MostlyFiction Book Reviews » Nobel Prize for Literature We Love to Read! Wed, 14 May 2014 13:06:32 +0000 en-US hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=4.3 THE BOX: TALES FROM THE DARKROOM by Gunter Grass /2010/the-box-tales-from-the-darkroom-by-gunter-grass/ /2010/the-box-tales-from-the-darkroom-by-gunter-grass/#comments Tue, 09 Nov 2010 23:53:17 +0000 /?p=13508 Book Quote:

“But that is not enough, or too much, for all of you. Yes, children, I know: being a father is only an assertion, one that constantly has to be corroborated. This is why, to make you believe me, I must lie.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (NOV 9, 2010)

Nobel laureate Günter Grass has made a career out of fictionalizing the past in order to be better believed. His first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), used an autistic dwarf named Oskar as a magic-realist alter-ego commentator on the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Some two dozen books later, Crabwalk (2002), his most recent novel, reviews the same period together with the Soviet occupation of East Germany, under the guise of a fictionalized family biography. In this, a writer (though not Grass himself) uses the web to research the sinking of a ship in which his mother was one of the few survivors, while at the same time observing the internet activities of his neo-Nazi son. Shortly after that, in Peeling the Onion (2006), Grass turned to true autobiography, attempting to explain his own activities as a member of the Hitler Youth and soldier in the Waffen SS in the last year of the War, a fact that he had kept hidden for sixty years.

Hidden but not forgotten; if Grass lied about his life in factually objective terms, his entire fictional oeuvre has been an attempt to find metaphors for his own responsibility and that of his countrymen towards their common past. In his latest work, The Box, he combines autobiography with magic realism in an oblique view of his entire life as a writer, though without strong political or moral overtones or, frankly, much interest.

Although the book is subtitled “Tales from the Darkroom” and looks a little like a set of nine short stories, it is in fact a continuous series of vignettes. At different times, in different cities, various groups of Grass’s eight children (by several different mothers) meet to reminisce about different phases of their childhood. Each child is the principal narrator for a different chapter, though there are no quotation marks, and various other voices weave in without clear attribution. The focus of their memories are the pictures taken by Marie (Mariechen), a family friend and possibly their father’s lover, on a prewar Agfa box camera. Damaged in an air raid, it has the capacity to record things not as they are, but in terms of the stories they contain. A snapshot taken near Checkpoint Charlie shows the escape of the woman who would become the author’s second wife. A series of pictures of the family dog Joggi imagine him riding the subway on his own all across the city. Landscapes taken near the Danish border on the Baltic coast reveal scenes from the Thirty Years War. It is a very clever analogy for the way in which an author collects motifs from all around him and tells stories about them. When the stories are shaped and focused, the result can be great fiction, but when we get only the fragments without the shape, the result is merely self-indulgent.

I am writing this two days after hosting my daughter’s wedding. The house has been full of family members telling stories about the past. It is an enthralling celebration for those who share our common links, but for someone visiting for the first time it can be overwhelming and even alienating. At least that’s what I felt reading this book. A number of other Nobelists, curiously, seem to have turned to fictional autobiography in their late works; both Kenzaburo Oe and J. M. Coetzee have been mining their lives in this way for some years. But though autobiographical, Oe’s The Changeling also addresses the whole postwar history of Japan. Coetzee’s latest book, Summertime, not only says something equally important about South Africa, but creates a gallery of characters that are as rich as any in his novels. The family members in The Box, however, are little more than disembodied voices, reflecting a father figure — storyteller, creator, puppet-master, or director — who remains in the shadows nonetheless, writing to exorcise his own demons. Here are the final words of the book; if only Grass could have put his point so eloquently in the 200 pages that precede them!

“A quick exchange of glances. Partial sentences chewed and swallowed: assertions of love, but also reproaches, stored up over the years. Now the lives portrayed in snapshots are called into question. Now the children have reclaimed their real names. Now the father is shrinking, wants to vanish into thin air. Now the suspicion is voiced in whispers: he, and he alone, was Mariechen’s heir, and has the box stashed away somewhere, like other things: for later, because something is still ticking inside him that has to be worked through, as long as he is still here.”

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-0from 25 readers
PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (November 10, 2010)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? Not Yet
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Günter Grass
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

*Referred to as the Danzig Trilogy

Nonfiction:

Related:

Movies from Books

]]> /2010/the-box-tales-from-the-darkroom-by-gunter-grass/feed/ 0 THE ELEPHANT’S JOURNEY by Jose Saramago /2010/the-elephants-journey-by-jose-saramago/ /2010/the-elephants-journey-by-jose-saramago/#comments Wed, 13 Oct 2010 14:48:39 +0000 /?p=12893 Book Quote:

“It is said, once tolstoy had said it first, that all happy families are alike, and there is really little more to say about them. It would seem that the same is true of happy elephants. One need look no further than suleiman. During the two weeks he spent in bressanone, he rested, slept, ate and drank his fill, until he could eat no more, demolishing something like four tons of forage and drinking about three thousand liters of water, thus making up for the many enforced slimming regimes imposed on him during his long journey through the lands of portugal, spain and italy, when it wasn’t always possible to replenish his larder on a regular basis.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (OCT 13, 2010)

Saramago can look intimidating on the page, with his grey blocks of unbroken text and almost total avoidance of capital letters. But once you get used to his peculiarities (it takes only a few pages), you find a congenial companion with warmly humane ideas wittily expressed. This is a relatively minor book, a mere tale of 200 pages, but I can think of no better introduction to the Nobel laureate’s work. But as the first book published in translation since the writer’s death in June 2010 (there is one novel, Cain, still to come), one might equally call it the genial farewell of a great master.

