Literature – Page 2 – …on the B.L.

Edith Wharton

January 28, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: No
Length: 869
Quick Review: A thorough and insightful look into the life and writing of an influential, female author.

Edith Wharton is an author known for her realistic social critiques of the American upper echelon’s wealth, morals, classicism, and more. Her use of language captured a way of life that was both disappearing quickly and unattainable to the majority of Americans. Wharton had a unique insight into the New York City aristocracy because she was born into high society.

Wharton is one of my favorite authors and has been for a long time. I first fell in love with her writing while reading House of Mirth and Age of Innocence. They are both wonderful and classics. One thing I didn’t know about Wharton but learned is her love for dogs. She cites receiving her first dog as a child as a pivotal moment in her life. As a dog mama, I completely and totally identify with this sentiment.

Edith Wharton was born in New York City in 1862. She was much younger than her two older brothers, which caused her to view her childhood as one filled with solitude. Between the ages of four and ten, she lived in Europe. Upon returning to New York City, she could never shake the feeling of otherness, which would often crop up in her work thematically. The feeling of being an outsider would eventually allow her to critique the aristocracy so poignantly. Wharton was a writer from the very beginning. She began publishing work in her teens but disappeared from the publishing world for many, many years. At the age of 23, she married Edward Wharton. After 28 years of marriage in 1913, they divorced. She didn’t begin publishing until the later years of marriage that Wharton began publishing. Wharton would spend a great deal of time in France and spoke French fluently but with a heavy accent. She passed away in 1937 in France, her preferred home.

Hermione Lee explores the life and work of Edith Wharton in a mere 870 pages. Edith Wharton was extensively researched and written with precision. Lee relied heavily on Wharton’s work for biographical clues and sites lengthy passages from her work. Lee sites so much of Wharton’s work that the book feels more like a textual analysis than a biography. Vast majority of the time, it was difficult wading through all the passages and analysis to find out about the historical information about the woman who penned the words originally.

I can understand why Lee cited Wharton’s work so heavily. Much of Wharton’s life is a mystery because she was incredibly private. She destroyed her correspondences and asked for the recipients of her letters to do the same. In her autobiography and memoir, she was not always truthful in her self portrayal. Turning to Wharton’s work is an obvious and helpful way of circumventing the research challenges.

Memorable Quotes
“The gift of her first small dig at the age of three was evidently as life-changing an event as her first publication, or her first car, would be.”

Title: Edith Wharton
Author: Hermione Lee
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Copyright: 2007
ISBN: 978037540009

Books

Go Set A Watchman

January 20, 2018 RaeAnna

Read: Yes
Length: 278
Quick Review: Jean Louise – Scout – Finch is no longer the little girl we know and love. She is a grown woman returning home to her beloved Maycomb, Alabama.

Published in what could be called a scandal, Go Set A Watchman became accessible to the public 55 years and three days after the publication of To Kill A Mockingbird. Nelle Harper Lee wrote Go Set A Watchman, but revised it into an entirely different book most every American has read, which won a Pulitzer. It would be hard to imagine Harper Lee as a public figure, but in her early years she was. Due to the drains of fame, she receded from the public eye never to publish again. In her old age, Go Set A Watchman was published under a great amount of scrutiny as to if this is what she really wanted. The reviews flooded in quickly. They were mostly skeptical and rarely glowing.

I never read To Kill A Mockingbird in high school. I read it one summer in college. I enjoyed it, but I didn’t love it the way others do. It took me over two years before I bought Go Set A Watchman because of the circumstances it had been released. Its blue spine sat untouched on my shelf for several months before I finally picked it up to read.

I understand why people didn’t love this second Lee book. I, however, did. I wish I could talk about Go Set A Watchman without talking about To Kill A Mockingbird, but they are intrinsically linked not only by their characters but by the integral part To Kill A Mockingbird has played in the landscape of modern Americana.

Scout is no longer a little girl; instead, she is a grown, college educated woman of 26 living in New York City. She is known as Jean Louise, and she’s going home to Maycomb for two weeks. A lot has changed in her hometown. Atticus has gotten older, but he has stayed the same. Jean Louise is an adult on her own in the world. Go Set A Watchman is a coming of age story. The kind that is rarely told: the difficulty of separating one’s identity from that of their idol’s. As people, we all go through it in one way or another.

I can understand why so many people have a hard time with this book. They’re comparing it to the first. It’s easy to do. The characters are present. The setting has only been phased by the passing of time.

