The Future, this year’s Canada Reads winner, at times reads like poetry. It’s written by Catherine Leroux and translated from the French by Susan Ouriou. This is especially impressive because it’s a translation. The beautiful lyrical language is what carries The Future. But in terms of plot and characters it leaves a lot to be desired.
The story takes place in an alternate version of history, in which Detroit hasn’t been ceded to the Americans. It’s a dilapidated city run by the French, and called Fort Détroit. Groups of children who have lost their families or fled their homes live in camps in one of its parks, Parc Rouge. There’s no adult supervision and the children have their child-leaders. They fight each other, look out for one another, gather food, struggle and survive.
Gloria, a woman who’s come to Fort Détroit in search of her two granddaughters, and answers to the death of their mother, her daughter, is not able to find either, and decides to venture into the park. Gradually some painful details are unearthed, but some hope and love also make an appearance and grow.
Both Leroux and Ouriou are masters of language. A description of an abandoned house’s kitchen reads, “Gloria opens the door to the pantry. A space meant for abundance, designed for generosity. Gloria breathes in the scent of brown sugar and mustard that clings out of sheer nostalgia to the flaking paint, because other than calcified stains and insect wings in the corners, these shelves have been bare for decades…On the table shadows cast by a sudden sunbeam striking the fan transform into stunning reflections. One escapes, climbs the wall and attacks the wallpaper like the flame from a lighter.”
Leroux, who in one of her interviews says she’s sensitive to dialects and how language changes depending on location, has invented a different dialect of French which Ouriou has skillfully rendered into a dialect of English. This language is used mainly in the dialogues among the children. The narrative is always in the mesmerizing prose.
Local folklore, fantasy and magic realism are used in the book. These make the book entertaining. One of the children lives in the trees and somehow flies around. There’s a stray pit bull who appears at the exact time when her help is needed and saves the day. A river suddenly starts bubbling and flowing. Despite environmental degradation, nature rejuvenates and yields crops that haven’t been planted. Houses have a way of renewing themselves.
But the plot isn’t always coherent. The motivation of certain characters isn’t clear. The characters are not very well-developed. The children, despite their telling nicknames such as Terror, Lego, Wolfpop, Bleach, at times seem interchangeable.
Although grief, guilt, isolation and fear are part of the themes, there’s also hope, help, friendship and renewal. “She will live again in that house. She will learn to live with the crucible of their transgression. In the clouded rooms she will recognize the walls and cracks, ceiling and windows. Years of fear and guilt will be overcome by years of restitution.”
If you enjoy savoring good language, The Future is worth your time.
Dr. Peter Attia’s Outlive, is the mother of all books on longevity and health. He talks about the history and practice of medicine, various illnesses, their causes and treatments, metabolism and its irregularities, diet, exercise, rest, the importance of looking after your health, both physical and emotional, from a young age in order to live long and well.
Attia starts his book by saying he found it challenging to present the results of his expansive research in an accessible way to readers who are not scientifically or medically trained.
This challenge is evident throughout the book. Although Outlive is a treasure trove of information and advice on increasing both life span (how long we live) and health span (how healthy we are in the final decades of our lives), at times it gets too technical about biology and chemistry, proteins and sugars, genetics and metabolism, etc.
Despite that, there’s a lot to be learned from Outlive. Attia develops his book systematically by starting with historical advances in medicine.
He calls the medicine practiced until the 18th century Medicine 1.0. He calls the medicine based on the scientific method, that came up with antibiotics and vaccination and is practiced now, Medicine 2.0. But he argues that although Medicine 2.0 is effective in stopping large number of deaths from communicable diseases (fast death), it is not effective in treating chronic diseases (slow death).
He calls the major chronic diseases of our times the “four horsemen”. These are: cardiovascular disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and type 2 diabetes. He devotes a chapter to each of these horsemen, what medicine knows about them and how far it still has to go.
Attia says Medicine 2.0 waits for the person to get sick and treats the symptoms, not the causes. But by the time we get the symptoms of the four horsemen, it’s often too late to treat them. So, he argues, in the age of chronic disease we need a new approach, which he dubs Medicine 3.0, that focuses on prevention, starting as early in life as possible.
This involves regular visits to the doctor when you’re healthy, regular tests that look for elements not included in routine blood tests and tweaking of every individual’s lifestyle according to the results of their tests. It requires discipline, perseverance and money. Even if you have the first two, cost is still an issue. Insurance companies don’t cover the costs of doctor visits or tests when the person is not sick.