It is based on fact. In 1551, King João III of Portugal presented an Indian elephant named Solomon to Archduke Maximilian of Austria (the future Holy Roman Emperor) as a belated wedding present on his marriage to the daughter of King Carlos of Spain. The happy couple were currently in Valladolid, but due shortly to return to Vienna. So João sends the elephant under escort to the Spanish frontier, from where the procession moves on foot across Spain to the Mediterranean coast, by ship to Genoa, across Northern Italy to Padua, then North through the Alps to Innsbruck and by river to the gates of Vienna, a journey that takes them from late summer into early winter. Not being José Saramago, I can honor titled men with capital letters in the customary places, but the author has little time for grandees being grandees. Instead, he presents them as ordinary men, fallible and human like the rest of us. When João III climbs a ladder to look over the elephant’s enclosure in Belém, the animal’s keeper fails to recognize this small bearded man as king. Archduke Maximilian wants the elephant to lead his carriage on his triumphal progress northward, until he is forced to admit that his advisers were right who warned him of the fragrant offerings the elephant would lay under his wheels.

The hero of this story, other than the elephant himself, is also an ordinary man: Subhro, the elephant’s mahout or driver. Even when the Archduke changes his name to Fritz (and the elephant’s to Suleiman), he retains his dignity. Arriving in Genoa, “it occurred to him that, all things considered, archdukes, kings and emperors were really nothing more than mahouts mounted on elephants.” True. This is the communist Samarago speaking, but there is nothing vindictive about his egalitarianism; by painting everyone in terms of their common humanity, he elevates them to a level where simple wisdom and practical common sense win out over posturing. The book is full of potential disasters that are averted because some quite ordinary person knew how to say the words that would deflate ego and assuage wounded pride.

Saramago’s other bête noire, organized religion, also comes in for some gentle deflation. When asked if he is a Christian, Subhro replies that he has been baptized and follows the faith, more or less. But he believes the gospels no more than the stories of the Hindu god Ganesh with an elephant’s head; both are metaphors containing much wisdom, but neither holds a monopoly on truth. Approaching Trent, where the Council of clerics is meeting to debate the response of the Catholic Church to Lutheranism, Subhro is asked to participate in the faking of a small miracle outside the church of St. Anthony (another transplanted Portuguese) in Padua. He obliges, and then briefly makes a profitable business on the side selling tufts of holy elephant hair to cure baldness.

But the most charming figure in the story might well be Saramago himself, whose presence as commentator and narrator is never forgotten. There is a scene fairly early in the book when the convoy is temporarily shrouded in a dense mist that makes people imagine things that are not there. Let’s leave it to Saramago to blow away those literal mists as he will blow away so many figurative ones:

“The fact is that the sun, like a vast broom of light, suddenly broke through the mist and swept it away. The landscape revealed itself as it had always been, stones, trees, ravines, and mountains. The three men are no longer there. The mahout opens his mouth to speak, then closes it again. The man who insisted he’d heard the elephant speak began to lose consistency and substance, to shrink, then grow round and transparent as a soap bubble, if the poor-quality soaps of the time were capable of forming the crystalline marvels that someone had the genius to invent, then he suddenly disappeared from view. He went plof and vanished. Onomatopoeia can be so very handy. Imagine if we’d had to provide a detailed description of someone disappearing. It would have taken at least ten pages. Plof.”

(Translated by Margaret Jull Costa.)

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 53 readers
PUBLISHER: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (September 8, 2010)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on José Saramago
EXTRAS: HMH Books on Saramago
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Bibliography:

Other:

]]> /2010/the-elephants-journey-by-jose-saramago/feed/ 1 THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE by Orhan Pamuk /2010/the-museum-of-innocence-by-orhan-pamuk/ /2010/the-museum-of-innocence-by-orhan-pamuk/#comments Thu, 07 Oct 2010 19:35:40 +0000 /?p=12750 Book Quote:

“Happiness means being close to the one you love, that’s all.”

Book Review:

Review by Helen Ditouras  (OCT 7, 2010)

I don’t know why I resisted Orhan Pamuk all of these years, but one thing’s for sure – I now can’t live without him. I remember the critical acclaim that followed Pamuk in 2005 after the release of Snow, but even with a Nobel Prize under his belt, I was hardly swayed. That may have had something to do with my obsessive relationship with Philip Roth during that time – after all, I’m a loyal gal. And this Pamuk guy was not going to take me away from the legendary Zuckermans and Kepeshes of modern Jewish fiction.

This was all before a few months ago when I stumbled across a review of Pamuk’s literary masterpiece, The Museum of Innocence. The premise of the novel immediately had me fixated: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy spends the next eight years of his life…sitting in a living room with girl, her husband, and her parents, watching Turkish serials and the evening news, night after night. Now that’s what hooked me: the utter devotion and sacrifice that boy made just to see his beloved, day after day, for eight torturous years, with hardly any affirmation from his object of affection.

