Reading group book

Barack Obama, Dreams from my father

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Dreams from my father, Australian paperback (Cover: Courtesy Text Publishing)

Dreams from my father, Australian paperback (Cover: Courtesy Text Publishing)

I must be about the last person on earth to read Barack Obama’s autobiography, Dreams from my father. However, that’s not going to stop me adding my voice to the accolades heaped on the book! When it was originally published in 1995, it was subtitled “A story of race and inheritance”. This does not appear on the cover or title page of my 2009 reprint of the 2004 edition. Why is that? Maybe they just thought they’d keep it simple?

Anyhow, this aside, there’s a lot that can be said about this book – and in fact a lot has been said. I don’t really want to go over that ground again. Yes, it has a three part structure (Origins, Chicago and Kenya). Yes, it’s beautifully written with some lovely reflective prose. Yes, it contains the germ of his philosophies about race and politics. But, what did I get out of it?

Well the main thing is that it’s one of the most authentic explorations of identity crisis that I have ever read. Here is a man born of a mixed race marriage, who was brought up by the “dominant” race’s family without any real contact with the minority race family but who, by the time he reaches adolescence, finds that those around him identify him with that minority race. Consequently, much of the book is spent on his working out how to live (and grow) as a black man in a white society. He is very honest in chronicling his path from rather wild, disaffected youth to thoughtful more together young man. He starts to make this transition when, in his early 20s, he leaves the high corporate life in New York for the life of a poor community organiser in the Southside of Chicago. And here I must admit I could NOT get that Jim Croce song out of my head:

Well the south side of chicago
Is the baddest part of town…

Some readers, I know, found the Chicago section slow-going, and  I suppose I did too but that doesn’t mean I didn’t find it engrossing because it is in this section that he really explores the many faces of race relations and starts to work through his own views and values. After all, it is here that he gets first-hand experience of what it is like to be poor, powerless and black and it is here that he not only starts to develop his philosophy but also hone his organisational skills. He’s pretty modest about it but it is clear that he is an empathetic person who engenders confidence in people. The other interesting thing about this identity crisis aspect of the book is that while, unlike many of the people he worked with/for he had not “grown up black”, he is one of the rare Americans to actually have direct African roots, something he explores in the third part of the book. All this actually makes him a bit of an insider/outsider in both white and black society. The resolution, when it comes at the end, is emotional and yet rather ordinary. He writes:

I felt the circle finally close. I realised that who I was, what I cared about, was no longer just a matter of intellect or obligation, no longer a construct of words. I saw that my life in America – the black life, the white life, the sense of abandonment I’d felt as a boy, the frustration and hope I’d felt in Chicago – all of it was connected with a small plot of earth an ocean away, connected by more than the accident of a name or the colour of my skin. The pain I felt was my father’s pain. My questions were my brothers’ questions. Their struggle my birthright.

The other thing I got out of it was the exploration – mostly just subtly alongside other discussions – of the concepts of truth and authenticity. An historian he talks to in Nairobi towards the end of the book says, when discussing the historical challenges facing, say, post-colonial Africans, that “truth is usually the best corrective” and elaborates on this by suggesting that possibly “the worse thing that colonialism did was cloud our view of the past”. There’s much to think about in that statement! On a more personal level she says that what she wants for her daughter is less to be “authentically African” and more to be “authentically herself”. I can’t think of a better point on which to finish this little review of mine!

J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a bad year

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Coetzee, Poland, 2006 (Photo: Mariusz Kubik, from Wikipedia)

Coetzee, Poland, 2006 (Photo: Mariusz Kubik, from Wikipedia)

J.M. Coetzee is one of those rare novelists who pushes the boundaries of what a novel is. The progression from his mid-career novel, the spare but terrifying Disgrace (1999), through Elizabeth Costello (2003) to Diary of a bad year (2007) is so dramatic that there are those who question whether these last two are even novels. It’s actually been a year or so since I read Diary of a bad year but it is currently being discussed by one of my reading groups so now seemed to be a good time to blog about it here.

One of the first things to confront the reader who picks up Diary of a bad year is how to read it. It has three (two to begin with) concurrent strands running across the top, middle and bottom of the page. Some readers try to read the three strands as concurrently as possible while others read the strands sequentially. Following this latter path, though, means you risk missing the way the strands comment on each other. The three strands are:

  • the narrator’s formal voice, basically taking the form of essays he is writing
  • the narrator’s informal voice in which he talks about his life as he is writing the essays
  • the voice of Anya, his “little typist”, and, through her, of her boyfriend, Alan

The three characters represent three modes of viewing the world: the narrator’s is primarily theoretical, while Anya’s is more pragmatic and Alan’s rational. Through these modes, Coetzee teases out the moral conundrums of the early 21st century both in terms of the political (the events confronting us) and the personal (how are we to live).

