January 2010 Monthly Reading Life Review

This month I thought I would do something a little different for my month end post.

Reading done right has magic powers.    As I looked at the books I read in January I noticed that I have posted on more older works than I have in the past, one from the 11th century and one from the 18th.     I also read a number of novels set in the past and in diverse locations.  So everybody is invited on a grand around the world sea cruise.   Let us pick up our fellow travelers first.

The first port stop to pick up passenger is the courts of Angor, the great Mogul Emperor, with Salman Rushdie as our tour guide.    Staying a bit longer in India  and advancing a couple of hundred years we departed from the banks of the Ganges river to cross a Sea of Poppies with Captain Amitav Ghosh at the helm.    We have one more stop to make in India-some call center workers during One Night at the Call Center want to get out of the office very badly and I do not blame them.   Our next scheduled stop is Tokyo.

Stepping into the way back machine we go to 11th century Japan to hear some of the Tales of Ise and pick up a Samurai and his lady.  Skipping ahead a bit we make a stop in Tokyo to meet Naomi and Jiji.    Naomi's first question is "where are the ships stores".     From Tokyo we cruise along way to Johannesburg South Africa in the 1980s.   We pick up a very nice family there and the father wants to tell what he calls My Son's Story.   From there we cruise on to London.    A very large slightly odd gentleman in his 60s along with a very well dressed young man in his 30s come on board just having finished A Tour of the Hebrides.    We cannot help but notice that the younger man seems to write down everything his companion says.    We also take on Jeannette who for some reason wants to go at once to the kitchen so she can advise the head chef that Oranges are Not the Only Fruit.   Every body on board settles into shipboard life for the long trans-Atlantic portion of the trip.   James Boswell charms everyone but seems most interested in Naomi.    Dr Johnson at once engages in a conversation with our Samurai poet, he being the person Dr Johnson can learn the most from.     Our guests from South Africa confuse the captain by asking in what portions of the ship are they allowed to go.    The call center workers go wild when they find out all drinks and food are free.    So far none of our other Indian guests have left their cabins.

Our first New World stop is Birmingham Alabama in the 1930s where Harper Lee introduces us to a wonderful family.   The father in the family will end up friends with Dr Johnson but gives up on comparing professional notes from their work as Attorneys with Boswell.   His children cannot help but stare at some of the other guests.   Only one stop to go and that is Kingstown Jamaica in the 1840s.   We cross the Wide Sargasso Sea, taking on as a pilot through some very treacherous waters, Jean Rhys who introduces us to Mr Rochester and his wife Antoinette who he sometimes calls "Bertha".    Dr Johnson is completely taken with Antoinette and has to lecture Boswell about his colonial attitude toward her and the Indians.   Dr Johnson knows his friend Edmund Burke was right when he said that the cultural roots of Indian are much older than England.    Everybody is a bit confused as to why half way through the cruise Mr Rochester announces his wife will be confined to the cabin from now on.

Everyone is on board now.   It is up to the power of our imagination if we want to join this cruise are not.   Some of our guests are unpredictable.   The Emperor Angkor insisted on at least 50 cabins for his harem favorites, guards, foot tasters etc.    The  Indians other than the call center workers keep mostly to themselves.    The call center workers all consume mass quantities.    Boswell was a bit annoyed when Jeanette had no interest in him.    Many very diverse foods were served from collard greens and ham hocks for our guests from Birmingham to boiled sea weed with cod roe for Jiji.    The Emperor invites Johnson to his court to be his adviser.   Johnson says he will be honored to come as a guest but only if the Emperor will be his friend and not his patron.   Boswell has to be advised that it is a very bad idea to try to sneak into the cabin of one of the Harem girls of the Emperor.
  

Here is what I read in January 2010

1  The Tales of Ise by Arihara no Narihira

2  To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee

3  The Yellow Light Bookstore by Lewis Buzbee

4  Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson

5 One Night at the Call Center by Chetan Bhagat

6  Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

7  Sea of Poppies by Amitar Ghosh

8  The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie

9 My Son's Story by Nadine Gordimer

10  Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki

11  The Journal of a Tour to The Hebrides by James Boswell

January 2010 was a great month.     I read first  works  by four writers  new to authors  me I will for sure return to.   I revisited two old friends.   I added Jean Rhys to "my read everything they have written list." 

