Michael Ondaatje is best known for his book turned movie The English Patient.  Yet before he wrote The English Patient, Ondaatje penned In the Skin of a Lion, a hypnotically evocative novel set in 1920’s Toronto.

The Subject Heading in WorldCat for In the Skin of a Lion says, “Poor—Ontario–Toronto–Fiction.” Assigning subjects to fiction inevitably falls short. A story that can be summed up with a simple subject is not one I want to read. It’s true that welded to the frame of Ondaatje’s novel are the poor, immigrant laborers who have come to Toronto for a better life, yet, missing from this explanation, is the purity and force of Ondaatje’s words. He writes like an animistic god, inserting visions in his reader’s brain.

Here is social justice novel. Here is historical fiction, but mostly, here is a lyrical  exploration of living. What motivates a person to be active in the world, to fight injustice? Ondaatje asks. Then he answers with a series of images, vivid, luminescent.

I sought out In the Skin of a Lion because of an NPR story I heard over the summer. Part of the You Must Read This series. The commentator, Kamila Shamsie, called the novel “gloriously intoxicating.” She was so effusive about this book that I felt compelled to check it out.

I was disinclined to like Ondaatje. I had not read any of his work, but I was one of the only people—it seemed—that thought the movie the English Patient was a beautiful waste of time. Ondaatje’s career, I thought, rested solely on the fact that he had the good fortune of selling the rights to a mediocre story, turned Oscar winning movie.

I read the first few sections of In the Skin of a Lion with this chip on my shoulder. I constructed eviscerating reviews in my head. Found myeslf, mumbling things like “Oh, please,” as Ondaatje layered words upon words. Gradually, my criticism faded. I began to get involved with the characters. I started thinking about them when I was working, driving home, falling asleep. And when I thought of them, my thoughts were heavily textured things, weighty with both imagery and emotion. Anger, Love, Justice, Sex, Death. In the Skin is ripe with all the stuff of life, and Ondaatje got under my skin. He won me.

I cannot recommend this book more highly.

Chairman Mao with Pig-tails

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 which these stories teeter. These are not political diatribe, but are rather the art of a generation emerging from the morass of an overly politicized society.

The collection is a bit dated. It was published in 1995, and most of the stories were written in the immediate aftermath of the Tiannamen Massacre. Yet there is here a playfulness, an emerging sense of a literary aesthetic, that stokes my already growing excitement with contemporary Chinese fiction.

A few stories stand out:

“The Brothers Shu,” by Su Tong

This story solidifies my belief that Su Tong is China’s greatest living writer. In a manner characteristic of his stories in Raise the Red Lantern (the title story of which is my least favorite Su story) and Rice, Su gets into the minds of two families who live in a small town in rural Southern China. Tong is to Southern China and Chinese Literature what Faulkner is to the Southern U.S. and American Literature, viz. its master story teller—both advocate and critic and a damn fine wordsmith. Su’s brilliance lies with his characters and his compassionate submission to their whims and fancies. The man tells tragedy with a mix of humor and matter-of-fact narration that gets deep in your mind. His stories take on the shape of memory.

“When I Think of You Late at Night, There’s Nothing I Can Do: Five Tales of the Wen Clan Cave Dwellers,” by Cao NaiQian

There is still in Chinese literature a palpable connection to the land. In much of the literature of China, both past and present, an agrarian realism looms over the storied landscape. The best of Chinese writer’s know how to tap this feature and use it as the fourth-wall in their stories, without ever touching the subject in a direct thematic way. Cao’s story does just this. Laying forth five stories of men in love. The tragedy of love in China is a theme that reoccurs (see the earlier review of Ha Jin’s Waiting), and Cao manages here to vivify the notion, shifting the narrative voice from active to passive, moving in and out of the landscape of these five men, and, in much the same way as Su Tong, leaving the reader with images branded in the mind.