Towards the end, Coetzee refers to his love of Bach. To some degree the book is a paean to Bach: its three-part structure in which each part counterpoints the others seems to be a textual representation of Bach’s polyphony. The essays running across the top of the page, while a little uneven and dry on their own, are counterpointed by the views of the characters in the other two strands, resulting in our being presented with different ways of viewing the same world.

The characterisation is interesting: Senor C, the writer of the essays, is the logical, moral but somewhat pessimistic thinker; Anya is practical, down to earth, but with a strong moral sense; and Alan is the economic rationalist for whom money is essentially everything. The views of the two men are strongly contrasted, while Anya is caught in the middle. There is a Darwinian sense in Alan of the survival of the fittest, while Senor C spurns competition as a way of life, preferring collaboration. For all his “moral” views, though, Senor C is not presented as a paragon and we are discomforted at times by his attitude towards the beautiful Anya.

The overall theme seems to be how do we live in a world full of paradoxes and contradictions, a world that seems to be pervaded by dishonour and shame (the things Senor C explores in the essays). He talks about ordinary people and how they (we) cope with things they (we) don’t approve of. He wonders why they (we) don’t do something about it, but suggests in the end that they (we) practise “inner emigration”. He says:

The alternatives are not placid servitude on the one hand and revolt against servitude on the other. There is a third way, chosen by thousands and millions of people every day. It is the way of quietism, of willed obscurity, of inner emigration.

I like that concept though it does smack of burying one’s head in the sand. He also talks about collective guilt, and about bearing the dishonour of what’s gone on before. Through choosing a “novel” form like no other, one which blends but in no way harmonises fact and fiction, Coetzee shows in a very concrete way that difficult times need new ways of presenting ideas. He offers no neat conclusions, no easy outs;  he is quite subversive really. Late in the book he ponders the value of writing, and says:

Are these words written on paper truly what I wanted to say?

This then is another step in Coetzee’s path of trying to find the best, perfect perhaps, way of saying what he wants to say. I, for one, will be ready for his next step.

Orhan Pamuk, Snow

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One of my rules of reading is that when I have finished a book I go back and read the first chapter (or so) and any epigraphs the author may have included. These can often provide a real clue to meaning. This rule certainly applies to my latest read, Snow, by Nobel Prize winner, Orhan Pamuk.

(WARNING: SOME SPOILERS)

Snow, in fact, has no less than four epigraphs:

  • lines from Robert Browning’s “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” describing the paradoxical nature of things: “the honest thief, the tender murderer,/the superstitious atheist”;
  • a quote from Stendhal’s The charterhouse of Parma which warns about the ugliness of “politics in a literary work”;
  • a quote from Dostoevsky’s Notebooks for the Brothers Karamazov which suggests ideals like the European Enlightenment are “more important than people”; and
  • Joseph Conrad’s statement in Under Western eyes that “The Westerner in me was discomposed”.

These four epigraphs pretty well sum up the concerns of the book. What about the title? The second chapter begins with:

Veiling as it did the dirt, the mud and the darkness, the snow would continue to speak to Ka of purity, but after his first day in Kars, it no long promised innocence.

Here then is the first paradox: snow is pure but not innocent, and it covers dirt, mud and darkness. Already, you can see that this book is going to be ironic. Just how ironic though is a matter for contention but my suspicion is that its very foundation is ironic, as it grapples with what it means to be an artist in a political society, with how one is to live in a conflicted nation. The plot centres on a coup – a coup which is variously called a military coup and a theatrical coup! In fact, it is a coup by a theatrical group that is supported by the military! Art and politics could hardly be more entwined.

Kars Photo: Jean & Nathalie @ flickr (Creative Commons licence)

Kars Photo: Jean & Nathalie @ flickr (Creative Commons licence)

Snow though is not an easy read. It is my third Pamuk, but only the second one I have completed. I loved his memoir-cum-history Istanbul but could not, hard as I tried, finish My name is red.

What then is it about? The main action covers three days in the life of Ka, a Turkish poet recently returned from 12 years exile in Germany, who comes to Kars (in far east Turkey) ostensibly to write about the suicide epidemic among young women, but whose secondary (or perhaps primary!) reason is to fall in love with an old school-friend, Ipek. Soon after he arrives, however, the coup occurs and Ka is, rather unwillingly, caught up in the intrigue between the competing interests: the secularists, the Islamic fundamentalists, and the Kurdish nationalists. This sets the stage for exploring the art-politics nexus. Ka says to Sunay, the leader of the coup AND of the theatrical troupe that comes into town:

I know that you staged the coup not just for the sake of politics but also as a thing of beauty and in the name of art … you know only too well that a play in which Kadife bares her head for all of Kars to see will be no mere artistic triumph; it will also have profound political consequences.

