"The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"

 OK, so I’ll just say it: I wasn’t that impressed.  People seem to love this book (it won the Pulitzer, among other accolades), so I’ve been asking myself why I didn’t.  Maybe it’s just that it’s the first fiction I’ve read since finishing In Search of Lost Time.  That is such an amazing book that maybe any book coming right after it is at an automatic disadvantage.  In Search of Lost Time is beautifully written, addresses almost every facet of human life, and has characters so well-developed you probably know them better than you know your own friends.  Anything else is bound to be a disappointment.

But I don’t think that’s the only reason that I didn’t love Oscar Wao.  I know people love the “voice” of the narrator, and at times I really enjoyed it and of course it fit.  The book is made to sound as if the narrator, a Dominican-American, is talking to you and telling you the story.  There’s a lot of Spanish sprinkled in and it’s made to sound the way most people talk: not always in complete sentences.  But sometimes I just wanted proper English!  Yes, I know, I’m a hater.  More importantly, though, there’s little to no poetry in the telling of this story.  Again, not surprising since most people don’t talk that way.  But when I read a serious book I want poetry.  I want beauty.  I want to be swept off my feet.  None of that here. 

Diaz uses what seems to be an increasingly common approach in modern lit: he bounces back and forth telling the stories of multiple generations of one family.  I’ve seen that work wonderfully in some books (Behind the Scenes at the Museum is the first that comes to mind).  But there just seemed to be something missing here.  It didn’t quite all come together.  Maybe he tried to do too much in not enough space.  Many of the older generations seemed under-developed.  It was like he was telling their story just for the sake of having that “multi-generational” sense to the book.  I would have preferred one story satisfactorily developed.  Even the main story, Oscar’s story, ended somewhat abruptly.  It’s one thing to have an unpredictable denouement, it’s another to have an ending that comes out of nowhere and seems to bear no relation to the rest of the novel.  The ending here felt like the latter to me.

Was it satisfying simply as entertainment?  More so.  The narrator has a good sense of humor.  Oscar is a sci-fi/fantasy nerd, and as a very amateur “genre” fan myself I appreciated the frequent references to genre works.  The Lord of the Rings makes many appearances – I love The Lord of the Rings, so I thought that was fun.  I certainly missed a lot of the more obscure sci-fi/fantasy references, but I still enjoyed the ones I did get.

The most interesting aspect of this book to me was the crash course on Dominican history.  Sadly, I knew almost nothing about the 20^th century happenings in this island nation.  Diaz describes the resident dictator, Trujillo, as one of the most brutal in recent history and Wikipedia supports this, describing his reign as featuring “absolute repression and the copious use of murder, torture, and terrorist methods against the opposition.”  At one point Diaz mentions the U.S. occupation of the Dominican Republic from 1916-1924.  He then sarcastically notes, don’t worry, in another generation your children won’t know about the U.S. occupation of Iraq.  I’m not sure how true that is, but I did feel foolish for not knowing about a nearly 10-year occupation by the U.S.  Oh well, read and learn.  And in terms of learning about Dominican history, this book is instructive.

Reading back over this post I feel like I’ve been mostly critical.  I did somewhat enjoy the book, but I just can’t seem to find much positive to say.  Can any other readers help me out here?  What am I missing?

"Women Hold up Half the Sky"

When we moved to Denver a few months ago, one of the things I left behind in Chicago was the book club that I started over three years ago.  Tragic.  I tried to go cold turkey, but I just couldn’t handle it.  So the ladies were kind enough to keep me on the email list so I could keep up with what they’re reading.  One of the recent books was Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide.

This book discusses the many ways that women are mistreated around the world, from sexual slavery to domestic violence, rape as a weapon of war, etc.  It’s mostly things you already know about in a general sense, but seeing it all collected in one place is very powerful.  Each chapter in the book describes a problem, tells individual women’s stories to illustrate that problem, and then presents solutions.  As the authors point out, it is those individual stories that really touch us – we humans need to see another human suffering to truly understand a problem.  Statistics and numbers make us numb and leave us feeling powerless.  But the stories in this book are raw and you simply can’t ignore them.

