Literature by period

Lloyd Jones, Hand me down world

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I used to find myself saying, I can’t imagine. But, I’ve since found out, you can – it’s just a case of wanting to.

Hand me down world, bookcover

Book cover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

What this character is talking about is empathy – and empathy, the having or not having it, is for me a major theme of New Zealand writer Lloyd Jones’ latest novel, Hand me down world. The novel is chock-full of characters who vary in their ability to empathise or not with other humans, to behave altruistically or selfishly towards others, to treat others with the dignity that all humans deserve or as nobodies to be ignored (or worse). These are not, in the real world, absolute alternatives but continuums along which we all position ourselves when relating to others. I think this positioning is one of the fundamental challenges of being human, and Lloyd Jones explores it in a novel which got me in from the get-go. In other words, I loved it.

This is a novel with a simple plot but a complex narrative. The plot concerns a young, poor African woman, a hotel worker, who leaves Africa using human-traffickers to find her son in Berlin. Why she does this is a shocking story revealed in the first chapter. The book follows her journey until its inevitable but not totally predictable conclusion.

What is particularly interesting about the book is how Jones has chosen to tell the story. It is divided into five parts:

1. What they said
2. Berlin
3. Defoe
4. Ines
5. Abebi

The first two parts comprise 13 chapters, each named for the narrator telling that part of the story. All but one of the narrators are first person and they chronicle their experience with the woman (whom we come to know as Ines) as she journeys to and finally arrives in Berlin. The third person narrator is “The inspector”. Why he is third person initially mystified me, but it all becomes clear when he reappears in Ines’ part. As I was reading these early chapters, I was reminded of Gabriel Garcia Marquez‘s Chronicle of a death foretold because they sounded like witness statements (and that, in fact, is what we later discover they are). This is not, though, a whodunnit, any more than Marquez’s book is, although a death does occur. Intrigued? You should be.

Anyhow, it is in these early chapters that the “empathy” theme starts to play out as it is in them that we hear how Ines gets from Africa, via Italy, to Berlin. She is “helped” by a number of people including a truck driver, snail collector, an alpine hunter, a chess player and a film researcher. Some of these people help her expecting nothing, some help her only if she gives something in return (and I’m sure you can guess what that might be), some help her but would like something in return, some are unsure whether to help her or not, and so on. It certainly makes you wonder what you would do, how far out of your way you would go.

Suffice it to say, she makes it to Berlin, manages to find a job, and starts searching for her son. But, I won’t talk more on that, so you can discover for yourself how her story plays out. What I will talk about instead are some of the other features of the book that make it such an interesting read.

Several metaphors run through the novel, but they never feel overworked. One that I particularly liked concerns phantoms/ghosts. Lloyd uses them to describe the marginalised or dispossessed. The pastor (who better to talk about ghosts?) speaks of ghosts in a number of contexts, including:

The ghost remains a spectre, no more than a possibility. Something to be afraid of. A manifestation of fear, such as the opposition parties in each and every undemocratic regime in Africa.

The other ghosts – the real ghosts if I may call them that – are simply those whom we choose not to see.

Ines, of course, is one of these – and later, when she considers stealing her son, she talks of teaching him “to turn himself into a ghost”. Another motif that runs through the book is that of versions and lies. Most of the early narrators are not exactly reliable, several people do not go by their own name and there are references to things being transformed (such as snails which can change gender and lungfish which can live in and out of water). When Defoe describes the lungfish (below) we see its reference to the way people change, to how we can transform (for good) or dissemble (for ill, such as the father of Ines’ baby):

Now he arrived at the question that interested him. At which point does it become the one thing and cease to be the other? In becoming that new thing how much does it retain of the other?

One of the little side stories in this multilayered novel concerns the old blind man Ralf in whose household Ines finds work. We learn from Ralf’s ex-wife, Hannah, that after her gentle, kind father-in-law had died they found a photograph that revealed his secret past as a photographer of atrocities during the Nazi regime. Ralf’s inability to come to terms with his father’s contradictory, secret past brings about the breakdown of his marriage. Meanwhile, Ines lies, steals and pretends in order to achieve her goal of developing a relationship with her son:

I had to see him. And that need turned me into someone with no heart or conscience. I didn’t care how the money was earnt.

It is difficult in fact to know who the real Ines is … but she is a wounded soul. Who are we to judge? Throughout the novel, in fact, Jones confronts us with imperfect people and challenges us to consider both them and their circumstances. How far can, should, our empathy extend? Uncomfortable questions but ones we must face.

During Ines’ story she says “I was shown more kindness than abuse” which reminded me of Rieux’s statement at the end of The plague that “there are more things to admire in men to despise”. I like to think they’re right but, with Camus and Jones, I also know that we need books like this to remind us that we still have a way to go …

Lisa at ANZLitlovers also enjoyed this book.

