Joan, the main character, is an astronomer obsessed with the stars since childhood. She is content with her life as a physics professor until she sees an ad seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space program. While her initial attempt fails, she applies again and succeeds.
In the summer of 1980, she begins her astronaut training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, along with other trainees, including some from the military and others chosen because of their specialist expertise. She is one of those. Some of the top military pilots are nice and some like to make jokes at the expense of women. The women know they won’t all be chosen to go to space. As a consequence one woman in particular becomes excessively competitive. Others help each other and hang out together.
The novel details the rigor of astronaut training both mentally and physically, how trainees behave under stress, and how all the stress makes some people nicer and others increasingly rude. In the midst of all this Joan continues to care for her beloved niece and discovers a love she never dreamed of in her wildest dreams.
This is my first Murakami novel; it will not be my last. It’s fascinating and profound. A 15 year old boy, Kafka, runs away from home. His mother and older sister disappeared when he was four. He does not remember them. His father, a famous sculptor, ignores him. Although they live in the same house, they rarely see each other. After running away, he finds a private (but open to the public) library in another city and is taken in by the two people in charge of the library.
Nakata, another main character who is an elderly man, is not very bright due to a bizarre event that sent him to the hospital in a coma when he was a child. He talks to cats and makes fish and eel fall from the sky like rain. He becomes friends with another principal character, a young truck driver, who helps him out because Nakata reminds him of his grandfather.
The novel portrays the lives of these characters through their actions, dreams, and fantastical events. The unreal becomes real and people learn about their true selves through these events.
This novel surprised me by being a page turner. Once I read through the first couple of chapters, I had to keep going. In Southern California the Salton Sea, once much larger and the home of a thriving resort, now has shrunk and only a few people live there. Not far away lies the Imperial Valley, one of the largest agricultural regions in the US which is close to the Mexican border. This is the setting of the story of the little town of El Valle, the surrounding areas, and the tale of two families, one rich, white landowners, the other Mexican-indigenous. Mal, one of the main characters, has always lived on El Valle, worked hard, tried to forget the disappearance of her sister, and raised two daughters alone. Another local girl goes missing, then a week later her youngest daughter also goes missing. Frantic, she searches for answers, wonders if there is a link, and keeps dreaming of the local, indigenous legend of the horse headed woman, El Siguanaba. Meanwhile readers learn about the long friendship and affair between Mal’s oldest daughter, Griselda, and the son of the valley’s largest, white landowner, Mal’s difficult, disabled mother, her father, and brother’s, one of whom is running for office after going to Stanford, and the youngest brother, Benny, who is now a detective. Not only does this work of fiction combine Latinx and indigenous cultures, it also addresses environmental collapse, family secrets, and the complex relationships between mothers and daughters.
This autobiographical novel was written by a good friend of mine whose own family experienced some of the horrors of the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s. The main character, Hope Winterfield, and her husband make their living as antique dealers in Texas when her elder brother, Robert, a doctor with HIV, convinces them to move with their three daughters to the LA area to help him out. Because their antique business is not doing well and she wants to help her brother, they move, thinking that if it does not work out, they can move back to Texas.
Robert has an ex, Anthony, who is also his business partner, who hates Robert’s new love, the charming, handsome, younger man, Cody. Hope takes the job Robert has offered her, only to discover the dynamics surrounding the job, her brother, friends she has known for years, and many others are nearly overwhelming and that quite often nothing is as it seems. Added to all this is Hope’s difficult mother who often denies the realities of her own life. This is the tale of a family and complicated family dynamics where the main characters have to decide what it most important in life and what they should value the most and fight for.
Translated from French and written by a Senegalese author, this novel takes place during the time of colonialism and the slave trade. In Paris of 1806, a famous botanist, Michel Adanson, is dying. He never has finished the botanical work to which he dedicated his life, and as he lays dying, his last words are the woman’s name “Maram”.
His daughter finds an unpublished memoir hidden in a cabinet. It is the story of his younger life, what happened to him in Africa, all addressed to his daughter so she can understand his story and the meaning of his last word. It is a tale both strange and sad, filled with healers and magic and tragedy. Maram, a fabled revenant, a woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo, was captured and sold into slavery but managed to escape. While working on his quest to find new plants, Adanson hears about this woman and becomes obsessed with finding her. His guide, Ndiak, the son of a chief, accompanies him everywhere and they become friends. This is a story of adventure, romance, and the horrors and cruelty of the slave trade.
Note: The author won the International Booker Prize for his other novel, “At Night All Blood Is Black”. Readers of this will miss several books I am reading because I am a judge for a literary context and cannot discuss what I am reading for the next several weeks.
“What’s an army anywhere but a bunch of state-sanctioned mass shooters funded by our tax dollars. Do the deed as a civilian and you get the chair, do it as a soldier and they’ll pin some tinfoil your chest.”
