Among The Jumbled Heap

Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused

Chairman Mao is edited by the imminent sinophile Howard Goldblatt. Goldblatt is that type of scholar who oozes love for his subject, and one senses this in his selections for Chairman, a book that, despite its title, is far from political. In his introduction, Goldblatt explains this: Mao must have know that the only truly dangerous writing in a totalitarian society is that which ignores politics altogether, literature that serves art, not society This thought forms the fulcrum on wh...

Ha Jin Redux

My first voyage into the storied world of Ha Jin was his Ocean of Words. I was not impressed. I found it to be truly an ocean of words, lacking that economy of language I expect in contemporary American fiction (Stephanie Meyer excluded). My major beef with Ha was that he was boring, conventional, afraid to take the risks that other Chinese writers (those in the mainland of China) were taking par for the course. Folks like Mo Yan and Yu Hua who contrive wild stories full of improbabilities...

Literary Defecation

Below is possibly the best literary description of a bowel movement that I've ever read. Okay, it's perhaps the only literary description of a bowel movement that I've ever read. It comes from Mario Vargas Llosa's In Praise of the Step Mother. Don Rigoberto half closed his eyes and strained, just a little. That was all it took: he immediately felt the beneficent tickle in his rectum and the sensation that, there inside, in the hollows of his lower belly, something obedient to his will was...

St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves

Karen Russell's story collection St. Lucy's Home for Girl's Raised by Wolves is, as the title implies, filled with stories imbued with the fantastic. Each story draws upon myth and mystery, but in a way that aims to lay bare very human obsessions. There is a girl tracking her possessed sister through a swamp, a young boy traveling Westward in a wagon train whose father happens to be a minotaur, a boy who sings down an avalanche as part of an ancient tribal ritual, and the lead story about a gr...

Jean Marie Gustave LeClezio

Look at him. Venerable. Wizened. With a mole, that one little facial flaw that completes the perfection. Good hair too. A nice shock of hair. Jean Marie Gustave LeClezio, 2008's Nobel Prize winner for literature. A fella who needs some introduction, for prior to his selection by the Nobel committee few on this side of the pond had heard of LeClezio. I confess that I had not. In the days leading up to the announcement, the Nobel Folks summarily dismissed the notion that an America...

The Tao of Coetzee

Like an infant that has not yet smiled. I droop and drift, as though I belonged nowhere. All men have enough and to spare; I alone seem to have lost everything. Mine is indeed the very mind of an idiot, So dull am I. The world is full of people that shine; I alone am dark. They look lively and self assured; I alone, depressed. I seem unsettled as the ocean; Blown adrift, never brought to a stop. All men can be put to some use; I alone am intractable and boorish. But wherein I most ...

Life and Death are Wearing Me Out

Two Reviews of Chinese Writers "My story begins on January 1, 1950..." So begins Mo Yan's Life and Death are Wearing Me Out. The narrator is the landlord Ximen Nao, and on this first day of January 1950, Ximen Nao is executed as a bad element, an impediment to the revolution, a bourgeois blackguard. How can Ximen's story begin with his execution? Here is where Mo Yan's wit first exerts itself, for the story is not about Ximen Nao the man, but it is about the reincarnated Ximen Nao. We wat...

The Joan Didion Talent Search

Joan Didion is like my older, sarcastic, world-weary sister. Reading The Year of Magical Thinking is reading the diary of my sister. I see the workings of her mind; I hear the depth of her words, her feelings on the loss of my brother-in-law, her spouse of 40 years. These are things Joan never says at the family reunion. These are the thoughts she ruminates on while sitting in the corner of our grandparents living room, smiling while the family small talks. When reading the work of a si...

Greying Temples, Thinning Hair, Salman Rushdie

Fury: a novel © 2001 by Salman Rusdie Fury is my first Rusdie novel, and my only excuse for having spent twenty years now as a reader of contemporary fiction without once reading Rushdie is: "I don't like the guy." Nothing to do with his writing, about which I knew nothing, everything to do with the man. A plump toad of a man who hacked out novels simply because he had time, money, and access to a keyboard. A man with a trophy wife. A man whose fame, it seemed to me, rested on one book he w...

Fingersmith — Sarah Waters

Fingersmith is the type of literary novel that's not being written much these days, a style that fits more with the age of Queen Victoria than the age of Global Terrorism, and therein lies its beauty. Set in nineteenth century England, Fingersmith narrates the intersecting stories of two young women in seemingly disparate circumstances. Sarah Trindle is a fingersmith, a thief, living in a house of thieves and raised by Mrs. Sucksby, who dotes on the girl as if she were her own daughter, even...