Books Life Blogtag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2009-01-17:/mayas_blog//12010-02-26T17:45:44ZMovable Type 4.23-enAn OBE for James Willsontag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.1222010-02-26T17:34:04Z2010-02-26T17:45:44ZMayaOver the course of the last three novels I've written, I've found that going on-site to a location helps me write about the events that I imagine to have taken place there. For the first and third novels, Portnoy's Daughter and Waiting for Love Child respectively, "going on-site" never got more complicated than having drinks at a particular bar that crops up in the novel, or playing laser tag at the People's Liberation Army facility. "On-site research" was more involved, however, for my second novel, The Swing of Beijing: I traveled through Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and crossed back into China through the Torugart Pass . . . all to write passages that are no longer part of the novel. No matter: I was honing my methodology.
Therefore, for my fourth novel, which takes place during WWI in British East Africa, I knew that I'd be criss-crossing the territory covered by the British and German armies. In an earlier blog post, I wrote about my journey to the Narosera River, where Lord Delamere had camped out to recruit Masai scouts just after the start of the war.
This week I returned from a trip to Tsavo West, where most of the troops and action during the war took place. On this research trip, I was incredibly lucky to have James Willson (pictured above) as my guide to the numerous forts and battlefields that we toured.
The East African front during WWI is not one that is well known. (Indeed, Ross Anderson wrote a book about it called The Forgotten Front.) Although ruins of forts and battlefields exist, no effort is made to demarcate, preserve, develop or commemorate the sites in Kenya. (Imagine Gettysburg as a deserted, overgrown field, without tour guides, memorials or any public awareness of its significance.) No one - not the British military, nor the Kenyan military, nor the history curricula of either country - is interested.
With the exception of James Willson, that is. The world's expert on these sites, Willson has discovered and/or explored numerous areas of significance to WWI, including Fort Mzima, Crater Fort, Maktau and Salaita. Having read deeply on the subject, Willson is able to identify and map the different areas in the forts (trenches, command centers, parade grounds, tent encampments, etc.), and he has encyclopedic knowledge of the debris common at these ruins (shards of glass from Rose's lime juice bottles [pictured right], South African beer bottles, crushed tins that held bully beef, etc.).
With Willson's guidance, the experience of soldiers in WWI clarified in an extraordinary manner. We drove the route that soldiers marched, in the heat of the day, on their way into battle at Murka. We picked our way through overgrown brush at Fort Mashoti that the soldiers had clear cut. From the command center at Maktau (pictured left), we surveyed the landscape on which British soldiers spied approaching German raiding parties.
However much my on-site research had been useful writing previous books, their value is proving inordinately greater on this fourth book (my first work of historical fiction). Thanks to Willson, my capacity to write battle scenes and other passages involving soldiers and military encampments has received a vast boost, far beyond anything I could have achieved through book research alone.
Willson's own research has been conducted entirely as a labor of love, independent of any research or academic institution and without any funding. His knowledge is of incredible value both to our understanding of the past and to our present. (Many of the issues that the British military faced during WWI - including troops from multiple locations speaking mutually unintelligible languages, and horrendous supply chain challenges - are currently faced by the US and British militaries in Iraq.) What Willson knows has the potential to enrich many areas of human endeavor, including military strategy, literature and history.
We can only hope that the contents of Willson's brain will be adequately indexed in the coming years, so that his knowledge will be available to future generations. Willson has written a book that should be forthcoming within the year or so, but his familiarity with the Tsavo landscape and the WWI sites cannot be fully conveyed in a book. With luck, perhaps enough people will learn the lay of the sites from Willson, so that - when and if funding for preservation and memorialization becomes available - adequate knowledge underpinning those efforts will exist.
In the meantime, the cause of preservation, perpetuation of knowledge and honoring the dead will be well served by honoring the living. In recognition of his contribution to humanity and history, James Willson deserves an expression of our gratitude. While this blog post is certainly inadequate, an OBE seems about right. ]]>
Don't Marry Himtag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.1212010-02-26T11:59:50Z2010-02-26T12:08:25ZReviews of Lori Gottlieb's new book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, along with Gottlieb's original Atlantic article (on the book is based), miss an important opportunity for addressing a serious problem in American society.In her...MayaReviews of Lori Gottlieb's new book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, along with Gottlieb's original Atlantic article (on the book is based), miss an important opportunity for addressing a serious problem in American society.
In her Atlantic article, Gottlieb calls the problem one of the "most complicated, painful, and pervasive dilemmas many single women are forced to grapple with nowadays: Is it better to be alone, or to settle?"
In her review of Gottlieb's book in TheNew York Times Book Review, Amy Finnerty describes Gottlieb's restatement of the problem as follows:
Gottlieb makes a case that many women today end up alone because they hold men to insanely high standards. . . . She convinces us that we women are simply too fussy, entitled and downright delusional about our own worth in the mating marketplace. We overanalyze and seek undiluted sexual and intellectual fulfillment, thus setting men up for failure.
But both formulations of the problem miss the point. Gottlieb is closest to the real issue when, in her Atlantic article, she observes:
I've been told that the reason so many women end up alone is that we have too many choices. I think it's the opposite: we have no choice. If we could choose, we'd choose to be in a healthy marriage based on reciprocal passion and friendship. But the only choices on the table, it sometimes seems, are settle or risk being alone forever. That's not a whole lot of choice.
Sadly, Gottlieb doesn't expand upon this insight. Neither female pickiness nor a sense of being forced to choose between settling and solitary lives is the problem; these phenomena are side-effects of the real problem: American men aren't well-matched for America's post-feminist women.
The most serious failure of feminism was to ignore the fact that gender roles are relational. Men's and women's roles fit together like puzzle pieces (or like yin and yang). Radical alteration of one of the roles requires a similar level of change in the other role for the two roles to continue to be compatible. Feminists devoted extensive thought, theory and action to the cause of revising a woman's role; to the extent that the gave any thought to men's roles, however, they seem to have assumed that men would adjust.
Men have not adjusted. While women struggle under extraordinary social pressure to be educated and sociable, have careers and families, be sexy and mothers, be emotionally competent and financially wise, men grapple with the sense of being intimidated by women, of feeling inadequate and fearing they are a disappointment to the beloved women in their lives. In my experience, they deal with this complex of issues by taking refuge in extended adolescence and staying stoned a lot.
In this context, settling - as Gottlieb advises - is insanity. As anyone who has lived through a divorce (or who has witnessed parents get divorced) knows, a bad marriage causes vastly more damage that no marriage. And if a society is grooming men who aren't suited to the women that the society is producing, the choice is not between settling and solitude, but between a bad marriage and a decent life.
I'm not alone in either my conclusion or my analysis: two hundred years ago Jane Austen wrote a more persuasive argument than this blog post can offer in her novel, Pride and Prejudice. As any reader of that novel can recognize, American women live today in a world where too many of the men are Wickhams, the con artist scourge of Pride and Prejudice. By the conclusion of that novel, Eliza Bennett has learned that her own haughtiness and preconceived notions had prevented her both from seeing the dangers of the charming Mr. Wickham and the goodness of the more remote Mr. Darcy, her future husband.
Gottlieb would have American women unlearn the lesson of Eliza Bennett - would have American blind themselves to the unsuitability of the available partners out of their prideful need to get married and their prejudice against carving out a satisfactory life for themselves beyond the bounds of marriage. Gottlieb urges American women to settle for Wickham.