Speaking of objects, what Kemal, our love-struck narrator of this brilliant, 560-page novel does manage to do, is become a collector of sorts. Unable to recapture the love of his beautiful, distant-relation, Fusun, (who incidentally marries another man after severing ties with our narrator), Kemal begins to secretly collect items from Fusun, ranging from an earring, to a cigarette butt. And this collection begins to grow into a private, perpetual museum which Kemal cherishes and worships like a Marian shrine.

If I seem evasive, it’s because I don’t wish to give away too much of this melancholy tale of love and obsession in Turkey, circa 1970s. And how could I, anyway? This novel is a grand accomplishment for Pamuk, who allegedly worked on this project for ten years. Filled with images of modern Istanbul, with references to Turkish film, fashion, and soda pop, each page is a tender, nostalgic homage to a city now utterly transformed. Pamuk’s desire to seize these memories go well beyond the confines of his novel: this year, at some undisclosed date, the official Museum of Innocence will open to the Turkish public in the town of Cukurcuma, where much of the story unfolds. Fans of his novel will have an opportunity to visit the museum, and see first-hand, the very objects that Pamuk meticulously records throughout the book. For a sneak peak of these objects, see this slideshow.

As this review comes to an end, I have a confession to make. I can’t get over The Museum of Innocence. I think about it…all the time. It haunts me – like Wong Kar Wai’s similar magnum opus, the movie In the Mood for Love. Filled with lingering reminiscence, clandestine love, and most importantly, an era now vanished, the two works are almost companion pieces. There is something cinematic about Pamuk’s novel that begins on the front dust jacket and ends on the final page. I remember holding this giant of a book for the first time and being completely enthralled by the image before me: a group of young, Turkish adults, in a 1950s convertible car, all smiling. And I knew at that moment that this image was akin to a Lynchian smoke-screen – these were not happy people on a joyride. As you soon discover within the first chapter, the main characters of this novel are tormented but hopeful, destitute but euphoric, all because of a few moments of bliss that forever mark their lives.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-3-5from 64 readers
PUBLISHER: Vintage; Reprint edition (October 5, 2010)
REVIEWER: Helen Ditouras
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Orphan PamukWikipedia page on Orhan Pamuk
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and ExcerptMore on the physical  Museum of Innocence
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

And our review of:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

]]> /2010/the-museum-of-innocence-by-orhan-pamuk/feed/ 1 THE CHANGELING by Kenzaburo Oe /2010/the-changeling-by-kenzaburo-oe/ /2010/the-changeling-by-kenzaburo-oe/#comments Mon, 16 Aug 2010 20:51:55 +0000 /?p=11166 Book Quote:

“Now forget the dead, forget even the living. Turn your mind only to the unborn.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate (AUG 16, 2010)

Fractal designs, such as used to be popular twenty years ago, have the property that any part of them replicates the whole in miniature. If you zoom in on even the tiniest detail, you can reach an understanding of the entire shape. This analogy occurs to me after reading The Changeling by Kenzaburo Oe, a late work by the Japanese Nobel Laureate, and so far the only thing by him that I have read. Where most novels have a linear narrative behind them, this one reads as a series of one-sided conversations, thoughts about literature and other arts, buried memories, and some bizarre incidents — all generally minor in themselves, but each seemingly endowed with immense hidden significance, each a clue to some overall design that only gradually emerges as the various details replicate and mirror one another.

Despite its abstract content, the book is easy to read and its framework simple. Kogito Choko, a celebrated writer, is listening to some tapes sent him by his brother-in-law Goro Hanawa, once his childhood friend and now a famous film director. At the end of one of the cassettes, Goro remarks “So anyway, that’s it for today — I’m going to head over to the Other Side now. But don’t worry, I’m not going to stop communicating with you.” Immediately after, Goro throws himself out of the window of his high building. Kogito (an obsessive thinker, aptly named by his father from the phrase “cogito ergo sum”) engages in months of conversation with the dead Goro, playing snatches of the tapes, stopping them for his own response, and then continuing to hear his friend’s answer. When his wife suggests he needs to get away, he accepts a guest professorship in Berlin, where Goro had himself lived a few years back.

As an example of Oe’s method, take the chapter in which Kogito is being interviewed on television in connection with the Berlin Film Festival. There is a long section about how he gets to the interview, or almost doesn’t get to it: crossed wires with the person picking him up, confusion at the hotel where this is taking place, description of the technicians setting up the equipment in the hotel ballroom, the physical arrangement of the chairs, backdrop, camera, monitors, all in obsessive detail. And then, without further preamble, Kogito is shown a number of film clips on the monitor: samurai fighting off a peasant army, and a modern game of rugby football. He recognizes it as scenes from a book he had written, entitled Rugby Match 1860. In the novel, he had used the battle and the game as metaphors, but he intrigued by the decision of these filmmakers to film them literally, with an acute feeling for the Japanese atmosphere. He is told that what he has just seen is the only footage from the project so far shot, but the “young filmmakers” have run out of money; would he be willing to concede them the rights for free? Kogito’s translator warns him that he is being ambushed, but he agrees, and the chapter ends.

