MICHENER'S CARAVANS

Published in 1963 and set in 1946-7 (before the Partition of India), this book reminds us what a great investigator and thoughtful writer Michener was. The story itself is outmoded and Michener does not show great insight into the psychology of his characters. But one wonders if anyone in "exceptional" America read it when Charlie Wilson went to arm the Taliban against the Soviet supported regime, when soldiers were sent after 9/11 only to remain there for more than a dozen years. 

The author described Kabul as resembling Palestine in Jesus' day, of death by stoning, of an eye for an eye and a life for a life, of the fate of the country to be determined--whenever Afghanistan might be left to itself--by the struggle between the many bearded men led by mullahs from the hills and the few young experts with degrees from Oxford, Sorbonne or MIT, the former making up 99.99 percent of the country. 

"We are a brigand society and we murder our rulers," says one of the characters. There are indeed striking descriptions of a violent and very different society that has very likely not changed much except that the munitions have multiplied, the mullahs reinforced with money and ideology from an even more fundamentalist source, and the young experts very likely all killed, corrupted or disenchanted. It is a quiet book and does not address itself to the political issues. It muses on the fact that the Afghans look so much like the Jews and thought of themselves as one of the "lost tribes"; they rejoiced equally when the Germans proclaimed them the First Aryans.

Michener's story also gives prominence to wanderers who traded goods (perhaps stolen) and made annual migrations with their goats and camels between the Oxus (now in Turkmenistan) and Jhelum (now in Pakistan), a trek of two thousand miles.  Were they Povindahs? Kochis? Whatever, they were the gypsies of Central Asia.  The author tells of the Desert of Death that lies between Iran and Afghanistan and of the mysterious City at the border. The heat and absence of humidity of the desert were such that the Helmand River flows into the desert and simply disappears.  

The most ambitious among the Afghans in this book wants to build a dam and transform the desert gradually into farmland.  He even explores the ancient karez tunnels that were sunk deep into the ground to bring up water; such tunnels may have had Persian origins and are to be found all the way from Iran and Pakistan through Afghanistan to the desert town of Turpan in Western China.  Some years ago, I read a whole bunch of books on the Silk Road as if in a trance.  The romantic caravan trails they described, I learn now from Michener, crossed at Kabul.

RED SORGHUM

This is a bold, brash, bawdy and brilliant work. Purporting to be a family chronicle that the narrator obtains from a 92 year old woman from his family village, it tells of his brave, lusty and larger than life grandparents and their turbulent existence carving out a life in the midst of a northern Chinese region infested with bandits, opium smokers and gamblers, and invaded by the Japanese. There are horrific scenes of brutality: second grandma (thereon hangs another tale) and young auntie were raped and mutilated, Uncle Arhat was skinned alive before being dismembered, Grandpa himself murdered Grandma's newly-wed husband and father-in-law (you simply have to read this book).

The author paints his scenes in vivid language: the red sorghum of the title itself refers to the hardy grain that shimmered in fields like a "sea of blood"; dancing, it "reeked of glory; cold and graceful, it promised enchantment; passionate and loving, it was tumultuous." The narrator felt a pang on a return visit, finding the fields planted with a hybrid variety of sorghum that never seemed to ripen (guaranteed to cause constipation); he was haunted by "a nagging sense of our species' regression."

Though Grandma died in the main battle told, that of the Black Water River with several bands of Chinese ill-coordinated against the Japanese, she was the heroine--lovely as foot-binding had reduced her feet to three inch "lotuses" so that when she walked, "her body swayed like a willow in the wind," and as opium-smoking short of addiction had given her "the complexion of a peach, a sunny disposition and a clear mind." She died unafraid but unwillingly; unafraid of the eighteen levels of Hell that everyone knew about but unwilling to let go of life.

The novel covers much more--a digression into the marauding packs of dogs almost has the dogs taking on the voice of the narrator; a survivor of the war who lives on into the middle of the 20th century, Old Eighteen Stabs Geng who lived despite those wounds because of the magical ministrations of a silver fox, succumbs to starvation when his pension is held up by a petty bureaucrat.