Jane Austen has already illustrated the perils of that choice.
(Picture of Lori Gottlieb from The New York Times Book Review) ]]>
The accidental jestertag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.1202010-02-26T08:03:39Z2010-02-26T12:13:51ZMayaStorytellers don't have to be reliable to be entertaining. Great narrative voices can be widely off the mark - P.G. Wodehouse's marvelous Bertie Wooster is an example - and yet their own haplessness with facts and reality only deepens our delight in hearing what they have to say.
Lord Cranworth is an interesting example of an entertaining, unreliable narrative voice. Unlike Bertie Wooster, who is fictional, Lord Cranworth was real. And diverting further from Bertie Wooster, whose lack of reliability was the conscious intent of his creator, Cranworth didn't mean to be unreliable.
Cranworth has become unreliable in part because the passage of time has rendered so many of his opinions politically incorrect. "I dislike making contact with a black race which emphatically dissents from the superiority I claim for my race and colour," he writes of Ethiopians. (Lord Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles 178 (1939)).
But Cranworth has also become unreliable because his account of factual events diverges from other contemporaneous accounts. Here, for example, is Cranworth's version of the events leading up to the deportation of Galbraith Cole:
Galbraith Cole was one of the earliest pioneers, a brother-in-law of Lord Delamere, and deservedly one of the most popular inhabitants both with black and white. He had suffered repeatedly from thefts of cattle and sheep from his farm on Lake Elmenteita [sic], abutting the Masai Reserve. One day he caught a party of Masai red-handed driving off his sheep, and, having a rifle, fired a shot to frighten the delinquents. By an unfortunate mischance the shot struck one of the party, who subsequently died. The Government were placed in a position of difficulty. No local jury would, or indeed could, convict Cole of any major crime, and the tribe in question, with whom the punishment for cattle-stealing from time immemorial had been death, saw no justifiable grounds for complaint. On the other hand, a considerable opinion at home said that in the interest of our own rule and good name an example must be made. And again it is hard to dissent from that view. The Governor decided that it was a case for deportation, unpopular though the course might be.
(Kenya Chronicles at 64).
His account omits several salient facts that Karen Blixen mentions about the event:
When Karen Blixen lectured at Lund University in 1938 she gave an example of Galbraith Cole's unswerving conviction, which a man of less fibre would have easily betrayed. Like the Masai he had killed, he paid his price without question:
The Judge said to Galbraith, 'It's not, you know, that we don't understand that you shot only to stop the thieves.' 'No,' Galbraith said, 'I shot to kill. I said that I would do so.'
'Think again, Mr. Cole,' said the judge. 'We are convinced that you only shot to stop them.'
'No, by God,' Galbraith said. 'I shot to kill.' He was then sentenced to leave the country and, in a way, this really caused his death.
Errol Trzebinksi, Silence Will Speak 76 (1977) (quoting Donald Hannah, Isak Dinesen and Karen Blixen: the mask and the reality 35-36 (1971)).
In highlighting this disparity, I am not so much interested in which version is accurate, but in the relationship between an accurate grasp on facts and the formation of opinions that endure the test of time. My guess is that Cranworth wasn't just unlucky that public opinion shifted away from his conviction of white superiority; rather, I hazard that a certain disposition on his part to tamper with facts supported the formation of opinions that could not survive the eventual triumph of reality. Hence, the man could write of his early years in British East Africa:
Settlers were coming in with a steadily increasing flow. New, beautiful and undeveloped territories were being discovered and occupied. New crops were being tried out and new possibilities became probabilities almost monthly. Land values improved with great rapidity and the native population became more prosperous and infinitely happier and safer. No stigma rested at that time on the white settlers for the work that they were doing.
(Kenya Chronicles at 29 (emphasis added).)
Amusing to read now, but not very credible.
(Photo of Berkeley Cole and Lord Cranworth from Kenya Chronicles) ]]>
The grim reaper will come for your e-reader before it claims your booktag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.1192010-02-07T14:16:21Z2010-02-07T14:59:28ZMayaIn a recent, ranging Huffington Postentry, Andrew Zack opines:
[N]o one believes that the days of paper books aren't numbered. It will take a couple of generations for kids to be fully separated from paper books and adults ready to read everything on a tablet of some kind, but I wouldn't recommend anyone more than a decade from retirement invest in starting a bookstore. We are experiencing the beginning of the end of paper books right now. The brick-and-mortar store and the paper book will disappear faster than you might imagine.
I can only hope that provincialism and myopia disappear faster than we might imagine. From his statement, Zack appears to be unaware that much, if not most, of the world lives in locations where electricity is unreliable, broadband is unavailable and devices like iPods - let alone tablet computers - are prohibitively expensive. The fragility of electricity-dependent devices will only be compounded by ensuing climate change-related disasters and environmental upheaval. (Even without abnormal weather conditions, I've been amazed at the amount of insect life that I've had to dislodge from my laptop's keyboard and screen while working in Kenya.)
A book, on the other hand - as J.M.G. Le Clezio observed in his Nobel speech - is an "ideal tool. It is practical, easy to handle, economical. It does not require any particular technological prowess, and keeps well in any climate." He might also have added that a book is less likely to be stolen than a Kindle, that it won't clog up a landfill or contaminate a water source with its toxic e-waste, and that reading off a screen of any kind, no matter how gentle on the eyes, is less versatile than reading from a book. (Try reading off a screen in the bathtub.)
All of which is to say: the future is about versatility. The world's economic, environmental, cultural, technological and knowledge-management conditions are, and will continue to be, in flux. Successful navigation of the field will require adaptability and flexibility above all other skills. In this context, books will always have a place.
What is misplaced are smugly confident predictions premised on demonstrably-incorrect assumptions of never-ending prosperity.
(Image of the world's greatest technology from the MIT Libraries blog) ]]>
Starter of conversations, killer of poetstag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.1182010-02-07T13:29:48Z2010-02-07T14:09:50ZMayaPublisher's Weekly recently hosted a panel as part of its "Think Future: What's Next in Publishing" discussion series on the question of "Will Book Reviews Still Matter?"
I didn't attend the event, and I don't know what was said, but a fair guess is that the discussion, like the animating question, was of a piece with other expressions of the massive insecurity in the industry right now: will people read books in the future? Will book stores continue to exist?
Not being one who views change as synonymous with annihilation, I am comfortable projecting the continued existence both of books and book stores. My relaxed optimism extends with even more confidence to book reviews - though I might wish it to be otherwise. Here's why:
Short of folks stuck in ski chalets during blizzards who are driven by boredom to peruse the only book on hand, people's choices in reading materials are rarely random. They're usually guided by some previous knowledge about the book. Their friend recommended it. They've heard good things about the author. The book got good reviews.
Although a friend's recommendation, or a prior positive experience with the author's work, will likely remain more influential than reviews are to an individual's purchasing decision, reviews are nonetheless likely to continue to be important for sales. Reviews start a public conversation about a book, as well as setting the agenda for that conversation, and such conversations prime an audience's appetite for the book.
Conversation, whether in meat-space, virtual space or mental space, is vital for any book marketing effort because conversation is the social corollary to the private act of reading. Most of us are social animals and most of us, therefore, want to talk about what we read. In communities with a relatively high level of literary output, but without apparatus for sparking public conversation about books - for example, in Nairobi, where I've never seen a single book review, bookstores lack the space to accommodate book readings and the Internet hasn't picked up the slack - books don't sell.
