#81..."The Adventures of Augie March"

"Everyone tries to create a world he can live in, and what he can’t use he often can’t see. But the real world is already created, and if your fabrication doesn’t correspond, then even if you feel noble and insist on there being something better than what people call reality, that better something needn’t try to exceed what, in its actuality, since we know it so little, may be very surprising. If a happy state of things, surprising; if miserable or tragic, no worse than what we invent.”

Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March is a tour-de-force through the American life of its picaresque hero, Augie March. Augie is the middle child of a lower class family, living with his ambitious older brother Simon, mentally challenged brother George, and his mother, who was deserted by Augie’s father. The majority of the novel chronicles Augie’s journey to find himself and his purpose in life, which seems to be neverending, as Augie has absolutely zero attention span and can’t seem to commit to anyone or anything. At different points in the novel, he is an eagle-trainer, Merchant marine sailor, book-stealer, secretary to a millionaire, shoe salesman, law student, personal assistant, socialite, and strike organizer, and he lurches between love affairs in much the same way. He is a “born recruit”, due to his compassionate nature and gullibility, and because of this, finds himself unknowingly sucked into bad or difficult situations throughout the book. Augie manages to make it through these rough situations with the help of his friends and family, who disappear and resurface throughout the story constantly. He at last finds the stability and the love he has been seeking…but you get the feeling that the quest isn’t over yet, even at the end of the book.

I didn’t have a problem so much with the plot of the book, which definitely kept things interesting. You never knew what Augie would end up doing from page to page. I think my major hurdle with this book was Saul Bellow, not so much Augie. I would say it took me the first quarter of the book to get a handle on Bellow’s writing style, which consists of about three sentences per page (periods were definitely at a premium) and descriptive prose aplenty, which doesn’t always make for interesting reading. I tend to prefer plot over descriptions, so it was no wonder that Chapter 5 alone took me three days. The style of this book reminded me strongly of Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net, which if you’ve read my review (here) was not a fave. Both characters were on quests of self-discovery, both waxed prolific about their philosophies of life, and both relied on friends to help them out of their various scrapes. I tend to prefer Augie over Under the Net’s Jake Donaghue, since Augie was very compassionate and went out of his way to help people. I’m still not sure what the he** Jake was supposed to be doing. :)

Anyway, 586 pages later, I know everything there is to know about Augie March, and I am reasonably sure my life has not changed substantially because of this book. A book like this naturally begs the question of why finish books you don't like, when there are so many others out there to enjoy. And my answer is this: When you're on a quest to complete any project out there, there are always going to be enjoyable parts, and then not-so-enjoyable parts. Reading through this list, 20 books in, I have found some real treasures, and some real junkers. Finding the treasures make getting through the junkers worthwhile. :)


This book fulfills the second book needed for the Battle of the Prizes, American Version (National Book Award winner in 1954) and is another book down for the Chunkster Challenge, at a hefty 586 pages.


Grade: C+

#82....Angle of Repose

"There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone."

Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose is a beautiful, triumphant, bittersweet epic that brings together the lives of his main character, Lyman Ward, and his grandparents. Lyman is a historian, confined to a wheelchair by a bone disease and an amputated leg, living in California in the house his grandparents built. His wife has recently left him for someone else, and rather than looking towards a bleak future, or living in the painful present, Lyman chooses to delve into the past by writing a book about his famous grandmother, Susan Burling Ward. Enlisting the help of his caretaker's free-spirited daughter Shelly, he begins to go through the papers and letters his grandmother left behind to piece together her life story and the unusual relationship she had with her husband, Oliver.

Susan Burling is an Easterner, living among the wealthy literati, attending art school. Her life changes on the night she meets Oliver Ward, a quiet, gentle miner from the West. When Susan's love interest, the wealthy Thomas Hudson, marries her best friend Augusta, Susan decides to marry Oliver and move West, having little or no idea of the trials and hardships that will accompany the life of a cultured woman in the uncivilized wilds of California and Idaho. As the trusting Oliver is screwed in business again and again by unscrupulous opportunists, Susan becomes dissatisfied with her life and disappointed in her husband, and turns to her writing and drawing to support her growing family. While pining away for her past life back East, she misses out on the present and pushes those who love her away, until the one day she makes a fatal mistake and causes a tragedy that permanently damages her marriage. As he goes through Susan's papers, Lyman begins to see the parallels between the mistakes his grandparents made and his own life, and in the end, "wonders if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather."