The stories are incredibly depressing and it’s easy to come away from it feeling that men are pretty much evil.  Take this quote for example: “Women aged fifteen through forty-four are more likely to be maimed or die from male violence than from cancer, malaria, traffic accidents, and war combined.”  But as the authors point out, women also play a big role in the oppression of other women.  They run brothels, initiate female genital mutilation, beat and kill their daughters, and even participate as soldiers in gang rapes.  And women raised in these cultures buy into the violence.  One story in the book describes a woman who came to them for help because her husband and his family were beating her ruthlessly.  It finally came out that she was angry that they were beating her because she always did what she was told; but of course, if a wife did not do as she was told, her husband would be perfectly entitled to beat her.

As I read I was often reminded of the pro bono clients that I helped at my old job.  One in particular stood out.  She had been forced to undergo FGM at the age of twelve and was then forced into a marriage against her will.  She was her husband’s fourth wife and when she refused to sleep with him he beat and raped her repeatedly and kept her prisoner in his home.  She was finally able to escape and flee to the US, where we got her asylum.  Her story illustrates the previous point: her mother and two village women were the ones who performed the FGM.  And as a UNICEF Report makes clear, in many places where FGM is common it is the women who believe in it and carry on the tradition.

I was impressed that this book is, on the whole, very even-handed.  There is the occasional jab at conservatives, but those jabs are often warranted.  And there are criticisms of the left as well.  The authors often describe occurrences of the law of unintended consequences – when the West tries to help and only succeeds in creating new problems.  They also focus a lot on the value of private aid and non-centralized efforts.  I, of course, thought this quote was a gem: “Capitalism, it turns out, can achieve what charity and good intentions sometimes cannot.”

That quote is in reference to microcredit, one of the best tools for helping women worldwide.  (Speaking of microcredit, one of my friends from the old job recently quit said job and moved with his wife to Nepal, where she is a Kiva fellow.  How amazing!  They’re blogging about their experience at www.thekathmanduo.com.  You should check it out.)  Why is microcredit aimed at women?  Basically, because women are better.  “Several studies suggest that when women gain control over spending, less family money is devoted to instant gratification and more for education and starting small businesses.”  Men spend the family money on alcohol, tobacco, prostitutes and other unhelpful things.  Women spend it on good food, medicine and education.  The book is full of stories of women who received a small loan and used that loan to change their lives.  Typically, their husbands become less domineering because the women now have economic power, their children have better health and education outcomes, and the women are just happier.  The truly amazing part is how small those loans are – these women’s lives can be changed for what you might spend on dinner and movie.  I’ve usually donated to Heifer International in the past (which is based on a similar idea), but I think I’ll try sponsoring a microloan next.

In her book Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, Jane Smiley argues that one of the key questions that literature tries to answer is “the question of what to do with women.”  She’s mainly discussing western literature and, with some exceptions (Marquis du Sade’s Justine, for example), the answer typically does not involve outright violence.  But much of the rest of the world is not even asking that question – they know what to do with women and it isn’t pretty.  Thanks to Half the Sky I now have a deeper understanding of that problem.  And in the spirit of the book, here are some websites that everyone should visit:

www.globalgiving.org

www.kiva.org

www.givology.com

www.womenforwomen.org

www.halftheskymovement.org/get-involved

(On a related note, I'm very sad to hear the accusation that Greg Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea contains lies and that his charity is not well run.  That was one of our earliest book club books and it was truly inspiring.  These claims will likely hurt giving to other charities as well.  This is exactly why people are hesitant to give - they worry that their money is not being used wisely and that claims of how it helps are exaggerated or fabricated.  On the other hand, I can absolutely understand his point that the villagers have a different sense of time and so would not necessarily remember the year he went there.  I had a pro bono client from a remote African village who literally could not tell me the years her children were born.  When speaking her native language, all dates were in English - the native language simply did not have that concept of time.  I'll be watching to see what eventually comes of these claims.  And either way, it raises the important point: research the charities you give to before you give.)