The narrative of To Kill A Mockingbird flows forward through time; it’s easy to follow. Go Set A Watchman has a completely different rhythm. Jean Louise isn’t living in the present. She bounces between the past and present as memories are triggered. The book is well organized but anecdotal. It is a completely different reading experience than what one goes in believing it will be.

Atticus is a hero to Scout in a way he is a hero to everyone who has read him. He’s even, educated, fair, loyal, true, just, kind, and more. He is an ideal of a person we strive to become someday. I always found him to be too perfect. I didn’t love him because he seemed flat. Too good to be true, in a way. I want my heroes flawed, human. Go Set A Watchman rips holes in the perfect man. Lee portrays him as human, as a man of his time, a good yet flawed man. All the while, Lee portrays Scout as a young idealist with grit. Scout stands up for what she sees to be right under the most difficult of circumstance: she doesn’t back down when her hero disagrees. It becomes tenuous when Scout compares Atticus and Maycomb to Hitler and the Russian communists saying, “You just try to kill their souls instead of their bodies.” (Ouch!)

Scout replaces Atticus in our mind’s eye. She is the one who will go out into the world working to create a better and more just place for all. She believes in equality and opportunity for all, in helping, in tearing down walls based on gender or class or sex, that silence is support, and more. Jean Louise is no longer six years old; she is a young woman coming into her own in a world being torn further and further apart.

I think in many ways, Go Set A Watchman is more relevant today than To Kill A Mockingbird. We live in a world torn by intolerance and hate based on so many things, and sometimes the impact is felt most acutely in our own homes. As unfortunate as it is, many of the scenes playing out in front of Jean Louise’s eyes are familiar to the ones I see today. The relationship Scout has with her father is incredibly similar to the one I have with my father today. Many can relate to feeling betrayed by those we love when we find out their views fail to reach the standard we have set for them while failing to realize they are human too.

Go Set A Watchman has created waves. Many people do not feel for it the way they feel for the predecessor. I think this is a large part of its magic. It dares you to see a character and a book in a new light, no longer through rose colored glasses. Atticus is seen through the eyes of a child in To Kill A Mockingbird, but he is seen through the eyes of an adult in Go Set A Watchman. As children we see the world one way and another way as an adult. Lee makes us return to a favorite with the eyes of an adult.

Memorable Quotes
“Integrity, humor, and patience were the three words for Atticus Finch.”
“The course of English Literature would have been decidedly different had Mr. Wordsworth owned a power mower”
“They are simple people, most of them, but that doesn’t make them subhuman.”
“Prejudice, a dirty word, and faith, a clean one, have something in common: they both begin where reason ends.”
“You just try to kill their souls instead of their bodies”

Title: Go Set A Watchman
Author: Harper Lee
Publisher: Harper (HarperCollins Publishers)
Copyright: 2015
ISBN: 9780062409850

Books

An American Brat

August 27, 2017 RaeAnna

Read Yes
Length 317
Quick Review A young girl’s transformation after leaving everything she’s ever known in Pakistan for the US. A look into immigration, religion, culture, society, and familial obligation.

Bapsi Sidhwa published An American Brat in 1993. It deals with a lot of issues, which are still pressing, if not more prevalent, over twenty years later. She writes with a sense of humor and insight into two vastly different cultures.

Feroza is the sixteen year old daughter of Zareen and Cyrus. She is part of an upper class, tight-knit family in Pakistan belonging to the Parsee ethnic group of the Zoroastrian faith speaking Gujrati. The year is 1979, and a lot is changing in Pakistan with the rise of Muslim extremists. Having raised Feroza with a strong set of morals, Zareen and Cyrus send her to spend three months with her uncle in the US. While she’s in the US, she decides to apply for university. Once she is accepted, she moves to Idaho for her freshman year at a junior college. She keeps in touch with her family, but begins to find herself while exploring American culture, traditions, and friendships. After her freshman year, she relocates to Colorado with her roommate to go to a bigger university, where she meets people with similar ethnic backgrounds. Feroza begins to find her place and way in her new life navigating social norms, religious differences, cultural influences, and trying to meet her familial expectations.

I thought it was funny Feroza’s family wanted to send her to the very liberal and different United States in order to keep her grounded in Pakistani, Parsee, and Zoroastrian traditions. I really enjoyed how the women were portrayed throughout the novel. Sidhwa has very strong female roles, which differs from how most Middle Eastern women are portrayed throughout history and in contemporary media and art. These women have strong senses of self with leading roles in their homes and social circles. They have vibrant social lives even though they are not seen out and about like in Western cultures.