Reading Challenges

So far this year I have completed 9 reading challenges

I am still reading for 28 challenges-I expect to complete between six to ten  more challenges in February, with any luck.   Some new challenges will be started as the year goes on  and I will join some of them I am sure.   On July 30, 2010 I will be joining the Japanese Literature  4 challenge.    I fully intend to complete all these challenges but will not be stressed if I do not.   It is the journey that matters to me. I will give a more detailed challenge update next month.

 Notes to Manila readers-if any body in the GMA wants to work out a book swap please contact me-also we went to Cafe Juanita in the Fort Yesterday with some friends and it is the best restaurant we have yet been to in the GMA

As always I give my sincerest thanks to those who read my posts.   

Three Great Reading Challenges

This week I am joining three new reading challenges that offer the potential for edification as well as a chance to learn about some great books through my fellow challenge participants.

POC Reading Challenge

Last year I read and posted on 51 books by People of Color (POC).   I am understanding this to mean people of non-European ancestory.   I plan to continue with this in 2010 with a focus on Japanese, Filipino and Indian authors.   Last year I discovered several new to me authors who are POC that I have added them  to my "read everything they have written list".   I am joining this challenge in support of the project of diversified reading and in order to learn about some more great new to me authors.

The Rules for the POC Reading Challenge are on the challenge blog-There are reading lists and links for books reviewed.    There are various levels of commitment.   I will commit to level 5-16 to 25 books.  

Scottish Reading Challenge

Wuthering Expectations is hosting another challenge I found irresitable, The Scottish Literature Challenge.   The rules are simple-read one book by a Scottish author (written before 1914 or so) in 2010.  A unique feature for this challenge is the host, Amateur Reader, has promised to read any book that participants read (if he has not read it before).    He has done a lot of work providing reading suggestions.   I have in fact already read and posted on Boswell's The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.  I hope later in the year to read a work by Robert Louis Stevenson and Walter Scott and if I can work it in Tobias Smollett but I have completed the terms of this challenge.  I hope to read a lot of good reviews of Scottish books.

Jewish Literature Challenge 2010

The rules of the Jewish Challenge 2010 (runs from February 27 to Sept 10, 2010) are simple and explained on the link to the challenge.   The challenge post also gives us lots of reading ideas.  

(To challenge hosts, I cannot post all the badges for every challenge I am reading for in 2010 on my blog as it will slow down my load time.)

"The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides" by James Boswell

The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides by James Boswell (1785, 260 pages, reprinted by Penguin Classics, 1984-Included in the same book is Samuel Johnson's A Journey to the Western Islands)

I have been following Wuthering Expectations by Amateur Reader for some time now.   When he announced he would be hosting a Scottish reading challenge I knew at once that this was my spark to revisit an old friend, James Boswell, and a master of The Reading Life, Samuel Johnson.      I have read a lot of Boswell and some, though not nearly enough, Johnson.   I know everyone in the challenge will know who James Boswell and Samuel Johnson are but I want to explain who they are in my mind.

James Boswell (1709-84) was the son of a judge on the Scottish supreme court.   He grew up in Edinburgh Scotland and studied law, at the insistence of his father, at the university of Edinburgh.    Boswell was not a great attorney.   His first client was hung for stealing sheep.

Boswell loved the fast life, talking to the famous, the high and the low life of the big cities, and spent his life either trying to please his very harsh father or rebelling against him.  He also wrote the best biography ever written in any language, The Life of Samuel Johnson.

He  published a travel book about Corsica that was a best seller.   He met the greats and not so greats of Europe.   David Hume who scared him to death with his steadfast rationality and Voltaire  who tolerated the visit.   When Johnson passed away Boswell rushed his account of their joint trip to the Hebrides Islands into print so he could stake a claim to be the biographer of Samuel Johnson.  

Samuel Johnson is more read about than read.   He has a very good claim to be the greatest literary critic of all times.     He produced, with the help of some Scots, a massive dictionary of the English Language that the English liked to boast was superior to the one created for French by an army of scholars working several times as long.   He wrote speeches for famous politicians.   He wrote two wonderful poems, "The Vanity of Human Wishes" and "London".    He wrote a series of periodical essays that are unsurpassed anywhere.    His personality could be harsh but he was an extremally generous person.   In conversation he "spoke for victory" and did like to dominate with the force of his intellect.   To me, he is the sort of man who could have written the great wisdom texts of the world.