Should the author have put more energy into decrying such evil? This reviewer will not judge, only saying this--that it would have been criminal not to have written this book or to have published it. Yes, the story line is not chronologically straightforward and often jerks like the handheld videocams of journalists embedded in some war. So what? The Nobel was well earned.

For some context, I read Red Sorghum just after reading Anchee Min's Empress Orchid about which I wrote (in a review posted on Amazon.com):

This novel about the last Empress Dowager of China as a young concubine in the late Qing dynasty is smoothly told.  She pays attention to palace politics and learns about the wider world though her eunuchs, the emperor she serves and his half brother.  When she bears the Emperor a son, she is elevated to the position of Empress, only she has to share that position as there is already one. But never mind, it happens to be her best friend among occupants of the harem. 

Orchid must also face down and defeat the dying Emperor's most powerful advisor.  (One does not learn why he chose to make an enemy of her.)  China's humiliation at the hands of the barbarians penetrates into the harem somehow and Orchid chooses to support the uncle of her son the next Emperor.  Throughout the book, the prose is smooth and chaste, bloodless, even when people died.  An interesting read.

As Maureen Dowd complained after an editorial colleague at the New York Times won the Nobel Prize (for Economics) this is hardly a fair comparison.  It is not.  Some people love Goya's paintings, especially those he did of Spanish royalty.  There is an air, a style about them.  But it is difficult to pay heed when there is a Guernica in the same room. 

BOOKS--print or digital

The website TEACHINGDEGREE.ORG (attribution link), from which the graphics of this blog have been obtained, is clear about this.  There are more and more e-readers out there:

The shopping frenzy of the last few weeks--perhaps it continues--must surely have driven that point home.  But there is good news; this does not spell the end of real books.  

As it turns out, those who own an e-reader are likely to read more, even of books in print form.

For those who care that we do not slouch our way into illiteracy, this is a good thing.  In addition there some circumstances, if one thinks about it, in which one form of books work better than others:

Reading with a child, for example, is best done with a book in print, while the great convenience of having many books in a small thin device makes travelling with a whole library best done with an e-Reader.  (In any case, illustrated children's books test the current limits of e-publication.)



However one looks at it, this holiday season--here's to Books!

The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a Review

November 30, 2012

"You ought to read The German Ideology" says Madame Michel, one of the two voices in this rich, beguiling novel, thereby almost giving herself away. For she has chosen to remain disguised as what she thinks of herself--or as what she thinks the world takes her for, a 54 year old concierge dressed in a "white nuptial meringue [undergarment] buried beneath a lugubrious black pinafore," who only "gets through her everyday life thanks to her ignorance of any alternatives." We are therefore treated to her spasms of fear, palpitations of being outed as the intellectual that she is (despite the fact that she only went to school from five to twelve); she is overwhelmed by the huge chasm of class/social distinction between the concierge and the occupants/owners of the apartments in this venerable building.

The other voice belongs to Paloma, a hyper-intelligent 12 year old who lives in fear of showing her freakish intelligence--that's how her classmates and family would treat it, or so she fears. She therefore hides it by reading everything her friend (who is second in the class) and carefully imitating the latter's work: French as "words in coherent strings, correctly spelled"; Math as the "mechanical reproduction of operations devoid of meaning"; history as "a list of events joined by logical connections"--all to "dumb down" the appearance of her true intelligence.

Each of the two voices take turns, more or less, to beguile us with considerations beyond the ordinary, of the sort if not common or familiar, one would hope is at least recognizable to those belonging to that which baccalaureate exercises frequently describe as the "community of educated men and women." Paloma's revelations are revealed as journal entries (in a sans serif font) while Madame Michel's (Renee) are only sometimes referred to as journal entries. One such memorable occasion is when she compares her journal writing to the hypnotic, unconscious rhythm of mowing grass: "The lines become their own demiurges and, like some witless yet miraculous participant, I witness the birth on paper of sentences that have eluded my will."