“Fritter Hollow Chronicles,” by Wang XiangFu

In this story, Wang plays with story telling itself. He writes as a amateur storyteller who is trying to tell a tale of his small rural village. The story is one of murder, old grudges, pride, and success, and while the story reveals much about the structure of post-Cultural Revolution villages, it also manages to inspire with its humanity and brutality. Good stuff.

Barnes and Noble Gets It Right.

My friend Anthony is–to put it mildly–a bookslut.    The type of fellow who has so many books that when he buys more, he has to hid them from his wife because she’ll get mad.   (That’s Gin Phillips to the right, though, not Anthony.  More on her ins a minute.) Not content with mere collecting, Anthony has turned his addiction into an admirable scholarly pursuit.  His research focuses not on the content of books as much as human interaction with books.  How we feel about books, and why/if we are attached to the physcial manifestaion of words known as the book.  Anthony calls this the “book object,” and he’s even got a wonderful blog about his personal explorations into book objects (http://onbooksandbiblios.blogspot.com/).  Anthony and I sometimes wrangle about the future of the book.  I believe that there will come a time (behold it approaches) when we will get most of our words in some paperless fashion, and I do not lament the passing of the book.

The contents of a book excite me more than the book itself.  The physical book to me is more of an annoyance (but yes, I am a librarian) that you have to take care of, store, lug around from town to town.  Book objects are things that Thoreau would say are “easier got than gotten rid of.”

The book-object problem is accentuated, in my mind, by the dubious practices of the publishing industry.  Books today are designed to wear out, fall apart, and the crappy content that’s published in these book objects is not worth the CO2 released from the trees the book-objects are printed on.  (eg I saw a book at the Friends of the Library book sale today titled Jesus, CEO that purported to reveal the secrets of Jesus’ business management style).

Admittedly, I am a hypocrite.

I have felt that titillating surge—so much like an awkward and unexpected pubescent erection—when I walk into a massive bookstore. The smell of book objects. The racks and racks of books on every topic. The covers in colors or lacking colors, artful,sometimes playful. AND, most importantly, I have salivated over the amazing bargains. They buy one get one deal. The $1 Dover Thrift editions of the classics.

If the publishing industry has gone a-whoring, then the big box bookstores are their pimps. Sometimes, these corporate stores even get in directly on the whoring. Barnes and Noble is the worst offender. B&B cranks out their own editions, in disarmingly handsome hardback, of the classics. I admit to having bought a few of these over the years. And B&B’s sheer purchasing power allows them to discount their books at rates that make it hard to say no.

Yet, sometimes, they get it right. And this is a post about Barnes and Noble getting it right.

Every year, I can count on getting at least one B&B gift card for my birthday or for Christmas. One of the perks of being a librarian is that everyone thinks you always want books as a present (which isn’t too far off the mark, really). For the last two years, I’ve used these gift cards toward the purchase of quality hard-back fiction, mostly of authors who probably don’t sell that much hard-back fiction (btw, if you want to support authors and NOT publishers, then buy first-run hard-backed fiction. This is really where an author makes his/her money. The acid-washed paper-backed editions are a publishers wet-dream because this is where they can take someone’s intellectual property, crank it out quickly and cheaply, and rake in the profit).
Barnes and Noble has a program called Discover Great New Authors, and this is where they get it right. One of their picks for this year is Gin Phillips and her new novel The Well and the Mine. The rightness of this pick almost attones for their past sins.

The book explores the world of coal-mining Alabama in the 1930’s. Phillips narrates her tale through the shifting perspectives of members of the Moore family, a family living in the type of dignified poverty popular in seventies TV shows like the Waltons or Little House. There’s the strong, working-class father who is both rough and gentle. Mr Moore has that time of wisdom that sees it as nothing to bail out a colored friend, but who has trouble thinking on the deeper issues of racial injustice. Ma is that type of maternal figure who sacrifices all for her family and does so without quarrel, without question. She is the flattest of all the characters in the book. The children round out the Moor family: two girls and a boy. The oldest girl is the beauty. The youngest is the boy, Jack, who is the scion, the only son, and though he is the youngest, Phillips chooses to time-shift from time to time, as Jack picks up the story looking back over that time from his vantage point of middle age. Tess, is the middle child, not as pretty as her sister, but more spunky. One senses that Tess is Phillips favorite child, for she seems to get the grandest treatment in the story.