I cannot say enough good things about this book. Having lived in the San Francisco Bay area for a few years, Stegner's descriptions of the ruggedness of the California, Colorado and Idaho landscapes are dead-on and beautiful. His depictions of marriage as either an intersection of two lives, or two lives that lean against each other but never connect, is profound. The message of forgiveness for past wrongs, never taking anything for granted, and living each day firmly in the present is one that will stay with me for a long time. I was completely brought into the story, hoping against hope that Oliver would find the security and opportunity he was repeatedly denied, and that Susan would learn to accept her situation rather than continue to resist it. Alas, I was disappointed on both fronts.

This was a beautiful story depicting the culture clash between the civilized East and the uncivilized West. Finding out that it was based on the life of a real woman, Mary Hallock Foote, made the story even more compelling. Everyone should read it.

This book also counts towards both of the reading challenges I have set for myself this year...The Chunkster Challenge and the Battle of the Prizes, American Version. Those are on the sidebar if you want to join up too.

Grade: A+

#83....A Bend In the River

“People lived as they had always done; there was no break between past and present. All that had happened in the past was washed away; there was always only the present. It was as though, as a result of some disturbance in the heavens, the early morning light was always receding into the darkness and men lived in a perpetual dawn.”

A Bend in the River follows the story of Salim, who retreats from his ancestral home on the western coast of Africa and takes over a small trading goods store deep in the wilds of central Africa, at a bend in the river where civilization and the lack thereof intersect. Salim takes this job for several reasons: uprisings in his hometown, escaping from an unwanted engagement, and wanting to make something of himself. He is warned by the previous owner of the store, Nazruddin, to know ‘when to get out’. Salim arrives to see he will be living on the fringes of existence, in a town that has gone back to bush and rubble after colonial rule. He befriends other ‘foreigners’ who live in the town, and when a slave boy, Metty, is sent to him from his parents, he employs Metty in the shop.

Salim is also responsible for Ferdinand, a boy from the jungles who will be attending school in the town. Salim jealously watches while Ferdinand gets the schooling, education and opportunities that are closed to him. When the country is taken over by an anonymous President, new things begin to happen in the town. Modernization arrives in the form of the “Domain”, a series of modern buildings and a ‘polytechnic’, where Ferdinand gets to attend more school and Salim’s friend Indar, also from the upper-class coast, arrives as a speaker. Unlike Ferdinand, who blindly spouts the dogma he is taught at school, Indar has concerns about the direction of the country, as Salim has had all along. Through Indar, Salim meets Yvette, the young wife of Raymond, a man whom the President favors. Salim begins a passionate affair with Yvette, but when Raymond’s favor drops with the President, things go sour for Salim and Yvette. At the same time, things also start to go sour for the town. There are tribal uprisings and attacks against the President and his minions. Shop owners who have been there forever sell out and leave. Salim begins to feel the nervousness of being trapped, and decides to visit Nazruddin in London, where he becomes engaged to his daughter Kareisha. Upon returning to settle accounts in the town, he finds that the President has sold his shop to someone else, and he is under suspicion from the police. When he is imprisoned, Ferdinand, who has risen to the post of commissioner, bails him out of jail and puts him on the first steamer out of town before the arrival of the President, who is coming to execute everyone of prominence in the town.

One of the main themes of the book is a Latin saying inscribed on the town lycee building, Semper Aliquid Novi (‘always something new’). It is so appropriate to the seeming impermanence of settlements in Africa. The ruins of colonial buildings are still visible in the town, which begins to grow anew after independence and again under the Presidential rule, and Salim realizes that the current civilization he is living in could just as easily be reduced to rubble:

“The ruins, spread over so many acres, seemed to speak of a final catastrophe. But the civilization wasn’t dead. It was the civilization I existed in and in fact was still working towards. And that could make for an odd feeling: to be among the ruins was to have your time-sense unsettled. You felt like a ghost not from the past, but from the future. You felt that your life and ambition had already been lived out for you and you were looking at the relics of that life. You were in a place where the future had come and gone.”

Nothing seems to stay the same in Africa. Even the rise and fall of people in the President’s favor, such as Raymond’s rise and fall from grace, and the improbable rise of Ferdinand, an African raised in the jungle, show that importance as a human being can also be changed at a moment’s notice, and someone with the President’s ear one day can be ignored and forgotten the next.