Both voices therefore hide their light under the proverbial bushel; they are wabi, Japanese for an understated form of beauty, of "refinement masked by rusticity." They each recognize in the other the radiance of intelligence. Paloma, while speaking of the concierge in her journal, cries out: "I implore fate to give me the chance to see beyond myself and truly meet someone." The novel shows how they each eventually make their own way towards the light.

Along the way, guarded and repressed as they are, they reveal flashes of gnomic insight. Paloma speaks of grammar as "an end not simply a means ... pity the poor in spirit who know neither the enchantment nor the beauty of language." Madame Michel makes breathtakingly short work of Husserl's Cartesian Meditations: Introduction to Phenomenology--a "ridiculous little book...[born of] hard-core autism." Chancing on Paloma's older sister's thesis on William of Ockham's Potentia Dei Absoluta, she concludes that academia has not always chosen wisely or well between "elevating thought" and "the self-reproduction of a sterile elite." Stunned by a still life by Pieter Claesz, even though it is only a copy, she declares she would without hesitation "trade the entire Italian Quattrocento [Fra Angelico? Donatello? Leonardo?]" for Dutch still life.

Not to make this review overlong, let it be said that there are passages of great tenderness and humor, as well as more gentle disquisitions on philosophical issues of moment. Madame Michel has found the library and it allowed her to expand her horizons; the VCR and the DVD have transported her senses. She is friends with pre-1910 Russian literature, movies from Yasujiro Ozu's cinematic equivalents of Pieter Claesz to the Blade Runner and the Terminator, music from Mozart (whose "Confutatis" appears at a most startling point) to Eminem; she reflects on the difference between doors that swing open and those that slide.

You ought to read this book!

NANOWRIMO

I received an email yesterday reminding me that November is the month during which those who sign up are challenged to write 50,000 words.  See NANOWRIMO website.  

This is no mean task: it works out to writing 2,500 words a day for twenty days, =50,000 words assuming one works on the basis of a normal five day work week.  The website provides writers working on their individual novels with a sense of community that most writers do not have and might miss.  I thought of signing up as a challenge to finish a spy novel on which I have been working for some months, tentatively titled Operation Kashgar.  I have posted some of it on this site and more on a website for writers, AUTHONOMY.

But there are two other writing projects that clamor for attention right now.  Together they might add up to 50,000 words, but they are not novels or short novels, they are plays.  Every writer knows that if you write you must listen to the little voice inside.  The plays will be a re-writing of Heaven is High and the Emperor is Far Away, A Play; for this I have had the benefit of a dramatized reading with comments submitted by the audience as well as readings I myself did before smaller audiences.  The other is a dramatization that I have in mind of the investigations of Judge Dee.  He was a real life figure from the Tang dynasty during which he rose from a county magistrate to the position of something like the Chief Justice of Metropolitan Chang-an (or Xi-an, both names for the Tang capital).  His investigations have been "written up" by a gifted Dutch diplomat, Robert van Gulik, who died in 1967, see website.  

Judge Dee's cases have a devoted following much as Rumpole or Hercule Poirot do, although the medium is different.  Hence, reluctantly, I will not register with NANOWRIMO, but I welcome the challenge and hope to have written or re-written 50,000 words by the end of this month.

A new Review in Amazon

Engrossing world view, October 7, 2012

By 

Anne Carlisle "Anne Carlisle"

This review is from: The Battle of Chibi (Red Cliffs): selected and translated from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (Kindle Edition)

 

What makes "The Battle of Chibi," a 300 pager,such a worthwhile read is a feeling of global impact. Here is a mythos/history of ancient China worth absorbing. The world view of the most populous nation on earth and one that retains much of its ancient heritage should interest us, yet Western readers know little of its evolution. In this fascinating novel, which is part history, part fiction, part drama, and part poetry, Hock G. Tjoa ably takes on the mantle of translator and literary interpreter for a battle along a river that determined four hundred years of ancient Chinese history.

Tjoa does an excellent job at meeting his goal of providing the original in a more "readable and lively language as well as internal consistency." It's a worthwhile though not an easy read. As a boy in the book says, "I cannot remember all the names."