The core of this chapter, I believe, lies in one of its smallest details, the samurai film clip. Certain aspects of it reflect other images we encounter involving Kogito’s father, who appears to have been something of a philosophical leader of an ultra-right-wing movement opposing the Japanese surrender to the US. Kogito’s own politics, on the other hand, are liberal, so perhaps he is the Changeling of the title? (Or one of them, with Goro.) One begins to see that the whole novel is about change. In the background, there is the reconstruction of Japanese society after defeat. But this is worked out in terms of ideas — translation between languages, translation of one medium into another (writing into film or opera), and perhaps (as the example above would suggest) the handing over of ideas from one generation to another.

The fractal metaphor works on the personal level as well. From what I can gather, this novel reflects themes from every other book that Oe has written, and these in turn reflect the author’s life. His brother-in-law was indeed a famous film director, Juzo Itami, who committed suicide in a similar way. Like the fictional Kogito, Kenzaburo Oe has a son who was born brain-damaged, barely able to communicate in words, but who eventually found success as a composer. All Oe’s novels contain such a character, and the writer has spoken of his aim to give his son a voice denied to him in life. While the composer-son plays a relatively small role here, Oe shifts the relationship back a generation, as Kogito tries to understand the legacy of his own father and the huge changes between the Japan of his time and that of the present. The themes of rebirth and the passing of the torch between generations become clear only at the very end, but after so much mind-play they bring a lovely touch of simple human emotion. (Translated by Deborah Beohm.)

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 5 readers
PUBLISHER: Grove Press; 1 edition (March 16, 2010)
REVIEWER: Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Kenzaburo Oe
EXTRAS: Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: More Japanese writers:Huraki Murakami

Ryu Murakami

Natsuo Kirino

Bibliography:

The Flaming Green Tree Trilogy:

  • Until the Savior Gets Socked (1993)
  • Vacillating (1994)
  • On the Great Day (1995)

Nonfiction:

]]> /2010/the-changeling-by-kenzaburo-oe/feed/ 0 SUMMERTIME by J. M. Coetzee /2010/summertime-by-j-m-coetzee/ /2010/summertime-by-j-m-coetzee/#comments Mon, 01 Feb 2010 03:24:52 +0000 /?p=7594 Book Quote:

“Best to cut yourself free of what you love – cut yourself free and hope the wound heals.”

Book Review:

Review by Bonnie Brody (JAN 31, 2010)

Summertime is the brilliant new book by J. M. Coetzee, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 2003. This book is part novel, part fictional biography, part memoir, part alternative history, and an obituary for a living writer. Its essence is the imagined life of John Coetzee from 1971 – 1977 as gathered by a biographer who may or may not be Coetzee himself. The basis of the biography consists of interviews with a few people who knew the author, and fragments from the author’s journals.

This book is both ambiguous and a page-turner. It is a mystery about the essence of a man or perhaps his imagined self or alter-ego. We see Coetzee through the eyes of female lovers, relatives, colleagues and unrequited loves all interviewed many years after his supposed death. All of these people paint a similar picture of Coetzee as a bland man, socially inept, unassuming, diminished in some emotional capacity, and lacking passion. Is this who Coetzee was or is this a self-deprecatory construct? Is this bland, diminished man the author stripped of his art? Can any artist be viewed separately from his art? Clearly, Coetzee, stripped of his art, is only a cipher. The book weaves interlocking aspects of Coetzee’s personality with ever increasing subtlety. Is the fictional Coetzee the “real” Coetzee’s homunculus or is it a shadow of the real self?

Coetzee lives with his father and both are closed men, emotionally guarded, at times antagonistic towards one another. Coetzee’s father is a disbarred lawyer who now works as a bookkeeper. Coetzee is said to have gotten into trouble in the United Stated during the Vietnam war and was deported back to South Africa. The two men live simple, apparently boring and vacuous lives together. Both have been displaced and are socially isolated.

Coetzee’s first journal entrees speak to his dissatisfaction with living in South Africa. “How to escape the filth: not a new question. An old rat question that will not let go, that leaves its nasty suppurating wound.” He writes of the borderlands, murders followed by denials and how he feels soiled by all this. He has conflicted and complex feelings about the corrupt leadership in Africa and the violence correlative with the new apartheid.

The first person interviewed by the biographer is Julia, a therapist with whom Coetzee had a brief and relatively dispassionate affair. Julia describes Coetzee as “scrawny, he had a beard, he wore horn-rimmed glasses and sandals. He looked out of place, like a bird, one of those flightless birds; or like an abstracted scientist who had wandered by mistake out of his laboratory. There was an air of seediness about him, too, an air of failure.” It is she who seduces Coetzee and she questions her motivations as “he had no sexual presence whatsoever. It was as if he had been sprayed from head to toe with a neutering spray.” Further, he is not a good talker. She perceives John as incapable of love and self-absorbed. “Sex with him lacked all thrill” and had an “autistic quality.” At one point, John brought her a copy of his first published book, Dusklands. She was not impressed with it but “simply surprised that this intermittent lover of mine, this amateur handyman and part-time schoolteacher, had it in him to write a book-length book and, what is more, find a publisher.”

