One afternoon nine people are in a passport and visa office in a US city–a teenager and her Chinese grandmother, an elderly white couple, an African American with a military past, a young Muslim still struggling with the aftermath of 9/11, a young Indian graduate student. Suddenly, an earthquake traps them together with two workers from this office. There is little water and little food. They argue about what is the best strategy to survive. The two young men almost come to blows. Finally, they agree on some strategies on how to share the meager supplies. After a bit they notice a water leak and that the water is slowly rising. They stack chairs on tables as the water rises higher and higher. As tensions increase, the graduate student suggests they tell one amazing thing from their lives to distract them as the water keeps rising.
The novel then relates each person’s story and the reactions of the others to the stories. Some stories are quite heart wrenching of cruel families, others endearing and joyful. The stories enable them to quit most of the bickering and work on their survival
Although Roy has written numerous books including the Booker Prize winning “The God of Small Things”, this is her first memoir. While the prose is easy to read, the subject matter is often heart wrenching. Roy’s mother, a single parent (divorced) in India when this was totally unacceptable, accomplishes remarkable achievements including the founding of a very successful school while acting what often seems very cruel as a mother to her two children, Arundhati and her brother. The mother’s treatment of Arundhati is so disturbing that when she is just 18 and in her third year of architecture school in Delhi, she quits going home to Kerala to see her mother and quits communicating with her for seven years. Yet, she admits to loving her mother irrationally.
Arundhati becomes involved in documentary film making, sometimes as writer and sometimes as an actor in the films. In addition to her activities as a writer and film maker, she becomes an ardent political activist against rising Hindu nationalism. She provides details of spending time with hunted activists in the jungle, getting arrested, and even tried for writing a piece the judiciary considered insulting. This is an unusually honest and intimate memoir about her family, her mother, and life and politics in India.
By an author whose previous novel won the Booker Prize, this novel was long listed for the most recent Booker Prize. Although 670 pages long, it did not take me as long as I expected to read this because I found I kept going because I wanted to know what was going to occur. It is the tale of two families and two young people, both of whom have studied and lived in the United States. The background city for both families is the Indian city of Allahabad. The two, retired, family patriarchs get together frequently to play chess even though their families are sometimes rivals for status and influence.. The two do not live far apart and all the older family members know each other, including those who have moved away to Delhi and other places. The youngest members do not know each other and accidentally meet on an overnight train. At that point they do not know that their two grandparents had tried to match make them in an arranged marriage. Later, this becomes an embarrassment.
Sonia wants to become a novelist and is attending college at a small liberal arts college in New England where she becomes involved with a famous but cruel artist who becomes obsessed with her and whose influence she has become unable to escape, initially literally and later psychologically. Sunny lives and wants to stay in NYC to escape the overbearing influence of his mother and the violence between her and the two brothers of her deceased husband.
Not wanting to reveal all the complexities of the lives of these two young people who come to love each other but whose lives keep tearing them apart and the challenges they face as they try to make sense of their lives, I will simply say this is a novel I recommend. The reader learns a lot of about Indian culture and its variances, about the huge differences among different parts of India, e.g. Goa and Delhi, but also how universal family and personal struggles really are.
While waiting for a requested book to arrive at the library, I found this one and decided to read it. Because of personal interest I already knew quite a lot of about different types of Islam and some of the history, but this book goes into great detail explaining the founding and history of different groups, e.g. Sunni including different groups within Sunni Islam, Sufi, Shia. Sunni groups vary greatly from more mainstream to the very strict fundamentalism of the Salafis/Wahhabis which is the group controlling Saudi Arabia. The Shia are predominantly in Iran, Iraq, some of Syria, and are minorities in most of the Gulf States as well as Saudi Arabia. Sufis can be found all over the Muslim world, and in the West people often equate them with the whirling dervishes.