So conversation is necessary. And, though any glance at the line-up of television pundits might lead one to another conclusion, conversation (even in America, even today) is a skill. Good conversationalists have thought-provoking, witty and passionate things to say. Poor conversationalists - which includes most of us at some moment or another - can nonetheless function tolerably if they have the decency to quote (with or without attribution) that which they've heard good conversationalists articulate.
Reviewers, if they excel at their jobs, are good conversationalists who provide book-meat to the public for roasting, mastication and regurgitation. Reviewers thus serve a critical social function that will in some form transcend the rapid (and foolish, in my opinion) disappearance of book review sections in newspapers.
The question to my mind, therefore, is not, "Will Book Reviews Still Matter?" but "What are the media platforms from which book reviews will be disseminated?"
If the answer is (as it likely will be), "the Internet," then we will probably see a similar pattern to that which has emerged elsewhere online: faced with overwhelming choice and no editorial filter, netizens will default to trusted familiar voices. We will see, not a diminution in the importance of book reviews for book sales, but an increase in the importance of certain online reviewers' opinions about books.
And as anyone with even passing familiarity with Lord Byron's poem "Who Kill'd John Keats?" knows, concentration of the critics' power is never a positive development.
(Image of Dr. Samuel Johnson, in Harold Bloom's words, "the most eminent of all literary critics," from The New York Times) ]]>
A novelistic misfire, an anthropological missed opportunitytag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.1172010-02-06T19:38:13Z2010-02-06T20:20:48ZIn Richard Dawkins' Introduction to Elspeth Huxley's Red Strangers, he calls the novel "anthropologically illuminating," and that phrase struck me as the most insightful of the compliments he bestowed on the book ("epic," "gripping," "moving" and "humanistically mind-opening" among them)....MayaIn Richard Dawkins' Introduction to Elspeth Huxley's Red Strangers, he calls the novel "anthropologically illuminating," and that phrase struck me as the most insightful of the compliments he bestowed on the book ("epic," "gripping," "moving" and "humanistically mind-opening" among them).
Red Strangers recounts the history of Kenya from 1890-1937 through the eyes of three generations of Kikuyu men: history, still written by the victor, but seen through the eyes of colonized, as that perspective is imagined by the colonizer.
The ambition of Red Strangers is huge, and I have great admiration for the project. With Red Strangers, Huxley courageously undertook an "experiment," as she put it in her Foreword, to record "the way of life that existed before the white men came" because "within a few years none will survive of those who remember" those days. (Red Strangers was published in 1939.) The experiment was unquestionably worthwhile, and the record she has created is of tremendous historical and anthropological interest.
Nonetheless, Red Strangers suffers two serious flaws. First, Huxley's storytelling is overshadowed by her agenda. She wants to describe a bygone society and explain its reaction to the appearance of the colonists more than she wants to tell us a story. As a result, events occur without narrative pay-off: Muthengi seduces his adopted sister Ambui . . . but nothing happens as a result. Matu runs away to live with the Athi people for some time . . . but we never find out why this matters for the plot. A conflict erupts between the Kipsigis and the Kikuyu on Marafu's farm . . . that goes nowhere. More disturbingly, the book has the "one thing and then another" feel of poorly-written historical treatises. Events appear in the Red Strangers because they correspond to actual historical events that happened, not because they advance the plot.
Second, Huxley attempts to describe to a literate society a world that was preliterate, from the point of view of the preliterate. I am not sure that this goal is achievable. The thought processes and consciousnesses of preliterate peoples is different from that of literate, modern peoples, and I am not convinced that either methodology can be transmitted directly, that is, without an intervening process of interpretation. As Huxley herself posits, "[t]he old Kikuyu . . . cannot present their point of view to us because they cannot express it in terms which we can understand." To circumvent this problem, Huxley has chosen to depict "old Kikuyu" who express their point of view in terms we can understand; in other words, she has created a hybrid character who never existed: a Kikuyu from a preliterate, precolonial society who nonetheless communicates in a literate, post-colonial way. Unsurprisingly, this character is unsatisfactory. He (because all three generations of Kikuyu protagonists in Red Strangers are men) doesn't come across as resourceful, intelligent, reflective . . . or believable. Rather, he's flat and two dimensional.
Following the lead of Dawkins' "anthropologically illuminating" comment, I would guess that a better vehicle for the information Huxley wanted to convey would have been the long-form personal history, something like Marjorie Shostak's Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, a compelling page-turner about a Kalahari bushwoman. Nisa is an anthropological text, and I suspect that Huxley - who disclaimed any anthropological rigor in Red Strangers - avoided that option because she didn't want to be accused of sloppy scholarship. All the same, Nisa succeeds where Red Strangers fails. Although Nisa came from a preliterate society, and although her story was being told through the agency of a literate academic, Nisa comes alive in her book in ways that Muthengi, Matu and Karanja never do in Red Strangers. A novel, after all, must have a story; but a personal history must only have a life.
(Image of Red Strangers from Fantastic Fiction) ]]>
J.D. Salinger: a voice in search of a storytag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.1162010-02-05T14:36:54Z2010-02-05T19:44:32ZMayaThe mystique of J.D. Salinger's isolation, and the enduring popularity of The Catcher in the Rye - along with the consequent public fascination with his freakishness and super-success - often eclipse Salinger's writing itself.
Over the years, Salinger told me about . . . trying to stay away from everything that was written about him. He didn't care about reviews, he said, but "the side effects" bothered him. "There are no writers anymore," he said once. "Only book-selling louts and big mouths."
Plainly, the less examination of his writing, the better.
Salinger stopped publishing a short while after the critics turned on him. As Janet Maslin recounts in The New York Review of Books, "[b]y the late Fifties, . . . Salinger was no longer the universally beloved author of The Catcher in the Rye; he was now the seriously annoying creator of the Glass family."
Maslin goes on to rehabilitate Salinger from the condemnations of John Updike, Joan Didion and Mary McCarthy among others:
Today "Zooey" does not seem too long, and is arguably Salinger's masterpiece. Rereading it and its companion piece "Franny" is no less rewarding than rereading The Great Gatsby. It remains brilliant and is in no essential sense dated. It is the contemporary criticism that has dated . . . [and] now seems magnificently misguided.
And, in the aftermath of Salinger's recent death, many - including Michiko Kakutani, Adam Gopnik, and Charles McGrath - have published laudatory assessments of his talent and work:
Kakutani in The New York Times: What really knocked readers out about "The Catcher in the Rye" was the wonderfully immediate voice that J. D. Salinger fashioned for Holden Caulfield - a voice that enabled him to channel an alienated 16-year-old's thoughts and anxieties and frustrations, a voice that skeptically appraised the world and denounced its phonies and hypocrites and bores.
Gopnick in The New Yorker: Has any writer ever had a better ear for American talk?
Charles McGrath in The New York Times: [Nine Stories] were remarkable for their sharp social observation, their pitch-perfect dialogue . . . and the way they demolished whatever was left of the traditional architecture of the short story - the old structure of beginning, middle, end - for an architecture of emotion, in which a story could turn on a tiny alteration of mood or irony.
But the recent reversal in critical opinion misses one big, valid critique: Salinger couldn't tell a story.
