Mini Reviews: Morrison, Buck and Dinesen

I have this compulsive need to make sure I review everything I read last year, but little desire to sit down and bang out in-depth thoughts of each unreviewed book. So here are a few quick hits:

Home , by Toni Morrison

This was a pretty decent read. Not quite Beloved  or Song of Solomon , but much more engaging than her last book, A Mercy , which I finished, but never could quite settle into for some reason. This one explores a lot of the prejudice against, and exploitation of, southern blacks in the Jim Crow era, but does so without any of the surreal elements of her other novels. She also manages to avoid casting her characters as simple victims. In particular, there’s a nice twist to the main character’s recollection of a Korean War episode that haunts him and that gives the story some depth. I’d recommend it.

Sidenote: This one was an audio book, read by the author- and while I think I’m generally in favor of authors reading their own work, this one may have pushed me more solidly into the “there’s definitely a place for professional voice talent” camp. Ms. Morrison’s got a somewhat raspy voice that I find soothing, but at 81 years of age, she lacks the breath capacity to read more than 4 or 5 words at a clip half the time. The result is a Garrison Keillor-esque halt-and-continue performance that kind of took me out of the book.

The Good Earth , by Pearl Buck

I had read this one before, years and years ago, and wanted to see if it would hold up under the scrutiny of 35-year-old me. It certainly did. I absolutely love the cyclical nature of the story, of one “great house” replacing another out of the humblest beginnings, only to be poised at the end of the book to repeat the mistakes of the past. Some critics claim the novel spreads a litany of stereotypes about the rural Chinese poor, but the woman spent over 30 years as a missionary in rural China, I think I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt here. If anything, she takes up some pretty universal themes, which is why people are still reading it 80 years later. It’s a classic. And it made my top 10 for the year as a re-read. I only wish I could give it more than a paragraph. I guess there’s this, this and this.

Out of Africa , by Isak Denisen (Karen Blixen)

Another of my top 10 reads for the year. I grew up in the 80s, so for me, Out of Africa  will always be associated with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford and Academy Awards. I never had an interest in reading the book until I came across some praise for it in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast , where he lauds it as the best book on Africa he’d ever read. That’s some high praise, indeed. But it’s also highly deserved. It’s a breathtaking read. If you can get by some of the colonialist views on race (“All Natives have in them a strong strain of malice, a shrill delight in things going wrong.” –or- “Until you knew a Native well, it was almost impossible to get a straight answer from him.”) you will be blown away by the beautiful prose, all the more impressive because it was written by a native speaker of Danish. The main thread connecting her fascinating vignettes is an exploration of African culture and a business story more than anything else- certainly not the grand love story Hollywood made it out to be. But even if I didn’t find her story worth my time (I definitely did), this is one of the few books I would read again simply for the verbal imagery. There’s a reason we included it in this post. See also this and this.

That’s enough for today.

Reading "the baseball"

I took six years of German growing up- even passing the AP test in high school. Unfortunately that didn’t fulfill the language requirement for my BA, so I took two years of French in college. Then, for other reasons, I ended up spending a couple years overseas in Slovenia learning that language. And after loving the one college linguistics course I took (and with Germanic, Romantic and Slavic languages “under my belt” in varying degrees) I seriously considered studying linguistics when it came time to choose a major.

Alas, I didn’t. I was already much further along on a History track, and had pantloads of science classes I was trying to complete as a pre-med student on top of my regular major. So linguistics fell by the wayside. Perhaps someday, when I retire, I’ll go back and bone up on the study of languages through continuing education courses. After my architecture degree, that is. Or maybe before it. Who knows.

Anyway, why do I bring all of this up? Because there’s a part of me that still gets a strange thrill when I come across other languages in my reading. No, I don’t mean actually reading in a foreign language, although I’ve dabbled in that,too. No, I’m talking about dialogue written in English that captures the feel  of another language, and transports you out of your own culture for a time, by way of an implied direct translation, rather than a transparent translation. Take this exchange in The Old Man and the Sea :

“I'll get the cast net and go for sardines. Will you sit in the sun in the doorway?”

“Yes. I have yesterday's paper and I will read the baseball...”

“The Yankees cannot lose.”

“But I fear the Indians of Cleveland.”

“Have faith in the Yankees, my son. Think of the great DiMaggio.”

