Rumors of Delirium

I’m going to Sicily for a week to see championship fencing. In my carry-on bag are the following titles:

• Peter Robb: Midnight in Sicily
• Leonard Sciascia: The Day of the Owl
• Giuseppe Di Lampedusa: The Leopard

The Robb title is nonfiction, about the history of the Mafia on the island, literature and art as well. I read a similar book of his on Brazil (A Death in Brazil), which was riveting. Sciascia is a heralded crime novelist, also dealing with the Mafia. For light reading, I’m packing Lampedusa’s classic, The Leopard, about Sicilian life and aristocracy during the Risorgimento, the unification of Italy during the mid-nineteenth century.

I just found a new site called bookforum. It has lots of information and links, plus an interesting discussion of one of my favorite novelists, Richard Price. His new book, Lush Life, is on the top of my “to read” list.

There’s also a review of four Iranian women novelists.

In honor of my daughter and Mina’s daughter working and studying in India, the book club has decided to read Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire by Alex Von Tunzelmann.

It helps that I’ve already read it*, so I can whole-heartedly recommend this vivid history of end of the British Raj and the founding the modern states of Pakistan and India. It’s a panoramic portrait of the tricky politics of religion, caste, anti-colonialism, and British attitudes toward imperialism.

Juiciest — and what sold my picky fellow readers — is the sex. Namely, the romantic triangle featuring the last Viceroy of India, Dickie Mountbattan, who presided over the partition and the British exit, his glamorous wife, Edwina, and her passionate love affair with the handsome, lonely, and brilliant Nehru, India’s first prime minister.

Gandhi and Jinnah, the fiery Muslim who insisted on a separate state, the conflicts and violence among Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, and the British incompetence and indifference that led to horrific violence as the British left are described with cinematic flair.

It’s a great read, and should produce lively discussion.

*I prepared the index

Some of us loved the book; some of us found it flat. But it triggered an interesting conversation, as have so many books about which we’ve disagreed.

Priscilla and Terry, who didn’t care for the novel, and Olga, who liked it, were serious musicians until injuries prevented each from continuing to play. In the context of these experiences, we discussed what Maryellen felt was the heart of the novel — dealing with losses that are the inevitable byproducts of life. Maryellen was an athlete in her youth, and she’s found it difficult as she gets older to deal with the loss of her ability. Olga put it well — learning to cope with our losses is the key to maturity. The Soloist illustrates the process as Rennie, a former cello prodigy, while serving on a murder trial jury, comes to terms with his loss of ability and ambition.

Barbara linked the book with Salzman’s later work, Lying Awake. Both books explore the continuum between religious experience and insanity, and the difficulty of determining a clear demarcation between the two.

A shout-out to Mary Ellen, who’s pushed for reading Tolstoy by our book club.

I’ve discovered a fabulous discussion of Tolstoy’s War and Peace at the New York Times’ Reading Room blog.

Here’s a taste from the introduction by Sam Tanenhaus.

Why “War and Peace”? Well, it’s one of the greatest novels ever written — the very greatest, some would say. It is, moreover, almost eerie in its timeliness, with its sweeping detailed narrative of military invasion and occupation (by France of Russia in 1812) set against political and social intrigue in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as experienced by aristocratic families, some of them in decline.

“War and Peace” is not just massive. It is sturdily and delicately structured. The novel divides into four volumes (there is also an epilogue). We’ll cover one volume each week — though the panelists will be encouraged to range freely over the whole of the book, its opulent mix of incidents and characters (who include Napoleon and Czar Alexander) and also to tackle Tolstoy’s profound meditations on history, philosophy, religion and human nature.

The participants are:

• Bill Keller, the executive editor of The Times, reported from the paper’s Moscow Bureau from December, 1986, until October, 1991.
• Stephen Kotkin teaches history and directs the program in Russian and Eurasian studies at Princeton University.
• Francine Prose’s most recent book is “Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them.”
• Liesl Schillinger is a regular reviewer for the Book Review, studied comparative literature and Russian at Yale, and lived in Moscow in 1993, where she was editor of the English supplement of Moscow Magazine and wrote dispatches for The New Republic.
• Sam Tanenhaus is the editor of the Book Review

Re: Henry James’s The Ambassadors — Lambert Strether?

I just finished Half of a Yellow Sun by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The novel, about the Nigerian war against Biafra and the Igbo people of the 1960s, won the 2007 Orange Prize and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

This fits into my two recent obsessions: novels about war and novels about Africa.

Today I’ll focus on Africa.

I’ve read a number of fine novels from a white colonialist perspective. Though they take place in different time periods, all echo Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, about the brutal exploitation that was the colonialist venture. As such they contain more insight into the colonialist’s soul than into Africa itself. (The Norton critical edition, which I linked, looks interesting. It contains essays by Achebe and Edward Said, among others.)

So it is refreshing to read Africa from the perspective of African authors. I’ve just begun, so I can’t do much of a comparative analysis. Top on my list is Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, which, like Half a Yellow Sun, takes place in Nigeria. It is closely followed by Wizard of the Crow by Kenyan novelist Ngugi wa Thiong’o*. Both have a timeless quality that give them a universal dimension despite the specificity of place that allows a reader insight into African culture. Things Fall Apart depicts precolonial tribal and village life and the impact of colonialism that follows. Wizard of the Crow is a satire set in a fictional post-colonial dictatorship. The country is rife with corruption, cronyism, and repression, but a magical trickster character can survive and win. Despite the harsh realities they depict, both books reveal a thread of hope.