Here then is one evocation of the second epigraph. The third and fourth epigraphs refer to the running conflict in the book between European/Western values and Turkish/Eastern values. There is very much a sense that the people of Kars feel condescended to by European culture, but as a teen-ager says at one point, “We are not stupid! We’re just poor”. The people of Kars do not understand Western notions of individualism, and they see Western ideas of secularism and atheism as equating with immorality. Ka, as a Westernised Turk, acts as an uncomfortable, to him, bridge between the two worlds.

The core of the book is Ka. He is a sad and highly conflicted individual who, in his youth, had used words to argue that people should act for “the common good” but now finds himself using them to further his own happiness. Once politically active, “he now knew that the greatest happiness in life was to embrace a beautiful, intelligent woman and sit in a corner writing poetry”. The irony is that, for all his attempts to achieve this, he ends up with neither and dies four years after the coup a sad and lonely man.

The novel is interesting, stylistically and structurally. It is essentially a third person story about Ka but is told by a first person narrator, Ka’s friend, the novelist Orhan(!). This metafictional narrative technique, by adding another layer to the “conversation”, rather deepens the “artist in society” and art/politics themes of the book. Much of the story is foreshadowed: we learn of Ka’s death in Chapter 29, though the book has 44 chapters. The tone of the book is imbued with huzun, that very particular Turkish sense of melancholy that Pamuk explores beautifully in his book Istanbul. And, while it is about a coup and has a body count of 29, there are some very funny scenes, one being the political meeting at which the competing rebels prepare a statement about their beliefs for the Western Press. Anyone who has attended a political meeting will feel at home here!

All this said, the book is a challenge to grasp: there are a lot of characters, comings-and-goings, and ideas to track. Just why Ka is the way he is, just what did happen to him in the end, and just what Orhan is saying about art and politics are hard to pin down. I love the way the book is underpinned by paradox and irony – and yet at times the meaning can be a little tricky to discern. What is clear though is that Ka has found living by his political beliefs deeply unsatisfying but, ironically, is unable to bring about a situation in which he can live “happily” any other way.

Kadife, the leader of the headscarf girls, says (fairly early in the book):

…do not assume from this that our religion leaves no room for discussion. I will say that I am not prepared to discuss my faith with an atheist, or even a secularist. I beg your pardon.

Oh dear! Some reviewers call it a brave book. With its fearless exploration of the tensions in modern Turkey, it certainly feels that way. I am very glad that I put in the effort to read it.

Steve Toltz, A fraction of the whole

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I reckon the voters for the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards inaugural People’s Choice Award got it right when they chose Toltz’s A fraction of the whole as the first winner. Not necessarily because it is the best book of the year, because I’m not sure that it is, but because it is such a life-writ-large book. It is funny – belly-laugh, sometimes, and quiet chuckle, other times – but serious at the same time. Just when you think you have grasped what it is about, it dives off on another tangent and your brain has to start working all over again.

I’m not sure how to describe it. It’s basically a father-son story, told in first person by the son, Jasper. However, Jasper inserts into his story three long sections in his father’s voice: Martin’s life-story (to the age of 22) as he tells it to Jasper in a seventeen hour stint, entries from Martin’s journal describing his relationship with Jasper’s mother, and Martin’s unfinished autobiography. These add some texture to the novel and allow us to know things that Jasper couldn’t know.

Created by Tinette, Wikipedia, under GNU Free Documentation Licence

Created by Tinette for Wikipedia under GNU Free Documentation Licence

The characters are intriguing, with Martin being centre-stage. At my bookgroup’s discussion of the book one of the members wondered whether there could be a bit of yin-yang between Martin and his brother Terry, and she could have a point. Jasper quotes the following from his father’s journal:

No symbolic journey can take place in an apartment. There’s nothing metaphorical about a trip to the kitchen. There’s nothing to ascend! Nothing to descend! No space! No verticality! No cosmicity! … The essential important idea that will shift me from Thinking Man to Doing Man is impossible to apply here. … I am a halfway man …

But, while he tries, Martin never really does move from a Thinking Man, while his brother remains the Doing Man. Jasper seems caught in the middle. Martin’s trouble is that he has “thought himself into a corner”, one where he is so distrustful  of humanity, and so fearful of death, that he can’t trust the ideas that could get him out. As Martin says: “If men are constantly manufacturing meaning in order to deny death, then how can I know I didn’t manufacture that experience myself?”. This corner, this distrust, is to bring tragedy to his life near the end of the novel.