Julia is very surprised at John’s need to write and his belief that books give meaning to life. John wants books to provide him with immortality. Julia is more pragmatic. Rather than continuing to write, she recommends that John find a good wife. She uses her therapeutic background to analyze John’s books which she views as having a recurrent theme of the woman not falling for the man. “My guess, my highly informed guess, is that it reflects his life experience. Women didn’t fall for him – not women in their right senses. They inspected him, they sniffed him, they even tried him out. Then they moved on.” She finds it very odd that a man who is hardly capable of intimacy makes his living writing books about “intimate human experience.”

The biographer interviews John’s cousin Margot about their annual family get togethers. In his family group, John is like a “lost sheep” and his relatives, except for Margot, view him with disdain and disapproval. His family are Afrikaners but, since John has been schooled outside South Africa, he is no longer accepted as one of their own. He is viewed as odd, bookish and stuck up. Margot is puzzled that John has learned Hottentot, a Khoi language, all of which are considered dead languages. John states that he’s “interested in the things we have lost, not the things we have kept.” Margot wonders who John can speak to with these languages. He answers, “the dead . . . who otherwise are cast out into everlasting silence.”

Like Julia, Margot sees John as without male aura. “She cannot think of him as a man.” She considers him a failed man and a failed son, unable to decide what to do with his own life and incapable of caring for his father. ” He doesn’t have plans. He is a Coetzee. Coetzee’s don’t have plans, don’t have ambitions, they only have idle longings.” John longs to be a writer and to set his father up in a home separate from his own. Like Julia, Margot thinks John would be better off having a wife. However, she doesn’t think any woman would have him. Julia and Margot both feel a responsibility for John but are weighed down by his inaccessibility and melancholy.

Further interviews ensue. One is with a woman with whom John had an unrequited love and who detests John to the point that she feels stalked by him. The other two interviews are with his colleagues at a Capetown university. One of these colleagues is male and the other is a woman with whom John had an affair. The woman who despises John talks about how unsuited John is for marriage and describes him “like a man who has spent his life in the priesthood and lost his manhood and become incompetent with women.” She acknowledges that he might have been a decent writer but he still “was not anybody.” At any rate, she did not read his books. With John’s male colleague, similar descriptions of his personality come to light. He’s described as a mediocre teacher, reserved, a misfit, incapable of intimacy, and socially inept. This colleague makes a striking point – – “It seems strange to be doing a biography of a writer while ignoring his writing.”

All of these interviews take place in the background of a changing South Africa and point to Coetzee’s conflicted feelings about the struggles that his country is facing. “He accepted that the liberation struggle was just. The struggle was just but the new South Africa toward which it strove was not utopian enough for him.” He yearned for a “coloured” South Africa where everyone was ethnically the same but again he feels outcast with his Afrikaner heritage and history. His female colleague and lover says, “I think he was happiest in the role of outsider. He was not a joiner.” She talks about John’s Nobel prize and acknowledges that he must have earned it. However, she is not a fan of his writing. “He had no special sensitivity that I could detect, no original insight into the human condition. He was just a man, a man of his time, talented, maybe even gifted, but frankly, not a giant.”

Mr. Coetzee has painted a fictional alter-ego, a self-deprecatory memory, or perhaps a fictional being. Regardless of the historical truth, this is a provocative and extraordinarily important book by one of our greatest living writers. It is about the paradox of art and the artist, about the man who creates great art and who, without his art, is of no great importance. Is it about John Coetzee? In some sense it must be, as he is the author. How much of it is fact? We may never know, but that doesn’t matter, as the book itself is a work of enduring art.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-4-5from 42 readers
PUBLISHER: Viking Adult (December 24, 2009)
REVIEWER: Bonnie Brody
AMAZON PAGE: Summertime
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on J. M. Coetzee
EXTRAS:
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of: Disgrace

Bibliography:

Fictionalize autobiography:

Essays:

]]> /2010/summertime-by-j-m-coetzee/feed/ 2 CAIRO MODERN by Naguib Mahfouz /2009/cairo-modern-by-naguib-mahfouz/ /2009/cairo-modern-by-naguib-mahfouz/#comments Tue, 29 Dec 2009 00:41:58 +0000 /?p=6989 Book Quote:

“The appointment of government officials is rigged, the award of contracts is rigged, and the elections themselves are rigged: so why shouldn’t the choice of a beauty queen also be rigged.”

Book Review:

Review by Mary Whipple (DEC 28, 2009)

Set in the 1930s and published in 1945, Cairo Modern is, by turns, ironic, satirical, farcical, and, ultimately, cynical, as the author creates a morality tale which takes place in a country where life’s most basic guiding principles are still uncertain. World War II has kept the British on the scene as a foreign power, a weak Egyptian monarchy is under siege by reformers, and the army is growing. As the novel opens, four college students, all due to graduate that year, are arguing moral principles, one planning to live his life according to “the principles that God Almighty has decreed,” while others argue in favor of science as the new religion, materialism, social liberation, and even love as guiding principles. None of the students have any respect for their government, which they see as “rich folks and major families.”

