The Housekeeper and the Professor --- Yoko Ogawa

What a pleasure to read a book about my field, mathematics. My only gripe is that the popular books on mathematicians have them being autistic and/or socially abnormal in some way or other.
A short, sweet book with the positive message that everyone, including 80-minute men, make a contribution to the betterment of the world. All the characters are endearing, even quaint. The use of the English language was a bit too bland for my taste, but maybe that was the tranlation.
I’m always trying to pinpoint just why the author wrote, and published, the book we are reading at the time. One common answer that I come up with is, as an exercise. An etude wherein authors set themselves certain rules and guidelines and try to achieve a goal within those rules. I often thought Robert Parker took on challenges just such as this to prove to his students that they could do it. He’s the one who wrote the same detective story scores of times over the years, changing only genders, races, or historical settings.
Ogawa’s writing has all the rhythm of a standard novel: emotional ups and downs, plotlines going backwards and forwards. It has excellent character development and by the end, we have bonded with, and shed a tear for the Professor.

However, this reading is almost more of a prose poem than a short novel or novella. Trying to describe the book, I want to say it is like a Japanese water-color depiction of a misty morning view of the hills across a river valley.
There is no thematic drama, which is usually found in the Western novel. Not one of the seven deadly sins plays a part in this prose: not wrath, greed, sloth, pride, lust, envy, nor gluttony.
Aging takes place of course, since it is a memoir sort of narrative, but even this is peaceful. Changes take place, but in years, decades, not suddenly. Dementia slowly takes the Professor away; the boy grows up, middle-age leaves the housekeeper basically unchanged.
The epilogue is predictable, as is the whole plotline advancement, but the reader doesn’t care much, because it’s classic schmaltz. My unofficial poll, taken in people’s moments of weakness, indicates that 83% of the adult, TV-viewing audience watches at least one Hallmark Theater production a week, and 70% of that 83% watch right up until and through the tear-inducing final scenes.

PS: My favorite game, with kids, on long automobile trips (last one 1997,) is factoring license plate numbers (difficult these days with vanity (see sin on right) plates. What are the prime factors of your plate.? Mine are KGGV 951. {3 X 317}.

On the right.

See a painting of the sin of Vanity (or pride): One of the Seven Deadly Sins.

Sourland --- Joyce Carol Oates

JCO is more prolific than ever.!. You normally think of a collection of short stories as being gathered from one, two, or three decades of past writings; … .. not “Sourland”. I decided to read this book from front to back, serially. Right off the bat with “Pumpkin-Head”, we face JCO’s recent widowhood through the prospect of being hit on by males who want to “help” the recently bereaved with their “sexual” needs.
Things were sort of back to normal in the next half a dozen stories: violence, rape, other childhood fears, but I felt a growing recognition of thoughts and phrases from her memoir: hospitals, subservience to men, and female teenage powerlessness. Then, with “The Beating”, it dawned on me --- these were all new stories; all writen since her “A Widow’s Story.” She opened the spigots to her dark and mourning side and prose has been gushering out. These are great short stories --- all over the map on character and plot line, but with constant focus on three interlinked, human driving forces: obsession, fear, and violence(power).
In “Bitch,” she transfers the male role from husband to father, then in just three pages, she mind-dumps her stream of consciousness fears of inadequacy and powerlessness at her loss; at the hospital; and of no male figurehead in her life.
“Honor Code” is about the female-to-female bullying that goes on at every level of school, albeit more so at the upper echelons of academic priciness.
JCO has organized the short stories into three segments for this book. She doesn’t explain why she chose these groupings. If I were pushed to label the three parts, I would say –I- was women’s stories; -II- was girls stories; and –III- was early bereavement stories.
But I have to mention that, as the reader progresses from front to back of these sixteen stories, the plots become stranger, even delusional, as was “Probate”, which mixed in fear & regret, along with blenderizing hospital and courtroom experiences. When we reach the title story, “Sourland”, we’re in fantasyland. The plotline is like one of those teen-age, chain-saw scary movies; where the viewer is constantly screaming, “No! No.!. Stop.!. No one in their right mind would descend a dark staircase into an unused cellar to see what the strange noise was, when we’re just three girls, home alone on a Saturday night.”
Another view of these stories is as the exercises leading up to, “A Widow’s Story,” which was the full memoir of JCO’s experiences and traumas of bereavement. Reading both the memoir and the short stories is probably of interest mostly to writers trying to analyse her craftmanship. Themes are repeated between memoir and stories. Putting both together is the making of a master writing class on soul searching.