I Would Tell Him to Shrug

OK, so I’m already deviating from my stated purpose on my second post – Atlas Shrugged is not a book I just recently read.  But as the movie comes out today (after 50 years of failed attempts) it seemed like a good topic.  I’ve read Atlas Shrugged three times – as a child, in college, and about five years ago.  Who reads Atlas Shrugged as a child?, you may ask.  Good question.  Here’s the story: my father was trying to convince my older, teenage, sister to read it and she refused. (Not surprising.  He also tried to get her to read the encyclopedia as he had done as a child.  She refused again.)  I decided that I would make my daddy happy and read the book myself.  Yes, that’s the kind of child I was.  I obviously didn’t understand the book completely at that age, but people to whom I’ve told that story have been known to say, “Wow, that explains so much.”

Atlas Shrugged gets a bad rap as not really being serious literature.  Cynically, I would say that’s because people who disagree with the political message want to degrade the book in every way possible.  On the other hand, I do agree that it’s not of the same literary quality as, say, In Search of Lost Time.  Atlas Shrugged is as much political manifesto/philosophical discourse as it is novel, and that inevitably leads to some of the art being sacrificed to the political/philosophical message.  But there certainly is beauty in the book.  Ayn Rand knows how to express an idea and she does it with her own unique cadence and poetry.  Another common detraction relates to the long speeches, most particularly Galt’s approximately 50-page speech toward the end of the book.  This is Rand using a character to expound her entire philosophy of life in one place in her novel.  (This speech, by the way, took her two years to write.)  Sure, it’s not super realistic.  But it’s not intended to be.  Rand was a romantic – she didn’t want her characters to sound conversational, she wanted them to sound heroic.  And after just finishing a book in which the author spent several hundred pages describing one short afternoon party, it doesn’t seem overly long to me.

Whether it’s high art or not, there’s no denying that people love it.  In a survey asking people to name their favorite books, Atlas Shrugged was in the top ten.  And it was considered the second most influential book in another survey.  Of course, the number one book on both lists was the Bible.  Considering that Rand was a staunch atheist and clearly advances that idea in the book, this doesn’t say much about the internal consistency of most Americans.  But nonetheless, it obviously resonates with people.  Mere popularity doesn’t mean that a book is actually good (see, e.g., Dan Brown), but it does show how far her influence has stretched.

People who disagree with Rand are afraid of that influence and they try to diminish her power.  A recent New Yorker article compared The Fountainhead to Mein Kampf in terms of both books' ability to influence “susceptible” minds.  Wow.  Similarly, a friend in college once said to me, “How can you like Ayn Rand, she was a Nazi.”  I responded, “She most definitely was not.  She hated the Nazis as much as she hated the communists – to her they were all the same, collectivists.  What makes you think that?”  “Oh, my teacher told me that.”  She had never read anything by Rand and she believed the word of her teacher.  I wonder if the teacher had ever read Rand, either.  How many people have a skewed view of her based on faulty information?  People assume she was cold-hearted, but she had a wonderful, long marriage and she believed that the most important things in life are love and art.  When her husband died she said that, if she believed in the afterlife, she would kill herself immediately to rejoin him there.  In fact, she did die soon after him, having lost the most important thing in life.

Rand’s objectivism has greatly influenced my political thought and I would say I agree with almost all of what she has to say.  Rand despised the religious right just as much as she despised the left in this country.  Here’s a great quote to that effect:

“The battle of morality was fought between those who claimed that your life belongs to God and those who claimed that it belongs to your neighbors--between those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of ghosts in heaven and those who preached that the good is self-sacrifice for the sake of incompetents on earth. And no one came to say that your life belongs to you and the good is to live it.”