Among the students, Mahgub Abd al-Da’im is the poorest, living on a pittance, which is all his father and mother can provide him. His father’s sudden stroke, however, reduces Mahgub’s three pounds a month to only one pound, and he must literally starve himself in order to finish the school year, becoming more and emaciated as time passes. His father, unable to work, has only enough money to survive for one month after Mahgub graduates in May, so finding a job is truly a matter of the whole family’s survival for Mahgub. When Mahgub contacts a former neighbor, Salim Al-Ikhshidi, for help, Al-Ikhshidi lays out the facts of life regarding government jobs like his own—certain people will help him in exchange for a flat fee or a portion of his salary over several years—unless he can find a wife among the daughters of ministers, an impossibility considering Mahgub’s poverty.

Before long, however, Al-Ikhshidi, in consultation with higher-ups, has devised a plan for Mahgub, who is in no position to be selective. If Mahgub will agree to marry the lover of a high-ranked government official and become part of a ménage a trois, all his expenses will be paid and a job will be guaranteed in the ministry where Al-Ikhshidi himself works. Desperate, Mahgub agrees, intending to “find satisfaction in a marriage that was a means, rather than an end.” On his wedding day, he meets the bride—the former girlfriend of one of his closest friends, a young man who had been devastated by her unexplained breaking off of their relationship.

The marriage of Mahgub and Ihsan is filled with the expected complications as Mahgub tries to hide his poverty-stricken past and his betrayal of his college friend, at the same time that he is rising in the government, associating with wealthy and influential friends, and becoming arrogant, all sources of great humor and satire by Mahfouz. Elegant society parties attended by people who “surpassed [Mahgub] in his own cynical principles” reveal Mahfouz’s opinion of this level of society. Mahgub and Ihsan become a perfect couple—“Each of us has sold himself in exchange for status and money.”

As the carefully created charade begins to unwind, the final scenes are worthy of the grandest of farces, and it is easy to imagine this as a period film, with the complications turning Mahgub’s life into a disaster. The Egyptian setting, while important, ultimately becomes less important here than the universal themes and attitudes which the author is satirizing—the naivete of college students, the lure of wealth, the arrogance of power, the pretentions of the newly affluent, the willingness to sacrifice principle for expediency, and, ultimately, the ability of “the clique of most powerful criminals to destroy the weaker ones.” As Mahgub’s friends gather to discuss the latest governmental scandal at the end of the novel, they hark back to their arguments at the novel’s opening, wondering about the role of religion, the definition of evil, the mores of their society, and all the interactions among these. Life is busy for these young men, but tomorrow is another day.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 4 readers
PUBLISHER: Anchor (December 1, 2009)
REVIEWER: Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE: Cairo Modern
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Naguib Mahfouz
EXTRAS: Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read our review of:

Karnak Cafe

Morning and Evening Talk

Bibliography:

* Part of the The Cairo Trilogy (1956-57)

** Three Novels of Ancient Egypt

]]> /2009/cairo-modern-by-naguib-mahfouz/feed/ 0 THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE by Orhan Pamuk /2009/museum-of-innocence-by-orhan-pamuk/ /2009/museum-of-innocence-by-orhan-pamuk/#comments Tue, 15 Dec 2009 00:25:31 +0000 /?p=6810 Book Quote:

“ I would go to the Merhamet Apartments, and, reflecting upon the happy hours Fusun and I had spent there, I would lose myself in daydreams, admiring my slowly growing “collection” with ever renewed wonder. As these objects accumulated, so did the manifest intensity of my love. Sometimes I would see them not as mementos of the blissful hours but as the tangible precious debris of the storm raging in my soul. ”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (DEC 14, 2009)

“Irresponsible, spoiled and bourgeois.” One of the characters in The Musuem of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, uses these labels to describe a segment of Istanbul’s young adults. These same descriptors could specifically apply to 30-year-old Kemal, the novel’s protagonist. Kemal, part of Istanbul’s upper class, spends his time managing a portion of the family business. He has the privilege of an education in America and as the novel opens, is about to be engaged to Sibel, the daughter of another wealthy family in the city. It’s slated to be a marriage between equals.

One day, Sibel’s eye catches a designer purse in a local shopping boutique and later, Kemal decides to buy it as a surprise for his soon-to-be fiancée. It is here that he meets 18-year-old Füsun—a distant cousin who will become the obsession of his life. Over the following weeks, the two often meet at an apartment owned by Kemal’s family, which now lies largely abandoned. Füsun gives up her virginity to Kemal and their lovemaking extends over many lazy afternoons. All this time Füsun is torn knowing that she will eventually lose Kemal to Sibel. Nevertheless she hopes the power of their love will be enough for Kemal to stop his upcoming engagement to Sibel.

That doesn’t happen however and Kemal and Sibel get engaged in a lavish ceremony at the Hilton in Istanbul. Istanbul’s crème de la crème attend and Füsun is crushed. At this point, selfishly, Kemal still believes he can have it all—a beautiful wife in Sibel and a mistress on the side.

Having waited long enough for Kemal to come around, however, Füsun decides to call it quits and leaves him hanging. Totally devastated, Kemal ends up breaking off his engagement to Sibel—but this act turns out to be a tad late. When after many months, Kemal does run into Füsun in one of Istanbul’s poorer neighborhoods, she is married to a struggling screenwriter Feridun. Now Kemal doesn’t know of any way to stay close to Füsun except by offering to finance one of Feridun’s scripts and in doing so, turning Füsun into a star. Day after day, month after month, for seven years, Kemal visits the Keskin family in their tiny apartment. He shares meals with them and lives on the tiniest slivers of hope that Füsun might some day actually be his.