Another element of the story I found fascinating was Naipaul’s treatment of African history. Salim says that, as Africans, “we never asked why; we never recorded”, since natives were unable to read and write. They relied on the oral tradition of passing stories down among family members. Salim, in talking about a story he heard from his grandfather, notes that “without my own memory of the old man’s story I suppose that would have been a piece of history lost forever.” Africa has to rely on educated Europeans, like Raymond, to record their history for posterity. However, absent from these dry European histories, which rely primarily on documentation, are the true experiences of the African natives and their traditions and beliefs. Salim becomes very angry reading over Raymond's journal articles, saying:

"[Raymond] gave no reasons and looked for none; he just quoted from the missionary reports. He didn't seem to have gone to any of the places he wrote about; he hadn't tried to talk to anybody....He knew so much, had researched so much. He must have spent weeks on each article. But he had less true knowledge of Africa, less feel for it, than Indar or Nazruddin or even Mahesh....Yet he had made Africa his subject."

A lot of noise has been made in other reviews about Naipaul’s treatment of women in this novel. Women seemed to fall into one of two categories: modern working woman, and object of obsession. Ferdinand’s mother, Zabeth, is a single mom who runs her own business in the bush, and Salim’s fiancée, Kareisha, is still single at 30 and becomes a pharmacist. Shoba, who is idolized by her husband Mahesh, and Yvette, who really seems to get around, aren’t portrayed as particularly ambitious women, who rely on the men around them to bring them their security. I did not enjoy the scene where Salim loses it and beats up Yvette, but I don’t think it says anything overarchingly negative about all women everywhere.

I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed V.S. Naipaul’s A Bend in the River. And my enjoyment was unexpected, and definitely wasn’t enjoyment in the traditional sense. The story was dark, foreboding, and at times apocalyptic in its story of the rise, fall and disappearance of civilizations and rule in the wilds of Africa. Not usually my thing at all, but I have to admit I was sucked into the story, and was actually begging Salim to do as Nazruddin told him and “get out” when things started to go badly in town. The ending was a bit ambiguous for my taste, but that's probably the way Naipaul wanted it to go down. This book should remind all of us how lucky we are as Americans to have stability, democracy and education in our country.

Grade: B+

#84...The Death of the Heart

"Happy that few of us are aware of the world until we are already in league with it."

Elizabeth Bowen, author of The Death of the Heart, was “greatly interested in "life with the lid on and what happens when the lid comes off.” To make a long story short, Bowen liked to write about what would happen if people didn’t apply filters before acting or speaking, and ended up doing or saying socially unacceptable things. Throw that situation into emotionally repressed 1930’s Inter-War England, and already we have the makings of a fascinating and potentially explosive plot line before even opening the book.

In The Death of the Heart, we are introduced to the Quayne family: Anna and Thomas, who have taken in Thomas' half-sister Portia after the death of Portia's mother, Irene. Portia and Thomas have the same father; their father had an affair with Irene, and Thomas' mother forced her husband to divorce her, marry Irene and have Portia in order to punish him. Mr Quayne eventually dies, and after Irene dies, the dreamy, lonely Portia is sent to live with Thomas and Anna for a year per Mr Quayne's dying wish. The emotionally stifled Anna is less than thrilled with the arrangement; the book begins with her whining to her friend St Quentin about Portia's messy room and admitting that she's read Portia's diary, which included some unflattering remarks about all of them. Portia also has the misfortune to fall in love with Eddie, a shiftless, irresponsible jerk, who leads Portia on yet keeps her at arm’s length. Portia’s diary and her desperate need to be loved in an emotionally sterile household bring events to a head in the Quayne household.

Anyone who has ever felt different, misunderstood or alone will immediately sympathize with Portia’s plight. A child who was born under socially questionable circumstances, who lived a rather free and unconventional life abroad with her mother prior to moving to England, is then thrown into a situation where the pressure is on to conform and repress how they really feel. How awful that would be. It's no wonder that Portia befriends Major Brutt, an awkward, unemployed gentleman who sends her puzzles, and falls for Eddie, a morally bankrupt social pariah, because they are 'different' like she is, and because she is so desperate to feel understood. Portia’s diary throws the Quayne household into disarray because Portia does not hold back in her writing about how the people around her behave, and what her true thoughts are about them. Rather than understanding that Portia should be allowed to have a private place where she can unburden her thoughts and feelings, and minding their own business, the Quaynes whine about feeling unnatural and spied on. When Anna reads Portia’s diary, she is shown a side of herself that contradicts her own view of herself, which makes her uncomfortable.