That he had an authorial voice, that he had an ear for dialogue, that he had an eye for detail - all these talents are undisputed. But as John Updike observed in a 1961 New York Timesreview of "Franny and Zooey," plot escaped Salinger:
Few writers since Joyce would risk such a wealth of words upon events that are purely internal and deeds that are purely talk. . . . As Hemingway sought the words for things in motion, Salinger seeks the words for things transmuted into human subjectivity. His fiction . . . pays the price . . . of becoming dangerously convoluted and static. A sense of composition is not among Salinger's strengths.
Indeed, time and again, reviewers use terms like "prose-poem" (Updike), "fables of otherness," "fairy tales," "Greek myths" and "Bible stories" (Maslin), and "stories within stories" (Kakutani) to describe the praise-worthy in Salinger's writing. Notably present in all these descriptions is the absence of a modern storytelling form. Catcher affirms these descriptions with its episodic, "mythic journey"-like structure; its narrative is presciently suited to a series of blog posts about a rough weekend - but not to a novel.
Coincidentally, reading Jim Windolf's review of Last Words, by George Carlin with Tony Hendra, I stumbled on a description that described Salinger perfectly:
Although Carlin spent roughly five decades performing with nothing but his brain, his mouth and a microphone, he was never much of a storyteller. Unlike Pryor and Bill Cosby, who made their names as yarn spinners, he did his best work as a secular preacher.
"A secular preacher" he was: Salinger perennially preached the message, aptly summarized by Gopnik,
that, amid the malice and falseness of social life, redemption rises from clear speech and childlike enchantment, from all the forms of unself-conscious innocence that still surround us (with the hovering unease that one might mistake emptiness for innocence).
Given the superficial, sentimental nature of this bit of "good news," my bet is that Salinger will not be remembered for his agenda. But Salinger should be remembered for his literary innovation, a point on which Maslin dwells. Apropos of Salinger's fall from grace with the critics of the 1950's and 60's, Maslin posits that:
negative contemporary criticism of a masterpiece can be helpful to later critics, acting as a kind of radar that picks up the ping of the work's originality. The "mistakes" and "excesses" that early critics complain of are often precisely the innovations that have given the work its power.
She then goes on to identify Salinger's innovation as the creation of "offensive" characters whose negative reception by the audience hammers home the point that the characters are unable "to live comfortably in the world."
Here I must part ways with Maslin. Although I agree that Salinger is innovative, I think Maslin is missing the true nature his innovation. Her resistance to criticism that highlights Salinger's inability to plot (she mocks Maxwell Geismar's assessment of "Zooey" as "interminable," as well as George Steiner's critique that it was "shapeless") simultaneously deprives her of the ability to name his accomplishment: using oral story-telling traditions and techniques to tell modern stories in which plot was replaced by shifts in psychological states.
"Fables," "fairy tales," "Greek myths," "Bible stories" - epic poems (prose or verse) and "stories within stories" - are all forms originating in oral, pre-literate societies. Episodic, rambling, redundant - indeed "shapeless" and "interminable" - are all adjectives applicable to the genre. However, the content of these stories often features extensive action and explicit violence - events that create stark mental pictures for the audience of listeners. Transmuting "words . . . into human subjectivity" is not a strong point of these types of stories. Even the idea of "human subjectivity" was different in oral, pre-literate societies, all of which were communal. Their subconscious was "collective" (according to Jung), and their stories distilled the "archetypal," not the "individual."
Salinger, whether intentionally or otherwise, used ancient forms as a vehicle for modern content. To the extent that he innovated, this combination is his contribution.
And, like other innovations of a certain type - the cigarette filter made from cheese comes to mind - its primary function is cautionary: it doesn't work. Modern plot structures provide a much better framework for telling stories involving individual psychological development (as well as balancing the story with action and ensuring sustained interest over the length of the tale).
Devotees of Salinger don't read him because he redefined the way modern stories are told. Rather, fans flock to the Salinger tent for the same reasons that any traveling preacher attracts crowds: because his voice resonates with them, and because they are predisposed to his sappy message.
(Photo of J.D. Salinger with Erik Ross from The New Yorker) ]]>
Diagnosing the cause of memoir fevertag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.1152010-02-05T10:46:36Z2010-02-05T19:56:22ZMaya"Why do you think memoirs are so popular these days?" my friend Gabi asked me roughly ten weeks ago. I told her that I hadn't given the question much thought. She had, however, and her conclusion (I'm summarizing) was that people these days are too stupid for novels: society, to paraphrase her view, is dumbing down to the point where the only stories that grip are elevated gossip.
I was dubious, as I am of all claims that society is getting dumber. From what I can see, society has always been composed of a healthy majority of idiots. In any event, I've never been convinced by comparisons between today's reading population and that of times past because literacy rates are so much higher now. You can't expect literate morons to gravitate to the same fare as literate non-morons, and incorporating so many of these morons into the literate population (a development which I fully endorse) was bound to change the overall mix of reading options.
But I continued to mull Gabi's question, and I was still mulling when Daniel Mendelsohn published his review of Ben Yagoda's book, Memoir: A History, in The New Yorker. Mendelsohn, like Gabi, suggests that the recent glut of memoirs "may be filling a gap created by the gradual displacement of the novel from its once central position in literary culture." Although Yagoda apparently doesn't speculate about why such a displacement is occurring, Mendelsohn has a theory. Televised talk shows, reality TV and the confessional Internet culture, Mendelsohn conjectures, may be creating an audience that cannot identify with protagonists who don't claim to be "real":
Indeed, shows like Winfrey's, with their insistence on "real" emotions, may themselves have created an audience for whom fictional emotions are bound, in the end, to seem like little more than "dramatization without illumination." If you can watch a real lonely woman yearning after young hunks on a reality dating show, why bother with Emma Bovary?
Although, as numerous recent memoir fakes have demonstrated, "real" protagonists often tread into fictional territory, modern audiences (according to Mendelsohn) may find such protagonists easier to sympathize with (and to forgive) than fictional characters.
I am as intrigued by Mendelsohn's explanation, but ultimately as skeptical of it as I am of Gabi's. Certainly, "real" stories have an allure that the fictional will always lack, but the notion that an audience's ability to relate to characters depends on the claimed truthfulness or fictional nature of the story doesn't (intuitively) strike me as persuasive.
More likely, in my opinion, is that people are becoming conditioned to expect certain narratives in certain media: quite possibly people are gravitating towards TV and Internet content that delivers some semblance of "the real" - 24 hour news stations, reality TV, infotainment, documentaries, nature programming and, of course, talk shows. Television and dynamic Internet leave less room for the imagination than a book; demanding that such media deliver narratives that, likewise, are composed of more facts and less fantasy is (to my mind, misguided, but nonetheless) an understandable expectation.
But if people aren't becoming too stupid for novels, and if television and Internet narrative expectations aren't infecting books, then what explains the recent outpouring of published memoirs? The most credible supposition, to my mind, builds on a point Judith Shulevitz made in her review of Yagoda's Memoir in The New York Times Review of Books. She argues that memoirists, whether liars or oracles (or, more likely, something in between), appeal:
(1) because [they] might become . . . friend[s]; (2) because we might learn something useful; and (3) because we can't help being curious about the ways other people go about reflecting on themselves and justifying their existence.