Lloyd Jones
Hand me down world
Melbourne, Text Publishing, 2010
352pp
ISBN: 9781921656682

André Gide, The immoralist (or, L’immoraliste)

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André Gide: pencil drawing

Gide, c. 1901, Pencil drawing by Henry Bataille (Presumed Public Domain, via Wikipedia

Reading synchronicities strike again – though on the surface it wouldn’t seem to be so. That is, could there really be synchronicities between Geoff Dyer‘s Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi and Andre Gide‘s The immoralist? I think there are. Besides some comments on art – its value and meaning – in The immoralist, there is the grappling with what seems to me to be the paradoxes inherent in explorations of how to live our lives. In Dyer, as I wrote in my recent post, the paradoxes are front and centre. You can’t miss them. In Gide, they are there too, but tend to be more subtle.

The immoralist was published in 1902 and was at the time, I believe, seen as a rather shocking tale of dereliction. Over a century later, we are not so easily shocked by the behaviour he describes, but the book still has things to say. Gide writes in his preface:

If certain distinguished persons have refused to see this drama as anything other than the folding of a particular, unusual case, and its hero as anything other than an individual with an illness, they have failed to see that there are important ideas of interest to many to be found in it.

In other words, he claims some level of universality for his tale.

The first thing to note about the novel is that it has three parts – at least, from the second edition on when Gide included his preface. There’s:

  • the preface in which Gide, as I’ve explained above, argues that Michel’s “problem” exists regardless of whether or not he resolves it;
  • the letter in which one of Michel’s friends seeks a job for Michel to, in effect, save him from himself; and
  • Michel’s story, as told to his three friends.

And so what is Michel’s story? Well, it’s about an unworldly young scholar who marries a young woman, Marceline, whom he barely knows, at the request of his dying father. After their marriage, which they do not consummate for some time, he becomes ill with tuberculosis and nearly dies. As he starts to recover in beautiful Biskra to which they have travelled, he starts to see life in a new way – inspired partly by a young Arab boy, Bachir, introduced to him by his wife:

I thought of Bachir’s beautiful, glistening blood … And, suddenly I felt a wish, a desire, more pressing and imperious than anything I have ever felt before, to live. I want to live!

So, gradually, begins his life as an “immoralist”. This does not exactly mean that he lived an “immoral” life, though that he did to some degree, but that he rejected being bound by morality, by society’s rules and restrictions. Gide was influenced by the philosophies of Nietzsche, which in the novel are promulgated, somewhat extremely, by an older friend, Ménalque. For Michel, they mean, for example, learning to “feel” – and to eventually putting sensation (body) totally ahead of thinking (the mind):

The only way I could pay attention to anything was through my five senses …

From this time on, he tries out his new ideas and starts leading a self-centred life, ignoring his friends and his wife more and more to follow a life of freedom to do what he will. He wants to live a life that is individual, not imitative of others. He loses interest in the lessons of the past (which had once been his passion) because, as Ménalque says, the past (particularly through memory) “encroaches” on and thereby spoils the present:

Now I could only derive pleasure from history by imagining it in the present. I was much less inspired by great political events than by the new emotions stirred by the poets or certain men of action…

What he discovers, though, is that freedom does not, in fact, free him (or, make him happy). Paradox, n’est-ce pas?

I’m not going to detail the full story of his “decline”, his forays into low-living, his “repudiation of all culture, decency and morality”, the tragedies he experiences in his personal life, but he eventually arrives at the point where he calls his friends to hear his story, and help him. He says to them at the end of his story:

The thing that scares me, I have to admit, is that I am still quite young. I sometimes feel as if my real life has yet to begin. Take me away from here and give me a reason to live. I no longer have one. Maybe I have liberated myself. But so what? I find this empty liberty painful to bear.

This is a complex little book, and I’m not sure I’ve fully grasped its import. Does it, for example, reject Nietzschean ideas or simply the misapplication of them? Does the Michel at the end still believe in himself as the “perfectible being” he did earlier in the novel? Are we meant to see his as a cautionary tale, and if so, what particular lessons should we draw from it? Anyone?

Andre Gide
The immoralist
(trans. by David Watson)
London: Penguin Books, 2000
124pp
ISBN: 9780141182995

Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi

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Geoff Dyer, Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi

Bookcover (Courtesy: Text Publishing)

What, a few moments earlier, had seemed such a persuasive notion – that ridiculousness might be the animating principle of life –  seemed, in the face of this more pedestrian idea of progress, abruptly … ridiculous. No sooner had I thought this, than I’d suddenly had enough of walking. (“Death in Varanasi”)

Hmm … what has the “idea of progress” got to do with “the animating principle of life”? Geoff Dyer‘s Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi, which comprises two loosely connected novellas, is full of non-sequiturs, paradoxes and other confusions – so much so that I’m not quite sure what to make of it, but perhaps by the end of this review, I will!

I wanted to read it because I’d been hearing about it around the traps, and had seen it recommended several times on people’s reading lists. There is, it seems, a vague autobiographical element to this book: Dyer has been to the Venice Biennale and to Varanasi, and he has written journalistic pieces as have the two (or is it one?) narrators the book. But, he went to both with his wife, not as a single man, and he is Geoff not Jeff. Methinks there is some teasing/playing with us going on here!