‘Read the baseball,’ ‘the Indians of Cleveland,’ ‘the great DiMaggio’…  all of these phrases will clang around clumsily in a native English-speaker’s ear, but that’s precisely what makes them work for me. They reinforce the authenticity of the dialogue as it was imagined to have occurred- in Spanish - with Spanish phrasings, Spanish word order and Spanish color. Hemingway had already done this elsewhere, of course. Take this exchange from For Whom the Bell Tolls :

“You have a curious idea to sleep in the open, don Roberto,” he said standing over there in the dark, muffled in his blanket cape, his carbine slung over his shoulder.

“I am accustomed to it.”

“When are you relieved?”

“At four.”

“There is much cold between now and then.”

“I am accustomed to it,” Fernando said.

“Since, then, you are accustomed to it-“ Robert Jordan said politely.

‘A curious idea to…’ and ‘much cold’ are both charming Spanishisms, but I really love that last sentence, where the unfinished thought, the trailing off into silence, is itself an implied idiom. And even if you’ve never heard the specific phrase or idiom that’s implied, the point is that your recognize that there is one. The author knows it, because the characters spoke it. It transports you across cultures and into their heads. Pearl Buck is another author who does this. Here are a few random lines from The Good Earth :

“It is an anger to me.”

“Well, and he may even be killed.”

“Well, and it is like the old days.”

“Well, and if it must be so, let it be so.”

I swear, for a solid week after I read that book, I had to consciously avoid beginning my own real-world dialogue with the ‘Well, and…’ affectation. (“Well, and if the car needs an oil change, I’ll take it in for an oil change.”) But this same sense of foreignness can be conveyed in other ways, too. Just listen to the narrator of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station  as he relays his poorly understood Spanish conversations to the reader:

“The father had been either a famous painter or collector of paintings and she had either become a painter to impress him or quit painting because she couldn’t deal with the pressure of his example or because he was such an asshole, although here I was basically guessing; all I knew was painting was mentioned with some bitterness or regret. Then without a transition or with a transition I missed she was talking about her travels in Europe and then I heard her say New York and college and she paused and as she paused my breath caught because I realized what was coming.”

The guesswork, and the multiple potential truths make for a  humorous situation. But it’s another effective way of illustrating that gulf between the reader’s culture, and that of the book’s characters. And I love it when I come across this stuff.

Another post for another day: how should such passages be translated back into the characters’ original language? Should they retain the intended idiom? Or should they retain the feeling of foreignness? I could be convinced of either, but I’d probably say the former. I'll have to noodle on that one a bit.

The Good Earth: Found!

Our post from the other day about Cojimar got me thinking about the setting of another book I just finished: Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth . Spend five minutes with your favorite search engine and you can learn all sorts of things about that book- that it led the bestsellers lists for 21 months, that it nabbed a Pulitzer Prize, and that it was the basis of Buck’s Nobel Prize just a few years later. But if you want to know where the book actually takes place, well, that’s a little tougher to come by.

For one thing, Latin spellings of Chinese place names have changed over time, so pulling clues from Buck’s novel can be a little tricky. For another, those Latin spellings are at best just approximations of the actual Chinese pronunciation, so if you find in a biographical sketch that Buck and her husband lived in Nanhsuchou in the farming country of northern Anhwei, you might find that Google Maps suggests instead the town of nan suzhou , in Anhui  province. As it turns out, that is the correct answer, as you’ll see in a minute. And kudos to Oprah’s Book Club for putting together what appears to be the only map on the internet that tries to answer the question:

Now, as maps go, this one’s pretty crappy. Everything to the right of that right-most squiggle is actually ocean, so you’ll have to use your mind’s eye to paint it blue. And the coastline won't match what you see on any decent globe. There’s also no sense of scale except for the relative scale between cities- cities that are, again, somewhat difficult to find on a modern map with modern place names. But Shanghai is still Shanghai, so we can start our search pretty confidently from there. The Oprah Book Club (OBC) city of Chinkiang is most likely the Google Maps (GM) city of Zhenjiang. And the OBC city of Nanking is almost certainly the GM city of Nanjing. It would appear, then, that the OBC map’s ordinal directions are also pretty skewed, since in the real world Nanking/Nanjing is northwest from Shanghai, and not due west as shown in the OBC map. But okay, they tried.