In order to live the last decades of your life in better health Attia offers extensive advice, based on wide-ranging research and personal experience, in four main areas:
Exercise, “The most powerful longevity drug”, with three goals: cardiovascular fitness, muscle building, and stability
Nutrition: right nutritional biochemistry, eating pattern, amount and time for you
Sleep: strategies for good quality and quantity of sleep
Emotional health, which demands the same discipline and amount of work and financial resources as physical health
All of the above only scratches the surface of Outlive. Although Attia sometimes gets bogged down by his own athletic leanings, training and scientific minutiae, he also offers a wide perspective. For example in the chapter “The Crisis of Abundance: Can Our Ancient Genes Cope with Our Modern Diet?” he looks at the big picture of our civilization, how and why our eating habits have evolved and how they counter the basic design and needs of our bodies.
Everything considered, Outlive is a worthwhile read. It will change your views on old age, medicine and life.
Alasdair Gray’s Poor Things is an extremely unusual, imaginative, funky and funny novel to be read with a grain of salt. The author claims the first part is based on “Episodes from the early life of Archibald McCandless, M.D. Scottish Public Health Officer”, and the second part is “A letter about the book to a grand- or great-grandchild by ‘Victoria’ McCandless M.D.”
Both the narrators of the first and second parts and the author himself, are unreliable. Hence the tongue in cheek playfulness of the whole macabre story.
The first part is about Bella Baxter, a Scottish pregnant woman who commits suicide by throwing herself in the river. Dr. Godwin Baxter salvages the body, and transplants the dead fetus’s brain into Bella’s head. With the help of some Frankenstein-style electrical shocks Bella comes back to life as a creature with the brain of a newborn infant, housed in the body of a young woman.
What ensues, as Bella takes quick giant steps in learning, is the adventurous life of an intellectually curious, morally uninhibited, and sexually voracious young woman who is loved and financially supported by her creator, Godwin Baxter, (aka God) is engaged to his colleague, Archibald McCandless (aka Candle) and elopes with God’s lawyer, Duncan Wedderburn (aka Wedder). Their travels take them to Europe, Africa and Asia. En route Bella meets with interesting and opinionated people, from whom she learns about class divides and politics.
After driving her “weary old Wedder” both physically and financially into the ground, Bella continues solo on her journey for a while before returning home. She writes about all her adventures in detail to God, who dutifully reads them to Candle, who in turn, narrates them to us, the readers.
On her return to Scotland, interesting, and might I add, very cleverly written, – courtroom drama style – developments occur that lead to the second part of the book, “A letter from Victoria McCandless M.D. to her eldest surviving descendant in 1974 correcting what she claims are errors in ‘Episodes from the early life of Archibald McCandless, M.D. Scottish Public Health Officer’ by her late husband”.
The second part negates the first part and presents a totally different version of Bella Baxter’s story, with credible objections and rational causes for the intentional misrepresentations made in the first part by Archibald McCandless.
The book is illustrated with pictures from the book, Gray’s Anatomy, and sketches by Alisdair Gray who was an artist as well as a writer. But he claims the sketches are from nineteenth century engravings 😊
Gray explores social themes, such as gender inequity, sexuality, oppression and poverty with his biting sarcasm. About her upbringing Bella says, “Mother had taught me to be a working man’s domestic slave; the nuns taught me to be a rich man’s domestic toy. When they sent me back Mother was dead and I could speak French, dance, play the piano, move like a lady and discuss events as Conservative newspapers reported them for the nuns thought husbands might prefer wives who knew some things about the world.”
Of the medical practice at the end of the 19th century God, a doctor, opines, “The smooth bedside manner we cultivate is seldom more than a cheap anesthetic to make our patients as passive as the corpses we train upon.” And, “The public hospitals are places where doctors learn how to get money off the rich by practicing on the poor.” About his own dad, also a doctor, he says, “He had very little interest in people, except as surgical cases.”
When Bella asks a friend she met in her travels to change the topic to a happy one, his answer is, “We could talk of the radiant future of the human race a century hence when science trade and fraternal democracy will have abolished disease, war and poverty, and everyone will live in a hygienic apartment block with a free clinic in the basement run by a good German dentist. But I would feel lost in such a future.”
In the Introduction to the book Gray lists a number of historical facts, echoing events in the book, about McCandless, his wife, Godwyn Baxter, Duncan Wedderburn and others, that happened between 1879 and 1886.
