“Thinking back, he is surprised at the quantity of time he spent in daydreams. His private fictions have sustained him from one day to the next, even as the world itself has become nonsense. It never occurred to him to consider that the greatest portion of his spirit might have been poured into this creation. But it is not a despairing conclusion. His daydreams were a life’s endeavor of sorts, and now, when everything else is cast off, they are still at hand.”

Book Review:

Review by Roger Brunyate  (Mar 6, 2011)

How do you write about failure?

Early in this book, its protagonist, Ulrich, a young Bulgarian man studying chemistry in Berlin, is walking down a corridor after Albert Einstein, who drops a sheaf of papers. When he picks them up and runs after the great man, Einstein thanks him by saying “I would be nothing without you.” Much later in life, after his own career has been a failure by all outward measures, and life has almost been crushed out of him by Soviet austerity, Ulrich comes to learn more about Einstein and his callousness to some of those closest to him, and realizes that genius feeds off the failure of others. “The people close to him were blocked up and cut off. Their lives were subdued, and they were prevented from doing what they hoped to do. […] How many stopped-up men and women does it take to produce one Einstein?” Ulrich realizes that when Einstein spoke those words, “it was not success he saw written in my face. He saw, rather, that I would never accomplish anything at all.”

I suspect that this insight might have been the genesis of this daring novel. How might it have been for a non-Einstein, a scientist forced to abandon his studies, a musician without a violin, a human being neutered by a grey regime? What might he have had to offer the world other than dreams? Seeing that Dasgupta gives his novel a musical title, and calls its two parts “movements,” I also suspect that his musical inspiration might have been Bela Bartok’s “Two Portraits for Violin and Orchestra” of 1908. This is a two-movement composition reworking the same material in two contrasted ways, the first elegiac and slow, and the second frenetic and distorted. This is exactly the structure of Dasgupta’s novel: a first part about a life lived in shades of grey, followed by a second dream-life in strident color.

The concept is daring because it deals with mediocrity and failure in a strikingly bipolar way. But Dasgupta’s ideas require him to generate enough momentum to keep one reading through the Slavic gloom of Ulrich’s deterioration in the first part and present the second as a convincing and relevant reworking of the material. Unfortunately, in order to emphasize the contrast between the two “movements,” the author shoots himself in the foot. The second part, despite a certain flashy vulgarity, is not uninteresting, but you have to get through the first part in order to reach it — 160 pages devoid of music, poetry, or inner beauty. For instance, we first see Ulrich as a young boy fascinated with music. His mother buys him a violin, but when his father returns from a business trip some months later, he throws the instrument into the fire. This happens on page 18, and from then on there is virtually no music in the first part of the book — not even in the writing, which is dry and declarative almost throughout: this happened; then that happened; then something else.

Ulrich transfers his interests to chemistry. He gets to study in Berlin, but has to abandon his degree when his parents lose their money. Back in Sofia, he works as a clerk, then as the manager of a chemical factory charged with impossible goals in each successive Five Year Plan. His romantic life fizzles out in failure. Now retired, blind, poor, and nearing 100, all he has are the daydreams which form his legacy. Or so we are told. The first part ends with the quotation I offer above, but this is the first we hear of any daydreams at all. By depriving Ulrich of any inner life in the first part, Dasgupta sets up his contrast all right, but he deprives the reader also.

Ulrich’s daydreams make up the second movement, and they restore at least some of the music that had vanished so completely earlier. But it is a savage music, a grotesque scherzo. It begins almost as a series of short stories: a near-feral boy playing on an old fiddle in an abandoned factory, the beautiful but impoverished daughter of a former princess who marries a Georgian gangster and takes on much of his ruthlessness, and an American record producer credited with the invention of world music as a popular genre. Eventually, these strands interweave. Dasgupta has gifts as a storyteller, and there is a color, an energy, a wild poetry here that the first part lacks. But he is a self-conscious writer who now seems determined to bring in all the hues he had previously denied. His moments of ecstasy go over the top, and there is too much reliance on drugs, alcohol, and sex. None of these characters is entirely likeable, and this second part also reflects the wanton hardness, squandering of resources, and disregard for humanity that made the first part so distasteful. Yet at least this preserves an element of truth in the fun-house mirror, in a way a more sentimental ending might not.