Rand specifically disavowed tacking her philosophy to a specific political party, but most people agree it accords most closely with libertarianism.  Rand would have balked at saying there was any non-selfish motivation behind her philosophy, but almost every libertarian I know (myself included) believes that a libertarian approach will raise the quality of life of every person, even, and maybe most especially, the poorest among us.  Although that is a side effect, the moral grounding of Rand’s philosophy is inalienable individual rights and the idea that every person has a right to realize the fruits of his labors and may not be deprived of such against his will. I can’t think of a better moral principle on which to base my politics.

Can Time Lost be Found?

Marcel Proust’s seven-volume, 4000+ page masterpiece is, as the title reveals, an essay on Time.  The first volume and the last volume deal most directly with Time, while the middle volumes serve as the background needed to understand Marcel’s final reclaiming of Time at the end of the book.  The episode of the madeleine, which occurs in the first volume, is a pivotal moment in the novel.  In this episode, Marcel as an older man dips a madeleine in tea and takes a bite of it.  He is instantaneously transported back to a moment from his childhood where he had a similar experience.  But it is not just that the memory is called to mind.  His entire awareness of the present moment is obscured by all aspects of that past moment returning to him.  He is literally transported back to a moment of Time that had, until then, been Lost.

As I watch my baby girl grow and change every day, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about time; the way it crawls and races, squeezes out in small drops and rushes past in a flood, and the fact that I don’t want to miss any of this time with her.  “It goes by so fast.”  I swear there must be an international meeting of all parents of older children where they are instructed to give this advice to parents of young babies.  How else to explain that every single parent uses this exact phrase when they see you with your little one?  I know, I know.  This time is precious, cherish it while it lasts, it will be over before you know it.  I get it.  But do I really?  Can we ever really get it?  Can we understand the speed with which time goes as we’re living each individual day?  I always remember a conversation I had with my father as I was finishing college.  “It went so fast,” I told him.  “Just wait until you wake up one day and look in the mirror and you’re 50 and you still feel 20 and you don’t know how you got here.”  Thanks for the pick-me-up, dad.  But as Marcel discovers at the end of “In Search of Lost Time,” we may only see the truth in retrospect. 

And even if we receive this advice and try to honor it, what can we do?  I try to practice mindfulness and awareness of the present moment, so as not to lose time without truly living it.  But how often have I come to the end of a day spent in chores, habits and routines and discovered that it has gone before I even knew it.  And if time only speeds up as we age, how to stop that “Wait, I’m 50” moment from happening?

In the last volume of In Search of Lost Time Marcel attends a party in Paris after a long absence.  At first, he believes it is a fancy dress party and that all of the guests have put on disguises of old age because he recognizes no one.  Then he realizes that everyone he used to know is old now.  And, more brutally, he realizes that he, too, is old.  It is at this same party that he has finally found Lost Time.  The episode of the madeleine from the first volume is revisited and he experiences other epiphanies as well.  And though he had experienced such things before, it is only now, as an old man, that he finally understands.  This is the only way to find Lost Time – you cannot go there of your own volition –  Time must overtake you, sweep you away, and leave you, finally, with a sense of fleeting completeness.

The title of this work is sometimes translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past.  That title seems wholly inadequate – things past can be remembered, but that is not what Proust describes.  Remembrance is something we do – the regaining of Lost Time is something that happens to us.  We may try to remember to make it happen more often, but it doesn’t work that way.  We must cherish each moment of Lost Time that we regain, because it will not happen very often and it will only be when we least expect it.

Near the end of the novel Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, the mother of the family is blind and dying.  She asks her son to read aloud to her her diaries from when she was a young woman.  He knows that she’s looking for something, but he doesn’t know what.  Finally he reads a passage where she describes experiencing a moment of pure happiness and joy.  A moment that she vows to hold on to and to keep with her always.  He sees his mother calm and she tells him he can stop reading the diaries now.  She has found her moment of Lost Time and she can die in peace.  We should all have at least one moment of pure joy that we can hold on to – one moment of Lost Time that we can find again at the end.

(Obviously there is much, much more to say about In Search of Lost Time but this seemed like enough to be getting on with.  I may reflect on other themes, such as love, art, suffering, social status, homosexuality, politics, patriotism, war, etc, in future posts.)