At the end of the book there are 40 pages of endnotes, including pictures, under the heading, “Notes Critical and Historical”. Given the general tone of the book, and an erratum note about one of the illustrations of the book, I wouldn’t bet on the accuracy of either the intro or the notes.
Having said that, it not only doesn’t take away one iota from the rollicking entertainment that is Poor Things, it adds to it.
Remarkably Bright Creatures is a warm and fuzzy mystery. Contradiction in terms, you say? Not if you’re Shelby Van Pelt and can pull it off. I enjoyed the book because it’s warm and fuzzy, it’s witty, original and quirky. I also enjoyed it because its main protagonist is a 70- year-old woman. There are very few books, movies or series about people over 70. Remarkably Bright Creatures is one of the very few. Besides, it treats its protagonist with respect, without stereotyping or pidgeon-holing her.
Tova Sullivan, 70, has recently lost her husband of over 45 years. The couple’s only son, Erik, disappeared about thirty years ago when he was eighteen, and was never found. The police concluded that he had committed suicide, although his parents disagreed because he was a happy and thriving teenager.
At this stage in her life Tova works a part-time job at nights as the cleaner of an aquarium in Sowell Bay. Although her friends try their best to convince her not to, – she doesn’t need the money, and she’s too old to be on her feet and do physical labor – Tova likes to keep busy. It takes her mind off her loneliness, grief and obsession with the mystery of her son’s disappearance.
At her job she befriends Marcellus, the remarkably bright Pacific octopus, who is an expert at escaping his tank, wandering around the aquarium and collecting coins, earrings and other objects visitors drop in the halls. Marcellus understands human speech, is observant and notices and figures out a lot of things that humans don’t, or can’t be bothered to.
The second storyline is about Cameron, a thirty-year-old ne’er-do-well, whom his mother abandoned when he was 9, and who’s never met his father. Although remarkably bright in some ways, Cameron can never hold down a job or a relationship. He travels from his native California to Sowell Bay in search of his father. When Tova injures her foot, Cameron is hired as the night cleaner and meets Marcellus.
Some chapters are narrated by Marcellus, the most lovable and smart character of the book, who has keen observations about humans and their weird behaviour.
“Humans are the only species who subvert truth for their own entertainment. They call them jokes. Sometimes puns.”
“Why can humans not use their millions of words to simply tell one another what they desire?”
Shelby Van Pelt adds a number of other characters to the mix. Among them are Tova’s gossiping friends, the store owner who has a crush on Tova, Cameron’s love interests and his aunt who raised him. All characters are lovable and kind, and Van Pelt does a great job portraying both their capabilities and idiosyncrasies convincingly. The tone is humorous and light, and the mystery leads the reader by the nose.
Through casual conversations and remarks, gradual revelations are made about the past, but the main catalyst and hero of the day is Marcellus, who despite his limited physical abilities is able to help his friend. “Secrets are everywhere. Some humans are crammed full of them. How do they not explode? It seems to be a hallmark of the human species: abysmal communication skills.”
Although unrealistic and far-fetched in some respects, Remarkably Bright Creatures truthfully portrays the issues the elderly face in the final stages of their lives. But despite its serious themes it is an entertaining, funny and feel-good page-turner and a pleasure to read.
I think I know why Study for Obedience won the Giller Prize this year. Its writing style is unique, powerful and beguiling. I read it and appreciated its author, Sarah Bernstein’s skill in her distinctive, deliberate and oppressive use of language, but to say I enjoyed it won’t be true.
The narrator is a young woman, who is trained to see the sole purpose of her life as obediently serving her family members. She is summoned to a distant northern country by her older brother to attend to his household affairs after he separates from his wife. She does as she’s told. She takes care of everything, from cooking and cleaning to helping him bathe and dress. She listens to him talk about his problems and obediently follows his orders, which often micromanage her life. “My brother knew how to interpret, to impute, to notate, knew in other words how to wield power.”
When the brother goes away on business, strange things start happening in the village below. Animals die, dogs get pregnant, crops go bad, and the woman senses that the inhabitants of the village hold her responsible for the mishaps.
There are no names in the book. The woman, the brother, people in the village, the village, the language and the country remain nameless. The narrator doesn’t speak the language of her new country, so she can only surmise that the villagers blame/hate her, or the woman with the pregnant dog yelling at her is saying the narrator’s dog is the one that impregnated her dog.