The real beauty about the ending of Heart is that Portia’s discovery that Anna has read her diary, and the other characters’ discovery of this as well, forces people to admit things or discuss things that would never have come to the surface. You are left wondering if people will change once these revelations are made, but not with much hope.

Anyone who loves a good comedy of manners will be all about this book. A great read.

Grade: A-

#85....Lord Jim

"It is impossible to say how much he lied to Jim then, how much he lied to me now--and to himself always. Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory, and the truth of every passion wants some pretence to make it live."

Pete Rose is arguably one of the most famous baseball players of our time. Here in Minnesota, we're all about Joe Mauer and his batting titles, but Rose in his heyday made Mauer look like a minor leaguer. According to Wikipedia, Rose is the MLB leader in "hits (4,256), games played (3,562), at-bats (14,053), and outs (10,328), with three World Series wins, three batting titles, one MVP Award, two Gold Gloves, the Rookie of the Year Award, and 17 All-Star appearances at an unequaled five different positions (2B, LF, RF, 3B & 1B)".

However, none of that mattered in 1989. Rose had retired from baseball in 1986, but unfortunately, it came to light that during his years as a player and manager for the Cincinnati Reds, Rose had placed bets on his team as high as $10,000, always picking the Reds to win. It was felt that a player betting on baseball, even in favor of his own team,"jeopardized the integrity of the game". Rose was banned from baseball and put on the "permanently ineligible" list. He did not openly admit to the allegations until 2004. A career that should have been enshrined long ago in Cooperstown was permanently disgraced.

Joseph Conrad wasn't around to see what happened with Pete Rose, but the main character of his 1900 novel, Lord Jim, would have completely understood the pain associated with making a major mistake in your professional career that would taint the rest of your life. Jim is a regular guy who turns to a life on the sea as his trade. Jim is loving life as the chief officer of a boat called the Patna until one night when things go terribly, horribly wrong. The boat hits an underwater wreck and begins to fill with water. Jim prematurely panicks and jumps ship along with the other crew members, arriving back on land only to find the ship didn't actually sink and he is now under investigation for deserting his post. He is prohibited from ever being a ship captain again. Utterly humiliated, Jim hops from one menial job to the next, always skipping town whenever the Patna comes up in conversation. He is finally given an opportunity to start completely over in a small tribal community, where he is revered by the locals with the title of "Lord" Jim, until the day when trashy white sailors arrive on the island and threaten everything Jim has tried to escape. He is given a chance to redeem himself for his past and prove that he is not the coward he has been branded as.

I have found over a lifetime of reading that there are some books out there that you can coast through without having to read every word deliberately, yet still be able to follow the the story. And then there are books so wordy and dense that you feel like you have to crawl into a deep, dark, non-distracting hole for about a month in order to even find the story. Unfortunately, Lord Jim was one of the latter books for me. Conrad takes basic sentences like "the sky is blue" and turns them into a page-long paragraph, semi-colons, run-ons, and adjectives aplenty. I found myself re-reading sentences just to make sure I got every word, and then going, "Geez, was THAT all he was trying to say??" Someone should have let Conrad know that he could have bored a hole in himself any time and let the adverbs out.

The disappointment for me with Lord Jim was not that the story was bad. In fact, the last 1/3 and the ending were really good. The disappointment for me was how hard it was to slog through the first 2/3 of the book. It was like walking through two-foot deep snow, something we know all about up here in the Great White North.

The take home message? If you love what you do for a career, don't make the one major mistake that will screw it up forever. And if you decide to pick up Lord Jim, find your deep, dark, non-distracting hole in advance.

Grade: C

#86.....Ragtime

The 2005 movie Crash, winner of the Oscar for Best Picture, revolved around everyday, multi-ethnic people who collide with each other in Los Angeles amid racial and social tensions. Along these same lines is E.L. Doctorow's novel Ragtime, which focuses on a Jewish family, an African-American family, and a Caucasian family that all come together over a period of years in New York and change each other's lives.

Just like the plot of Crash, several stories occur simultaneously in Ragtime. The book opens in turn-of-the-century America with a traditional upper class Caucasian family living in New York. One day the mother discovers a live African-American baby buried in their backyard; she finds the mother of the baby and both the mother, named Sarah, and her baby move into the house. At the same time, a family of Jewish immigrants arrives from overseas, and are so financially strapped that both parents and the young daughter work in the mills, until the father hits it big with his 'moving pictures'. The father of Sarah's baby, a decent and successful musician named Coalhouse, is harrassed by several white firemen because of his color, and his car is vandalized and Coalhouse is sent to prison when he tries to protest. Sarah dies while trying to secure Coalhouse's release, and Coalhouse goes on a rampage to get revenge, killing firemen and blowing up firehouses. How it all ends up, you'll have to find out for yourself.

