So Uncool

      2007 went out with a pile of good reading. I did manage to finish the Armchair Traveler’s Reading Challenge, although with a last-minute change of titles, and even read two books for the Canadian Book Challenge as well as two of the books on my south of the border reading list.

     I finished The Lemon Tree, by Sandy Tolan, and although I had reported it dry at first, once I got about of the third of the way through it became quite compelling, and I enjoyed the rest of it without reservation. The book turned out to be highly readable, after its drier beginning. It is also the most even-handed and thorough account of the history of the conflict between the Palestinians and the Israelis that I have ever come across; I recommend it to anyone who wishes to understand both sides of the issue, and most particularly to those, like myself, who have a family history (my father is Palestinian; I was born in the United States and raised by an American mother in the United States, removing me from firsthand experience of Palestine) that has been deeply affected by it. Although I already had heard this story in bits and pieces, as family history, this book gave me a more detailed, and more precise, look at this history. I now have a better understanding of the “what happened’” as well as its effect on another Palestinian family (and an Israeli family), which has deepened my understanding of my father’s outlook and the collective psyche of the Palestinian people.

     I also read Anil’s Ghost by Michael Ondaatje, letting this book do double duty for both reading challenges. The author is Canadian, but the story is set in Sri Lanka. The protagonist, Anil, is a native of Sri Lanka who left as a young adult to obtain an education in England and in the United States. She returns to her civil war-torn native country as a forensic anthropologist to investigate mass killings on behalf of an international human rights group. There is no explicit ghost in the book, excepting perhaps the implied ghost of a skeleton nicknamed Sailor by Anil and her Sri Lankan colleague, whose bones point toward governmental misdeeds. The concept of “ghost,” however, pervades the novel, where not only is Anil’s return to Sri Lanka an encounter with ghosts of her own past, but of Sri Lanka’s past and present, embodied in the novel’s characters who all seem to be either ghosts of their own pasts or made ghosts in their own present lives by war and oppression. This book is a pleasurable read, and goes deep.

     The Good Husband of Zebra Drive, by Alexander McCall Smith, was more of the same in the Number One Ladies’ Detective Agency series. And that’s a good thing. Sweet, funny, a bit predictable, set in Botswana, and always wonderful; what’s not to like?

     Erased Faces by Graciela Limon is set in Chiapas, Mexico, and tells the story of the Zapatista uprising in 1994. While I did not like the flow of the book as well as I did Anil’s Ghost, it read well and gave a good feel for the roots of the uprising. Where Anil’s Ghost read like a human story (or stories) set against civil war, the characters in Erased Faces come across more as vehicles for telling this (admittedly important) history. Still, this is a book worth reading, and is not at all tedious; it moves along well, and the characters are sympathetic. At first I thought the lesbian love affair distracted from the focus on the uprising, but once I had finished the book, it made sense to me that a Mexican American professor such as Limon would want to address multiple forms of oppression, making the well-taken point that all forms of oppression are interrelated and come from the same impulse.

     I know that I said I would write more about A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini, but guess what? I’m not. All I’m going to do is urge everyone to read it; it’s a wonderful book. The reason I don’t want to write much about my reaction to it, is that I find it too painful to write as a book review. The patriarchy in this book is brutal and extreme; but this is the mindset under which I was raised. Since I was born and raised in the U.S., it was quite mitigated in terms of what could or would be put into practice, but this extreme patriarchy was the mindset of my family and of our peer group as I was growing up. Religion was a whip used against me, and it still hurts. A lot. So, I would love for everyone to read this book and know that not only is such behavior not in the past, it is also not only relegated to war-torn third world countries (or Muslims, but this book doesn’t make that point). People right here think that way, too. So, now I’ll stop, because I’m trying to make a point without saying anything, and I’ve never seen that actually work for anyone yet! Thank you to Hosseini for this book.

     Like Water for Chocolate by Laura Esquivel is the book that I substituted for Women in Guerilla Movements. I still want to read Women in Guerilla Movements, but it is more scholarly in tone than I had thought it would be, and not a book I just want to plow through in a hurry. Since I was running out of time, Like Water for Chocolate filled in with some easy, light reading. This is a fun little book about passion that is erotic without being explicit. Overtly the book is about sexual passion, but with its emphasis on food and its backdrop of military conflict, there are more passions operating than the simply sexual. It’s not a complex book, but it is one that reminds us that humanness is physical as well as mental—and both contribute to spirit.

     Finally, The Blind Assassin, by Margaret Atwood, one of my favorite writers, was the only one of these books that I did not like. It is a very competent book, intertwining stories within stories. But, I found none of the characters likeable in the least, and it is one of those novels that is self-consciously about being fictional. It constantly calls attention to the fact that this is a story, knocking the reader out of one story into another, until finally multiple levels of story coalesce into one character’s story. But although I found this clever, I do not enjoy that type of book. I want to fall into the story; I want to believe it. I know that it’s a story; I know it has an author, and I know that the narrator’s voice is not necessarily that of the author. Why remind me? It’s been done, I’ve studied it in English classes, and I’m not interested. So, while I did admire Atwood’s skill (she did this particularly well), and I enjoyed the puzzle-like aspect of it for a bit, and I did appreciate (and agree with) the message that all of life is a story, and that true meaning is manipulated—intentionally or not—by the teller of the story, and that stories matter, still I did not like this book.

     One of the things I noticed in this rush to read all of my Armchair Traveler books by December 31, was all of these books were about people affected by wars, either in the past or in the (book’s) present. All of the books set in other places had war either as a backdrop or as an active presence, and The Blind Assassin, although set in and near Toronto, had characters and story affected by World Wars I and II. Is war an unchangeable fact of human existence?

     I hope not. So, my trite but true wish for 2008 is for peace, in whatever small ways we—all of us, all over the world—can make it happen.