Over the years, Kemal slowly collects small items that form part of a big collection—these are all items touched by Füsun or connected to her in some way. It is hard to write much more about the story without giving it all away but doing so wouldn’t dilute the fun either. For early on in the story, you can see that this just might turn out to be a modern-day version of Laila-Majnu the story of the ill-fated lovers of Arabia.

The Museum of Innocence is more than just a love story however. In its many layers, it explores various aspects of Turkish life and the country’s history. Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk has always used his work to showcase a Turkey caught between tradition and Western values. In his earlier novel, Snow, he used the headscarf as a motif for this struggle with change. Here, too, his characters are caught in the tide. Kemal’s young friends all consider themselves “modern” and alcohol flows freely at their parties. They are even beginning to explore intimacy before marriage. Still it is mostly understood that a woman gives up her virginity only to a man she knows for sure, she will marry. This problem haunts Sibel as she decides whether or not to break off her engagement to her straying fiancé. “Sibel knew full well that no matter how high she held her head, no matter how “European” her friends were in their outlook, this affair would not be seen as a love story if we did not marry. It would become the story of a woman whose honor had been stained,” Kemal recounts.

The change that Turkey has to grapple with can be found in the most unexpected places. For example, towards the beginning of the novel, Kemal’s friend Zaim launches a new soda called Meltem. To attract the urban market, he uses a leggy German model to market the product. After a few years though, as the product loses its cachet with the urban rich, Zaim has to rely on a Turkish film actress who can sell the product to the “provincial masses.” This gradual falling out of Meltem to be replaced by Coke and Pepsi is one change that creeps up slowly but is perhaps indicative of the country’s larger struggles with the impact of globalization.

The Museum of Innocence starts off in the early 70s and the political upheaval of the 70s and 80s simmers in the background. That Kemal chooses not to dwell on this discontent too much shows not just how his obsession with Füsun takes precedent over everything else but how a rich kid like him can afford to live comfortably above it all. “I have no desire to interrupt my story with descriptions of the street clashes between fervent nationalists and fervent communists at that time, except to say what we were witnessing was an extension of the Cold War,” Kemal says.

As the story begins, as Kemal goes out with both Sibel and Füsun, he emerges as a selfish and vain person, someone the reader cannot immediately empathize with. Even at his engagement party, Kemal looks forward to “partaking of all the pleasures of a happy home life with a beautiful, sensible, well-educated woman, and at the same time enjoying the pleasures of an alluring and wild young girl—all this while I was still in my thirties, having scarcely suffered for it, or paid a price.” It is to Pamuk’s credit that as the story goes on, Kemal matures into a tragic character, someone the reader can feel sorry for.

Pamuk’s new novel describes many of the neighborhoods—Beyoglu, Taksim, Tophane, Fatih, Edirnekapi—he visits in his wonderful non-fiction work, Istanbul: Memories and the City. Especially as Kemal visits with the Keskin family night after night for dinner, he makes his way around Istanbul’s poorer neighborhoods and Pamuk beautifully describes these.

Pamuk has always been a fan of well-honed literary devices and here he narrates Kemal’s story through the individual items in his collection of everyday objects stored at the Museum of Innocence. Many a chapter ends with the cataloging of seemingly mundane objects—which nevertheless have some resonance for Kemal. “I have here the clock, and these matchsticks and matchbooks, because the display suggests how I spent the slow ten or fifteen minutes it took me to accept that Füsun was not coming that day,” Pamuk writes in one such instance.

These objects are as disparate as they can get but they are all bound by one unifying thread—they are all touched by Füsun or somehow associated with her. A quince grater, a vast collection of cigarette stubs, a lost earring, a ticket to a movie—together they paint a complete set of memories for the lovelorn Kemal. This endless cataloging of objects can start to wear down on the reader occasionally but Pamuk is skilful enough to know just when to accelerate the pace a tad. Besides, one realizes, love is full of mundane moments mixed in with the sublime.

As Kemal spends endless hours in the Merhamet Apartments with his collection, wallowing in his memories, it becomes obvious that while the objects offer him some measure of relief, they also stifle him in many ways. After all, no collection of objects can really substitute for the warm touch of a loved one. Kemal seeks solace from the fact that even if they might not be the real thing, from their association with his lover, they are enough to offer some kind of daily sustenance.

The Museum of Innocence reminds us that unlike love, which can be ephemeral, objects can be more easily possessed. And, when all else fails, the memories they evoke can be enough to last an anguished lifetime. (Translated by Maureen Freely.)