At this historical moment, those last two reasons are intensely salient. The modern world demands much of its denizens. People must be educated and informed. They must be physically fit and attractive. They must be healthy and engaged in the world. They must have families and jobs. They must be sexy and productive. They must be prosperous and environmentally-sound. They must be free of prejudices and self-aware. They must be mobile and simultaneously rooted in family and community.
No other time in history has demanded as much of its people. Typically, in past ages, societies have been content to let their women occupy one limited realm, their soldiers another, and they restricted similarly their wise men, merchants, rulers, wealthy and poor. These groups all had roles that were, generally speaking, well-defined; and these roles required skill sets that were, generally speaking, within the capacities of their players to learn within a relatively short time. Not so today: "unbounded" is le mot just with respect to social roles. Everyone must be everything. And the necessary skills for such high-level functioning require more time, training and experience to acquire than most of us will ever have.
The current popularity of memoirs, to my mind, relates to these social demands. Memoirs tantalize readers with the promise of answers to their stress-inducing question: how do you do it? How do you meet social expectations in this day and age? Can someone else - someone successful enough to merit a published book about their life - tell me what I'm supposed to do?
Historically, of course, seekers of such information turned to (among others) the witch doctors, elders, gossips and teachers of their day. They might also seek second opinions in the works of their relevant epic poets, myth makers, and story tellers (playwrights, novelists, etc.).
Usually, of course, the advice of the witch doctor contingent was oral and unrecorded, so quite possibly we undercount the extent to which it was relied on by past generations. Today, of course, the modern equivalents of the witch doctors (Jack Welch, Rick Warren, Sarah Palin, etc.) have many mass platforms and outlets on and by which to promote and record their answers to the pressing question: how do you do it? So perhaps we now overcount their importance.
Regardless, if today we are seeing a supposedly ahistorical reliance on the witch doctors, et al., and a corresponding decline in reliance on the epic poets and their ilk, perhaps the reason is not the audience's intelligence, nor its capacity for identifying with fictional characters, but the content of the fiction on offer. Surely fiction that enfolds the breadth of this global moment and provides fodder for rumination about the modern predicament is not penned by MFA graduates enjoying suburban lives underwritten by their jobs teaching in MFA programs?
(Image of title page of Benjamin Franklin's memoirs from the website of The Library Company of Philadelphia) ]]>
The language of literaturetag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.1142010-01-28T19:37:42Z2010-01-31T20:26:18ZMayaNgugi wa Thiong'o writes in Gikuyu, the language spoken by the Kikuyu tribe in Kenya. He translates his own work into English.
His choice to do so, as he recognizes in a recent video interview with Granta deputy editor Ellah Allfrey, is not popular with the "new generation" of African writers, many (if not most) of whom write in English. Ngugi wa Thiong'o reserves judgment of these young writers, acknowledging that writing in an African language decreases the chances of publication. But he criticized the assumptions underlying African literary prizes:
Look at prizes given to promote African writing . . . They all assume that African writing is only that which is in English. They assume that European languages are the beginning or the only means by which the African imagination can work, and it's not true.
The question of the language of the imagination is an important and interesting one. But in framing the issue as he does (and in attacking the faceless "they" to whom "assumptions" can be attributed), Ngugi seems to be setting up a straw colonist for attack and missing the key issue: whether to write in the language of an oral society.
All written literature builds on other writings, through references, allusions, quotations or outright copying (Shakespeare, for example, used other authors' plots). A writer who decides to write in a language that has no literary canon deprives his or her work of the richness of that dialogue with preexisting literary works. Attaining aesthetic quality in such a context is an even greater challenge than normal.
That "new generation" African writers are writing in European languages may not simply be a function of wanting to be published, as Ngugi wa Thiong'o suggests, but may result from what Binyavanga Wainaina identifies as a desire for recognition based on "the very 'aesthetic' of their work, not their political leanings or their arrival from a wayward 'Dark Continent.'" In other words, Wainana urges recognition for quality writing, rather than for the identity or politics of the author - or the language in which he or she writes.
To produce quality writing, all writers must translate the story in their imagination to words on the page. And, in the end, the language of the imagination and the language of literature differ, even when both nominally occur in English. (For instance, the imagination can operate in pictures, while literature uses words.)
When the writer in question has a choice of languages into which to translate the story in his or her imagination, selecting a non-native language has time and again resulted in innovative works that enrich the language in which they're written (think Vladimir Nabokov, Isak Dinesen, Ha Jin). Penalizing African writers for choosing English is likely to result in a loss both to English and to literature.
(Photo of Ngugi wa Thiong'o from his website) ]]>
A literary lovertag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.1132010-01-22T14:52:16Z2010-01-31T20:28:09ZMayaIn Beppo, Lord Byron's verse play, the poet raises an intractable question: were 99 stanzas necessary?
A comic, bawdy Venetian adventure, Beppo ostensibly tells the tale of a woman, Laura, whose husband, Beppo, goes to sea and disappears without a word. "And really if a man won't let us know/That he's alive, he's dead, or should be so," explains Byron. So Laura takes a cavalier servente, an openly-accepted second husband. Six years go by, and Laura and her cavalier servente are enjoying their life together, when - at a masked ball during Carnival - Laura catches the attention of a Turk . . . who turns out to be her husband.
Despite the drama of this situation, the plot is secondary to scene-setting and musings of tangential relevance. In Beppo, Byron's digressions, quite self-consciously, rule the poem:
. . . [F]or I find Digression is a sin, that by degrees Becomes exceeding tedious to my mind,
Byron complains in stanza 50. Just thirteen stanzas later, he's moaning again:
To turn, -and to return; the devil take it! This story slips for ever through my fingers.
But however much Byron protests his poetic ADD, he devotes extensive energy to it. As Jeffrey, writing in Edinburgh Review in 1818 observed, "This story, such as it is, occupies about twenty stanzas." (My own count is not so condemnatory. I allow the first 20 verses as appropriate background scene-setting, and I only count 27 or so verses of proper digression. Nonetheless, even by my generous assessment, 47 verses of 99 do not advance the plot.)
Explanations of Byron's digressions abound. Jeffrey calls them "unquestionably by far the most lively and interesting parts of the work." Harsh condemnation of the story then.
Jeffrey is not the only critic to slight Beppo's story. Writing in The Guardian, Benjamin Markovits calls the story "scant" and explains the digressions in Beppo as follows:
The real hero of the piece is the poet himself . . . . [engaging in] a series of digressions on worldliness: on how to take pleasure from the world, on how to live.
While I agree with both these comments, I think in some sense they miss the larger picture of how the digressions deepen the reader's experience of the story and how the poem's constituent parts relate to the whole.
If, as Jeffrey and Markovits suggests, the digressions don't relate to the story, but instead supplant the story, then my inquiry is irrelevant. The constituent parts don't relate beyond allowing the story to serve as a frame for Byron's digressions.
But to explain the story in Beppo as a thin branch on which to hang the poet's "lively and interesting" observations "on how to live" seems (to my mind) to disserve Byron's skills as a storyteller. Such an interpretation also fails to give meaning to the stanzas in which Byron calls attention to his own digressions.
