenes that come close. The rapes seem to have taken place entirely in his head but that doesn't make them any less difficult to get through. Vargalys's perception of women is generally demeaning and constantly narrows down to breasts and vaginas.

In Vargalys's mind, the transformation from human to "kanuk" is physical as well as psychological. This causes his POV to swing between either worshiping women's bodies or reviling them. His suspicion that ex-wife Irena - previously his life-saving Madonna - has been kanuked is fueled in part by what seems to be the natural aging process: her skin loses its youthful luster and she has gained weight. His subsequent disgust is violent: "That woman's breasts are swollen, three hideous rolls lie pressed together. . . The waist has disappeared somewhere; square thighs stick out immediately below the bulging breasts. Between the legs, almost from the knees up, spout fat globs of flesh - something like thick ropes." The image of the older woman's body is further juxtaposed against references to degraded sexuality, sour and moldy smells, and disease.

And yet later, during his involvement with Lolita: "I'm amazed that Solomon attempted to compare his loved one's body to something. Lolita isn't comparable to anything; she's not even comparable with herself, because she is different every time. She is like an entire world, like a universe - with stars, nebulae, and comets. Her flavor is heavenly. . ." (And on and on for two whole pages.) What this reminded me of, very eerily, was a Dutch novel by Ilja Leornard Pfeijffer I reviewed awhile back called Rupert: A Confession, about a pathological rapist who waxes poetic for pages and pages about his beautiful Mira, the "fact that makes fiction possible." Overall, the impression I get from both Rupert (who made my recent Top 10 Villains list, BTW) and Vargalys is of men only capable of perceiving women as either sex objects or rejected sex objects. And even the former are venerated as symbols rather than real human beings (in that same passage, Vargalys finds himself unable to look at Lolita's face and starts seeing her as some kind of "universal woman"). It is also worth noting that both Rupert and Vargalys's stories end with a brutal act of male-on-female violence.

Until Martynas's section 300 pages later I was unsure if this misogyny was simply the characterization of a depraved mind or if at least some of it was Gavelis's Henry Miller-esque bias showing. Martynas is generally sympathetic to the plight of the female characters, although I also felt, as Emily did, that Stefa's chapter was very "derivative" when compared to the three male narrations - one of whom had been reincarnated as a dog! Stefa had this stream-of-conscious style going on that also lacked the social/philosophical insight of the rest of the book - as though she was more instinctive and less analytical than the men. On the one hand, it's great that at least Gavelis gave her a voice. But it's still a very "othered" voice that ends with a gang rape that added nothing to the story. Why was that even there? (Again, trigger warning.)

So at this point we're down to the Big Question. Did I like Vilnius Poker? It certainly wasn't my favorite but I did enjoy most of it. As I mentioned earlier, Ričardas Gavelis's prose is excellent and I did enjoy reading it. But Vilnius Poker is also a polarizing book, even to a single reader. Once again, I really don't blame anyone who abandons this one and there are definitely many reasons why that would happen. Although I chose to focus on gender with this post, there is a lot more happening here and I strongly recommend checking out what my compatriots have written.

See also: my reviews of The Wall in My Head: Words and Images from the Fall of the Iron Curtain and The Judgment Day Archives.

It occurs to me that every book I have read and blogged about lately has been either really depressing, published by Open Letter Press, or both. I promise that the book I am reading now is neither.

---

Ričardas Gavelis's Vilnius Poker was The Wolves' reading selection for the month of November. Please feel free to join us at any time! You can find a complete book list here.

Past selections:

March: Tennessee Williams, The Night of the Iguana
April: Georges Perec, Life: A User's Manual
May: Margo Lanagan, Tender Morsels
June: Gabriel Josipovici, Moo Pak
July: Kenzaburo Ōe, A Personal Matter Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!
August: William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain
September: Tomás Eloy Martínez, Santa Evita
October: Tobias Wolff, Old School