A bit of history many in the West do not know is how Mohamed Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism, joined with the ancestor of the current Saudi rulers to conquer and control all of Saudi Arabia in the 1700s. This extreme conservative part of Islam is still the rule and law in Saudi Arabia. It is such a potent force in the world today because Saudi Arabia has spent billions to export their preferred form of Islam across the world. Osama bin Laden belonged to this group of Muslims. They have built mosques and training schools all over the world. Some adherents feel it is their obligation to kill others who do not agree with them including other Muslims. al-Wahab’s book, Kitab al-Tawhid, The Book of Oneness, dominates the global market and promotes this strict form of Islam. It is from this form of Islam that ISIS and other groups have arisen. Most Sunni Muslims in the world do not adhere to this form of Islam. Many people do not realize that the majority of Muslims are not Arabs.
The author also explains the rise in jihadism with recommendations on how to deal with Islamic extremism. Part of this goes into the history of early Islam when for hundreds of years much of the progress in a lot of the world was via Muslim science, mathematics, literature, etc. Part Three details The Rise of the West and the Loss of Muslim Confidence which has led to anger and frustration and a strong sense of humiliation which has lead to much of the extremism occurring now and recently.
Although I do not agree with some of the author’s statements and claims because of what I know from Muslims I do know, I highly recommend this book. I think many people in the West have little to no knowledge regarding Muslims, the history, etc. Islam is the fastest growing religion in the world currently and it behooves people to gain understanding.
In the not too distant future the city of Kolkata in India is besieged with floods and famine. Ma, her elderly father, and two year old daughter are preparing to emigrate to the US where her husband has a good professional job. This is one of the families in the story. The other is a poor family from the Sundarban struggling to stay alive while the oldest son, Boomba, has gone to Kolkata to try to earn enough to save his family.
In the two weeks time of this novel, Boomba, driven to desperation and holding a secret about Ma, breaks into Ma’s house and steals her purse which contains the passports for her, her father, and her child. Both her actions previous to his, her current actions, and Boomba’s lead both down paths they could never have previously dreamed with dire consequences for all.
Due to the flooding and famine, everyone in the city is desperate except for the one billionaire who has stayed. Their desperation leads some to behave in undesirable ways, but the main “lesson” of this novel illustrates how just one action by one person can lead to dire consequences for two entire families and possibly others as well–actions have consequences you can never begin to imagine. Be careful.
The inside of the front cover informs the potential reader that this is a novel about a world steeped in mythology and violence, set in a small town in rural southeastern Mexico. The violence part is extreme, the kind of violence that only sometimes pervades a lot of small, rural, poverty ridden towns everywhere in the world. Written in a style reminiscent of Faulkner (I read a translation from the Spanish), each chapter tells the main story from a different perspective, the story leading up to and the death of the Witch who is found floating in the water of a canal. She is called the Witch but no one for sure seems to know her gender, where she attained the money to build such a huge house, and how she manages to entertain with lavish abandon. People both avoid her and are drawn to her.
There is the grandmother who thinks her wayward grandson can do no wrong while blaming her daughter ( the child’s mother) for everything and anything, there is his friend whom he both loves and hates, their is the poor girl he aids and loves who has been groomed and impregnated by her stepfather and has run away because of it, the engineer who loves boys and men, the woman who makes her living as a fancy prostitute to support her disabled husband and on and on it goes–people harming each other out of anger and frustration with their dire circumstances. For some of the characters, the writing is first person so the reader learns the interworkings of those mentally harmed by their life’s poverty and environment from which there appears to be no escape.
When I was in the eighth grade, I asked my parents for two books for Christmas, “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey”. I am sure even then there was a more modern version but they chose Dryden’s translation which was basically 17th century British. It took me a while, but I read them both even though I often had to resort to using the dictionary to learn all the words I had never seen before. My favorite then and now is “The Iliad”, the story of Achilles and the Trojan War. Since then, I have read more books than I can count about Achilles and the war, including this one and three recently by Pat Barker, which I wrote about on this blog.