My reading is that the digressions are integral to the story. By calling attention to his digressions, Byron is signaling to the reader that they are not the sloppy tangents of a debauched mind, but deliberate and purposeful additions to the story. Byron is telling the tale of a woman whose relationship with her cavalier servente is a digression in her marriage. The digression is entertaining, worldly and broad-minded - just like Byron's digressions in the poem. In Beppo, Byron is offering himself as cavalier servente to the reader; he is inviting his adoring fans to allow him to be a digression in their day, life, relationship. (The poet isn't the hero of the poem; the reader is.)
And, in the reader's acceptance of Byron's service, the reader is implicated in Laura's "sin." Writing of immoral relations for a conservative British audience, Byron stealthily builds the reader's sympathy for Laura - as well as support for the poem's happy ending that allows Laura to escape without punishment - by inviting the reader to partake via literary effigy in Laura's naughtiness.
Given such playfulness, 99 stanzas are not only necessary, but possibly insufficient.
(Cover of Beppo from Byronetc.com.) ]]>
Waiting for the breaktag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.1122010-01-22T14:43:28Z2010-01-22T20:27:34ZMayaReading a 2003 New York Timesprofile of author Beth Ann Bauman, I was struck by her perseverance. At 38, Bauman had been living an impoverished life without publishing success for twelve years, despite an MFA in Creative Writing and a connection to Tina Bennett, a leading agent. '''Everyone around her was getting published first,'' said Alice Elliott Dark . . . one of Ms. Bauman's teachers in a writing workshop. 'I've seen this happen to a number of really talented people. It's very flukey.'''
When her first story collection, Beautiful Girls, was finally published, Bauman's characters shared a common characteristic:
''All of the characters are waiting for something,'' Ms. Bauman said. ''They're all waiting for their lives to unfurl.''
Which is, of course, exactly what she has been doing all these years.
''I have,'' she agreed eagerly. ''I have been waiting, feeling trapped by my circumstances - the day job, never having enough time to write, wanting something larger and more comfortable, a better life. Maybe not a better life, but just wanting to arrive somewhere.''
This account of Bauman's experience resonates with me. I am familiar with that agony of feeling that my life is stalled until I can get a book published (although my fictional characters aren't "waiting for their lives to unfurl"; on the contrary, my fiction fairly bursts with people charging into adventure and the unknown). And I feel acute indignation at the costs that Bauman has paid for her eventual success: they are unfairly high.
At the other end of the spectrum - an author who met with success early and with super-success by the time she was Beth Ann Bauman's age - Elizabeth Gilbert on her website quotes Werner Herzog on the question of an artist's response to the costs involved with making art:
Quit your complaining. It's not the world's fault that you wanted to be an artist. . . . [I]t's certainly not the world's obligation to pay for your dreams. Nobody wants to hear it. . . [S]top whining and get back to work.
I am not persuaded. Of course, in the literal sense of no one promising to pay us for our writing, Herzog is right. But in the larger sense, he's wrong.
Society does promise us baselines: our reasonable expectations for our lives. The promise of these baselines is called the social compact, and it's not a new concept. Indeed, anything recognizable as a society would be impossible without this compact.
In Masai communities, for example, females can reasonably expect to have multiple lovers, to be married and - unless they're barren - to have children. They can also expect to have enough goats, sheep and cows to ensure that neither they nor their children will ever be hungry. A woman whose life doesn't include these factors is unlucky or has been treated wrongly.
In American society, females can reasonably expect that if they work hard, their merit will be rewarded. They can expect to be paid the same amount as their male peers for their work. They can expect to be paid for their work - we don't condone unpaid labor in the U.S. They can expect to enjoy a career and a family life. A woman whose life includes hard work that goes unrewarded, lower-paid or unpaid labor, or labor that requires her to give up the enjoyments of family and children is seen - in many instances - to have been discriminated against.
Notwithstanding the social compact, Bauman, myself and (no doubt) countless other female writers are not seeing our entitlements honored. Hard work doesn't have as much correlation with pay-off as does luck. Women writers routinely work for free and are expected to do so; publishers think nothing of requesting rewrites without a contract in place to pay for them. And many women writers find that a family (for many reasons) is out of the question if they want to write.
Complaining, as Herzog notes, is unattractive and often unhelpful, and I don't mean by this blog post to bellyache about the plight of women writers. Rather, my aim is to enrich the storehouse of that most American of stories - that of triumph over unfair adversity - by saluting Beth Ann Bauman (and all the other similarly situated women writers) who are asked to run an unfair gauntlet, one that represents society's failure to uphold its end of the social compact.
(Photo of Beth Ann Bauman from MacAdam/Cage) ]]>
An industry with the loyalty of Iagotag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.1112010-01-22T14:36:41Z2010-01-22T14:42:04ZThe New York Times magazine recently ran a profile of James Patterson, the world's best-selling author, in which his former publisher at Little, Brown, Sarah Crichton, "says she was continually surprised by the success of Patterson's books. To her, they...MayaThe New York Times magazine recently ran a profile of James Patterson, the world's best-selling author, in which his former publisher at Little, Brown, Sarah Crichton, "says she was continually surprised by the success of Patterson's books. To her, they lacked the nuance and originality of other blockbuster genre writers like Stephen King or Dean Koontz."
Lacked the nuance and originality of Dean Koontz? That's like saying he lacks the grammatical competence of Sarah Palin.
Whatever the legitimacy of the criticism (and I don't know because I haven't read Patterson), I have to wish - however naively - that publishers were more publicly supportive of their authors.
Of course, authors can generate terrific material insulting their publishers (for example, Lord Byron's "Dear Doctor, I have read your play"). But such artistic impishness doesn't strike me as being as shockingly discourteous as Critchton's remark. John Murray, after all, made money off Byron's poem mocking him.
(Gilbert Stuart's portrait of Iago from the Victoria & Albert museum) ]]>
A rebuttal to Kihikatag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.1102010-01-15T10:58:32Z2010-01-15T11:39:07ZMayaIn Ngugi wa Thiongo's A Grain of Wheat, Kihika, a Mau Mau rebel leader, expresses some brutal opinions about the way preceding generations dealt with imperialism:
I despise the weak. Let them be trampled to death, I spit on the weakness of our fathers. Their memory gives me no pride. And even today, tomorrow, the weak and those with feeble hearts shall be wiped from the earth. The strong shall rule. Our fathers had no reason to be weak. The weak need not remain weak. Why? Because people united in faith are stronger than the bomb. They shall not tremble or run away before the sword. Then instead the enemy shall flee.
(p. 180.)
While wa Thiongo doesn't outright endorse Kihika's view of history, he doesn't refute it, either. But - though Kihika's unyielding condemnation and lack of interest in nuance might be appropriate (and is probably necessary) for a guerrilla fighter - history is more complicated, more interesting and kinder to Kihika's forebears than Kihika allows.
As an overall descriptive of the black African response to British imperialism, "weak" is an inadequate adjective. "Measured," "thoughtful," "multi-faceted," "practical" or "wise" are all more accurate. A close reading of the historical record reveals, decade by decade, a slowly-evolving, pragmatic African response to the British colonial presence. Here is a summary:
From 1895 (when the British officially arrived) through 1914, the colonists came with - in addition to a breathtaking sense of superiority and the ideology of Pax Britannica - some things the Africans wanted and/or adopted: Jesus, medicines, new ways of living and - importantly - enough power to banish the twin menaces of the Masai and the Swahili slave traders. Some Africans did rebel and resist the British, and the British mounted "punitive" military expeditions against those tribes; but Africans also cooperated with the British, and some African leaders allowed themselves to be co-opted into service of the imperial cause.