Boswell and Johnson had often talked of making a joint tour of the Hebrides Islands of northern Scotland.    (The Wikipedia article linked above gives a lot of interesting historical  data on the Hebrides).    Travel in those days was an adventure and the Hebrides Islands were at the time a very poor area ruled by near feudal lairds.   Most of the residents spoke only Scottish Gaelic and according to Boswell went barefoot most of the time.   

A lot of the  fun of reading Boswell's The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides is in the conversations between Johnson and others, including Boswell.   Boswell was a very keen observer (with some big blind spots) of social situations and we learn a lot about life in Scotland from his observations.   To me most of all it is a tale of a friendship between two very (Very) different sorts of men and a wonderful account of the pleasure of traveling.   Boswell said in his advertisement for the third edition of the Journal that the works of Johnson will be read as long as the English Language is spoken.   So far he has been right (lots of his works can be read for free on line).

I am a bit of a loggerheads how to post on the body of the journal.     After some reflection I decided I would try to illustrate the flavor of the book by looking at some passages.

Most biographies of  the times were hymns to great men.    Boswell was one of the first to give small details that let us know a person.

"I remember Dr Adam Smith, in his rhetorical lectures in Glasgow, told us he was glad to know that Milton wore latchets in his shoes instead of buckles.   When I mention the oak stick, it is but letting Hercules have his club"

Johnson is notorious for his joking comments about the Scots who were considered somewhat backwoods by Londoners.   

"To Scotland however he ventured: and he returned in great good humor with his prejudices much lessened."

Johnson never failed to learn from his experiences and he saw the world with open eyes.  He did not  see the world through his prejudgments.   (The same cannot be said of Boswell.)

In one very touching scene (Sunday, 15th August 1773-the journey took place from mid-August to mid-November 1773) Boswell and Johnson stop in at Boswell house.   Boswell's wife is a bit intimidated by Samuel Johnson (pretty much anybody would be).   Johnson got along very well with the Boswell children and left making a good impression on Boswell's wife (who had good reason to dislike many of Boswell's other friends).   Boswell's youngest daughter loved Johnson and saw through the gruff exterior.    One of the frequent topics of conversation of Boswell and Johnson was the emigration of Scots to America.   Johnson felt the emmigration had the potential to weaken the nation.  (Johnson  was basically in favor of independence for America based on the ground that England could not hold a colony so far away that did not want to be held and secondly a free America would evolve into a strong trading partner and potential ally.   He opposed slavery on moral grounds-Boswell's views on this are not so sanguine.   He supported the monarchy because he felt huge problems occur if there is no clear way of changing leaderships when a ruler passes out of power.)

Here is a passage that shows the clearness of Johnson's thinking.   Johnson thought through things for himself whereas Boswell liked to have "proper" views on things and worked backwards from his theories to the facts. 

"I said, I believed mankind were happier in the ancient feudal state of subordination, than they are in the modern state of independency.  Johnson:  to be sure the chief was:  but we must think of the number of individuals.   That they were less happy, seems plain: for that state from which all escape as soon as they can, and to which none return after they have left it, must be less happy:  and this is the case with the dependence on a great chief or great man".

Here we learn a lot about how Johnson got to be a man of great wisdom:

"Dr Johnson has the happy art of instructing himself by making every man he meets tell him something of what he knows best."

Johnson loved learning things almost as he loved reading, eating and talking!    Johnson also walked the streets of London (often for miles on end) in the company of men like Richard Savage in the early days when he could barely afford lodging.  He was very far from an ivory tower intellectual.  

On 30 August 1773 Boswell and Johnson encounter a very elderly lady living in a  primitive  peat hut along with fifty sheep.   Thier descriptions of the encounter are utterly hilarious.     Dr Johnson wanted to go into her hut (Johnson was 62 or so, huge for the time and Boswell was in his early 30s and looked a bit of a dandy).