There are lots of little substories involving famous people like Harry Houdini, Evelyn Nesbit, Sigmund Freud, JP Morgan, and Henry Ford, who also mingle with varying ways into the lives of the three families. Their stories, however, are nowhere near as fascinating as those of the fictional characters, and almost seem like afterthoughts dropped into the story. I'm not sure if Doctorow felt his story would be more interesting with real-life personages, or if he wanted to use the real-life personages to give the story a historical perspective. I think the story would have been just fine without them, personally.

I enjoyed this book a lot. Once I got used to the back and forth style of writing Doctorow uses while switching in between all of his characters, it was easier. He used short, concise sentences, which surprisingly didn't detract from the detailed picture he was trying to create. The narrative definitely sucked you in and had you caring about the characters and wondering how everything would turn out for everyone. I was so PO'd reading the section about Coalhouse's harassment. It is unfathomable to me that there was a period in this country where it was acceptable for anyone to be treated that way.

The front cover of Ragtime calls it "the astonishing bestseller about America", and while it only spanned maybe 15 years of American history, it displays our country at a time of innocence that would never happen again, before World War I, the Holocaust, the Civil Rights movement and before terrorism and Communism really got going. It was strange to see famous people walking around in the book without paparazzi trailing their every move or without a posse of bodyguards. Those were really the days! Now movie stars can't even go to Starbucks without escorts.

An enjoyable read you won't be sorry you picked up.

Grade: B-

#89.....Loving

I was super-psyched to read Henry Green's Loving. Having loved Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of The Day, I was ready for another book exposing what really goes on in the servants' quarters of manorial England. All of the basic plot elements for a great story were there: naughty children, rich widows, cranky housemaids, adultery, embezzlement, blackmail, and backstabbing, all crammed into 200 pages. Unfortunately, Green never found a way to weave these great elements together in a cohesive and interesting way.

On the positive side.... no one ever got more accomplished around the house than I did this week, instead of staying on track and reading this book. Catbox? Unbelievably clean. Basement? Completely reorganized. 1000-piece Twilight puzzle with 90% black pieces? I was on it! My husband is campaigning to have me read nothing but Loving for the remainder of my life.

Ok, so back to the book. The first 100 or so pages were unreadable. Couldn't get into it at all. I actually had to start the book over three times before I could catch on to what was happening. Here's an attempt to sum up the plot, just for the sake of being thorough: a manor house in Ireland during WWII is the setting of Loving, where a rich old widow lives with her daughter-in-law while her son is off fighting in the war. That's about all we learn about the 'masters'. The rest of the time is spent on a rather motley and clueless collection of 'servants', most of whom don't seem to work very hard and elicited no emotions from me other than irritation.

If Green wants readers to feel the boredom, isolation and paranoia his characters experienced by living in a huge castle out in the middle of nowhere during a war, he succeeded with me. I almost wished the castle was in London so the Blitz could happen, just to give the characters something of substance to do and worry about. I also wondered if Green wanted to show us that servants have very superficial, boring lives and that nothing of consequence ever happens to them. Because that was another take-home message for me. 99.9% of this story revolved around "nice cups of tea", idle chitter-chatter, and people freaking out about lost gardening gloves for like fifteen pages.

I’ve read other books on the Modern Library's list, like Tobacco Road, for instance, that didn’t have huge and involved plots but somehow managed to be 200 times more captivating than this book was. I was extremely disappointed in the ending. Green just sort of lopped it off like a dead branch, and it doesn't go with the rest of the story at all. Maybe he got tired of the story himself and just decided to end it. I can’t say I blame him. This book was beginning to have an Under the Net stream of consciousness feel to it, like it would never end, so I am glad he figured something out.

The bottom line on this one? If you're really into the servant/master thing, check out The Remains of the Day. I promise you won't be sorry. But if you really need motivation to get some household chores done, pick up Loving. Your husband will thank you.

Grade: D

#87....The Old Wives' Tale

"These visions of herself seemed beautiful to her, her childish existence seemed beautiful; the storms and tempests of her girlhood seemed beautiful; even the great sterile expanse of tedium when, after giving up a scholastic career, she had served for two years in the shop--even this had a strange charm in her memory.

And she thought that not for millions of pounds would she live her life over again."