David Malouf focuses on two characters, Achilles and Priam and one singular event, Priam’s decision to disguise himself as an ordinary person, hire an ordinary man with an ordinary cart, and go to the Greek camp and beg Achilles for Hector’s body. The only other main character in the book is the cart driver who likes to talk and share. From him Priam sees another view of life and experiences some new simple things, like cooling your feet in a stream, eating ordinary food. Priam suddenly realizes he has missed much of life’s meaning since, as king, he has been shielded from the lives of most people. The book includes Priam’s thoughts, those of the cart driver, and Achilles’. This is not an action thriller novel. It is the story of three people and their thoughts and reactions to this one event.
Aaliya Saleh, 72, lives alone in an apartment in Beirut. Her obsession is reading books and translating books into Arabic. Every January she starts a new translation. Upon completion, she stores the translation in a box and puts it in the spare bedroom. No one ever sees them or reads them. Her family members envy her large apartment because she is divorced and has no children–her brothers think they should have it because they are married and have children. Her mother is a difficult woman and has become stricken with mild dementia. Written in first person, Aaliya relates her life as she sees it. Her impotent husband walks out and she is fine with this because he is a difficult person. Living alone she is able to defy norms and customs and lives as she chooses, a reclusive life for the most part except for her decades long job running a small bookstore. During her telling in the novel she is now retired with some relatively minor aches and pains. She has managed to live as she chooses in spite of the Civil War, repeated bombing by the Israelis, and other difficulties. Toward the end, an unthinkable disaster occurs that threatens what she views as her life’s purpose.
This character’s prodigious reading and knowledge of literature and authors inspired me to look up authors I had not read, learn more about them, and go to the bookstore and library in search of some of the books she discusses in the novel. It also made me think more about how societies see women as unnecessary (or worse) if they fail to comply with societal norms. This novel’s setting may be Beirut, but it could be anywhere in the world in terms of the price women often pay when they defy cultural norms and live as they choose.
In Lebanese, a hakawati is a traditional teller of legends, tales, all sorts of stories. Two basic sets of stories run parallel in this 500 plus page novel. One set is the family story of the narrator whose grandfather was a famous hakawati. This part of the novel portrays life in contemporary Lebanon and the life of the narrator who emigrated to the US to attend UCLA engineering school and stayed in the US. He tells about his family history and his growing up, the various invasions of Israel into Lebanon and how it affected his family and friends, and how his family deals with their blended ethnicities, e.g Druze, Maronite, Orthodox. The novel alternates between this family’s story and traditional Middle Eastern tales of military heroes, jinn, magic, the underworld, etc. That portion of the novel is a sort of more modern One Thousand and One Nights.
My favorite quote from the novel is this: “Uncle Jihad used to say that what happens is of little significance compared with the stories we tell ourselves about what happens. Events matter little, only stories of those events affect us.” I reread this several times and thought about how even in the same family, individuals remember an event totally differently. This novel is also a reminder that even though Lebanon is in a totally different part of the world, families everywhere are more similar than different–the likes and dislikes, the family feuds, the emotions–in this all families remain the same no matter where on Earth.
As I mentioned in an earlier post, I read the second and third book of this trilogy first not realizing it was a trilogy until after I started the second one. Pat Barker won the Booker for another set of historical novels and this appears to be her preferred genre. Most stories about Achilles and the Trojan War focus on the viewpoint of the men fighting. This trilogy focuses on the women in and around Troy who have been captured by the Greeks and have become their slaves.
This novel’s voice is that of Briseis, who was once queen of one of Troy’s neighboring kingdoms before Achilles sacked it and murdered her husband and brothers. She is now Achilles’ slave, a battle prize. She realizes she must adapt in order to survive. She gets caught in a dispute between Agamemnon and Achilles’ with the former demanding to take her away from Achilles. Achilles refuses to fight, the Greeks start to lose, something has to be done or the Trojans will win.
Briseis is just one of thousands of women who are now the slaves of the Greeks. This is not only her story but that of all those other women who are now slaves, prostitutes, nurses, women who lay out the dead. This is their story as well as that of Achilles, Patroclus, and various other Greek men but from the viewpoint of Briseis.
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