"Dr Johnson was curious to know where she slept..She answered with a tone of emotion, saying (in Erse through a translator) she was afraid we wanted to go to bed with her.   This coquetry, or whatever it may be called, of so wretched a being was truly ludicrous.   Dr Johnson and I afterwards were merry upon it.   I said it was he who alarmed the poor woman's virtue.  'No Sir,' said he "She say "There came a wicked young fellow, a wild dog, who I believed would have ravished me had there not been with him a grave old gentleman, who repressed him.  "No Sir (Boswell replies) There was a terrible Ruffian who would have forced me, had it not been for a civil decent young man, who I take it, was an angel sent from heaven to protect me"."

There is another wonderful scene where somehow the pretty young wife of a minor Hebrides laird ends up sitting on Johnson's knee and kissing and hugging him.  

One of the best set piece in the journal involves the visit of Boswell and Johnson to see Boswell's father.   Boswell's father (a widower) was about the same age as Johnson and also very much, he was the equivalent of a supreme court judge,  a stern authority figure.  (Literary biographers of Boswell have pointed out at length Boswell's need for a substitute father figure that would be more accepting than his real father).   Boswell warned and begged Johnson not talk about either the Church of England or Cromwell as Johnson and Boswell's father had totally opposing views and both were used to having what they said accepted just because they said it.    Johnson resists the urge at first but he soon cannot help but ask Laird Boswell "what do you think of Cromwell and do you not agree the church of England is way superior to the church of Scotland?"    Boswell does not give us any details but he says he prayed they would not fall on each other!    From that day forth the father  would refer to Johnson as "Ursa Major".

Almost anywhere in this work you can find wonderful passages.   The book is the very model of a travel narrative.   We learn lots of interesting facts about the Islands and we greatly enjoy the company on the journey.   The prose is not hard to read and does not feel arcane.   You can feel the real friendship between Boswell and Johnson.   We also encounter some other names students of the 18th century will spark too.  We get a good look at country inns, sea voyages, and life in the Hebrides in the 1770s.   This book is also kind of a snack, the full meal is the massive Life of Samuel Johnson.   As Amateur Reader very rightly said it is amazing that a man with all the weakness of Boswell could produce this work.

Here is a statement from Boswell that we all can agree with

"everyman should keep minutes of whatever he reads. Every circumstance of his studies should be recorded; what books he has consulted; how much of them he has read; at what time; how often the same authors; and what opinions he formed of them, at different periods of his life. Such an account would much illustrate the history of his mind".

In closing I want to repeat that this is a fun book to read, not a chore to be completed for a class in the 18th century travel book.    In a month or so I will read Johnson's quite different account of the tour, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.  (I do not want to read them back to back, just my quirk here.)

In addition to the Scottish Challenge I am reading this book for

Typically British Challenge
Flashback   Challenge
Memorable Memoir Challenge.

I want to thank Suko of Suko's Note Book for directing me to Cooltext.com, from which I made my banner for the challenge.    Amateur Reader has put a lot of thought into his reading suggestions for which I thank him.   I think later on I will read my first Robert Lewis Stevenson book and my first Sir Walter Scott since high school!.   I am also going to try to read the collected periodical essays of James Boswell.  (Published in two volumes under  the title The Hypochondriack in 1925)

"Naomi" by Junichiro Tanizaki

Naomi by Junichiro Tanizaki (1924, 237 pages, translated from the Japanese by Anthony Chambers, Tuttle Publishing) is not a great Japanese novel, it is not a great 20th century novel, it simply is a great novel.  

