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.
This book is way more than the maps. It starts with Borders Throughout History going back to ancient times when borders were not clearly defined. Modern borders emerged with modern cartography. The “more detailed the map, the more accurately boundaries can be drawn.” Cultural borders based on religion, language and such rarely align with actual modern borders. Think about places you know and who lives there and the cultural and religious differences. The first maps show Borders in Six Stages delineating the changing borders before 1800 to current borders.
The next set shows Borders and Civilizations–what we often refer to as Western Civilization, Latin American, Orthodox Christian, Islamic, African, Hindu, Sinic, Buddhist, Japanese. This view started with the book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (1996). In many ways this Atlas is also a history book on how various agreements and treaties affect boundary changes. An example is the map of the results of The Sykes-Picot Agreement. It also includes the legacy of the British Empire and how this affected borders over time.
I had not thought much about how even after colonialism, Europe still has some over seas territories, mostly islands over which wars have been fought even though many have never heard of them. The book includes maps and discussion on border disputes in Latin America as well as other parts of the world. There is another section on sea borders and those disputes continue today, e.g. the Arctic which many countries try to claim. And then there is the Persian Gulf with detailed illustrations of the Strait of Hormuz and all the islands there. I had forgotten that Bahrain is an island until I read this book.
There are too many sections to detail here, but the maps of the South China Sea and the disputes involving China there are very illustrative of just how complex claims by countries can be.
When I think of walls, I think of Berlin Wall and its fall and the disputes in US over walls between US and Mexico, but there are others in the world–Morocco, the Koreas. There is a map illustrating all the places where walls exist today. There are more than 70 closed borders protected by a wall or fence. The number of barriers is rising. The book not only lists them but how high they are in meters. Then so many disputed borders still exist that the maps and lists take up two pages of lists.
There is so much interesting information in this book that I cannot recommend it enough for anyone interested in history and current affairs.
This is a murder mystery set in Lafayette, Louisiana. The main character is an older Black lady who spends Sunday afternoons after church at the local coffee shop helping gamblers with their sports betting. While there, she learns that her best friend, a nun, has been found dead in her apartment. The police insist it is a suicide, but Glory knows that cannot be and sets out to find out what really occurred and who the murderer is. Her daughter, a classy NYC attorney, is visiting. She is very reluctant to join her mother’s quest but eventually agrees to help. Together they begin to investigate. After Glory is bitten by a pit bull under scary circumstances. receives a package full of bees which sting her and send her to the hospital, and other unexpected occurrences, Glory’s daughter realizes her mother may be correct about this being a murder, not a suicide. Their investigation leads them to the trailer house of a priestess, the grounds of a notorious drug dealer, etc.
Glory has grown up during segregation and is used to being overlooked and dismissed. Although she is in many ways a very traditional woman with traditional values, she is determined to do right by her friend. This leads her to places she would never n normally go and encounter people she would normally avoid.
I rarely read murder mysteries but since this is a book in a book club to which I belong, I read it anyway. It was an enjoyable read, sometimes funny, and certainly a glimpse into bayou culture about which I know little. I think there is a sequel so might look for it since I enjoyed Glory’s spunk and determination.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Fascinated since childhood by the lands surrounding the Mediterranean Sea, I accidentally discovered this book when I had to go to a new LA County library because the one near me is closed for renovations. The book describes in detail the life of Mohammed and the controversy that ensued after his death as to who should be in charge. This dispute ultimately caused the division into Sunni and Shia which continues today. It also covers other less well known groups such as Ismailis, a missionary sect of Shia Islam, and Sufiis, Muslim mystics.
I found the book extremely informative in describing how a small group of Arabs managed to conquer most of the land south of the Mediterranean and the lands to the east and eventually convert Central Asia and a substantial portion of West Africa. It also details the reign of many of the more famous caliphs, wars among various Muslim ruling families, and the building of Alhambra. While most of Europe was still feudal and in the Dark Ages, many Muslim cities such as Cairo and Damascus were centers of scientific research and learning as well as the arts and literature. Unlike what many continue to believe, Muslim women often held jobs and sometimes positions of considerable power and had legal guarantees to property and inheritance when women in Europe did not.
writingontherim 