Nonetheless, this novel about a mediocrity is by no means mediocre itself. It is an original concept that might work for other readers. So let’s end with Ulrich passing his legacy to Boris, the dream alter-ego whose violin playing has rocketed him to stardom: “I have a lot of failure to give away. Look at my music: a fantastic failure. A triumphant failure. That’s the legacy I leave behind. If I could make an Einstein with my failed science, think what will come of my music!”

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 25 readers
PUBLISHER:	Houghton Mifflin Harcourt; 1 edition (February 1, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Roger Brunyate
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Rana Dasgupta
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More music melded with literature: An Unfinished Score by Elise Blackwell

Bibliography:

• Tokyo Cancelled (2005)
• Solo (2009; February 2011 in US)  Commonwealth Prize

“This is the kind of story the Jade Emperor himself enjoys hearing from me, one where the focus, indeed the whole point of the tale, is the grand heroic choice, the cinematic action. He is always telling me to hurry up, to cut out the needless detail, to do some editing and present him with the stripped-down version. But life is not like that. The fight to ensure the survival of love is more likely to find its toughest battles amid small snarls about changing nappies or midnight feedings or plain old boredom; it is more likely to focus on little betrayals or hurtful slips of the tongue, to feature the day-to-day heroism of pretending not to be aware of a thousand little annoying habits. In short, love is hard work, and the fairytale ending of our story is only the beginning of the hard work of keeping love alive.”

Book Review:

Review by Jill I. Shtulman  (DEC 7, 2010)

If this book doesn’t attain the high readership it deserves, there is no justice. It’s quite simply one of the most lavishly imagined, masterfully researched, exquisitely written contemporary novels I’ve read. And if that sounds as if I’m gushing…well, it’s probably because I am.

Under Fishbone Clouds is written by debut author Sam Meekings, who grew up near the south coast of England and currently resides in China. It is absolutely remarkable that the author is under 30; the book is full of gravitas and maturity that is normally the result of decades of living and writing. Interwoven seamlessly within this mesmerizing narrative is Chinese folklore and myths – absorbingly told – in addition to insights into Chinese distant and recent past history.

This novel is narrated by the Kitchen God, a common household deity who is challenged by the more powerful Jade Emperor to fathom the inner workings of the human heart. He chooses to follow a couple who, like him and his own mythical wife, were caught in the whirlwind of history: Jinyi and his wife Yuying. The tale begins in 1942 when the two fall in love, in spite of their different backgrounds and their arranged marriage, and continues to their doddering old age as the new millennium takes hold.

At the onset, Yuying follows her husband across war-torn China to her husband’s rustic and impoverished home. Bad times ensue, and when they eventually make their way back to the city, the Cultural Revolution has begun; everything now belongs to the state and all social strata are forced to undergo hard labor in the factories and the fields.

Although the Mao Cultural Revolution years have been well documented, Under Fishbone Clouds takes you up close and personal to these dehumanizing times; it is a rare reader who will not wince at the no-holds-barred look at a country whose rigid ideology trumps personal relationships and freedoms. Business owners, entrepreneurs, artists, teachers, intellectuals – all are labeled “bourgeois” and re-educated in the harshest possible ways. In a particularly harrowing scene, a man has a heart attack and is ordered to “crawl” to comfort and stop being a slacker. The depths to which Jinyi and Yuying are forced to descend to – separately, without each other’s comfort – is heartbreaking.

Yuying reflects, “Life isn’t meant for perfect things. I knew it when we were told to put making steel above common sense; I knew it when we were told to starve patriotically because the noble peasants had been huddling around homemade furnaces instead of growing food in the fields; I knew it when the whole country began to rise up to cut down the past. I felt in the pit of my stomach all the time; I just never knew what it was until now.”

Yet despite the intensity of the Cultural Revolution years, Under Fishbone Clouds is not a book about tragedy; at its heart (and a big heart it is), it’s a family saga about the universal and enduring power of love. There is sheer magic and lyricism in the love that Jinyi and Yuying share as they navigate answers that are often impenetrable.

And, Meekings suggests, by love we are transfigured. Jinyi realizes toward the end of his life: “Love also changes shape. It is no longer slim, lithe, nervous and sweaty palmed. It was no longer sleepless, heavy, a stone weighing deep within the chest. It was now warm, slow, soft, a tarry old blanket huddled under in the dark. It was the last embers of a promise made decades before, still glowing red though the flames had petered down.”