Naomi was first published as a serial in a Japanese newspaper starting in 1924.  (I do not think there is any newspaper editor in The USA or Europe that could have published this work at that time without risking arrest.)    It is set in Japan in the early 1920s in Tokyo.   It is narrated by a male engineer named Joji.   At the start of the work he is 27.   It details his obsession with Naomi, who is 15 when he first meets her.   (It appears the age difference and the age of Naomi was not contrary to statute and custom in Japan at the time.)   Joji meets her where she works as a waitress in a coffee house.   He is mesmerized by her beauty.    Her family is quite poor and has a less than stellar reputation.   Joji offers to take her off her parents hands and raise her and they readily agree to relieve themselves of a burden.     Joji is very devoid of experience of romantic encounters of any kind but deeply desires Naomi.   He is a very decent man and he knows it is best that they live together as friends only, sort off, to start.   He sends her to school, buys her nice clothes and hires an English tutor for her.    He also loves giving Naomi her bath.   Naomi begins to realize the power she can obtain over Joji.   The bathing ritual goes on for a long time.   There is no sex at this point between Naomi and Joji but the bathing ritual is clearly very erotic for both of them.  We can feel the power of Naomi growing.   Joji begins to develop a fetish like obsession with Naomi's skin.   He begins to keep a log of the development of her body as she matures into a woman.    Naomi who was once an undemanding young woman begins to demand more material goods from Joji.   Joji begins their relationship worshiping her for her purity, as he perceives it.   As the narrative proceeds it is clear he is an unreliable narrator.   (I like to think that maybe Ford Madox Ford might have published Naomi in The English Review).    Naomi decides she wants to have  lessons in Western  style dancing.   Now  the real trouble begins.   The lessons are given by a White Russian woman who may have been a countess in  the old days.  (I notice in novels of the 1920s former Russian noblewomen often play the parts of the bringers of trouble.)    Naomi is about 19 now and she and Joji are married.    Naomi begins to occasionally mock Joji as an old man out touch with the then westernizing Japan.    He begins to compare her to Mary Pickford, something she finds very flattering.   There are young men her age in the dance class and to Joji's great surprise somehow Naomi seems to already know them.   When he asks her how she knows them, she tells him oh I just met them around.  There is also a Western man in the class.   Joji sees him as sinister figure of some sort in Japan as part of criminal enterprise.  Soon some really bad things happen.   I do not want to tell anymore of the plot action as the plot is so much fun and suspenseful as well.   We were really made to care about Joji even if our 21th century sensibilities are offended by his joy in bathing the 15 year old Naomi  which becomes full scale erotic enslavement.   (I admit as his enslavement to Naomi progresses I wanted to tell him go down to the pleasure quarters and get her out of your system before it is too late.).   The work is acutely perceptive in his portrayal of the characters.   We see slowly the dynamics of power change.   Joji thinks he loves Naomi but he actually has altered her into a fetish object.   Naomi is drawn to western culture and completely repelled by her own cultural roots.   In one purely masterful scene Naomi comes to visit Joji dressed in purely western clothes with matching make up and hair.    The revulsion felt by Joji nearly made my skin crawl.

Naomi has numerous thematic mines one could work.    It is a tale of the corruption of a culture by an outside force.   It is a story of the balance of power between a man and a woman.   It is a classic tale of misperception.   In Naomi we have a woman degraded by what she and others think exalts her.  It is also a story of what may be described without being judgmental as  a sexual perversion by which I mean turning in this case a woman, Naomi, from a person to a fetish object.   There are also lots of acute observations along the way.   It is a good look at Japan in the 1920s and the influence of western culture, mainly movies.  (For a time Tanizaki was a screen writer.)   I cannot judge if the translation is good or not but the prose is very well done and there are none of the "howlers" there are in some translated work.    It is a tragedy and a comedy of manners.    Most of all it is a lot of fun to read.   

This is the sixth work of Junichiro Tanizaki that I have reviewed for the Japanese Literaure 3 Challenge.    I have him on my "Read all they have written list-or in this case all that has been translated list."   I think he has four other novels translated into English that I have not yet read along with a collection of short stories and a work of artistic theory.

This will be my last review for the Japanese Literature 3 Challenge.   I give my sincerest gratitude to Dolce Bellezza for hosting it.   As The Japanese Challenge 4  begins I plan to do a post called "The Reading Life Guide to Getting Started in the Japanese Novel" where I will give my ideas on the best 3, 6, 9 or 12 Japanese novels to start with and why one should read Japanese novels.   There are still, of course, huge holes in my reading.   One obvious one is that I have read none of the major works of Murakami.   I hope to read his major works in the next few months.    I also have two novels by Kenzaburo Oe waiting to be read soon and he has a brand new one coming out in March!-

Mel u

"My Son's Story" by Nadine Gordimer

Johannesburg in the Times of Apartheid

If you are visiting from the class project on Nadine Gordimer, you are very welcome here-feel free to leave any comments or questions you may have-Jan 13, 2011