From 1914 through 1922, Africans adjusted their views of the British. The whites came to be revealed as fallible humans - and hypocrites: not super-human bringers-of-peace and banishers-of-slavery-and-tribal-warfare, but self-interested farmers who warred among themselves and forced the Africans into the white fight. Criticism of British government policies began to be voiced. Africans protested against "alienation" of African lands and reassignment of such property to whites. Africans additionally began to question to white missionaries' interpretations of Christianity, where such interpretations condemned traditional African practices.
From 1922 through 1939, African opinion condemning colonial abuses coalesced, although little agreement could be reached about how to address such abuses. The Kikuyu, the largest tribe, split internally on the issue of how to engage the British. Few were willing to allow white missionaries to continue to "represent" black interests, but advocates for slow-going diplomacy found opponents in favor of more radical measures designed to bring faster results.
From 1939-1952, Africans again adjusted their views of British rule, this time in light of WWII and India's triumphant achievement of independence. The Africans saw that the British could be defeated. The condemnation of colonial abuses hardened into a rejection of the imperial presence altogether. Jomo Kenyatta emerged as a leader who could shepherd Kenyans into independent nationhood.
From 1952-1963, the Emergency pitched black Africans (and the Kikuyu especially) into a guerrilla war for independence. British atrocities during this period confirmed the worst suspicions about the white man being more devil than human and promoted a dichotomy of black-African-good/white-Colonist-bad that was to influence subsequent thinking about the colonial era. Nonetheless, not all blacks resisted the British (e.g., the spear-carrying soldiers depicted in the accompanying photograph), and the British had some African supporters.
As this overview suggests, the black African response to imperialism in the time leading to the years covered by A Grain of Wheat was not at all passive or submissive, but complex, sophisticated and characterized by a reluctance for reflexive, knee-jerk behavior. In its diplomacy, the response asserted that Kenyans were a people of a nation dealing as equals with another nation. In its entirety, the response was one about which Kenyans, including Kihika, could justifiably feel pride, if reductive, backwards-glancing concerns about emasculation and, to use Kihika's word, "weakness," didn't force a less positive interpretation.
For all its admirable undermining of reductive ideologies (explored in this post), A Grain of Wheat could have and should have done more to depict the variegated reality of Kenyan history and to honor the individual men and women whose forbearance, patience and negotiations skills gave the Mau Mau violence its claim to justice - and who made Kihika a freedom fighter, rather than a thug.
(Image of black African soldiers [carrying spears] escorting captured Mau Mau fighters from The Daily Mail)
]]>
Taking A Grain of Wheat's ideology with a grain of salttag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.1092010-01-15T09:19:26Z2010-01-15T10:05:14ZMayaI am a fan of art transcending reductive ideologies and, in A Grain of Wheat, Ngugi wa Thiongo may have provided us with an example of such transcendence.
The story follows Mugo, a young Kikuyu man, who has been tapped for leadership roles in his village in the aftermath of the 1952 Emergency that pitted the British colonial forces against Mau Mau freedom fighters. Mugo is deeply conflicted about serving as a leader because he has a shameful past: during the Emergency, he betrayed Kihika, a fiery rebel commander, to the British. In the end (spoiler alert), Mugo confesses his betrayal to the assembled villagers, and he is condemned to death by the former resistance fighters who have long been seeking Kihika's murderer.
Despite two audacious acts - betrayal and public confession - Mugo is an ambivalent person:
Mugo . . . . had always found it difficult to make decisions. Recoiling as if by instinct from setting in motion a course of action whose consequences he could not determine before the start, he allowed himself to drift into things or be pushed into them by an uncanny demon; he rode on the wave of circumstance and lay against the crest, fearing but fascinated by fate.
(p. 23-24.) In the course of the novel, Mugo struggles to identify with his family, which has abused him; with his tribe, which wants to force him first into war and then into leadership when he'd rather abstain; and with the British, from whom he craves absolution but receives, instead, total rejection. These struggles endow Mugo with the strength to make a final moral decision (public confession) that leads to his death, rather than to enjoy a diminished life as a corrupt leader with a guilty conscience.
By contrast, Kihika is a person to whom ambivalence is a stranger. Here, for example, is Kihika discussing his forebearers' responses to colonialism:
I despise the weak. Let them be trampled to death, I spit on the weakness of our fathers. Their memory gives me no pride. And even today, tomorrow, the weak and those with feeble hearts shall be wiped from the earth. The strong shall rule. Our fathers had no reason to be weak. The weak need not remain weak. Why? Because people united in faith are stronger than the bomb. They shall not tremble or run away before the sword. Then instead the enemy shall flee.
(p. 180.) Throughout his life, Kihika has exhibited a devil-may-care rebellious bravado. He alone among the boys at school challenges the religious instruction against female circumcision (a Kikuyu custom). He similarly rejects his devoted girlfriend, Wambuku, because accepting her love would require him to settle down into village life. In the end, Kihika dies because - unused to any approach involving compromise or tolerance of differences of opinion - he too forcefully tries to push Mugo into fighting for the cause.
And now we arrive at what may be transcendence. From his two-dimensional and unsympathetic depictions of the colonists in A Grain of Wheat, we know that wa Thiongo is not especially interested in a holistic understanding of the white man. From his choice (after A Grain of Wheat was published) to write only in Kikuyu, we know that wa Thiongo is not even especially interested in communicating with non-Kikuyus, let alone whites. And yet A Grain of Wheat ultimately discourages the reader from embracing inflexibility of mind or heart.
By the novel's end, two conclusions - both arrived at by women - complicate the novel's moral landscape. First, Wambui - a feisty crone who'd risked her life running guns to the Mau Mau fighters and who served as the judge in Mugo's trial - is seized with regret at Mugo's execution. Mugo was a conscientious man who could have contributed much to an independent Kenya; instead, he had been executed for ideology: "Wambui was lost in a solid consciousness of a terrible anti-climax to her activities in the fight for freedom. Perhaps we should not have tried [Mugo], she muttered." (p. 228-229.)
The second conclusion involves the resolution of a sub-plot involving Mumbi, a gorgeous woman, and Gikonyo, her husband who was imprisoned by the British. During his imprisonment, Mumbi succumbed to the sexual advances of a former suitor, who has been installed as a village leader by the British. Returning from prison to find his wife having given birth to his former rival's child, Gikonyo punishes Mumbi for her unfaithfulness. By the end of the novel, however, Gikonyo wishes to rebuild his relationship with Mumbi, and she refuses any easy reconciliation:
"No, Gikonyo. People try to rub out things, but they cannot. Things are not so easy. What has passed between us is too much to be passed over in a sentence. We need to talk, to open our hearts to one another, examine them, and then together plan the future we want. But now, I must go, for the child is ill."
(p. 232-233.)
In short, although the novel condemns white missionaries and humiliates a black teacher in a missionary school for his complicity in the white man's Christianity, A Grain of Wheat also preaches for the redemption of Judas and the forgiveness of Mary Magdalene - on her own terms. Despite its unquestionable allegiance with the anti-colonial cause (and what appears to be genuine dislike of white people), the message of A Grain of Wheat is hardly the propaganda of militant nationalism. This textured multi-facetedness - even (possibly) inconsistency - imbues the novel with an admirable humanity. With these qualities, A Grain of Wheat joins the ranks of works that enlarge the author - and, by extension, all of us - beyond the confinement of our personal limitations.
