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.
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.
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.
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.
This award winning author has a writing style all his own–both serious and very funny. How anyone can make serious topics so entertainingly funny is a unique gift. The setting of the first is the island of Lesbos when masses of Syrian and other refugees are landing and many NGOs go there to help the refugees. Mina Simpson is a Lebanese American doctor who goes on a two week trip there to help a friend who works for an NGO. Mina is a trans woman who has been rejected by all her Lebanese family except one brother with whom she is very close. He goes there to meet her. This is also the story of a refugee family, the mother of whom is dying from cancer, her small children, her husband, and the NGO people and others who do everything to help this family.
The second is his most recent novel and tells the life story of a philosophy teacher in Beirut. It starts in Beirut in 2023 then goes back to the Covid pandemic and the banking collapse in Lebanon from 2001 to 2021. Then it skips back to his childhood in 1960 to 1975, the Lebanese Civil War in 1975, and later to the port explosion that destroyed much of Beirut. This novel is Lebanese history from the viewpoint of this main character. We learn all about his mother, her best friend who seems to be some kind on international criminal gang leader, some of his students, classmates, and others. While much of it relates horrors of living in dire circumstances, it is also very funny. I found myself frequently laughing.
Note: I enjoyed these two books so much that I intend to read other novels by this author.
After getting started with the first one, I realized the other was a sequel. Later, I learned this is a trilogy but the library did not have the first book of it. This British author won the Booker Prize for another historical trilogy, “The Regeneration Trilogy.” These two books are obviously about the Trojan War. Although “The Women of Troy” begins with Achilles’ son stuck in the Trojan horse, young (16), scared and concerned about how he will live up to his father’s name, most of the book occurs after the Greeks have won the war, Troy is destroyed, most of the Trojan men and boys, including infants, have been killed and the Greeks have built a village below what is left of Troy because they cannot go home. The constant gale winds make it impossible for their fleet of ships to travel. They have been stuck there for years, have become restive, often violent, bored. The women of Troy, even the princesses and other noble women are now slaves to Greek leaders. Most of the book is told from the viewpoint of several women including, Briseis, who once belonged to Achilles and is pregnant with his child but now married to the leader Acinus. Cassandra, the murdered Trojan king’s daughter, has been forced to live with Agamemnon, She has vowed revenge and has prophesied than both of them will die once they reach his Greek kingdom. This novel centers on what life is like for these Trojan women who are the spoils of war, living as slaves in the Greek camp.
“The Voyage Home” centers on the trip from Troy back to Mycenae and the immediate aftermath of their arrival home. It is mostly told from the viewpoint of Ritsa, a healer who has been assigned to watch over Cassandra even though she belongs as a slave to another person, a doctor. Because of her assignment to Cassandra and healing abilities, she has higher status than many others. Part of the story is also told from the viewpoint of Clytemnestra, Agamemnon’s wife, the queen who has been in charge of Mycenae during his ten year absence. For readers who know many of the different myths surrounding her, this novel has a totally different take. It is from the viewpoint of a woman still devastated by the death of her daughter with Agamemnon whom he killed because he was told the gods would give him and his soldiers a good wind to get to Troy if he sacrificed her. He deceived Clytemnestra to achieve this sacrifice and she has never recovered from this loss.
If you enjoy Greek mythes and the different retellings of them and want to experience a different perspective, mostly told from the viewpoint of female characters, you will enjoy these books. I read both in just a few day; I became so interested.
Another intriguing novel by an author who has won both the Pulitzer and the National Book Award. Initially the four main characters do not seem to have any interactions with each other. 12 year old Evie’s life is changed forever when her father, the inventor of the first aqualung, makes her submerge in a pool to prove it works. She becomes one of the world’s most famous divers and oceanographers. Ina, an artist, grew up in US naval bases all over the South Pacific and eventually finds herself at a university in Illinois. Rafi, a genius black child, is pushed by his dad to apply to a private Jesuit high school where he meets Todd, a rich kid whose whose family provides scholarships to the school. The two become best friends in spite of different interests. Rafi loves literature and Todd loves computers. They bond over a thousands of years old Chinese game with which they become obsessed. They become roommates at the same university where Ina is a student. The three become best friends.