My  Son's Story (1990, 277 pages) is my first venture into the very large corpus of Nadine Gordimer.   Gordimer (1923-) was born in Johannesburg South Africa in a time of institutionalized legally mandated white supremacy.    Citizens were legally classified as either pure white, black or colored by the government. (Indians were also treated as a separate class of citizen.)   Where one could live was determined by your race.   Where you could go to school was determined by this.  In most areas, only whites were allowed to use the libraries, for example.   The wealth of the country was concentrated in the hands of whites.    Here is a good summery of the history of racial relations in South Africa (from Wikipedia.com):

"Racial segregation in South Africa began in colonial times, but apartheid as an official policy was introduced following the general election of 1948. New legislation classified inhabitants into racial groups ("black", "white", "coloured", and "Indian"), and residential areas were segregated by means of forced removals. From 1958, Blacks were deprived of their citizenship, legally becoming citizens of one of ten tribally based self-governing homelands called bantustans, four of which became nominally independent states. The government segregated education, medical care, and other public services, and provided black people with services inferior to those of whites.


Apartheid sparked significant internal resistance and violence as well as a long trade embargo against South Africa.[1] A series of popular uprisings and protests were met with the banning of opposition and imprisoning of anti-apartheid leaders. As unrest spread and became more violent, state organizations responded with increasing repression and state-sponsored violence."

My Son's Story is set in the decade prior to the beginning of the end of apartheid (1990) as a state policy.   It details in a masterful way the effects of growing up mixed in this enviornment.    A very big part of the evil of the policy is the harm it does to the souls of those raised under it as Gordimer shows us brilliantly in My Son's Story.

There are five characters that matter in this novel.   Sonny, a mixed race political activist and the father of late teen age Will and his slightly older daughter Baby.   He is married to Aila who is a beautiful, very mature almost gently regal woman.   One day Will sees his father at the movies with a white woman, a blond named Hannah who his father met through his political contacts.   (Hannah is mentioned as blond over and over - maybe this is a bit heavy handed on the part of Gordimer).    The son is shocked.   He begins to feel hatred as well as jealousy toward his father as he too wishes to be with a blond woman rather than the sort of woman society feels he should have.   The first woman for whom he has a sexual desire is a woman his father is committing adultery with.   Hannah is not at all a bad person.   She is very involved in the struggle for human rights in South Africa and is solicitous about Sonny's family.   Sonny (Gordimer does point out for us the irony of calling a mature man in a position of leadership  "Sonny" and sees the proliferation of such names as one of the insidious effects of state policies) feels deep guilt over his unfaithfulness to his wife.    He wants a white woman so badly he will risk everything to be with Hannah.

My Son's Story does a wonderful job detailing the small intimacies that make up a good marriage.   Sonny has a very good wife and a very good marriage.   Sonny is also a deep reader of Shakespeare and Kafka.   Sonny's daughter Baby is a bit rebellious but nothing real bad.   I noticed as the action of the novel changed the prose style changed.   In a great set piece in which Gordimer describes a riot the tone and the syntax of the prose comes to unite with the plot action to make us feel we are in the middle of the riot.    Sonny does come across as a man who totally on his own has internalized much of Shakespeare.   As we read his thoughts we think what he might have been.    We see the many ways in which apartheid effects the characters.   Baby begins to act out in a way calculated to offend those in the community who admire her mother as a beautiful and dignified person of mixed blood.   Will and others in the work continually speak of tribal blacks as dangerous and undisciplined.   Much of  the self esteem of the son comes from looking down on blacks.    Some will question the exact motives of Hannah as we are not taken very deeply into her psyche.  

There is a lot in My Son's Story.    There is a very knowing portrait of the growth of intimacy in a marriage.   We see how the father's adultery affects his children and his wife as well as his commitment to the movement.   We see the inside of courts and prisons.    To me My Son's Story is a work of small gem-like   observations and fine subtle nuances.   I felt a powerful intelligence behind this work.    I learned, among other things, how labor policy under apartheid was behind to a large extent the spread of aids in South Africa.    In the three figures of Alia, Hannah and Baby we have a commentary on women in this society.    At some point one must wonder if the gentle refinement of Alia is really the result of her parents raising her to be a person very unlike the stereotypical notion of a nonwhite woman.   Maybe she is bound by this.    There is a very subtle suggestion that Alia may have her own affair also but we are left to decide if she did or not on our own.    Baby is acting out.   In her late teenage years she is dancing in the streets in skin tight clothes and shorts to music very unacceptable to her parents.   