Five to ten line sentences and five to six page paragraphs are common in the book. Most of these are the narrator’s observations and inner thoughts on identity, guilt, abuse and the human condition. They are the expressions of a semi-deranged mind of a woman who for weeks on end doesn’t talk to anyone. On identity she recalls, “Each morning I composed myself, as perhaps others all along the suburban streets composed themselves too, before the bedroom mirror and descended the stairs in the skin of a sister. “
On guilt and the human condition she states, “Every single one of us on this ruined earth exhibited a perfect obedience to our local forces of gravity, daily choosing, the path of least resistance, which while entirely and understandably human was at the same time the most barbaric, the most abominable course of action. So listen. I am not blameless. I played my part.”
There’s no dialogue. The narrator is unreliable, the plot sparse and illogical. The ending is abrupt and inconsistent. But the tone is haunting and the language spellbinding. Bernstein says she writes by sound rather than sense. Her dedication at the beginning of the book reads, “For my pops, Nat Bernstein, who taught me to love the sound of the words.”
Although there are parallels between the content of the book and Milgram’s experiment by the same name, I don’t know if Bernstein intended the reader to look up the connection. In the 1960s Stanley Milgram, an American psychologist did an experiment at Yale University in which he asked the participants to administer electric shocks to people they didn’t know, and gradually increase the strength of the shock. Although the participants felt sad, guilty, agitated or distressed during the experiment, they still continued to yield to the authority and obediently deliver the shocks.
Is the brother in the story a Milgram? “He took me under his wing. I became his pupil … he made me understand the necessity of temperance and silence. I had made an essential error when organizing my consciousness early on in life, my brother explained, and this was by entertaining the idea that it was reasonable for me to form my own judgements about the world, about the people in it. It was not an uncommon error, my brother went on, but it was a conviction particularly unwarranted and also deep-seated in my case. It would not be easy to remedy, no, it would be my life’s work to reorient all my desires in the service of another, that was the most I should expect to achieve.”
Don’t expect to find answers to any of the questions the book raises. It’s a laborious read, with exquisitely manipulative language.
In the past couple of months I read two books written by female authors about women who defied the social norms of their time. Even if they didn’t manage to break the glass ceiling, they bypassed it.
The first book, The Personal Librarian by Marie Benedict and Victoria Christopher Murray is based on the life of Belle da Costa Greene, a historical figure who lived and worked in early to mid-twentieth century in New York. Belle was the daughter of Richard Theodore Greener, the first black graduate of Harvard University, an activist and lawyer.
At the urging of her mother, Belle takes advantage of her light complexion, changes her name from Belle Marion Greener to Belle da Costa Green and pretends to be of Portuguese ancestry.
Belle, who fell in love with fine arts and old manuscripts under the influence of her dad, grows up to become an expert in the field. When J.P. Morgan is looking to hire a librarian for his personal library, Belle, a young and petite woman, manages to snag the position from many older, more experienced male competitors.
Under the tutelage of her mother, who encourages all her light-skinned children to pass as white, and trains Belle systematically in how to handle delicate situations when her experience, credentials or ancestry are questioned, Belle manages to maneuver the course of her career. She gradually acquires new skills and insights of her own on how to deal with the demanding and capricious J.P. Morgan, and his acrimonious daughter. Belle becomes an expert both in spotting, finding, and authenticating ancient manuscripts, and in bidding on them in auctions, and negotiating sales contracts. So much so that her boss trusts her with huge sums of his money to acquire manuscripts and art for his personal Pierpont Morgan library. Belle does this while being the only woman in a sea of men, and being extra cautious not to accidentally give away her secret of being black.
The storyline is linear and the writing devoid of any humor. The book mainly concerns itself with Belle’s fear of her true identity being revealed, and thus is a tense read. Through her meteoric success as J.P. Morgan’s personal librarian, she gets many promotions and is able to provide many necessities and luxuries for her family. However, she knows how very racist Morgan is and if he finds out she’s black he will fire her with no second thought. Not only will she lose her job, but also she will not be able to find another one, because no one will knowingly hire a black woman for any decent job. Thus her family will lose their high lifestyle.
This fear forces her to sign off on the prospect of marriage, because her children might betray her ancestry. It also forces her to develop various coping mechanisms when Morgan pressures her to attend his family parties, concerts and balls. She also cultivates her patience to deal with Morgan when he is extra stressed and extra capricious, and coddling skills when he needs to be comforted. She is such a resourceful and capable woman that even living under these circumstances she manages to have a forbidden affair with someone who has his own secrets to guard.