At the outset, the author provides useful background. The historical events were originally recounted in a classic Ming novel, "Romance of the Three Kingdoms," written in 1400 by Luo Guanzhong. In turn the "Romance" was a compilation of work by writers living in the third and fourth centuries AD. (The Arthurian legend immediately comes to mind.) Luo's version is in four volumes of 120 scenes/chapters, the first 80 of which is about the decline of the Han Dynasty and the rise of three kingdoms, a period of transition from 184 to 280 AD. Tjoa characterizes the divergence as one "between imperial unity and fragmentation."

The selections chosen from the "Romance" center on the Battle of Chibi (Red Cliffs), dated 208AD, which Tjoa points out was "the tipping point" between the Han and Three Kingdoms periods. One of the three realms, the Shu, was led by Han loyalist Liu Bei. A second, the Wei, was led by Cao Cao the Usurper. Cao's plan was to become the new unifier of China, but his ambitions disqualified him in the eyes of the other two leaders. A third realm, the Wu led by Sun Quan, lay on the fringe of what was called All under Heaven, a name, says Tjoa, that equates to a Greco-Roman term, "the whole known civiilized world." An interesting pattern emerges in the novel's three-part structure. To my eye, a dialectic of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis unifies the diversity of the structural components as well as underlining the clash of cultures. The dynasty's decline is vividly characterized by its eunuchs, warlords, and rebels.

I became engaged in the story also through the spare, dramatically staged dialogue and the pleasing literary elements. The title of Chapter 8 ("Like Fish Seeking Water") is one example of how metaphor and poetry are used to illustrate what is going on. Here's another: "Screens, decorated with feathers,/Divide the space inside/Bamboo fences and fragrant flowers/Define the space outside."

A new world order emerges from the divisiveness, and though the country is no longer unified, neither is it so insularly focused. At the end of the day, Tjoa's work is historical romance in the most classic sense of the term. It would certainly lend itself to screen adaptation.

Anne Carlisle, Ph. D., reviewer and author of "Home Schooling: The Fire Night Ball"
Original Amazon Review

FROM PRINT TO E-BOOK

September 22, 2012

Who would have thought it could be so difficult?

Having published the print version of The Battle of Chibi (Createspace, 2010) I thought it would be a breeze to produce an e-book version.  Well, it is harder than I thought.

I loved learning about the process of writing a book.  It had to be well-written, of course.  There ought not to be any mistakes, grammatical, typos, or worse; I understand.  There should be consistency in the format of the pages and of the paragraphs; naturally.

Wouldn’t it be the same for e-books?  Well, not exactly.  The text for print must be the same and consistent through-out, so the best format is Adobe Acrobat which produces "pictures" of each page, as it were.  But in an e-book, the text has to flow and wrap around regardless of the size of the font or of the page.  Needless to say, page numbers are worse than useless and an index that cannot refer to page numbers, well!  As for Adobe Acrobat, just forget about it.  On the other hand, it would be nice for the reader to find roughly where he or she needs to be so it is highly recommended that the Table of Contents has links to the different chapters and chapter-like elements.

As it appeared from the existence and recommendations of various style-sheets that different electronic publishers could be very different, I thought it would be a more complete education to try to publish the e-book on two web-sites.

The first site I used required all the items I mentioned two paragraphs earlier.  This exercise was like proof-reading except that it included the “cues” to the publishing mechanism regarding paragraphs, font styles, etc.  There are no more than a dozen of these things that one has to learn in addition to the items required for a print edition.  So it was relatively simple to send this to an automated process on the publisher’s web-site and in a day or two the process was done.  A couple of problems were flagged for correction and then we were done-done.

The other site proceeded as smoothly except that the publisher’s web-site kept sending me what I thought were mixed signals.  Specifically, it would tell me that the conversion was complete and I would find upon proofing it that it was not.  So I tried again, and again.  Since each attempt took about three weeks, I decided that three times was enough.  I “simply” paid to have this done for me.  I don’t regret that decision one bit.