The tale of the Biafran war and starvation depicted in Half of a Yellow Sun struck me as more despairing. Perhaps because the tone is realistic. The story is told from the close point of view of several of the major characters — two well-to-do twin sisters, their two lovers, and a houseboy who works for one of the sisters. The ethnic warfare, the assault on civilians, and the hunger were palpable.

If one wants to know how it feels to survive as a civilian in wartime, this is the book to read.

Stylistically, while Half a Yellow Sun was interesting and informative, the novel as a whole didn’t have the impact I had expected. The narrative lost focus about half-way through and only recovered at the very end. It would have been more compelling if there had been fewer point-of-view characters and if the author had defined more clearly the trajectory of the plot or character arcs.

Still, it was fascinating to read a female novelist’s portrait of women of different social classes in a still highly patriarchal society, life among the African elites and intellectuals, including contacts with white Westerners as well as African-Americans, their interactions with many levels of tribal and village life, the impact of sexual violence used as a weapon of war.

*Here are links for more about Wizard of the Crow and Ngugi wa Thiong’o, who’s led an amazing life.

One of our most successful choices was Kafka’s The Trial. Other books that everyone enjoyed reading and fostered lively discussion: Wild Swans, Bel Canto, Love in the Time of Cholera, and The Known World. We also had great discussions about Embers, Lolita and Atonement. So I ask myself, what do these books have in common?

1. Well-written, with style and beauty.
2. Thought-provoking themes and characters.
3. Aside from the Kafka, not too densely written…and aside from Love in the Time of Cholera not terribly long.
4. Accessible, with enough narrative energy to keep us reading.

Needless to say, some great books don’t make good book club books. Example: Almost anything by Dickens–because of the length–or by Faulkner–because of the density of the prose. I wonder how many of us will finish the Henry James?

Our list is here. Someday soon, I’ll add grades and links to my reviews.

Juicy life; dry read. That was the club verdict on Vindication, the recent biography of Mary Wollstonecraft by Lyndall Gordon.

Grade — B- (C readability; A- subject matter)

Barbara was taken with the historical and literary aspects, most particularly Mary Wollstonecraft’s friendship with John and Abigail Adams. To augment Gordon’s biography, she read Wollstonecrafts’s most famous work — A Vindication of the Rights of Woman – as well as three other biographies. The one she’d recommend for general readers is The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft by Claire Tomalin, which is shorter and more focused.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s life was marked by obstacles and adventure — a violent father, financial strains, needy siblings who constantly beg for money, a love affair with a charming but faithless American spy (Gilbert Imlay), life in France during the Terror, travels with a baby in tow through Norway and Holland on the trail of stolen silver.

Despite these ills, she produced many influential works including the first declaration of women’s rights, a history of the French Revolution, and books on the education of daughters, child-rearing, and travel. Many of her ideas are still current after two centuries. She was one of the first advocates for mothers’ breast-feeding, for example.

Sadly, when she found and married a possible soul-mate*, William Godwin, she died in childbirth, leaving two daughters without a mother.

I felt the book went overboard describing the romantic and sexual aspects of Wollstonecraft’s life and shortchanged her intellectual contributions. We are too often reduced to our sexual and emotional selves.

Terry felt Gordon went off on a tangent at the end — connecting the lives of the daughters and a student Margaret King (who dressed as a man in order to study medicine) to Wollstonecraft’s ideas.

Others felt Gordon made poor transitions, went on and on about irrelevant details, and left out connecting information leaving the reader feeling lost or bewildered, scratching her head and saying: Where did this character come from?

That said, we found plenty to talk about — the horrors of childbirth in the 18th century, the shocking practice of the French aristocracy of sending their infants off to a wet nurse to be reared (where they often died), and the absolute legal rights of men over wives and children. It was wrenching to read about women being forced to give their very young children to the father upon separating, and about wives having no recourse if physically or psychologically abused by their husbands.

We touched on Rousseau (education, child-rearing), the fact that Wollstonecraft can be seen as a transitional figure between Enlightenment rationalism and the Romantic / Sentimentalist movement (Sorrows of Young Werther; poets Shelley and Byron), free love and its consequences in a world without contraception (free love is free only for men), and Wollstonecraft’s daughters (Fanny Imlay who commits suicide; Mary Godwin Shelley who writes Frankenstein and lives in a menage à trois with the poet Percy Shelley and her step-sister Claire Clairmont).

Yes, great topics of discussion…if you can make it all the way through the book!

*Point of contention — was he indeed the right man, or a cold fish?

Update:

Barbara adds –

Vindication is truly fascinating. It is a feminist classic but its feminist concerns have more to do reforming marriage and motherhood than in winning political or sexual freedoms. In particular, Wollstonecraft wants mothers to become the nurturers and educators rather than turning their children over to hirelings. Here’s a money quotation: “To be a good mother, a woman must have sense, and that independence of mind which few women possess who are taught to depend entirely on their husbands.”

By the way, Gilbert Imlay’s novel, The Emigrants, is still available in a Penguin classic edition.