The first tease relates to the form. Are the two novellas connected by character? Is the third person Jeff in “Geoff in Venice” the same as the first person narrator in “Death in Varanasi”? And there are teases in the subject matter, but let’s talk plot first, such as there is. “Jeff in Venice” describes Jeff’s few days at the Venice Biennale, and particularly his falling in love (or is it lust) with the lovely Laura. There is quite a bit of explicit sex in the story: in other words, the so-called “little death” is well covered. This first story is about art, life and love – and yet encompasses, paradoxically, the idea of “death”. In “Death in Varanasi”, the main character, a freelance journalist who could very well be Jeff, goes to Varanasi for a few days to write a commissioned piece, but decides to stay. One of the first things he does in Varanasi is go to see the cremations by the Ganges. Death is all around, and yet, paradoxically, this is where many westerners turn up to find “enlightenment”, that is, to find the meaning of life. The narrator, himself, gradually drops all vestiges of his former self until, near the end, he has shaven his head and wears a dhoti.

So what is the background premise to these stories? As far as I can tell it is something to do with being in one’s mid-forties and starting to wonder what it’s all about. Jeff Atman, “stuffed with pastry, tense with coffee”, decides to dye his hair because:

For a long time he’d thought of grey hair as a symptom, a synonym of inner dreariness, and had accepted it as inevitable – but that was about to change.

There are a lot of sly little jokes and word-games in the book. When Jeff’s newly dyed hair is about to be revealed, he calls it “the moment of untruth” which, in a sense it is, though it is also his new truth. It’s all a matter of perspective isn’t it? (After all, the hairdresser had quoted Plath – a hairdresser quoting Plath impresses Jeff –  at him by saying “We do [dye] it so it looks real”.) And so the new real Jeff goes to the Venice Biennale, a place characterised as much by “party-anxiety and invite-envy” as it is by exciting new art to discover. This first story is about hedonism, about booze, drugs and sex. It’s a common story in literature – a certain dissipation that follows disillusion, and leads to … well, it seems to me, back to disillusion. See, it’s a tricky  book!

I enjoyed the satirical descriptions of the Biennale, of the art world and, particularly, of the more sycophantic adherents. But, I couldn’t quite believe the relationship with Laura – it felt more like male fantasy than real. Perhaps that’s how it was supposed to come across.

In the second story of the book, the tone becomes a little more meditative, lower key. I expected to meet the beautiful Laura again. After all, she told Jeff in the first story that she planned to go to Varanasi to be a hedge fund manager (of all things!). But, we don’t meet her and, if there’s a reference to her (and I think there is), it’s very obscure and does suggest we are dealing with Jeff again. “Death in Varanasi” starts with:

The thing about destiny is that it can so nearly not happen and, even when it does, rarely looks like what it is.

What happens is that the narrator’s brief stay turns into something longer term. It’s not so much that he makes a definite decision to stay as that he doesn’t decide to leave: “there was nothing to go home for”.

As I said at the beginning, this is a book full of teases and paradoxes. The narrator in Varanasi “invents” the God Ganoona who “is all that which is not anything else. But it’s also that which is everything else”. In a similar vein he talks of being desire-free:

… for the idea of desirelessness to take root, to set off in that direction, to try to free yourself of desire, surely that must manifest itself as a desire, a yearning, an urge. How then does desire transcend itself?

This book demands some mental gymnastics – not hard ones, necessarily, but ones asking you to keep on going without pondering too long or thinking each one is the answer. In a discussion about the book on The First Tuesday Book Club, English author Philip Hensher says that in all his books Geoff Dyer “seems to reinvent the genre, to make the reader think twice about what it is he’s reading … the book is constantly retreating from you” so you have to make up your own mind. And that, in my best Dyeresque way, is where I’ll leave you … it’s worth a look, even if at the end you are not quite sure what you saw!

Geoff Dyer
Jeff in Venice, death in Varanasi
Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2009
296pp.
ISBN: 9781921656897

(Review copy courtesy Text Publishing)

Jane Austen, Sense and sensibility (Vol. 2)

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Austen, Sense and sensibility, Ch 36 illustration

From Chapter 36, illus. by CEBrock (Presumed Public Domain, from solitaryelegance.com)

…and because they were fond of reading, she fancied them satirical… (Lady Middleton on the Dashwood sisters, Ch. 36)

In January, I wrote about Volume 1 of Jane Austen’s Sense and sensibility, which my local Jane Austen group is reading volume by volume this 200th anniversary year of its publication. Unfortunately I missed the February meeting and so didn’t take part in the discussion. But, I am still reading it volume by volume. Here are some thoughts on Volume 2 (which comprises Chapters 23 to 36).

In my discussion of Volume 1, I suggested that the “sense” and “sensibility” dichotomy is not as absolute as the title would suggest. However, in Volume 2, Elinor and Marianne are pretty well entrenched in these two opposing positions. Marianne gives full rein to her emotions as the extent of Willoughby’s perfidy becomes clear, while Elinor takes tight control of herself to hide her emotional distress about Edward. Is this a flaw in the novel? Or Austen’s skill in setting up the characters and then, in this central section, using their prime characteristic to further her plot and themes? Let’s see how it pans out in Volume 3.