A story like this , with a cast of characters that leans so closely toward archetypal cliches, could easily get so syrupy that it sends one into a diabetic comma. Yet Phillips eschews oversimplifying the life of this family, and she does so largely by sticking to the facts. The narrative facts of the story, that is.Portions of the story where other writers might be tempted to moralize, Philips simply tells the tale, or rather lets her characters do the talking. Much like Harper Lee’s classic—one of my all-time favorites—there is a strong theme of maturation at work in the Well and the Mine. This is a family growing up in a difficult time. That is all. It is not a more difficult time than any other; it is not a more romantic age. It is simply a different time. The story a human story.

But to get back to my original point: the success of this book is made more astounding by the fact that, as wonderful as the story is, no major publisher picked it up. No Random House, no Viking, no Knopf. The Well and the Mine was published by Hawthorne Books, a independent publishing house in Portland, OR (http://www.hawthornebooks.com/). Hawthorne says of itself: “we’re serious about literature. We suspected that good writers were being ignored and cast aside as a result of consolidation in the publishing industry, and in 2001 we decided to find these writers and give them a voice.” Three cheers for Hawthorne: Hip Hip Horrah! Each of their books is printed in durable paper-back with handsome cover-art and book-marking flaps. Barnes and Noble’s pick of The Well and the Mine gives me a shred of hope for publishing and for the literary arts in general. It makes me feel that maybe book-objects are still a worthy obsession.

Your move, Anthony.

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. I like big messy stories.

With Ha’s novel Waiting, I humbly admit my error.

This is not to say that Ha has ramped up the story. He still does not reach the outrageous level of a Yu Hua. BUT, and this is important, he pieces together an extremely compelling human drama. One that–I am not ashamed to admit–made me tear up.

In Waiting Lin Kong is a military doctor who consents to marry a country woman who is his intellectual opposite. They have a child together, but no passion exists between them. In fact, Lin lives at the military hospital in the city, only returning to his family once a year for his one week leave.

Inevitably, Lin takes a lover more to his liking. Manna Wu is a nurse at the hospital, and although younger than Lin, she is fast approaching the age of spinsterhood.

Waitingis a romance story, the love story of Lin Kong and Manna Wu. The two live together in a chaste and friendly way for seventeen years until finally, Lin is allowed by the authorities to divorce his wife. The two finally marry. They have twin boys. They are free to love openly after seventeen years of hiding, restraining, and sublimating their desires.

And this is where the story turns sad. There is a melancholic timbre to the whole tale, but after the marriage, the Yeatsian moment when things fall apart.

Lin Kong begins a running dialogue with himself. His imagined interlocutor chides and questions Lin Kong, filling him with doubt. What was all the waiting about. You don’t even know what love is? You have only ever surrendered yourself to a mystic fate because you lack the courage to do anything different.

And the book ends on this unsteady ground.

There are still moments in Waiting when Ha Jin suffers the same problems of Ocean, Lengthy descriptions that seem unnecessary and out of place, but am a sucker for a sad ending: Negative capability, smashing that bitter grape on my pallet. Ha Jin accomplishes a feat of negative capablity in the midst of a romance, and for that I tip my hat.

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 about to depart and was already wriggling its way down that passage which, in order to make its exit easier, was widening. His anus, in turn, had begun to dilate in anticipation, preparing itself to complete the expulsion of the expelled, whereupon it would shut itself up tight and pout, with its thousand little puckers, as though mocking: “You’re gone, you rascal you, and can’t ever return.”