AMAZON READER RATING: from 64 readers
PUBLISHER: Knopf; 1 edition (October 20, 2009)
REVIEWER: Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK? YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:
EXTRAS:
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:

And our review of:

Bibliography:

Nonfiction:

]]> /2009/museum-of-innocence-by-orhan-pamuk/feed/ 0 MORNING AND EVENING TALK by Naguib Mahfouz /2009/morning-and-evening-talk-by-naguib-mahfouz/ /2009/morning-and-evening-talk-by-naguib-mahfouz/#comments Fri, 07 Aug 2009 21:56:47 +0000 /?p=3833 Book Quote:

“He let his contempt be known from the first day. He wondered how people distinguished by nothing but their possession of weapons could usurp government. Did it mean then that brigands could become kings? What had happened to noble families? How could the rank of pasha be eliminated with the stroke of a pen?…The world had truly turned upside down—the bottom now at the top, the top now at the bottom. Fires of jealousy and rancor raged in his heart. He glowered angrily at the new world glowering at him.”

Book Review:

Reviewed by Mary Whipple (AUG 07, 2009)

Written in 1987, this last entry in the Cairo series by Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz is not a novel in the traditional sense. The book has no beginning, middle, and end, and no real plot. There is no standard chronology or strong characters who develop fully during the action. In a bold experiment, Mahfouz uses the traditional Arab biographical dictionary as his structural model for the book. These dictionaries came into use in the ninth century, recording the lives of influential people from all walks of life in single-paragraph entries.

Creating sixty-seven individual biographies, Mahfouz arranges them according to the Arab alphabetical order of the characters’ first names, each entry being a personal anecdote which adds life to the book and resembles a short story. Incorporating the history of three Cairo families from the Napoleonic Wars through the assassination of Anwar Sadat, Mahfouz recreates Cairo life and culture in an impressionistic collage which, because it is dependent on the alphabetical order of the characters, jumbles the chronology and the generations of families.

The book begins with the death of a child, who was the best friend of his uncle, only a year and a half older, an episode which is recalled again near the end of the book, and as the child’s family is recreated, in random order by alphabet, the novel grows like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond, incorporating different eras and other families over four or five generations. Most of the characters belong to well-off families in Cairo, but the inheritance laws and marriage laws do not benefit women and widows and often leave a family destitute upon the death of the male family leader. This creates a panorama of characters of different economic and educational levels, and different levels of professional success, though they may be within the same generation of the same family.

Since Mahfouz is also incorporating one hundred fifty years of Egyptian history, he is also able to bring history to life by showing how the important influences on Egyptian history affect particular members of these families. Beginning (non-chronologically) with the entrance of Napoleon into Cairo in 1798, Mahfouz shows the progression of political change: the British Occupation from 1882 – 1952; the 1919 Revolution against the British occupation; the Free Officer’s movement, founded by Gamal Abdel Nasser, leading to the July Revolution of 1952; the Tripartite Aggression (the Suez Crisis) of 1956, in which Britain, France, and Israel attacked Egypt for nationalizing the Suez canal; the Six Day War of 1967, in which Israel attacked Egypt; the War of Attrition from 1967 – 70 between Egypt and Israel; and the Yom Kippur War of 1973, in which Egypt and Syria attempted to recapture land lost to Israel in the Six Day War.

As much as the book may be about political change, however, it is at least, if not more, about marriage and its importance in the culture. Throughout these generations, members of the same family intermarry, usually at the level of cousins, to protect inheritance and wealth, but other marriages are also arranged among other “appropriate” families. Some of these marriages are happy, and others are not. Some lead to divorce, while others lead to the taking of additional wives by some of the husbands. Despite the different educational levels between the men and the women, the women are all educated at least at the level of literacy, and as time moves toward the present, the wives are often educated professionals—lawyers or physicians—who may move easily between Egyptian and European cultures.

Though most of the families remain in Cairo, a few of the individual members move to other parts of the world. Some leave for Germany, the United States, France, and Saudi Arabia. Some of the women marry men from Pakistan and Syria. Still, they return often to Cairo, despite their absences for significant periods of time. Among the families in this novel, the religious commitments are casual, not devout, and while some of the characters may be passionately committed to some of the political movements of the day (and others may oppose them just as passionately), none of them are religious extremists.

Readers new to Mahfouz will probably want to start elsewhere for their introduction, perhaps with the Cairo Trilogy or even Akhenaten, written just two years before this novel, both of which are more traditional in chronology and development. An experiment which stretches the bounds of the novel, Morning and Evening Talk was written when Mahfouz was an old man reflecting on history and the meaning of being an Egyptian. The book can be tedious and sometimes frustrating, with characters having similar names making it difficult to remember who is who, and with sixty-seven biographies, some characters also resemble other characters and do not add significant new information to the novel. Still, like an impressionistic or pointillist painting, the individual biographies are colorful and fascinating, and taken together they give a picture of a broad cross section of Egyptian society dealing, over time, with the winds of change.

AMAZON READER RATING: stars-5-0from 1 readers
PUBLISHER: Anchor; Reprint edition (March 10, 2009)
REVIEWER: Mary Whipple
AMAZON PAGE: Morning and Evening Talk
AUTHOR WEBSITE: Wikipedia page on Naguib Mahfouz
EXTRAS: Excerpt

Complete review on Morning and Evening Talk
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION: Read a review of Karnak Cafe

Read a review of Cairo Modern

More set in  Egypt:

The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany

The Winter Vault by Anne Michaels

The Ptolemies by Duncan Sprott

Another interesting narrative approach:

A Dictionary of Magiao by Han Shaogong

Bibliography:

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