What I found more interesting than the fictitious book based on a remarkable historical character was the relationship between its two co-authors, discussed at the end of the book. When Marie Benedict, a white lawyer turned novelist, had the idea to write A Personal Librarian, she felt she would benefit from a black woman’s perspective, in character development, racist social attitudes and language of the time. So she approached Victoria Christopher Murray, a black writer, regarding co-writing the book. And “the rest is history” as they say. The two women formed a lasting deep bond, learned from each other, and discovered a lot about their subject.
The Personal Librarian is a historical fiction about an amazing woman who defies the norms of her day and age to become one of the most powerful women of her time.
The second book I read, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, is also about a woman defying the stereotypes of her time. But whereas Belle is a historical character, Elizabeth is ficticious. While The Personal Librarian is a tense read, Lessons in Chemistry is light and funny. And while Belle lies all the time in order to succeed, Elizabeth is a compulsive truth-teller sometimes to her own detriment.
The story is about Elizabeth Zott, a PhD Cnadidate in chemistry at the UCLA in 1950s, who is practically kicked out of the program because she stabs her advisor with a pencil while he was sexually assaulting her. The police doesn’t believe her story. Afterall the advisor is male and a professor, wherease she “just” a girl.
Later, while working at the Hastings Institute she meets and falls in love with Calvin Evans, a genius and a famous Nobel Prize nominated chemist. A genius daughter is born of their union.
Hastings kicks Elizabeth out because she becomes pregnant out of wedlock. As a last resort she agrees to be the chef on a cooking show. Despite the recommendations and demands of her bosses to wear sexy clothes and fix cocktails at the end of the show, Elizabeth wears trousers or drab dresses. “She looked like a cross between a hotel maid and a bomb-squad expert,” doesn’t fix cocktails and mixes a lot of explanations on the chemistry of ingredients and why and how they interact with each other. This makes her show a hit. She makes women feel intelligent and empowered to learn and do things other than housekeeping. Elizabeth continues to defy the sexist norms of the society, like she’s impervious to them.
There are many secondary characters in Lessons in Chemistry who help or hinder Elizabeth’s trajectory in life. The genius of Garmus is the extreme qualities she convincingly and humorously injects into them. She’s got super-dumb people and super-smart animals. Of the lecherous and abusive husband of Elizabeth’s friend, Harriet, she writes, “Like most stupid people he wasn’t smart enough to know just how stupid he was.”
My favorite by a long shot was Six-Thirty, Elizabeth’s dog, who picks up her has a vocabulary of over 800 words, to whom Elizabeth reads literature all the time, and who picks up her 5-year-old daughter from school every day. Garmus gives the dog human-like abilities and thoughts. It’s absolutely endearing how Six-Thirty refers to Elizabeth’s baby in her mom’s womb as “the creature”, and how he cares for her. “The dog pressed his head against her thigh begging her not to go any further.” Or how he keeps a running commentary on human behaviour: “Humans were strange Six-Thirty thought. The way they constantly battled dirt when they were above ground, but after death willingly entombed themselves in it. At the funeral he couldn’t believe the amount of dirt needed to cover…coffin and when he saw the size of the shovel he’d wondered if he should offer the help of his back legs to cover the hole.”
Bonnie Garmus, who worked as a copywriter for years, is a master of packing punches with language. She’s concise, candid and witty. In an interview with The Guardian she says she was inspired to write the book after a particularly frustrating meeting at the advertising company she worked for, in which she gave a presentation to male colleagues, had her ideas appropriated by one of them, and was put down as a woman to boot. She wrote the first chapter of the book on that very same day!
Lessons in Chemistry is so meaningfully entertaining that despite being a debut novel it was number 1 on the New York Times, Sunday Times and Der Spiegel best-seller lists, has won multiple awards, has been translated into 42 languages, and turned into a TV miniseries of the same name starring Brie Larson as Elizabeth Zott.
For a debut novel, Woman on the Edge, by Samantha M. Bailey is overall decent thriller.
First off, it starts with a climax. On a busy train platform, a stranger shoves an infant into Morgan’s arms, begs her to take care of it, and jumps in front of the incoming train.
Although it begins with that explosive scene, and you think, ‘Ok, where is it going to go from here?’ the book keeps you on the edge of your seat the whole time. The short chapters alternate between “Morgan”, happening in the present, and “Nicole”, the stranger who jumped, happening in the past. There are back stories to both women, involving Morgan’s diseased husband, her estranged mother, Nicole’s husband, best friend, brother, a woman from her distant past and her meteoric success as the founder and director of a great company.