Island Beneath The Sea --- Isabel Allende

My guess is that Isabel Allende was culturally trained at a young age for story-telling. Her plot lines always seem to unfold seamlessly: the next paragraph, and chapter following logically, without question, as the most normal outcome of preceding events.
Allende does well with her historical novels, I think, because she is researching her own family tree, her own country’s history, and more realistically, the histories of South and Central America. At some point, there will be a serious movie (not Zorro) incorporating her stoies of the nineteenth century.
Isabel spears a name from a dartboard, a Frenchman, Toulouse Valmorain, who arrives in Haiti in 1770 to take over the family plantation. Clear family bloodlines disappear almost immediately, as in the savage West Indies, the melting pot has begun with colors, creeds, and races all copulating with whomever, or, so it seems, the nearest at hand.
Allende deftly juggles half a dozen story line threads: Toulouse of course, as a plantation owner; his mistress Tété, who is a slave, but a family retainer, not a field worker; and Etienne Relais, a royalist Frenchman, Major of the guard in Haiti. Remember 1793 was the date Marie A. {let-them-eat-cake) was guillotined.
Earlier Isabel has set up Violette Boisier, a courtesan of mixed heritage. It seemed important at that time to keep track of white-black blood mix: half, quarter, eighth,; but also with whom it was mixed: Spanish, French, or English. So, a lot of variations possible and all of them came about.
The great slave rebellion of 1791 marks the midpoint of Allende’s story. The 500,000 slaves on this small island easily fought off the few French regiments and burned all the plantations, driving off the few thousand Europeans.
The focus changes after this revolution to New Orleans. Toulouse Valmorain has sired two children, Maurice, born by Toulouse’s first wife, a Spanish nobelwoman; and Rosette, whose mother was Tété. The novel follows their growing up, intertwined with events in France under Napoléon Bonaparte, like the Louisianna Purchase in 1803. Toulouse builds another sugar plantation. The pace of the book seems hurried in the final pages, trying to squeeze in appropriate outcomes for each character. But maybe this is just the slow pace of the tropics in the first half compared to the industriousness of America in the second.
As Allende’s tale winds down, Maurice and Rosette are secretly married aboard a ship outside the port of New Orleans. Mixed marriages are not allowed in the United States in the year 1806. Maurice vows to become an Abolitionist while going to college in Boston. Pregnant Rosette stays home and winds up being jailed, then dying during childbirth. Grandma Tété takes on the task of raising the child.

The Geography of Bliss -- Eric Weiner

Things were too good to be true for our merry band of readers. We’re back to the “stinker” books again. “Bliss” is the type of book that makes us ask, “Why are we reading a travel book? And no Dave Barry or Bill Bryson either – why such a boring and unfunny book?”

Eric Weiner is not a writer

He is a man who has leveraged his opportunities to their maximum potential. My hat’s off to him; he’s squeezed the last drop of ink out of his pen. This is his one “book,” and I assume his last. His lone claim to “fame” is ten years at NPR. But wait, the “R” in NPR stands for radio, an auditory art focussed on current events; no writing, no reflection, no comedy, no basis for this publication. As Eric says, “NPR were the best years of my life.” Now he’s too young to be “recapturing his youth”; maybe he just missed the expense account travel money.

His approach to covering a topic is irritatingly, repetitively formulaic: a dash of old NPR vignette; a liberal lambasting of the locals and their culture; a heaping pile of rubbish about happiness; with seasoning to tasteless, poorly researched facts and figures; topped off with a large dollop of shallow reflection. Did I say yet that he was boring?