Also in my discussion of Volume 1, I talked about what I saw as the theme of “judgement” being developed in the book. The word “judgement” does not appear as frequently in this volume, but I think the idea is still there. Elinor is convinced that Marianne and Willoughby have a “secret” engagement because she does not believe Marianne to be so lacking in judgement as to behave the way she does (giving Willoughby a lock of hair, writing to him) without being engaged. And yet, she’s not totally confident in Marianne because she decides to go to London with Marianne and Mrs Jennings

as she did not think it proper that Marianne should be left to the sole guidance of her own judgement…

Is Elinor a bit of prig? Some think so, but I prefer to see her as a wise young person, who needed to be so, given the mother and sister she had. As the volume progresses, we see the failure of judgement in many of the characters, such as Fanny Dashwood who ironically prefers to have the Steele sisters as her guests over her relations, the Dashwoods, and Mrs Jennings whose general kindness makes it hard for her to see through more calculating characters like Lucy Steele.

For all this, though, it is money that drives the plot in this book, that generates its main plot crises, one of which occurs in this volume. Money is behind Willoughby’s callous treatment of Marianne, as Miss Grey has £50,000! Miss Morton has £30,000, and so is being promoted in this volume as a good catch for Edward Ferrars who has only £2,000 of his own (though he is promised more if he marries well. What’s that about money begetting money?) Lucy claims to love Edward for himself, and not his money. Money is the governing principle in the lives of Mrs Ferrars and her daughter, Fanny Dashwood. John Dashwood never appears without money being far behind. Money is a significant factor – particularly regarding women and marriage – in all of Austen’s novels, something she establishes clearly in this, her first one to be published.

One of the delights of this volume is the way characters are so beautifully and consistently delineated. For example, here is how some of the characters respond to the news of Willoughby’s engagement to Miss Grey:

  • Hail-fellow-well-met Sir John Middleton finds the behaviour “unaccountable” from such a bold rider;
  • Cheery but garrulous Mrs Palmer “resolved never to mention his name again, and she should tell everybody she saw, how good-for-nothing he was”;
  • Cold Lady Middleton shows “calm and polite unconcern”; while
  • Kind Colonel Brandon makes “delicate, unobtrusive enquiries”.

Austen’s ability to define character so clearly, using satire, irony or straight description as the character warrants, is one of the things I love about her.

Finally, I just have to share this little bit of “plus ça change”:

Why don’t he, in such a case, sell his horses, let his house, turn off his servants, and make a thorough reform at once? I warrant you, Miss Marianne would have been ready to wait till matters came round. But that won’t do now-a-days; nothing in the way of pleasure can ever be given up by the young men of this age.

What do I hear today about today’s younger generation wanting it all now?

David Foster Wallace, All that

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I have not yet read anything by David Foster Wallace and so when I came across his short story*, “All that”, in The New Yorker, I jumped at the chance of an introduction.

It has a first person narrator, who is looking back on his childhood and recalling, in particular, his fascination with magic and religion. It is a clever – and rather sad – little piece about the mismatch between the rationality of parents and the incredulity of children, especially highly imaginative ones. The prime technique Wallace uses to explore this mismatch is that of an unreliable or, more specifically, naive narrator, so that we ache for the little boy while also recognising where the parents are coming from (even if we hope we would not be quite like them). As the narrator says:

That is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt’s complete absence. They have forgotten.

And so they tease, and set children up, unaware of the impact of their behaviour.

The story’s tone is one of uncertainty and qualification. The narration is peppered with such expressions as “I’m ninety percent sure”, “as I remember”, “I’m positive it was”, “I believe”. And, on occasions, he uses ambiguous syntax and then has to clarify the meaning for us, as in “It was (‘it’ meaning the cement mixer) the same overlarge miniature …”. All this gives the reader the distinct sense of a disconnect between what the narrator is saying and what he is really feeling. For example, the parents lie to their son in the teasing but cruel way that adults do, by telling him that his cement mixer is magic, that it mixes cement while he pulls it along but that it stops the minute he turns around to look at it. He is mystified why his parents, knowing of this “magic”, hadn’t told him immediately but waited some weeks or months. He says of his parents:

They were a delightful but often impenetrable puzzle to me; I no more knew their minds and motives than a pencil knows what it is being used for.

Now that’s an interesting image to unpack, eh? The first time he mentions his parents, he calls them “my biological parents”, providing another clue to a disconnect.

Then there is the intriguing pacing. Most of the story is written at a normal pace with a mix of simple and complex sentences, but, every now and then, there is an excessively long sentence, as in:

Sometimes the experience of the voices was ecstatic, sometimes so much so that it was almost too intense for me – as when you first bite into an apple or a confection that tastes so delicious and causes such a flood of oral juices in your mouth that there is a moment of intense pain in your mouth and glands – particularly in the late afternoons of spring and summer, when the sunlight on sunny days achieved moments of immanence and became the color of beaten gold and was itself (the light, as if it were taste) so delicious that it was almost too much to stand, and I would lie on the pile of large pillows in our living room and roll back and forth in an agony of delight and tell my mother, who always read on the couch, that I felt so good and full and ecstatic that I could hardly bear it, and I remember her pursing her lips, trying not to laugh, and saying in the driest possible voice that she found it hard to feel too much sympathy or concern for this problem and was confident I could survive this level of ecstasy, and that I probably didn’t need to be rushed to the emergency room, and at such moments my love and affection for my mother’s dry humor and love became, stacked upon the original ecstasy, so intense that I almost had to stifle a scream of pleasure as I rolled ecstatically between the pillows and the books on the floor.