The real heroine of the story is Morgan. From the moment the infant, Quinn, is thrust into her arms, she feels affection for her. Although she’s under suspicion by the police, and has no one to lean on except her lawyer, she bravely, single-mindedly and doggedly pursues the puzzle and does her own detective work to find out if Quinn is okay and why this total stranger chose her to take care of her little daughter. She encounters opposition, suspicion and danger every step of the way, but never gives up.
Nicole, on the other hand, starts off as a successful owner and director of a company, but after having her baby, when she keeps getting threats from a woman in her past who holds a grudge against her, starts losing her mental balance. Although she has a few close people who offer to help her, she refuses help and gradually deteriorates to the point of no return.
True to thriller-style novels, Bailey makes you doubt everyone as the culprit of Nicole’s demise. A red-haired woman attacks Morgan, leaves threatening notes and objects for Nicole and her brother. A woman from Nicole’s distant past who used to send her nasty notes is also a red-head, but she lives in a different town. There are other women with red hair connected to various characters in the book.
The “Morgan” chapters grow to be more and more interesting as the book goes on.
The “Nicole” chapters however, become harder to read as the story progresses. They start off with a normal degree of post-partem depression and worry for a new mom. But they gradually become more agonizing and annoying to go through. This reader found them somewhat over the top as Nicole becomes more and more paranoid, dysfunctional and addicted to her anti-anxiety pills. “She grasped the arm of the couch and heaved herself up, dropping her chin to her chest until the wooziness passed…her arms aching…Nicole barely had the energy to make it up the stairs…She’d draped black silk sheets over all the first-floor windows, so her house felt as dark as she did inside.” “Voices rang in her ears…She shook her head back and forth to get rid of them.”
To her credit Bailey keeps up the tension until almost the very end.
However, the ending is too abrupt and clean. The book suddenly changes its tone: the psychological thriller suddenly becomes an action thriller, the puzzle is quickly solved, the loose ends are too conveniently tied and delivered in a neatly wrapped package with a bow on top.
The change of tone at the end is too jarring and doesn’t match the rest of the book.
Like Balzac, Milan Kundera was on my reading bucket list. A number of friends talked highly of him, and some of my respected writers quoted him. So I chose to read his Immortality, a New York Times best-selling novel.
Unfortunately I was very disappointed.
Kundera doesn’t believe in the conventional form of the novel. He declares, “Dramatic tension is the real curse of the novel.” So Immortality has little plot. Instead Kundera uses the book to ponder some philosophical, social and behavioural topics, while criticizing and satirizing a slew of people and issues. He is as belligerent, vain and sexist as Jordan B. Peterson. But whereas Peterson offers some research-based and reasonable material, Kundera offers his own fragmented imagination with a flat story. He is egocentric, sarcastic, and didactic throughout.
The book consists of seven parts. The first one, “The Face”, introduces four characters, Agnes, her husband Paul, their daughter Brigite and Agnes’s sister, Laura. These four weave in and out of the so-called story. Kundera tries to prove that we identify with our face. If a person were able to change their face, they wouldn’t be the same person.
The second part, called “Immortality” is about Goethe and Bettina, a young woman enamored by Goethe. Bettina wrote copious love-letters to Goethe, and Kundera argues that those published love-letters immortalized Goethe more than his own body of work.
The third part, “Fighting” is about Agnes and Laura’s fighting. Laura, a neurotic woman is dating a much younger man, and when he tries to distance himself from her, Laura gets depressed and threatens her sister and brother-in-law with suicide. Kundera posits that she does that to immortalize herself. Because if a loved one commits suicide, you never forget them.
Fourth comes “Homo Sentimentalis” in which Goethe and Ernest Hemingway chat in the other world, and debate whether their fame is due to their talent and writing or due to what biographers and others said posthumously about them. Kundera also satirizes Romain Rolland, the winner of 1915 Nobel Prize in literature, for certain opinions the latter expressed.
In the fifth section, “Chance”, Agnes makes an appearance and Kundera tries to prove that in life chance plays a big role. Agnes’s story is intertwined with Kundera self-inserting himself and chatting with Professor Richard Avenarius, a German philosopher of 19th century. They discuss writing, symbols, politics, love and chance. Kundera teaches the reader “…if we love someone, he cannot be compared. The beloved is incomparable.” On the very next page he contradicts himself by saying, “Maternal love is greater than conjugal love…”
Part six, “The Dial”, is about a new character, Rubens, who lives his life sleeping with every woman he comes in contact with, but doesn’t remember anything about any of them. Not even their names. There’s a real obsession in the whole book with men touching women’s breasts, to a degree that it turns the reader off sex altogether.