It’s a very funny book, with the comedy being both verbal and situational. It is at different times absurd, ironic or satiric. The satire is aimed at pretty much anything you could imagine – education, politics, media (journalists in particular), philosophy, death and, indeed, humanity. Almost any page you open will provide either a laugh or a description that makes you go “aha” – on many pages you will find both.

So what is it actually about? It is about father-son relationships, and about sons who don’t want to replicate their fathers. It is about Australia (“our demented country”) and Australians – and is not too complimentary about our willingness to put others down, our lack of compassion for those who need our help. It is about the paradoxes that make up our lives and thus humanity and much of the book is expressed in terms of these paradoxes – the good and bad, life and death, pessimism (Martin) versus optimism (Jasper), sanity and insanity, forgiveness and unforgiveness, and so on.

There is so much to write about this book that I think it’s best I end here with, fittingly, a paradoxical statement made by Martin two-thirds through the novel. “Fiction”, he says in his unfinished autobiography, “has a habit of making the real world seem made-up”. Toltz has produced in his novel a world that seems both real and made-up. It is up to us to decide which is which…and act accordingly!

Christos Tsiolkas, The slap (Review)

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You could easily give yourself away when reviewing Christos Tsiolkas’ latest novel, The slap. For example, do you align yourself with the uncompromising, emotional earth mother Rosie or the rational, cool and collected but somewhat more willing to compromise Aisha? Do you rail against the liberal use of expletives, the relaxed attitude to recreational drug use, and the focus on carnal appetites more often in their ugly or elemental than their loving guise? Do you engage in the private versus public school argument? These are the sorts of things that confront Tsiolkas’ readers.

Courtesy: Allen & Unwin

Courtesy: Allen & Unwin

In simple terms, The slap explores the fallout that occurs after a young child is slapped by an unrelated adult at a family-and-friends barbecue. This slap occurs in the first “chapter”, reminding me of Ian McEwan’s books which also tend to start with an event that triggers a set of actions and reactions. However, unlike McEwan, Tsiolkas does not build up a strong sense of suspense about “what will happen next”. In fact, the actual slap storyline is resolved about two-thirds of the way through the novel.

Rather, the book is about its characters and their relationships as spouse, parent, child, sibling, friend. At face level, most are not particularly appealing. They are often intolerant, narrow-minded and/or confrontational – just as you begin to like, or at least understand, them they do something that changes your mind.  And yet, in all their imperfections, they do engage.

The book has an interesting though not unique structure. Like Elliot Perlman’s Seven types of ambiguity, the story is progressed through a sequence of different, third person, points of view covering three generations. This shifting of perspectives and stories has the effect of moving our focus from the plot to the content.  And the content ranges broadly across the things that confront families and marriages – love and hate, family versus friends, anger, loyalty, compassion and forgiveness. It has moments of real venom, but also of real tenderness.

Not surprisingly, violence features heavily in the book. Tsiolkas shows how pervasive violence is in western middle class society. Through the various characters’ stories we see a wide range of violent behaviour from domestic violence through consensual but aggressive sex to those seemingly casual expressions of violence such as “I wanted to kill her” about a person who annoys. We also see how deeply ingrained prejudice against “other” is, whether that other be racial, religious, cultural, sexual orientation or socioeconomic. In Tsiolkas’ world it feels as though only a thin veneer of civility covers our more primitive selves and the reader is never quite sure when or whether these selves will break through and wreak havoc. It is to the credit of the characters, and by extension us, that they rarely do, but we are left in no illusion that they could.

A critical aspect of the structure is whose perspective starts and ends the novel. Interestingly, again perhaps emphasising the minimal importance of plot, these are neither the slapper nor the “slappee”. In fact, the final voice is given to someone who starts out on the edge of the main action but is gradually drawn in. As an involved outsider, with issues of his own, he is able to resolve (as much as they can be resolved) the secondary plot lines and, as a person on the brink of adulthood, he can offer a sense of hope to what has been a pretty gritty story.

Wallace Stegner, the great American writer, wrote in his book, Angle of repose, that “Civilizations grow by agreements and accommodations and accretions, not by repudiations”.  This, taken at a more personal level, seems to be the point of the novel for as Aisha says in the second last chapter, “This finally was love … Love, at its core, was negotiation, the surrender of two individuals to the messy, banal, domestic realities of sharing a life together. In this way, in love, she could secure a familiar happiness”.

POSTSCRIPT: In 2011 The slap was adapted for television, for the ABC, and closely followed the novel’s narrative style with each episode being viewed through the eyes of a different character. The scriptwriters are, I think, a quality bunch:  Emily Ballou, Alice Bell, Brendan Cowell, Kris Mrksa, Cate Shortland. Interestingly, Tsiolkas is not among them.