Six Degrees of Separation - April 2018

This month we're starting with Arthur Golden's 1997 bestseller, Memoirs of a Geisha.  I read this novel many years ago as part of an "Around the World" book challenge: read a book set in or about a country in each of six continents: Asia, Europe, Africa, North America, South America, Australia/Oceania. The few books set in Antarctica tend to be about polar exploration or natural history, and there aren't a lot to choose from, so the challenge allowed us to either pick one of them or read a second book about a continent we particularly wanted to "explore."  For the Asia part of the challenge, I picked Memoirs of a Geisha since I think half the people I knew had read it and recommended it.  I enjoyed it, but I can't say that much of it stayed with me. Some of the other books that I read for that challenge have.

 
 
For Europe, I read The Siege, by Helen Dunmore.   Set in what was then Leningrad in the Soviet Union during the first winter of the city's besiegement by the Germans during World War II, this is a beautifully written story of physical and emotional survival and endurance.  It is sometimes harrowing, but the writing flawless, and the theme is lightened by the love and beauty the characters find, even in such circumstances. 

 
 


Another difficult but rewarding read was my choice for Africa, Half of a Yellow Sun, by  Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.  What an excellent writer she is!  Five memorable characters in 1960s Nigeria discover which are the ties that bind - or don't.  Ties of family, ethnicity, politics, love, country, class - all of these come into play.  This is one of my "desert island" books.


One of the best things about this challenge was discovering writers who were new to me.  For Australia/Oceania, I was introduced to a wonderful writer, well-known to Australians, Tim Winton, author of Cloudstreet.  This saga is about two very different working-class families who live in a huge, old house called Cloudstreet in Perth and covers 20 years of joy, tragedy, marriage, birth, and death.  The writing is both earthy and spiritual (and there's a bit of magical realism involved).  Heartwarming and heartbreaking and highly recommended. 

 
My North American stop involved another new-to-me writer, Julia Alvarez, author of In the Time of the Butterflies.  This is a fictionalized story of the Mirabal sisters, four sisters who opposed the corrupt and murderous dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo, in the 1950s.  The story is told in flashbacks with alternating points of view so that we come to know each of the sisters as individuals with virtues and flaws, and the reader sees how each came to find herself resisting the Trujillo regime.  Anyone who wants to read about strong, female characters will appreciate this novel. 

For South America, I chose a non-fiction book, Fordlandia, The Rise and Fall of Henry Ford's Forgotten Jungle City, by Greg Grandin.  This is one of those forgotten history stories, that of a rather bizarre attempt to build Ford's vision of a small American town in the middle of the Amazon.  Fordlandia, as the town was called, was supposed to be the headquarters of a rubber plantation (tires for all those model Ts!).  If you're thinking that plunking a mid-western industrial plant and town in the jungle and expecting success isn't going to go well, you're right.  It turns into a fascinating and at times funny story of man vs. nature.  Spoiler alert: nature will always win.

My "reader's choice" and final stop was back in Asia: A Fine Balance, by Rohinton Mistry.  Set in India during the government-declared State of Emergency in 1975, it tells of four people in an unnamed city (speculation is that the author had Mumbai in mind): a shrewd widow, a naive student, and two tailors from a small village, all of whom live in the widow's apartment.  The novelist has been compared to Dickens, and I think that's right in his scope and in his empathy for so many different characters in all kinds of situations.  This one really stayed with me; I can remember scenes from it as though I read it last week.  Wonderful.    

So there we are: around the world in 7 books!   As always, thanks to Books are My Favourite and Best for the Six Degrees meme.

One of the joys of reading is the ability to be an armchair traveler: to go any place, any time, to meet anyone.  What are your favorite armchair travel books?

Latvian Elegy

Title: Among the Living and the Dead: A Tale of Exile and Homecoming on the War Roads of Europe

Author: Inara Verzemnieks
Edition: W.W. Norton Company, 2017
Setting: Latvia and the US
Genre: Memoir, Family History

My husband asked me what I was reading, and I told him, "one of the saddest stories ever told."  Don't let that dissuade you, however, from reading this elegy to the author's Latvian family.  Verzemnieks is from a Latvian peasant family; this book recounts the family's history from the late 1880s to today.  And it's quite a history, from the superstitions and myths that ruled and gave meaning to her great-grandparent's lives to the ambition that led them to own their farm to the misery the family lived through during WWII and during Soviet control of their country.  

The writing is vivid:  just as her grandmother described her lost farm in Latvia so that young Inara would be able to feel, see, smell, and touch it, so grown Inara describes it just as vividly to the reader.  A voice is compared to "a match drawn across phosphorus", and the family farm is described as "the roof rises above the grass line to meet us, though its edges sag, brushing the ground in places, like the hem of a skirt coming loose.”  The stories her grandmother tells her about the myths and legends of Latvia seem almost like preparation for the stories of the war and aftermath which are like particularly terrible Grimm's fairy tales.  But this is also a hopeful tale, one of survival, one of resilience, one of peace found after grim struggle.

The narrative skips around through time, but the author's skill is such that I had no trouble following it.  The beauty of the writing and the story make this moving book highly recommended.

Sacrifice and Survival in the Boer War

Title: The Lost History of Stars

Author: Dave Boling

Edition: Algonquin Books, June, 2017

Setting: Southern Africa, early 1900s

Genre: Historical Fiction

How many of us know much of anything about the Anglo-Boer war of 1899-1902? Before reading this fine novel, I knew that it was fought in what is now South Africa, that it was a war between the British and Afrikaners, and that concentration camps were somehow involved. One of the marvels of good historical fiction is that it can educate and illuminate and bring history to life. The book did just that.

The narrator, Aletta (called “Lettie”) is a young girl from a Boer farming family whose grandfather, father, and older brother have gone to war. The opening of the story is riveting: Lettie describes the raid on their farm by the British forces who brutally destroy everything on the farm and burn their home, threatening Lettie’s young brother Willem with a firing squad to try to get him to tell them where their men have gone. Lettie, Willem, her young sister Cecelia, and her mother are then forced into a concentration camp. The camp is a miserable, unhealthy place. Lack of food, poor sanitation, and overcrowding lead to disease and death (over 20,000 Boer women and children died in these camps).

Lettie survives through stories: by making up stories to tell her little sister, by imagining stories for herself and remembering those told to her by her grandfather, and by reading whatever she can get her hands on, including a copy of David Copperfield, given to her by a British camp guard, Tommy Maples. Maples is a nineteen year old guard who joined the army for adventure. He finds that he hates the war, and is ashamed and miserable guarding women and children in the awful circumstances of the camp. Lettie hides her growing relationship with Maples from her mother, who is steadfastly and violently opposed to anything to do with the British, including family members who have cooperated with them.

Boling explores issues of loyalty, imagination, sacrifice, and cost of survival in this finely written book. His descriptions of both the beauty and harshness of the land, and the misery of the camp are memorable. And while it sounds grim (and it is), the final chapter is a beautiful and hopeful resolution. Highly recommended.