Phew! That is one mouthful and a half. It relates to his discussion of his childhood “voices” and his religious feelings (which were not shared by his rational parents), but the language used here and the sudden breathless pace speak to all sorts of undercurrents. The story ends with his recounting watching a movie with his father, in which his and his father’s memory of some critical points vary significantly.

The thing is, I don’t know much about Wallace’s writing and his specific concerns but I did find this a rather disturbing tale … partly because it is hard to decide just how unreliable the unreliable narrator is!

David Foster Wallace
“All that”
The New Yorker, 14 December 2009
Available: online

* I believe this is an excerpt from his posthumous “novel”, The pale king, which will be published this April.

Marie Munkara, Every secret thing

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They all nodded, not knowing what the hell curry* was but getting gist of the story all the same.

Marie Munkara leads us a merry dance with Every secret thing, her first book, which won the David Unaipon Award for an unpublished Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander writer. What exactly is this “thing” she presents to us? A novel? A short story collection? Well, I think it’s a bit of both. It looks like stand-alone short stories, and can probably be read that way. But, the same characters keep reappearing in the stories and there is a chronological thrust to it with a conclusion of sorts in the final story, so I’d call it connected short stories.

Form, though, is not the only way in which she leads us a merry dance. This is a genuinely funny book – sometimes slapstick or ribald, sometimes more bitter, satiric and/or ironic, but pretty well always funny. However, her subject matter is desperately serious – the destruction of indigenous culture through contact with white culture, specifically in this book through contact with missions and missionaries.

Bathurst Island (Tiwi Islands)
Approaching beautiful Bathurst Island (Tiwi Islands)

Marie Munkara was born in Arnhem Land and spent the first few years of her life on Bathurst Island in the Tiwi Islands. She left there when she was 3 years old, and didn’t return until she was 28. These stories, she says, are drawn from those told to her by friends and family, and are set, I think, in the early to mid twentieth century. She explores a wide range of issues reflective of indigenous-white contact at that time, including education and religion, the stolen generation, sexual abuse, the introduction of alcohol and disease, and anthropological research.

Munkara sees humour in everything (more or less) but her more biting humour is reserved for the “mission mob” because, of course, it is they who wield the power over the “bush mob”. The “bush mob” are shown to be intelligent and resourceful but no match for the power of the muruntawi (white people). Her language draws on a wide range of traditions – including indigenous storytelling, biblical, common clichés – and from these she tells stories that are only too believable. Here she tells us about one of the Brothers:

And so time passed and the natural progression of things came to be and the bullied became the bully, and the bully became the misogynist, and the misogynist became a Brother in a Catholic mission in a remote place in the Northern Territory… (“The sound of music”)

A too familiar story, told in a biblical tone. There is a funny story in which the “bush mob” tries to lead an anthropologist astray by feeding him incorrect information (such as obscene or silly names for ordinary objects), but their victory is Pyrrhic, as the end of the story conveys:

And after all, it was difficult sometimes to tell the difference between the missionaries and the madmen and the mercenaries because their eyes all looked the same and their tongues all spoke the same language of greed. If it wasn’t your soul they wanted, it was something else. Until it became an automatic response whenever a strange muruntani appeared to put out your hand for the specimen bottle to piss into or extend your arm for a blood sample to be taken or for the ungracious thought to pass through their mind that here was yet another who had come to take but as always gave nothing in return. (“Wurruwataka”)

Her stories about the stolen generations are particularly bitter, but again she uses humour. She tells the story of Marigold (née Tapalinga) who’d returned “home” after years away, only to find that she no longer fit, but:

Nor did Mrs Jones want the hussy back as their servant having sprung the little slut underneath Mr Jones in the spare room. The poor man was still traumatised by the ordeal. This wasn’t the first time she’d raped him, he claimed. (“Marigold”)

Only an indigenous writer could write something so patently ridiculous on this topic – and so drive the point home!

Munkara neatly tracks the Bishop’s behaviour and impact on his flock by constantly changing her epithet for him. In the first story, “The Bishop”, he is introduced as “his Most Distinguished” but is then referred to by various names including “his Most Garrulous”, “his Most Impatient” and “his Most Impious”. This changing of names for the Bishop is rather unsubtle humour but it carries a sly comment on the “mission mob’s” disrespect for indigenous culture by insisting on naming indigenous people, completely ignoring the fact that they have their own names. And so, in the first story, we are introduced to Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, to Epiphany, Lazarus, and John the Baptist, to name just a few of the cast of characters populating the book.