Eric Weiner is not a philosopher.

Eric strikes me as the kind of a guy who enjoys traveling and has hoisted many a local libation getting his story. One aspect of his writing “style” is to ask himself rhetorical questions, or worse yet, for variety I suppose, have a friend ask him the leading question. This is how he ferrets out the truth of a situation.

Eric is full of pronouncements, like, “Europe is intrinsically interesting.” He is saying this because of the “warrens of narrow streets and alleys.” Hello Cairo, Tokyo, Jerusalem, Hong Kong, Beijing, or Bombay. It’s large, old cities than are intrinsically interesting, Eric, the world over. Eric gives full credit to the Swiss for rueing envy on the path to happiness, while this is a major tenet of almost all religions and philosophies, like Buddhist thought or the old testament’s tenth commandment.

Eric Weiner is not a commedian.

Eric does actually stoop to a low point of telling a fart joke and at the heart of triteness uses the old cliché about the English and Americans being separated by a common language.. Maybe I just like the slapstick of Dave Barry – hard to measure up to a travel writer like that. Then again, now that I think about it, my daughter writes a better travel story than Eric Weiner does, http://MyTravelBumBlog.BlogSpot.com . She’s equally as well-traveled, much more insightful, and a lot funnier. Start reading at 2009: December: Permission to enter.

One irritating stylistic quirk of Eric’s is the way he will open a paragraph with what seems to be an interesting vignette or anecdote like meeting Susan and her in-your-face NY style. Then the paragraph dissipates into ramblings about conferences, Perrier, and name tags.

Egypt: A Short History

This is a new library book that I can heartily recommend. The author does a brilliant job of meeting the goals he set out to accomplish: it is short; yet it is a complete 5,000-year history of Egypt; and he never gets bogged down in what could easily be diversionary tangents, as so many other books like this wind up doing. I picked it up because, with things going on the way they have this year in Egypt, it is topical and even active readers need help through books like this to assess what’s happened and where things might be going.

Tignor presents history up to and through Mubarak, winding up with a final section titled, “What Happens After Mubarak?” The author clarifies that the revolutionary movement, known as kifaya, has been active since 2005. Kifaya means “enough.”

The book left me with three new impressions that will stick with me for some time to come, as events in Egypt continue to unfold:

a.) Up until the 21st century, where everything now is electronically equidistant, Egypt had been geographically, the center of the occidental world. While maybe some would say, of course, that this is obvious, it is the cultural impact of this condition which begins to soak in as the history rolls by century by century, millenia by millenia. This is not to say that the center has the biggest armies or the most money or even power. But in most life forms, the surroundings feed the center. Picture an apple or an orange; the extremities are protection; the main pulp is the food and juice feeding the center, where the seeds for future propogation are found and nutured. For millenia, Egypt was the repository of world knowledge, education was revered; the population was cross-fertlized by almost every other race, creed, and color. A true melting pot.

b.) One of the manifestations of being the center is that all the big empires and great conquerors throughout history lusted after ownership of Egypt: Alexander and Bonaparte, the Ottamans and the Arabs. Up until the 20th century, Egypt was prized because of being the bread-basket of the world. This was because of the 4,000-mile long Nile River, which uniquely blessed Egypt by winding up running through the length of the country, bounded by a long range of mountains along the Red Sea, and forcing the river to overflow inland every year. Agriculture became far less important during the 20th century, and thus the Aswan Dam has switched Egypt to an energy-based economy.

c.) The third thing that gives one pause when thinking it through from a different perspective is religion. We don’t make fun of the Greeks or the Romans, the Angles or the Saxons for their multiple God religions. But we do make fun of the Pharaohs for believing they were the descendants of their one God. We also laugh at mummification, but don’t some of us send our body parts, sperm and/or DNA off into space (hoping for aliens to find and fix us?), or on ice in millennial refrigerators, waiting for … .. some future “God” to wake us up and renew our lives?