Part seven, “Celebration”, returns to Paul and Laura, again with Kundera self-inserting.
The book contains some disparate philosophical discussions among various characters. But overall Kundera sounds like a rebel without a cause, making derisive comments about everyone and everything, gesticulating just to be contrary, and to prove he’s right.
“Forget for a moment that you’re an American and exercise your brain.”
“…disciplined Swiss drivers obeyed the rules, whereas the French, shaking their heads in short horizontal motions, expressed their indignation at those who would deprive people of their right to speed and turned highway travel into an orgiastic celebration of human rights.”
“Once women start to fight they don’t stop.”
“It has been extremely lucky that up to now wars have been fought only by men. If they had been fought by women, they would have been so consistently cruel that today there wouldn’t be a single human being left on the planet.”
I persevered until the painful end to see if there was a point to the book. Alas, there was none to be found.
The Covenant of Water, is an immersive experience in an emotional ocean.
It’s a voluminous novel, written in spectacular prose about endearing characters who live in the span between 1900 and 1977, and who collide with life with varying degrees of impact. It shares many of the qualities of Cutting For Stone, Abraham Verghese’s previous novel, which I fell head over heels in love with. Both books span over generations and continents, both involve orphaned kids and family secrets, both are as much about the science and art of medicine as about people and events, and both are written in exquisite language.
The Covenant of Water, was written over 13 years. Verghese is a medical doctor, author, Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Vice Chair of Education at Stanford University Medical School. How he finds the time to write a 730-page novel, is beyond me.
The first plot is about Mariamma, who lives in Kerala, in the south of India. In the year 1900 she is 12 and is married off to a 40-year-old widower, who lives in a far-away village and has a 2-year-old son. To comfort her, Mariamma’s mother tells her, “The saddest day of a girl’s life is the day of her wedding. After that, God willing, it gets better.”
It’s love at first sight between Mariamma and her stepson Jojo. Not so between her and her husband. In fact, the widower is reluctant to marry Mariamma. But over the years the couple grows to love each other and have children. The husband’s family has a strange “condition”. Many males are born with an innate fear of water and often die by drowning even in shallow water. The story follows the trials and tribulations of generations of this family, their relatives, neighbors, friends and servants.
The second plot in the book is about Digby Kilgour, a Scottish surgeon. As a Catholic he is looked down upon and is not allowed to develop his considerable talent. So he joins the Indian Medical Service and goes to Madras to get away from his unhappy past and to avail himself of better opportunities to train and practice surgery. “Oppressed in Glasgow. Oppressor here. The thought depresses him.”
The story is sprawling. Digby’s plot, although introduced early-on in the book, disappears for a long time, only to make a comeback towards the end and connect to the main one. A multitude of characters and subplots are introduced and developed. Medicine is practiced (my favorite) and joked about. A multitude of serious themes are explored. The oppressive cast system in India, the plight of lepers, rare diseases, harassment of women in education and society, religion, ghosts, love, art, addiction and loss are recurring themes. Funny episodes and lines are thrown in as well. Overall the very broad scope of the book seems to need a bit of trimming and tightening.
Verghese’s prose is meditative and sumptuous. “He stares at his blistered hands. The thumb alone would prove the existence of God. A working hand is a miracle; his are capable of removing a kidney or stacking bricks.” “Her scars, her burns, and her contractures were all on the inside, invisible…unless one looked into her eyes: then it was like looking into a still pond and gradually making out the sunken car with its trapped occupants at the bottom.”
His characters are smart, sensitive and lovable. Even his trees, elephants and ghosts are adorable! He makes the reader fall in love with his characters and then drags both character and reader through hell. I found the novel too emotional and jam-packed with suffering. I also found the great majority of the characters to be kind-hearted and self-sacrificing. There are only a couple of half-hearted villains. None of the many tragedies in the book are caused by villains. Life itself is the villain.
I greatly enjoyed the medical sections and especially the medical jokes. Akila, a head nurse at a Madras hospital helps/teaches the resident doctors in the L & D (Labour and Delivery) ward. She has her own “Better out than in” or Five-F rule: “Flatus, fluid, feces, foreign body and fetus, are all better out than in.” She yells commands at more than one doctor at a time. To one who’s using forceps to pull a baby out, “’Ayyo! You call that pulling, doctor?’ Akila shouts from the other side of the room, without looking. ‘The baby will drag you back inside, slippers and all, if you can’t do better.’” And to another, “Doctor! By the time you finish sewing up the episiotomy, the baby will be walking…”
The Covenant of Water is a portal into an expansive world that with its powerful prose exposes you to many profound themes, and puts you through an emotional roller-coaster.