Another technique Munkara uses is to pepper her stories with white culture sayings and clichés, such as, “misery loves company alright”, “looking on the bright side”, “but you just can’t please everyone”, and this one:

And so it came to be that for the first time ever, the mission mob found themselves sitting where they’d never sat before – between a rock called ‘you didn’t see that one coming did you’ and a hard place called ‘bush mob’s indifference’. (“The good doctor”)

Overall, this is deceptively simple but clever writing that sets up and undermines its premises every step of the way. First “the mission mob” seems to be winning, and then “the bush mob”. However, while it could be said that “the bush mob” were “clever individuals who had learnt to sit on the wobbly fence of cultural evolution without falling off”, the real truth is that

They didn’t have to die to go to hell because the mission had happily brought that with them when they’d arrived unasked on the fateful shores of the place that was their heaven all those years ago. (“The movies”)

A spoonful of sugar, they say, makes the medicine go down, and that’s certainly true of this book. The sugar is not so strong though that you miss the medicine. Munkara makes sure of that – and the end result is a very funny but also very sobering book. I suspect and hope that Munkara has more … because the missions are only one facet of the history of contact in Australia. There is plenty for her to sink her teeth into.

Musings of a Literary Dilettante and Resident Judge have also reviewed this book.

Marie Munkara
Every secret thing
St Lucia: University of Queensland Press, 2009
181pp.
ISBN: 9780702237195

* Reference to the colloquialism “giving them curry”.

Albert Camus, The plague (orig. La peste)

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All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. (Tarrou)

and

… to state quite simply  what we learn in a time of pestilence: that there are more things to admire in men than to despise. (Dr Rieux)

Albert Camus 1957

Camus 1957 (Public domain from the New York World-Telegram and Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, via Wikipedia)

I love Albert Camus‘ The plague. I loved it when I first read it in my teens, and I’ve loved it every time I’ve read it since. Why is this? Well, firstly, I have always loved Tarrou’s quote above. As Tarrou goes on to say, “This may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can’t say if it’s simple, but I know it’s true”. Someone once said to me in our current more cynical century, “Oh, but that means accepting victimhood!”. I don’t see it that way though … and neither I think did Camus.

Tarrou’s, and Rieux’s, statements, then, are one reason I love this book. Another is that it can be read on multiple levels … but first a quick rundown of the plot for those who haven’t read it. It is set in the town of Oran, on the Algerian coast, in the late 1940s. The town is stricken by the plague, and so closes itself off for the duration of the disease. The novel then follows the progress of the disease and how the citizens cope with such a pestilence and its impact on their lives. We see the story through the actions and conversations of several characters including Dr Rieux, Tarrou (a “goodhumoured” but somewhat mysterious visitor to the town), Rambert (a visiting journalist), and more secondary characters including the Priest Paneloux,  Grand (a minor government official), and Cottard (a criminal).

That’s the basis of the literal story … but there are other levels. It can be seen as an allegory of the French occupation in World War 2, but I prefer to see it more broadly as a metaphorical story about how to live in an “absurd” (that is, inherently irrational) world. It might have been inspired by the Nazi occupation and the French Resistance, but I think Camus’ concerns are more universal.

So, how to talk about this book? In the sixty plus years since its publication, it has been under almost constant analysis from every angle you can think of. What can I add? I’m not sure but I’ll give it a go – and talk about what I see as the three critical concepts explored in the novel:

  • pestilences;
  • their impact;
  • how we are to live in a world in which they occur.

Camus sees the world as “absurd”, that is, one in which the irrational can, and will, happen:

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.

Camus’ point seems to be that it doesn’t matter where this “irrationality” comes from – man or nature – but that it  does come, and it’s always a surprise. “Pestilences” is his word for the things that come and destablise us; they are the “impossible” things that make normal life not possible.

The impact of these pestilences is, in Camus’ view, very specific – loss of freedom, loss of individuality, loss of planning for the future, and apathy:

They fancied themselves free, and no-one will ever be free as long as there are pestilences.

and

They forced themselves never to think about the problematic day of escape, to cease looking to the future.

and

They maintained saving indifference.

So, how do we react to and live under pestilences? Camus explores three main reactions – rebel, escape and accept – and decides, not surprisingly, that the only real response is to rebel. Rebelling to him, though, doesn’t require a heroic taking to the hustings. It can simply mean not giving in. Here is Rieux:

What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of the plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves. All the same, when you see the misery it brings, you’d be a mad man, or a coward, or stone-blind to give in tamely to the plague.

And so you do the decent thing, you do what you can to “fight” the plague and help your fellow humans. This is what Rieux, Tarrou and Grand do – and what Rambert eventually decides to do (saying that “this business is everybody’s business”) after spending much of the novel trying to escape. Rieux, Tarrou and Rambert spend a lot of time intellectualising the plague, while Grand gets on with it. Grand could be a laughable character – he devotes his spare time trying to find the right words for the first sentence of his book – but the narrator doesn’t laugh at him. Grand:

was the true embodiment of the quiet courage that inspired the sanitary groups. He had said ‘Yes’ without a moment’s hesitation and with a large-heartedness that was second nature to him.

When Rieux thanks him Grand says in surprise:

Why, that’s not difficult. Plague is here and we’ve got to make a stand, that’s obvious.