I could wish that wa Thiongo had taken the additional step of providing a nuanced portrait of Pontius Pilate and his ilk, but perhaps such a greedy desire for even more transcendence would be un-Christian of me.
(Image of Ngugi wa Thiongo from University of Kwazulu-Natal website) ]]>
"Dear Doctor, I Have . . ." issues with rejectiontag:www.mayaalexandri.com,2010:/mayas_blog//1.1082010-01-14T19:24:44Z2010-01-14T19:47:10ZMaya
"Dear Doctor, I Have Read Your Play." It's funny, fun to read out loud, fun to imagine a play that "purges the eyes and moves the bowels" - moves the bowels?! Apparently, the good doctor of the title (Byron's friend, John William Polidori) invented an entirely new (and not-to-be-seen-again) genre: the laxative drama.
But, much as I believe the English literary canon would be diminished for its absence, I have to wonder why Lord Byron wrote the poem. The man, after all, was a super star by 1817 when he wrote "Dear Doctor," by which time he'd long been famous for accomplishments like Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and the unpublished (but no lesser known) I Had An Incestuous Affair With My Half Sister.
"Dear Doctor" allows the reader to infer that recent criticism of Byron's writing might have been a reason for the poem's composition:
There's Byron, too, who once did better, Has sent me, folded in a letter, A sort of - it's no more a drama Than Darnely, Ivan, or Kehama; So alter'd since last year is pen is, I think he's lost his wits at Venice.
Nonetheless, such cause seems a tad inadequate. Byron was not a man unfamiliar with rejection. His clubfoot, for instance, did not provoke an outpouring of acceptance and tolerance from his peers. And his personal life - incest, anal sex, divorce - seems to have generated sufficient expression of social condemnation to convince him to go into self-imposed exile.
Moreover, whatever the critics opined about his work, Byron was never at a loss for either publishers, fans or sales.
So why should Byron care about a rejection from John Murray, much less care enough to write a rhyming verse poem about it - a poem that, even for as skilled a hand as Byron, surely required more effort than the dismissive sigh of, "Well, that happened, moving on," that characterizes (for example) my reaction to rejection from publishers?
Plainly, something needled Byron into diverting poetic energies from the Romantic imperative of composing verses as aids to seduction and devoting those energies, instead, to a Philip Roth-like anxiety orgy of venting/moping/carping. I can think of at least three motivations for this trek off Byron's beaten path:
1. Byron was outraged, not by rejection of him, but by rejection of his friend, John William Polidari. The poem, in this interpretation, was an expression of loyalty and friendship. 2. Despite his experiences, Byron was unusually sensitive to criticism, to the point that he'd stoop to bashing easy targets. According to this theory, the poem is an expression of insecurity (and possibly immaturity). 3. Byron felt a heroic passion to expose the brutality of the publishing industry, which was inhumane in its treatment of authors and destructive to the cause of literature. In this scenario, the poem is an expression of reality.
In proffering this critique of the publishing industry, my own motivations are, of course, transparently obvious: to bring healing to the ill. Out of concern for what appears to be a plague of industry-wide, chronic constipation (of which reflexive rejection is a symptom), I am pioneering the laxative blog post.
Over the course of the last three novels I've written, I've found that going on-site to a location helps me write about the events that I imagine to have taken place there. For the first and third novels, Portnoy's Daughter and Waiting for Love Child respectively, "going on-site" never got more complicated than having drinks at a particular bar that crops up in the novel, or playing laser tag at the People's Liberation Army facility. "On-site research" was more involved, however, for my second novel, The Swing of Beijing: I traveled through Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and crossed back into China through the Torugart Pass . . . all to write passages that are no longer part of the novel. No matter: I was honing my methodology.
With the exception of James Willson, that is. The world's expert on these sites, Willson has discovered and/or explored numerous areas of significance to WWI, including Fort Mzima, Crater Fort, Maktau and Salaita. Having read deeply on the subject, Willson is able to identify and map the different areas in the forts (trenches, command centers, parade grounds, tent encampments, etc.), and he has encyclopedic knowledge of the debris common at these ruins (shards of glass from Rose's lime juice bottles [pictured right], South African beer bottles, crushed tins that held bully beef, etc.). 
With Willson's guidance, the experience of soldiers in WWI clarified in an extraordinary manner. We drove the route that soldiers marched, in the heat of the day, on their way into battle at Murka. We picked our way through overgrown brush at Fort Mashoti that the soldiers had clear cut. From the command center at Maktau (pictured left), we surveyed the landscape on which British soldiers spied approaching German raiding parties. 
Reviews of Lori Gottlieb's new book Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough, along with Gottlieb's original Atlantic article (on the book is based), miss an important opportunity for addressing a serious problem in American society.
Storytellers don't have to be reliable to be entertaining. Great narrative voices can be widely off the mark - P.G. Wodehouse's marvelous Bertie Wooster is an example - and yet their own haplessness with facts and reality only deepens our delight in hearing what they have to say.
In a recent, ranging Huffington Post entry, Andrew Zack opines:
Publisher's Weekly recently hosted a panel as part of its "Think Future: What's Next in Publishing" discussion series on the question of "Will Book Reviews Still Matter?" 
In Richard Dawkins' Introduction to Elspeth Huxley's Red Strangers, he calls the novel "anthropologically illuminating," and that phrase struck me as the most insightful of the compliments he bestowed on the book ("epic," "gripping," "moving" and "humanistically mind-opening" among them). 
The mystique of J.D. Salinger's isolation, and the enduring popularity of The Catcher in the Rye - along with the consequent public fascination with his freakishness and super-success - often eclipse Salinger's writing itself. 
"Why do you think memoirs are so popular these days?" my friend Gabi asked me roughly ten weeks ago. I told her that I hadn't given the question much thought. She had, however, and her conclusion (I'm summarizing) was that people these days are too stupid for novels: society, to paraphrase her view, is dumbing down to the point where the only stories that grip are elevated gossip.
Ngugi wa Thiong'o writes in Gikuyu, the language spoken by the Kikuyu tribe in Kenya. He translates his own work into English. 
In Beppo, Lord Byron's verse play, the poet raises an intractable question: were 99 stanzas necessary?
Reading a 2003 New York Times profile of author Beth Ann Bauman, I was struck by her perseverance. At 38, Bauman had been living an impoverished life without publishing success for twelve years, despite an MFA in Creative Writing and a connection to Tina Bennett, a leading agent. '''Everyone around her was getting published first,'' said Alice Elliott Dark . . . one of Ms. Bauman's teachers in a writing workshop. 'I've seen this happen to a number of really talented people. It's very flukey.'''
The New York Times magazine recently ran a profile of James Patterson, the world's best-selling author, in which his former publisher at Little, Brown, Sarah Crichton, "says she was continually surprised by the success of Patterson's books. To her, they lacked the nuance and originality of other blockbuster genre writers like Stephen King or Dean Koontz."
In Ngugi wa Thiongo's A Grain of Wheat, Kihika, a Mau Mau rebel leader, expresses some brutal opinions about the way preceding generations dealt with imperialism:
I am a fan of art transcending reductive ideologies and, in A Grain of Wheat, Ngugi wa Thiongo may have provided us with an example of such transcendence. 