The main power of Elif Shafak in The Bastard of Istanbul lies in her unique and omnipresent humor. From the funny titles of the chapters (Cinnamon, Garbanzo Beans, Vanilla, Roasted Hazelnuts), to the hilarious names of the cats (Pasha the Third, Sultan the Fifth), facetious nicknames of characters (The Dipsomaniac Cartoonist, The Closeted Gay Columnist), to the abundance of witty lines: (the namesake of the novel calls her mom auntie, “Asya auntifies her mom to keep her at a distance. ‘What an unpardonable injustice on the part of Allah to create a daughter far less beautiful than her own mother, ’” the humor rarely lets up.
The story’s scope is vast. It is heavily populated, spans continents and centuries. The Kazanci family, composed of seven women: four sisters, their mother, their grandmother and Asya, the illegitimate daughter of one of the sisters, live in one household in Istanbul. The only brother of the four sisters, Mustafa, lives in Arizona. He is married to an American divorcee, who has a daughter, Armanoush, from her first marriage to an Armenian man who lives in San Francisco with his extended Armenian family.
Complicated? Hang in tight.
Asya, a nineteen-year-old nihilist rebellious young woman, is full of anger towards her smothering caring extended family in general, and her mother in particular, for not telling her who her father is. Armanoush, who’s been very close with her Armenian paternal grandmother, a survivor of the Armenian genocide in Turkey, wants to see the house her grandmother was born in, and find out more about the details of her family’s past. So she picks up and goes to Istanbul and stays with her step-father, Mustafa’s family.
Asya is under strict instructions from her whole family to be nice to Armanoush, her step-cousin. She grudgingly obeys. But it takes no time for the two girls, of approximately the same age, to strike a deep friendship despite their diametrically opposite temperaments. One thing follows another, and gradually light is shed on historical events, dark secrets are revealed, and unexpected developments occur.
Elif Shafak talks about the Armenian Genocide in The Bastard of Istanbul. Because of that she was prosecuted in 2006 for “insulting Turkishness”, a charge that might have landed her in prison for three years. But the charges were eventually dropped.
The novel explores various attitudes about the historical deportations and massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915. The Armenian view is that it was a genocide and the government of Turkey has to apologize and pay restitutions. The Turkish views differ. Some have no idea and are not interested. Some claim that Armenians killed Turks too, so Turkey has nothing to apologize for. Some say whatever happened in the past is not our fault. Let’s move on to the future. And others say we have to examine the issue and resolve it before we can move on.
Alongside these conflicting political views, Shafak also explores the similarities between the two cultures. The family relationships and gatherings, the overbearing aunts and grandparents, and the cuisines of the Turkish Kazancis in Istanbul are practically interchangeable with those of the Armenian Chakhmakhchians in San Francisco.
There’s no shortage of mesmerizing and beautiful, but not always positive, descriptions of Istanbul. “…it is densely dark in Istanbul. Whether along the grimy, narrow streets snaking the oldest quarters, in the modern apartment buildings cramming the newly built districts, or throughout the fancy suburbs, people are fast asleep. All but some. Some Istanbulites have, as usual, awakened earlier than others. The imams…the simit vendors…the bakers…most of them get only a few hours of sleep…the cleaning ladies…of all ages, get up early to take at least two or three different buses to arrive at the houses of the well-off, where they will scrub, clean, and polish all day long…It is dawn now. The city is a gummy, almost gelatinous entity at this moment, an amorphous shape half-liquid, half-solid.”
Something that could be confusing for the uninitiated is the plethora of unfamiliar Turkish and Armenian names. However, Shafak’s characters are recognizable by their distinct and often colorful personalities. For example it’s impossible to confuse Asya’s four aunts: the tattoo-artist in high heels and miniskirt, Auntie Zeliha, the didactic high-school history teacher, Auntie Cevriye, the schizophrenic Auntie Feride who “had a problem with making eye-contact. She was more comfortable talking to objects…she addressed her words to Zeliha’s plate,” and the headscarf-wearing Auntie Banu, the fortune teller who carries two djinns on her shoulders, good one on the right, bad one on the left.
But what is constant and delightful throughout this densely populated novel full of heavy themes is Shafak’s unrelenting humor. Even at funerals and abortions.
Alternate Perspective 