“To be alive and try to be a decent person, and not turn it into anything big and grand, that’s the hardest thing of all. You think president is hard? Ha. Don’t you see that every president becomes a millionaire after he leaves office? If you can be a nobody, and stand on your own two feet for as long as I have, that’s enough…People don’t know what’s enough. That’s their problem. They think they suffer, but they’re really just bored. They don’t eat enough carrots.”
In a rather ordinary, small, dismal Connecticut town an elderly woman, suffering from dementia, saves a 19 year old boy from committing suicide. She takes him in and this act of kindness transforms both their lives in unexpected ways. While taking care of her, he also finds a job at a local fast food restaurant where his cousin works as well as several others whom many would consider lesser people. They help each other, form tight bonds, and develop unlikely friendships that reveal how caring and empathy can make all the difference in people’s lives.
This novel is touching, sad, and joyful all at once. These are poor ordinary people trying to survive the best way they know how. For many readers it will be a glimpse into the way many people in this country (and, indeed, the world) actually live–poor, struggling to survive, but also kind and caring.
As in Part One, I am only going to provide mostly quotes from the book.
The Rise of the New West:
“The demographic shift west continued with the Cold War. In all past wars, the nation had abruptly turned from military production to peacetime economy, but after WWII, the global tension between capitalism and communism continued to bolster the new war industries. Between 1950 and 1959, defense took up 62% of the federal budget as it expanded 246%, up to $228 billion annually, and much of that money moved west…Eisenhower, and after him, John F. Kennedy, expressed concern about the rising power of what Ike called ‘the military-industrial complex.’
“Westerners and southerners agreed that desegregation, which gave Black Americans benefits paid for by tax dollars, offered prime evidence of a communist conspiracy. In 1958, Welch, the chairman of the National Association of Manufacturers…started the John Birch Society, a secret organization with the goal of stopping the creep of communism…Welch attracted supporters by explaining that the civil rights movement roiling the country was really communism.”
“In the mid-1950s, the new television sets in all those new homes were tuned to Gunsmoke, Rawhide, Bonanza to see hard working white men fighting off evil, seemingly without help from the government…The shows all embraced the myth of the American West where cowboys worked hard, stood for what is right, and protected their women from bad men and Indians…the land unpeopled by anyone of color or women, except as they fit into the larger tale of the individualists.”
“Bozell started from the same point as James Henry Hammond had in South Carolina a century earlier, and for much the same reasons…the Constitution strictly limited the functions of government, and that restrictions on property holders were an infringement on liberty.”
“…a key Republican strategist, Kevin Phillips, identified Nixon’s election as the moment that marked the ending of the New Deal era.”
“…in 1967 men determined to stop the church from embracing rights for people of color and women launched a takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention…to turn religion away from the new ways and back to fundamentalism. These fundamentalist purged moderates, insisted on a literal interpretation of the Bible, barred women from positions of authority, and in 1998 oversaw an addition to the Baptist Faith and Message advising wives to ‘submit…graciously’ to their husbands.
“Milton Friedman explained that if the government stopped worrying about protecting workers and consumers and instead cut taxes and permitted money to accumulate at the top, wealthy people would invest in new businesses…This argument, which echoed precisely what the southern slaveholders had claimed, gained traction in the West, where blaming eastern liberals for the nation’s problems became an article of faith…In the 1970s, a secretive Christian organization know as The Family began to sponsor prayer meetings in businesses, colleges, and government. By the mid-1970s, they were effectively mobilizing white evangelicals as a voting bloc.”
Oligarchy Rides Again:
“When Reagan tapped the 35 year old Michigan Congressman David Stockman to be his Budget Director, Stockman, who had grown up on “Conscience of a Conservative’, set to bring Goldwater’s dream to life…The administration turned to tax cuts. When computer simulations at the Office of Management and Budget showed the proposed tax cuts would not increase revenues but instead would explode the deficit, Stockman simply reprogrammed the computers…To protect the tax cuts that lay at the heart of his vision, Reagan and his team supported…the plan to organize business leaders, evangelicals, and social conservatives into a political juggernaut.”
“Now in control of Congress, Gingrich’s Republicans set the terms of the political debate…In April 1995, an internal memo identified tax cuts as the central principle of Republicanism…and explained why: ‘All reductions in federal spending weaken the left in America….Defunding government is defunding the left.'”
“From the beginning in the 1950s, Movement Conservative leaders had recognized that they could not win over voters with policy, for the activist state they opposed was quite popular. So they shaped their message around vignettes that made a compelling story…leaders stayed in power by deliberately crafting a narrative that harked back to western individualism. The hardworking individual–the cowboy–was endangered by the behemoth state…They invoked the corollary to the American paradox, arguing that equality for women and people of color would destroy the freedom that lay at the heart of democracy.”