Meanwhile, Father Paneloux tries to understand the plague in terms of religion. His first reaction is that traditional one of God visiting his wrath upon a sinful people. But, as the plague sets in and he sees an innocent child die a painful death, he is forced to rethink his religion. He sees two options: to reject God or to totally accept whatever God presents. Since he is not willing to reject God, he decides that he must surrender totally to God’s will. Camus, it’s clear, doesn’t buy it!

Then there’s the criminal Cottard who flourishes under the plague. I won’t labour his story, but just say that one of the issues for him is that he’s safe from the police while the plague exists, and he relishes the fact that suddenly he’s not the only one who is miserable. In fact, as the townspeople become more miserable, the cheerier he becomes. He’s not prepared to join Rieux et al in their fight:

It’s not my job … What’s more, the plague suits me quite well and I see no reason why I should bother about trying to stop it.

The irony is that the person who most cares about Cottard is Grand!

Well, I have gone on about this novel, and could go on more. I’ve barely touched on its literary technique (its narrative style, structure, characterisation and language) but I think I’ve written enough. I will end with Rieux’s assessment of what it all means, because it means as much today as it did when it was written. That makes it a universal work.

None the less, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers.

Camus’ worldview here is a moderate form of humanism, one that is realistically rather than idealistically based. It makes a lot of sense to me.

Albert Camus
(Trans. by Stuart Gilbert)
The plague
Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1960 (orig. 1948)
252pp.
ISBN: 0140014721

Delicious descriptions from Down Under: Albert Camus on the sun

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As I’m an Australian litblogger, I intend my Delicious Descriptions from Down Under to be primarily of Down Under. However, as we in the southern hemisphere come to the end of summer, as my first two Delicious Descriptions were on the sun and, as I am re-reading Albert Camus‘ The plague, I can’t resist sharing a Camus description of the sun.

Frowning Sun

Courtesy: OCAL via clker.com

Here he is on Oran:

… summer blazed out above the house-tops. First a strong, scorching wind blew steadily for a whole day, drying up the walls. And then the sun took charge, incessant waves of heat and light swept the town daylong, and but for arcaded streets and the interiors of houses, everything lay naked to the dazzling impact of the light. The sun stalked our townsfolk along every byway, into every nook, and when they paused it struck.

This is Camus … so the sun has more than a literal role in this novel. But, at the literal level, I will simply add that I know that Australia is not the only “sunburnt place” in the world. And this, I think, is an effective description of another sunburnt place.

Abraham Verghese, Cutting for stone

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Verghese, Cutting for Stone

Bookcover (Used by permission of the Random House Group Ltd)

I  saw a man under the spell of his own tale, a snake charmer whose serpent has become his turban.

I’m not sure how I want to use the above quote, which comes late in the book, but I just liked it and so decided to start this post with it. Bear with me!

Discounting Dinaw Mengestu‘s short story, An honest exit, Abraham Verghese‘s Cutting for stone is the first novel I’ve read that’s set in Ethiopia (mostly). And for that, as much as for anything else, I enjoyed it. Also, in one of those eerily frequent experiences of reading synchronicities, this is the second book that I’ve read this year to deal with a long-standing dictator – and, even more eerie, is the fact that dictators in Africa are falling (sort of) around our ears at present. How do these things happen?

Anyhow, Cutting for stone is about as different from Mario Vargas Llosa‘s The feast of the goat as it could be. In the latter, dictator Trujillo is central to the story. He is the story really. In Cutting for stone Haile Selassie, and later Mengistu, provide the background. The characters are touched and, eventually, significantly affected by coups and unrest, but Selassie and his reign are not the subject of the novel.

So what is its plot? It is mostly set in an Ethiopian hospital, aptly, metaphorically, named Missing (a perversion of its original name, Mission). To this mission hospital come an English surgeon (Thomas Stone) via India and a young Indian nun (Sister Mary Joseph Praise), with rather cataclysmic results. Some time later (I’ll leave you to draw your conclusions) identical conjoined male twins named Shiva and Marion are born. The story follows their lives as they grow up, living through political upheavals while their adoptive parents, Hema and Ghosh, treat the sick and poor of the region, until one of them moves to the United States. Perhaps the best way to describe it is to quote Psychologies from the back cover: “a sweeping saga of family life, love, betrayal and redemption”.  Get the picture?

This is a traditional nineteenth-century-style novel, reminiscent, say, of Rohinton Mistry‘s A fine balance (1995). It’s about social conditions and family. The back cover (again) suggests it has flavours of Dickens and Waugh. Perhaps, but a weak flavour I’d say. While it has some of the intensity of those writers, it lacks their bite. I also found the fundamental crisis – which, not surprisingly given the set-up, has to do with a betrayal between the twins over a woman – to be not quite convincing. Maybe it’s me, but the narrator kept telling us of his love for the girl-then-woman in question, Genet, and I went along with it to a point. But it was never made clear how mutual this was. Marion is the narrator – this is a first person tale – and so we see it all through his eyes, but the whole “love” storyline did feel a little bit like a house of cards. Perhaps that’s the point? Perhaps it’s about his obsession regardless of whether it was realistic or not. It is, after all, partly a coming of age novel.