Decades later all these lives become intertwined on an island in the South Pacific–Makatea in French Polynesia, an island where the harvesting of giant phosphorus deposits nearly ruined it while furnishing the rest of the world with fuel to make planets grows faster and better and feed the world. Because of Evie’s obsession with the sea, I learned enormous amounts about the ocean and the varied animals that live there, some of which I had never heard of before. Because of Todd’s obsession with computers and his invention of an AI game, I learned a lot about how gaming works and how people become addicted. For Rafi, the agony and anger of often being the one left out, the one seen as the smart Black kid, and the only one in many circumstances affect how he views the world and himself and where life eventually takes him. From his character I learned new things about literature and how books and writing affect people and their relationships.
I could not stop reading this book. Years ago, when it first came out, I read the author’s novel, “The Overstay”. While the topics and characters are totally different, in some ways this novel reminded me of that story, of how our lives are often intertwined in all sorts of ways we never expected.
Neftali Ricardo Reyes Basoalto, a country boy who grew up in a remote, rainy, forested area in southern Chile, an area called Araucania, an indigenous name, became Pablo Neruda, a name he created so he could publish poetry without his father’s knowledge. His father and mother, who died less than a month after his birth, originally came from the wine country of central Chile. His father became a conductor for a ballast train in this southern region. His descriptions of his childhood are of a shy boy who loved nature in all its forms and books. Later, he wrote letters to girls for his friends. Yet, he says he wrote his first poem when he had barely learned to read. Overcome with emotion, he wrote a poem to his stepmother, the only mother he knew. When he showed it to his father, his father asked to know what he had copied it from.
Later, he moves to Santiago to attend university, always poor, always wearing black, always carrying books. He joins a Student Federation and becomes acquainted with other young poets. He writes, “I saw a refuge in poetry with the intensity of someone timid.” After he struggled paying for the printing of his first book, he wrote, “…the writer’s task…must be a personal effort for the benefit of all.”
He wins a literary prize at school, his books are popular, and he finds himself acquiring a job at a Chilean consul in Rangoon but to get there he and a friend end up in France and Portugal, then Japan, then Singapore, before finally arriving at his destination. Thus, began his life as a consul official in places all over the world, including Spain just before and at the beginning of Franco’s rise to power.
After witnessing so much poverty, so many conflicts benefiting the rich, he becomes an avid supporter of the Chilean Communist Party–a form of communism unlike what most think of when they think of communism. The communism he and his friends support includes working on behalf of the poor, the common laborer, the disenfranchised against the wealthy elite who controlled most Latin American countries during his lifetime and in many cases still do.
He states, “I want to live in a world where beings are only human with no other title but that, without worrying their heads about rules, a word, a label…I want the great majority, the only majority, everyone, to be able to speak out, read, listen, thrive…I have taken a road because I believe that road leads us all to a lasting brotherhood…an inexhaustible goodness…”
Later, he chose to live at Isla Negra, a sort of hideout especially in winter where he could write. Then he returned to Chile. He helped his friend Salvatore Allende campaign for the presidency of Chile. After Allende became president, he appointed Neruda to be ambassador to France. In 1971, Neruda won the Nobel Prize. In 1972, the US blockaded Chile and Neruda returned and completed the final edit of his memoirs. He was welcomed back with a ceremony at the National Stadium in Santiago with a huge crowd in attendance. In 1973, a military coup, supported by the US, overturned the government and assassinated Allende. Less than one month later, Neruda died. Shortly thereafter, news spread worldwide that his two houses in different parts of Chile had been ransacked and vandalized by the new government and its forces.
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