Llosa goes on to give a vivid illustration of Freud’s theory of anal retention:

Don Rigoberto gave a satisfied smile. Shitting, defecating, excreting: synonyms for sexual pleasure? he thought. Of course. Why not? Provided it was done slowly, savoring the task, without the least hurry, taking one’s time, imparting to the muscles of the colon a gentle, sustained quivering. It was a matter not of pushing but of guiding, of accompanying, of graciously escorting the gliding of the offerings toward the exit. Don Rigoberto sighed once again, his five senses absorbed in what was happening inside his body. He could almost see the spectacle: those expansions and retractions, those juices and masses in action, all of them in warm corporeal shadow and in silence interrupted every so often by muffled gargles or the joyful breeze of a mighty fart. He heard, finally, the discreet splash with which the first offering invited to leave his bowels plopped—was it floating, was it sinking?–into the water of the toilet bowl. Three or four more would fall. Eight was his Olympic record, the consequence of an extravagant lunch, with murderous mixtures of fats, sugars, and starches washed down with wines and spirits. As a general rule he evacuated five offerings; once the fifth was gone, after a few seconds’ pause to give muscles, intestines, anus, rectum, due time to assume their orthodox positions once again, there invaded him that intimate rejoicing at a duty fulfilled and a goal attained, that same feeling of spiritual cleanliness that had once upon a time possessed him as a schoolboy at La Recoleta, after he had confessed his sins and done the penance assigned him by the father confessor.

Llosa then sums up this wonderful exposition with a poignant maxim:

But cleaning out one’s belly is a much less dubious proposition than cleaning out one’s soul, he thought.

Short of King Eglon’s disastrous time of “covering his feet,” Llosa’s is the only account of defecation I have come across, and this presents a Reader’s Challenge. Yes, I’m challenging you, dear reader, to send me chapter and verse of any other literary accounts of shitting. Never mind that, including myself, I have approximately one reader. Send ‘em along as comments. Do it now before the rush overwhelms my inbox.

More on Llosa literary corpus to come…

“Lead us not into…”
Willie think ’bout temptation till his mind go blank
Replaced with action and boldness to act.
Thoughts wither like corn in a Texas drought.
“Listen real hard you can hear da corn grow,”
His daddy say one summer in Indiana.
But that was twenty years, two thousand miles,
Thirty degrees ago, an’ now Texas
Gonna burn a hole in ‘is soul.

‘Turn dis soul ta bread.
It might be useful.
Ain’t fit ta e’en put butter on now.

Feed the body.
Starve the soul.

“Willie, maybe the body and soul
Are two sides of the same crust.
Maybe spirit and flesh ain’t easily rent asunder.”

“You ain’t far from da kingdom, boy.”
Take, eat.

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 group of young girls whose parents are werewolves and who are sent for rehabilitation to St. Lucy’s.

The stories resemble Marquez and the Latin American “Magical Realists.” Think “A Very Old Man with Enourmous Wings.” But unlike Marquez, Russell’s choice of words is more simple, straightforward, more realist than magical. Her characters often tell us their stories in the first person, and they do so with an ease that takes for granted we will believe them. We do believe them. They are honest, and we feel with them and for them.

None of these stories ends completely. No, Russell leads us along, and then leaves us on the precipice, wondering what will happen. This is not to say that the stories in badly, but rather that they simply end without full resolution or with a resolution that is less than happy. For all the mythos this is not fairytale that Russell is writing.

Russell is a youngish woman of twenty -seven, a representative of that NYC school of writers, but there is something more universal and touching in her stories than I usually see coming from the Columbia MFAer’s. I look forward to reading more.

Hurrah! I have upgraded to WordPress 2.7 .

I’ve also installed WP2.7 on my local machine with the help of XAMPP and intend to build my own theme as soon as time is available…which is rarely.

I’m tired of the damned red, white, and blue.

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 American might possibly receive the prize. Horace Engdahl one of the members of the Sweedish committee that awards the Nobel summed up American literature this way:

The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.

“Europe,” Engdahl added, “is still the center of the literary world.”

It’s a thought worth exploring, no matter how much it smacks of the American bashing that has come to typify European intelligentsia. The U.S. probably deserves to be bashed.

But that’s a thought for another post.