Now, Nanking is about equidistant from Shanghai and Wang Lung’s farm on the OBC map, so we know that the OBC city of Nanhsuchou cannot be the GM city of Chuzhou- it’s too close to Nanking. If we keep searching to the north and west we come upon the GM city of Suzhou (different from the famous canal city near Shanghai). And here, I am fairly confident that we have pinpointed the setting of The Good Earth :

Why? Well, here’s what we know from the book itself:

• Wang Lung’s farm is frequently flooded by a “river to the North.” A farm on the northern outskirts of Suzhou, with the Xinbian River flowing just to the north, would fit that description (The Xinbian River is not shown on the OBC map but can be seen at the top of the map below.)
• During the first great famine Wang Lung travels southward 100 miles by train to the great cities of the South. What cities would fit this description and distance any better than the great cities on the banks of the Yangtze River: Nanjing, Zhenjiang and Shanghai?
• Last of all, the clincher: We know that the town closest to Wang Lung’s farm is surrounded by a mote- he crosses it, he buys land next to it, etc. It can hardly be a coincidence that the old town of Suzhou just happens to be surrounded by a moat. (See the roughly rectangular outline to the left of the Suzhou railway station in the map below. Somewhere outside of that moat was Wang Lung's farming village, and somewhere inside it was the great house of Hwang and the Tea House where he meets Lotus.)

Pretty cool, no?

View Larger Map

Literary Lucre

The idea of money, both the unlikely accumulation of it and the nerve racking experience of watching it run out, can be a pretty powerful thread to pull the reader through a book. It’s as universal a theme as there is. But you don’t have to read Og Mandino or Horatio Alger to see it done. Just consider these lasting images from some of our literary greats:

• The coffee can piggy bank nailed to the floor of the tenement closet in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – always dutifully fed, and all-too-frequently raided in times of need.
• The bags of gold buried under the brick floor in George Eliot’s Silas Marner  - which are dug up for continual counting, but disappear at the hands of a thief.
• The small stash of silver hidden away in the earthen walls of Wang Lung’s farm house in Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth – a stash that is multiplied and invested in land until it becomes the makings of a “great house”.
• The forty dollar kitty of the westward-bound Joad family in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath - a precarious sum that keeps us on pins and needles to see whether it can get their run-down jalopy across the desert and into California.

Money can be the driving force of the story, as are the boons bestowed by Pip’s mysterious benefactor in Dickens’ Great Expectations.  It can raise the stakes of the plot, as do Bingley’s and Darcy’s fortunes in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It can provide a mysterious back-story for a character as does Jay Gatsby’s ill-gotten wealth in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  Or it can be the measure of the rise or fall of a protagonist, like those experienced by Scarlett in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. 

Money is something we’ve all got experience with (some more than others, to be sure) and it’s something that most of us keep a keen interest in throughout our lives. So while a good “up from nothing” story can appeal to all of us, it can be equally gripping to follow a monied protagonist- whether that’s Hank Reardon fighting to protect his wealth and his property in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged , or whether it’s Ebenezer Scrooge finding inspiration to share his wealth in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol .

I’m looking for more great books in this vein. Do any of you have any reading recommendations to share?

Author Look-Alikes: Round 6

The almond-shaped eyes with the little crease underneath, the rounded eyebrows and flawless complexion… they might hail from geographical antipodes, but I think it’s safe to say there’s a little Ashley Judd in Jhumpa Lahiri:

And how about a very young Margaret Mitchell? With those cheekbones and that ultra-serious gaze, she reminds me more than a little of Olivia Wilde:

Another certified looker in her youth, Pearl Buck matured into an amiable Aunt Bee type in her later years:

Now, this kind of match is rare. Look at the hairline, the eyebrows, the ears, the nose, the heavy eyelids- heck, look at everything but that beard and tell me Herman Melville and Hugh Grant aren’t one and the same:

Finally, we have to deal with David Foster Wallace and his persistent bandana at some point. Take away the scruff, the half-smirk, the glasses and about thirty years, and DFW could be reborn as Danny Laruso, AKA the Karate Kid:

Sweep the leg? I don't think so.

My life story- in ten authors or less

Like Wallace Thurman and Neal Cassady, I was born in Salt Lake City.

I went to the same high school as another Wallace, Wallace Stegner.  (and Roseanne Barr as a matter of fact. High School Musical was filmed there-yep, okay. I’ll stop.)

Like both Wallaces, I went on to the University of Utah. And like Thurman, I was a pre-med student while there.

Like Pearl Buck, I spent time abroad as a missionary.

Like Harper Lee I was once an airline reservations agent. Unlike Harper Lee, I didn’t have friends who funded a one-year sabbatical so that I could finally write my lasting literary masterpiece.

Which is why I’m a marketing slave in corporate America, which kind of makes be like Kurt Vonnegut, who worked as a PR man at GE before exploding onto the literary scene.

Like Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor and Margaret Mitchell, I now live in central Georgia. (But yikes, unlike  those illustrious southern belles, I hope to live past their average 46 year lifespan. Perhaps Erskine Caldwell, who was born just 20 miles away and lived to age 83, bodes a little better for me.)

What about you? Who shares your biography?