There are interesting and exciting things that happen in the plot line.   At times Gordimer does seem a bit heavy handed in being sure we do not miss things.    She received the Nobel Prize in 1991.   She is very active in human rights organizations.    It should be noted that some in South Africa  see her as paternalistic and condescending in her treatment of blacks both in her work and in her social activities.

I am glad I read My Son's Story.   Maybe it is a bit heavy handed once or twice but it is beautifully written and a very high intellect shines through the book.  

I see this as a suitable read for the Women Unbound Challenge given its treatment of the three women.    We see how a marriage is ruined by the binds of race.   Sonny would never have cheated on his wife with Hannah if she were not white.    Baby breaks away from her father and partially asserts herself also but to explain that would be a spoiler.    


Mel u

Themed Reading Challenge 2010

Flaubert and Friends

Caribousmom is hosting for the second year the Themed Reading Challenge.   This is a very interesting challenge as it gives us a lot of freedom to create a reading project.   Basically you are asked to read five books with a central theme.   The challenge runs from February 14, 2010 to August 14, 2010.   (The full particulars are on the challenge blog linked above along with some ideas from 2009 if you need them.)  It is ok for books for this challenge to overlap with others.  

As soon as I saw this I began to ponder different themes for the challenge.   I just finished reading my first Salman Rushdie novel, The Enchantress of Florence.   I really liked the lush prose of the work so I thought I could read five more of his novels.   Then I thought, this might be like a literary sugar rush.    Then I thought maybe I could read western writers that Kenzaburo Oe admires like Stendhal, Twain, and Yeats.    Next I thought I might read some Japanese crime novels as I have a few already lined up to be read in 2010.

I have decided that my theme will be works by Gustave Flaubert and his Friends.   (I am taking as my authoritative source for inclusion among the friends, A Biography: Flaubert by Frederick Brown.    I urge anyone interested in Flaubert to read this very wonderful  book.)   

Here are some of what I hope to read and why:

A Sentimental Education by Gustave Flaubert-this will be my second reading-12 to go!

Indiana by George Sand -very close friend of Flaubert-set on the Island of Reunion
(Ok here is a good challenge idea-books set on Reunion Island!)

Anything by Ivan Turgenev-Turgenev was for sure his closest friend among writers-the information given on Turgenev in Brown's book makes me wish someone would write a similar biography of him.  

Emile Zola-(Brown has also written a biography of Zola.   I have it but have not yet read it.)-Zola passes into the class of friend as admirer but not a full intimate.

Guy de Maupassant-also in the category of disciple

Henry James-not actually a friend but he was part of Flaubert's circle for a while and attended dinners at which Flaubert's intimates were present.   I imagined Flaubert and Turgenev taking Henry James out for a night on the town while he was in Paris but the picture does not quite work!   

This will be my 35th reading challenge for 2010.   I have already completed seven challenges.   I anticipate I will be signing up for more challenges as they are announced, as not all challenges run from Jan 1 to December 31.   

I look forward to seeing what themes others will come up with for The Themed Reading Challenge 2010.

Mel u

"The Enchantress of Florence" by Salman Rushdie

The Enchantress of  Florence by Salman Rushdie (2008, 381 pages)

A Lush Account of Court Life in Mughal India  

I have been wanting to read a novel by Salman Rushdie for a long time.    He achieved fame in the non-literary world when he received death threats based on political reactions to his novel The Satanic Verses.    He is the most internationally known author from India, it seems to me.    (I still recall when Kramer mentioned him in a "Seinfeld" episode.   Nobody on the show had actually read his book but they had heard of him.)    Rushdie has received nearly every well known literary award short of the Nobel Prize.

The Enchantress of Florence is set in the late 16th century.   It takes place in part in the Florence of the Medici and in part in northern India in the court of Akbar, the greatest Mughal emperor.   Both of these cultures are nearing their zenith.    The tie to the two areas is a mysterious blond male visitor from Florence who claims to be related to Akbar the Great.     The language of this work is very lush.    The focus is on court life in both of the capitals.    We get a feeling of what it was like to be the emperor (it had a lot of perks such as a huge harem).    His oldest sons are already very corrupted by their power and Akbar feels they may well kill him one day and turn on each other.