With Engdahl’s words sounding through my skull, I pick up LeClezio’s The Prospector. It is a story of loss: loss of love, family, security, innocence, the breakdown of civilization. It is set at the turn of the Twentieth Century as World War I breaks the peace, and perhaps this is where the world society first went wrong. I could not help but read the story with the question on my lips: “how is this novel participating in the big dialogue?”

But that question would only bore me, would ultimately cause me to put the book down with a yawn. It takes something more compelling to keep reading.

That something else is LeClezio’s love of his characters. He writes with subtle passion and in the process he draws you in, following him down the rabbit hole. The Prospector is set in and around the island nation of Mauritius. LeClezio spent his own boyhood in Mauritius, and he mines his childhood experience to bejewel his story, in a way that brings to mind another great Frenchie who Remembered Things Past. His writing is evocative, moving in that way that you just can’t quite summarize, like the plastic carnival ducks in a shooting gallery, you see them, you want to kill them, you want the prize, but damed if you can hit ‘em.

This is to say that LeClezio leaves you wanting more.

Add to this that he’s a heckuva good guy.

In receiving his prize, LeClezio used his fifteen minutes on the world radar to speak out for the poor, and he did so in a way that is close to every librarian’s heart, including and perhaps especially my own, viz. he called for a bridge to the digital divide, that gulf of seperation between those with access to the new technology and those without.

To provide nearly everyone on the planet with a liquid crystal display is utopian. Are we not, therefore, in the process of creating a new elite, of drawing a new line to divide the world between those who have access to communication and knowledge, and those who are left out?

He went on to insist that the world must provide for more libraries worldwide.

LeClezio deserves his prize. Not just because he has great hair.

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 am different from men
Is that I prize no sustenance that comes not from the Mother’s breast.
~Tao Te Ching, Chapter 20

J.M. Coetzee is a celebrated South African novelist and scholar, winner of England’s Booker Prize and the 2003 Nobel in Literature. Upon receiving the Nobel, Coetzee was praised for his moral vision and for “in inumberable guises portraying the involvement of the outsider.” His novel Disgrace is illustrative of this emphesis on the outsider.

Disgrace begins with the self-assured, yet discontented, Professor David Laurie getting sexually involved with one of his students. This sexual escapade is indicative of Laurie’s adult life, simultaneously revering yet despising the fairer sex. The disgrace of Disgrace first manifests itself here. Laurie loses his professorship, because he cannot bring himself to acknowledge any wrongdoing. “Yes, it’s true; I slept with her.” Is as close as he can come to confession.

And so the once-professor Laurie, quits the city to live in the country with his hippie lesbian daughter Lucy. In cinema, the story would go like this: disgraced professor moves to country with lesbian daughter where he has revelation about his misogyny and cosmopolitan bias; redemption ensues; in the climax the chastened David Laurie presides over a a heartfelt commitment ceremony between Lucy and her lover.

Coetzee, however, eschews the Hollywood fantasy. Against the sometimes brutal backdrop of rural South Africa, Coetzee’s story illumines the complexities of disgrace and what it means to be disgraced, spiraling deeper and deeper into both our personal and corporate conceptions of guilt and justice.

There is no dualism for Coetzee. An act of “disgrace” is simultaneously and act of “redemption.”

There is nothing but dualism for Coetzee. There is disgrace and redemption. There is justice and injustice. Good and evil.

On one side are the black South African rapists. On the other is his hippie lesbian daughter who is patient and long suffering. Then there is the white Christian family. They are the parents of the student Laurie disgraced. They will forgive. They will offer redemption. The black “dog-handler” Petrus is both exploited and exploiter. Is he a protector or an instigator of violence? He is both.

In the middle, juggling all these dualities is Laurie. Professor Laurie is the unwitting Taoist sage. By the end he is a shadow of his former arrogant self. He job is to kill and incinerate unwanted dogs. He lives in a shack and spends his time tinkling out tunes on a busted banjo, tunes he intends to use for his forthcoming opera on the life and loves of Byron. He droops and drifts, prizing only the precious milk from the Mother’s Breast.