Verghese, like his main characters, is a doctor and so there is a lot of detail about things medical – about vena cavas and how they relate to the liver, about fistulas in circumcised women, about volvulus, and so on. More detail really than I needed, and yet most of it was interesting. What was even more interesting was the difference between the medical system in Africa and in the United States, and then the difference in the United States between the “Mayflower” hospitals and the “Port Ellis” hospitals. There are social messages here about the construction of medicine in the developed and developing worlds, and between the haves and have-nots. But this wasn’t the only message. According to Wikipedia, Verghese is passionate about “bedside medicine” and there is certainly a strong message here of caring for patients as well as treating them. Early in the novel the young Marion sits with a woman, Tsige, as her son dies. Much later, he is the one who can answer Thomas Stone’s question “What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”. The answer? “Words of comfort”.

Marion, then, as a child and a young doctor is well attuned to the feelings of others and yet he was unable to forgive all those who “wronged” him – Genet, his brother, and his birth father. I found that somewhat inconsistent with his character, and it affected my ability to fully buy  into the angst on which the plot turned.

Nonetheless, I liked the characters and so I kept reading, the story was interesting and so I kept reading, the writing was fine and so I kept reading. It doesn’t quite hang together, is a little melodramatic at times, but it’s a lively tale about characters I couldn’t help caring about. Early in the novel, we are told that Hema, who raises the twins, had:

come close to defining the nameless ambition that had pushed her this far: to avoid the sheep life at all costs.

The novel is full of characters who “avoid the sheep life”.

I started the review with Marion’s description of his father telling the painful tale of his life. I’ll end with the advice Marion’s adoptive father gives him:

The key to your happiness is to own your own slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your own family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more…

Obvious stuff really, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t need to be said.

Abraham Verghese
Cutting for stone
London: Vintage, 2010
541pp.
ISBN: 9870099443636

Monday musings on Australian literature: The triumvirate

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Flora Eldershaw

Flora Eldershaw, c. 1915 (Presumed Public Domain, from the National Library of Australia, via Wikipedia)

I’ve mentioned Marjorie Barnard in a couple of posts recently, but I suspect few Australians and even fewer readers from overseas (except of course Tony of Tony’s Bookworld) have ever heard of her. Rather than write specifically about her, though, I thought I’d talk a little about the Australian literary scene of the 1920s to 1940s, and about three writers in particular – Marjorie Barnard, Flora Eldershaw and Frank Dalby Davison.

I’m probably cheating here a little because, while I have read quite a bit about them over the last few years, I have read only a smidgin of their actual works. I’ve read (and re-read) Barnard’s The persimmon tree and other stories (1943) and Davison’s Man-shy (1931). I’ve dipped into Barnard and Eldershaw’s collaborative work A house is built (1929) and some of their other writings.

These three writers were part of a pretty active literary scene in Australia at the time. It included writers such as Vance and Nettie Palmer, Miles Franklin, Katharine Susannah Prichard (whom I reviewed recently), Eleanor Dark, Xavier Herbert and, yes, even, towards the end of the period, Patrick White. (Another contemporary, Christina Stead left Australia in 1928.) The reason I decided to start with these three is because of their friendship and “political activism”, mainly through the Fellowship of Australian Writers (FAW), which resulted in their being known for a time as “the triumvirate”. They were liberals who were concerned about the rise of Fascism in Europe – and the potential ramifications at “home”. Through them, in the late 1930s, the FAW engaged in political debate, particularly in relation to the protection of freedoms, such as that of speech. A topic, of course, dear to the heart of writers.

Barnard and Eldershaw wrote three novels, as M. Barnard Eldershaw, but they also wrote literary criticism and history. These days though, they are probably most read (when they are read at all) as early feminists. Neither Barnard nor Eldershaw married, though Barnard had an affair with Davison, and both lived independent lives supporting themselves through whatever work they could find. They were active in professional societies, judged literary competitions and edited anthologies. Eldershaw was a particularly skilled negotiator and worked hard to secure support for writers (via grants, pensions and other mechanisms). Vance Palmer admired Eldershaw for her ability to “neutralise conventional masculine expectations of the threat posed by women in ‘public life'”. At one stage they shared a flat, and held what could only be called a “salon”. It was attended by the literati of the day, including of course Davison.

That’s enough, though, of information you can pretty easily find in Wikipedia and other online sources. My aim here is to whet your appetite (I hope). I’ll finish with a quote from A house is built, which is set in mid-nineteenth century Sydney:

Her life was as full of ‘ifs’ as any woman’s. If she had not been so restricted, if her really considerable powers of mind and character had been given scope, Fanny would not have fallen victim to the first colourful stranger she met.

Barnard, it is reported, once said “Australia is still a man’s world”. I’d love to know what younger Australian readers of this blog think about Australia now – and whether anyone (besides Tony!) has read works by these three authors.

[Note: Some of the information for this post came from writings by Maryanne Dever whose PhD was on M. Barnard Eldershaw.]