Using Jinyi as a catalyst, the Kitchen God comes to the realization that people don’t just carry on with their lives because they must; the secret of life is love, atonement, and retribution. He puzzles out the human heart as he follows this couple through all kinds of trials: deep anguish, death of children, famine and forced labor, class warfare, drastic social and culture changes, isolation and homelessness, the loss of dignity and health.

Under Fishbone Clouds is one of those rare books that I would confidently recommend to anybody: those with an interest in the history of the East, those who are enthralled with mythology and folklore, those who hold out for the best of prose, and those who are simply seeking an old-fashioned story where love prevails. I predict an amazing future for this very talented author.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 23 readers
PUBLISHER:	Thomas Dunne Books; First Edition edition (December 7, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Jill I. Shtulman
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Living Scotsman interview with Sam Meekings
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	More novels based on Mao Cultural Revolution: A Dictionary of Maqiao by Han Shaogong Becoming Madam Mao by Anchee Min And a current novel that it can be compared to: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

Bibliography:

• Under Fishbone Clouds (2009; December 2010 in US)

Hailu was incredulous. “Do these children think they can take down a monarchy of three thousand years? Do they think all they have to do is raise a few signs and the world will change?” He was counting his prayer beads one by one. “That their ideas can stop bullets?”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (JAN 12, 2010)

Emperor Haile Selassie ruled Ethiopia for more than four decades. Stories about him are legendary even today. Debut author Maaza Mengiste’s book Beneath The Lion’s Gaze is set during a period of history when the emperor is just on his way out; it takes place over a few years around 1974.

This period was one of the most turbulent times in the country’s history. A student uprising to protest the emperor’s neglect of the famine-ravaged countryside soon got taken over by a “committee” – the Derg—fueled by the Soviet Union. Communism succeeded in replacing monarchy and the brutality only got worse.

Like authors before her, Mengiste tries to reduce the scale of the canvas by detailing the lives of one family during the course of the country’s events. The patriarch, Doctor Hailu, practices at a local hospital and as the book opens, is desperately hanging on to his wife, Selam, who has suffered severe cardiac arrest. Selam is not his only worry however. Hailu’s younger son, Dawit, is a hotheaded revolutionary. As he sees the Derg take over and realizes that this was not the new government he wanted as replacement for the emperor, he takes to anti-government activities with a renewed passion. These subversive activities will put the entire family—including older brother Yonas, his wife Sara, and their young daughter, Tizita—in harm’s way. There are a whole host of related characters—a shop-owner, neighbors and even Dawit’s friend, Mickey, who was once a sympathizer to the students’ cause but has now become a part of the government’s killing machine.

Maaza Mengiste portrays the full and gory range of human brutality in her writing. There’s plenty of violence and torture here—even to make the toughest reader flinch. Towards the end though, the brutality seems like an endless detailing of events and the reader might get tired of (or worse, inured to) the many incidents of oppression.

This might be mainly because of the one problem in the book—the characters just never seem to grow over the pages and time. Practically every one of them—Hailu the father, Dawit the revolutionary, Yonas the sensible older son—seems static. With a rare exception, the way the book’s characters start out at the beginning is pretty much how they end. Since there isn’t much character growth, even if Mengiste has created people the reader can empathize with, it’s easy to look upon them as mere props. And therein lies the problem. When you’re trying to narrate a country’s horrific history through the eyes of one family, you have to make that family organic and malleable. While they’re witnesses to history (and yes, even participants), Mengiste stops short of detailing the lingering effect history doubtless will have on all these family members we care about.

The “lions” imagery doesn’t seem to work too well either—Incidentally, emperor Selassie was spoken of as so strong and courageous (The Lion of Judah) that even lions bowed to him. Later in the book, Dawit takes on the mantle of the revolutionary lion but the metaphor is not fully articulated or integrated neatly into the plot.

Where Mengiste does succeed however, is in creating an absorbing history lesson—one the reader will not soon forget. Maaza Mengiste has taken on important themes and subject material in her debut novel and given that, Beneath The Lion’s Gaze is a commendable debut effort.

Mengiste joins a growing and talented set of writers from the African continent. It is not hard to imagine that this gifted writer’s voice will grow only stronger with time—and will yet roar.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 22 readers
PUBLISHER:	W. W. Norton & Company (January 11, 2010)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Maaza Mengiste
EXTRAS:	Reading Guide and Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Also set in Ethiopia: Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese More in Africa: A River Called Time by Mia Couto A Blade of Grass by Lewis DeSoto

Bibliography:

• Beneath the Lion’s Gaze (January 2010)