The title is An American Brat. You’ll read it expecting one person to be the American Brat, but the brat is constantly changing depending on the section you’re reading. Although, the bratty behavior is usually explainable and sometimes understandable.

There is a scene portrayed towards the beginning of the novel where Feroza is getting off the plane in the US and has to go through customs. As a white girl, I have never had an issue with customs. I have, however, watched people of other ethnicities have issues going through security and customs. Reading Sidhwa’s depiction, I can’t imagine the emotionally devastating impact it would have on someone, especially someone so young, sheltered, and alone as sixteen year old Feroza is in the novel. She is harangued by security guards and customs officers accusing her of lying and trying to stay in the country illegally. She is treated as if she doesn’t speak or understand the language, which is false. Remember this was published in 1993, which was almost a decade before 9/11 and security crackdowns. I can’t imagine what it would be like now.

Feroza must deal with trying to make herself happy while also living up to familial expectations. Her family expects her to return to Pakistan and marry a Parsee Zoroastrian. If she does not, she will be kicked out of her faith and left out of many important cultural traditions. It is also important to note the impact her leaving the faith would have on a wider scale. At the time, there were only 120,000 people in the ethnic group, so there is a scramble to keep the young people in the faith. Feroza is also dealing with the fact she and her family are not Muslim living in a Muslim country and culture. They are having to deal with a cultural shift.

While in the US, Feroza starts to realize her position as a woman. Growing up, she was told freedom would come to her once she was married. Through marriage, she would gain happiness and freedom. It is a way of keeping young girls pliable while maintaining traditional values. Living in the US, she sees how all of those qualities are completely attainable without marrying. Her mother, Zareen, visits the United States and starts to question the position women have in regards to their religion.

I overall, loved this book. There are so many complex issues Sidhwa explores throughout the novel. I couldn’t recommend it more!

Memorable Quotes
“In Pakistan, politics, with its social brew of martial law and religion, influenced every aspect of day-to-day living.”
“Finding herself awash in this exhilaratingly free and new culture had made her forget the strictures imposed on her conduct as a Pakistani girl.”
“… in the short while she’d been exposed to the American culture, she’d grown shockingly brazen.”
“To acknowledge it would be to advert that she was the cause, the irritant, the inducer of the evil.”
“Nevertheless, the schizophrenia she perceived at the core of America’s relationship to its own citizens and to those in poor countries like hers continued to disturb her.”
“Feroza realized with a sense of shock that she had outgrown her family’s expectations for her.”

Title: An American Brat

Author: Bapsi Sidhwa
Publisher: Milkweed Editions
Copyright: 1993
ISBN: 9781571310057

Books

1Q84

February 14, 2017 RaeAnna

Read Yes
Length 925
Quick Review Long but worth it. It’s a surreal, mystery, dystopian, fantastical love story. Technically it’s three books, but I read it in a volume of one.

Haruki Murakami wrote 1Q84 in three separately published books; however, the translated version appeared as a single volume with subsequent publications separating them again. I read it as one, and my only complaint is it’s awkward to finagle that large of a paperback.

1Q84 is a woven narrative of two characters finding their way through a world they happen into towards one another. The characters are rounded, real, and tangible to anyone who has feelings. Though the storyline is dystopian and the plot full of things no one on earth will ever experience, the characters are reachable. Their overwhelming sense of loneliness uniquely captures an aspect of humanity everyone feels in varying degrees of severity.

Murakami explores themes like religion, cult, politics, love, fate, and ultimately humanity by stepping away from the world we live in into a dystopian universe with two moons.

I’ll be honest, I haven’t read any of Murakami’s other works. If this is the standard, I need to read more. Though, I’m sad it’s only available to me in translation. Books always lose things in translation. Since I have experience in the field, I always read translations wondering what was changed, what was lost, are their cultural things I’m not getting, etc., and I am left to wonder how fabulous the original happens to be.

It’s odd. Less than 200 pages from the end of the third book, the narration style changes briefly. Throughout the book, up until this point, the narrative focuses on the perspective of one character per chapter. Here, the narration includes the happenings of the other significant characters implying the convergence of the storylines. Normally, the narrator is third person from whatever character is the action of the chapter. In this minor section, the narrator is different. The narrator becomes omniscient for the blippest of a moment. Though subtle, it stands out because it veers so drastically from the 976 pages of previously dominating narrative. Just as quickly, the new style evaporates into the original. As far as the last 50 pages, the narration style is thrown into the air as everything comes together.