“Party operatives had talked of cutting down black voting under a ‘ballot integrity’ initiative in 1986, and they bitterly opposed a 1993 Democratic expansion of voting registration…The Florida legislature took the lead passing a voter ID law to ensure that everyone who voted was a US citizen…the Florida law quickly became a purge of black voters, people presumed to vote Democratic… (this was 1997) This purge paid off in the election of 2000, when George W. Bush of Texas ran against Clinton’s vice president, Al Gore…Gore won the popular vote by more than half a million votes but was four votes short of a win in the Electoral College…the 1998 purge would decide the election.”
What Then Is This America:
“In the 2018 midterm elections, female candidates began to articulate a new vision of the country to replace the old American paradox. They emphasized community and fairness over individualism and the race, class, and gender roles that individualism has always implied. Women and voters of color are helping redefine an America for the twenty-first century…In 1612, English colonists were starving in Virginia…One hundred and seventy-five years later, America’s Founders put that idea into practice in what George Washington called a ‘great experiment’: a government based on the idea that human beings had the right to determine their own fate. Could such a government endure? Our country’s peculiar history has kept the question open.”
The novel fascinated me in so many ways, the style of writing, the subject matter, what I learned about some famous paintings and especially Turner. I will never see works by Turner in the same way as I previously did. Before mostly I noticed the colors, the translucence. I totally missed the details and the violence nearly hidden.
The novel takes place after an ecological collapse in England where first violent floods occurred followed by a devastating drought. Now it has not rained in three years and Penelope, the main character, spends most of her time working as an archivist for the notable collection at a soon to be demolished estate in the English countryside. She has lived here for two decades with her current partner, Aidan, who owns the estate. The disasters have nearly destroyed the once magnificent mansion. Now Penelope and Aidan allow refugees from the disasters to live there with them as they transition to new places and housing until the new buyers demolish the place.
Most of the novel is Penelope’s diary, what she writes about her life present and past. In the midst of this her archivist notes appear as well as descriptions of famous paintings, most of which show women being brutalized in one way or another, e.g. The Abduction of the Sabine Women, 1633-34, Nicholas Poussin. Later in the novel there are segments from the viewpoint of Aidan’s brother, Julian, who previously owned the estate and with whom Penelope experienced a violent and disastrous relationship.
This is a tale of survival, redemption, memory, and art as a means of renewal. I liked this novel so much that I spent time looking up the art the protagonist describes, researching Turner, writing down passages, etc.
While reading the novel “Landscapes” this afternoon, this passage struck me: a man, recently blind, explains, “I rely on my other senses. I get by. But in another way I’m not sure I ever knew where I was headed, not even when I had eyesight, you know what I mean? I doubt anyone really knows where they’re going. But you walk ahead anyways, no?”
This caused me to reflect on a video I saw earlier in the day at Mendez High School where I work for College Match LA. The purpose of the video was to help students address what they will write about in their college essays, how they will write about themselves. It’s called “Essence Objects”. The task is to think about various objects you would put in a box, objects that represent how you see certain things or people, how you think. Here are some examples:
What object reminds you of your mother?
What object represents your favorite piece of music?
What object reminds you of a fear you have?
What object would you choose to illustrate your favorite book?
What object would a friend associate with you?
The list goes on and on, thought provoking questions. I don’t have to write a college essay but I’m going to go over the whole list and think and think and think.
Note: I picked this photo because the objects that make me think of my mother are roses. She had a rose garden in front of the barn on our Missouri farm. All summer when the roses were blooming, she floated roses in a glass bowl on the kitchen table where we ate.
The last two books of hers that I read were set in the more recent times when Salvador Allende and later Pinochet were presidents of Chile. This one dates back to the 1800s and the Chilean Civil War. In 1866 a nun of Irish descent living in San Francisco has a passionate affair with a Chilean aristocrat and becomes pregnant. He abandons her; their daughter becomes the woman in the title of this novel. She is raised by a loving step father, an intellectual teacher from whom she learns to be independent and defy societal norms. At a young age she becomes the writer of short pulp fiction novels using a fake male name. The income from these helps her family live a reasonably good life.
Bored with writing these lucrative little books, she convinces a San Francisco newspaper to hire her as a journalist where she works along with a more seasoned journalist, Eric Whelan. Eventually, the two are sent to Chile to cover the civil war and violence occurring there. She sees this as not only an opportunity to satisfy her adventurous spirit but also an opportunity to find her biological father. She encounters dangers, almost gets killed, and sets off to find herself in the far southern reaches of the Chilean wilderness, learning from the indigenous people who live there how to survive in remote mountains.
Note: One of the places she goes was nearly impossible for non indigenous people to find during the 1800s and many never made it. Today, it is a popular area for hiking, camping, and exploring nature.
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