Memorable Quotes
“If you belong to the majority, you can avoid thinking about lots of troubling things.”
“Feelings like that don’t give you any choice, do they?” Aomame said. “They come at you whenever they want to.”
“‘Massacre?’ ‘The ones who did it can always rationalize their action and even forget what they did. They can turn away from things they don’t want to see. But the surviving victims can never forget. They can’t turn away.’”
“But people can never fully divorce themselves from the images implanted during early childhood”
“There is always just a thin line separating deep faith from intolerance.”
“Somehow the world survived the Nazis, the atomic bomb, and modern music.”

Title: 1Q84

Author: Haruki Murakami
Translated By: Jay Rubin (Book 1 & 2) and Philip Gabriel (Book 3)
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Copyright: 2011

Books

What Lies Between Us

December 29, 2016 RaeAnna

Read Yes
Length 310
Quick Review This is a book where you think you know exactly what’s going to happen from the very beginning and you spend the entire book hoping it doesn’t happen. It’s a fabulous insight into a journey and thought process no one really wants to think about.

Nayomi Munaweera writes What Lies Between Us, a compelling story about a young girl pulled away from everything she knows in Sri Lanka into a new existence in San Francisco, United States after a personal and familial tragedy. She learns how to handle herself and her background in a country entirely different from everything she knew in her home country.

Trigger Warning: If you can’t handle abuse, you will have a difficult time reading past the first thirtyish pages.

Munaweera writes a story grounded in heartbreak. The main character is vibrantly torn between herself and her culture, herself and her desires, and herself and her past. She walks through life carrying the same weight many abuse survivors experience.

If you read this books, which I hope you will, this is one of the more depressing sentences I’ve written: The protagonist, is one of the most relatable, human characters I have ever read. This is incredibly personal and absolutely not universal. You will have to read it to understand what I mean by this. So go out and buy it. You can even do that here, that’s how much I want you to read it.

Munaweera delves into a psychology so rarely visited or explored by writers or philosophers or anyone because the most basic instinct is to write off catastrophes and those consequences as inhuman. We dehumanize all that is difficult to comprehend, but how do we know what we would do unless we’re in the same position. It is hard to look past some horrors to their cause because we think it is impossible any caring or decent or even good person could commit these atrocities. It is hard to declare horrific acts as human, but in all reality they are.

What Lies Between Us explores one of my life’s mantras… Never judge someone unless you’ve lived their story.

Memorable Quote
“They say that family is the place of safety. But sometimes this is the greatest lie; family is not sanctuary, it is not safety and succor. For some of us, it is the secret wound. Sooner or later we pay for the woundings of our ancestors.”

Title: What Lies Between Us
Author: Nayomi Munaweera
Publisher: St. Martin’s Griffin
Copyright: 2016
ISBN: 9781250043948

Books, Fiction

A Christmas Carol

December 24, 2016 RaeAnna

Read Yes
Length 112
Quick Review MUST if you live in the Western Hemisphere and/or celebrate Christmas. It’s referenced for one month every year. A ton of Christmas movies are adaptations or inspired by this classic.

Even if you don’t like Dickens, do yourself a favor and devote one week to starting, reading, and finishing this novel; it’s not long like a majority of Dickens works. For one month every year, you can be the person in the room who has actually read A Christmas Carol and therefore knows the actual story instead of having the gist of it from all the different adaptations and the like. Hey, you might like it, and it could become the book you return to every Christmas season to enjoy again and again for the rest of your eternity.

A Christmas Carol is the iconic tale about a grumpy, rich, white guy who hates everyone was visited by ghosts helping him to become a better person and epitomized the spirit of Christmas in a mere 150 pages if the typeset is big. Dickens’ inspiration came from his impoverished childhood full of hardship, like much of his other works. I don’t want to give any of the plot away, but you probably know it already.

Anyways the language Dickens uses flows. There are moments of subtle humor in a sea of seriousness. It is easy to see why he is regarded as a master of the English language through his descriptions and narrative.

I was lucky enough to read a beautifully illustrated edition, which makes it an even bigger pleasure to read.

My favorite movie version of this classic story is A Muppet Christmas Carol. Full of humor and nontraditional characters, it really does stick with the original story. A great deal of the narration is pulled right from the text.

Memorable Quotes
““And what is that upon your cheek?” Scrooge muttered, with an unusual catching in his voice, that it was a pimple.”

Title: A Christmas Carol

Author: Charles Dickens