I’ll start out by saying this about Arnold Bennett’s The Old Wives’ Tale: if you have ever been a wife, a parent of a ungrateful teenager, or you just love family sagas, you will love this book with a capital L. This was exactly the type of book I hoped to encounter by reading the Modern Library’s list: a book I had never heard of, would never have picked up by chance, and an engrossing story. It makes wading through all the Maguses and Ginger Men worthwhile.

In The Old Wives’ Tale, we are introduced to the well-to-do Baines family, who live in a small town in England and run a successful drapery shop there. Mr Baines, the head of the family, suffered a stroke when his daughters were small that paralyzed the left half of his body. He spends the day in bed being tended to by various members of his family. His wife runs the shop and manages the family. The Baines daughters, Constance and Sophia, couldn’t be any different. Constance is a people-pleasing, non-ambitious model daughter who enjoys working in the shop, but her sassy younger sister Sophia is busting at the seams to get out of the drapery business.

Sophia wants to be a teacher, but changes her mind when she meets Gerald Scales, the Dirtbag of all Dirtbags, and elopes with him to Paris to spend his inheritance. They go through the money in about three months, and then Gerald deserts Sophia. She rises to the occasion though, becoming a successful pension owner in Paris during the war. Dependable Constance stays in town to inherit the drapery store, marry its chief assistant, Samuel Povey, and raise the most self-centered, unappreciative son in the universe, Cyril. Both women outlive their husbands and meet again in their old age to live out the remainder of their lives together.

I loved, loved, loved this book, start to finish. There were enough twists and turns that you never knew what would happen next, or like me, you tried to predict it and ended up wrong. Both women were likeable, strong, sympathetic characters, neither of whom had remarkable lives, but Bennett makes their stories compelling nonetheless. Sophia’s character was fascinating to me. She made the stupid mistake of picking the wrong man, but found the inner strength to make lemonade out of lemons without sacrificing her pride and running back to her family. For the time period this book took place in, she was a thoroughly modern woman. Constance’s life was more run-of-the-mill; I would have loved to send Super Nanny to her house to help her put the smack-down on Cyril.

Enjoy this one. It’s my favorite so far.

Grade: A+

#88...The Call of the Wild

"Thornton knelt down by Buck's side. He took his head in his two hands and rested cheek on cheek. He did not playfully shake him, as was his wont, or murmur soft love curses, but he whispered in his ear, "As you love me, Buck. As you love me," was what he whispered."

I do not love animal stories, especially ones where animals get hurt or die. Old Yeller traumatized me for life, as did Turner and Hooch. Yes, I know animal death is all part of the great Circle of Life and everything (yes, I bawled through The Lion King as well) but when you get right down to it, animal stories are just something I avoid like the plague. Period. Marley and Me will never, ever be on my TBR list.

So as you might guess I was jumping for joy to read Jack London's mini-epic The Call of the Wild. I spent most of the first 40 pages fighting back tears for Buck, a dog who is suddenly uprooted from a loving and happy home to hauling heavy sleds, barely getting enough food to make it through a day, sleeping wet and cold in the snow every night, and not to mention occasionally being attacked by humans or other dogs. Buck is able to dig deep to find the will to not only survive, but thrive in his new environment, and along the way does meet up with some very ethical and loving humans. Thank God.

Despite the animal angle, I found Call to be very well written. London is good at expressing the shock and denial any of us humans would experience in such a dramatic change in living conditions. Watching Survivor or Lost, you see people doing essentially the same thing Buck does…getting past social niceties and doing what they have to do to survive, no matter what else happens.

If animal stories are your thing (and I won't tell you if Buck makes it or not) pick up The Call of the Wild.

Grade: B-

#90....Midnight's Children

"To understand just one life, you have to swallow the world."

I have to admit I had my apprehensions about reading anything by Salman Rushdie. All his name brought to mind was what happened when I was a teenager with his book The Satanic Verses, which already sounded sacrilegious to my Catholic-raised mind. Turns out the Ayatollah Khomeini agreed with me; the book contained what he perceived as a blasphemous reference to the prophet Mohammad. Khomeini issued a fatwa (basically a death sentence) for the British-born Rushdie. He was forced to live in hiding for years, and Iran and the UK actually broke diplomatic relations in 1989, thanks to his book. Those out there who don’t think writing a book can change your life, think again!

In Rushdie’s 2nd novel, Midnight’s Children, our narrator, Saleem Sinai, is born exactly at midnight on August 15, 1947…the very day India becomes independent from Britain. But Saleem’s time seems to be running out, as he is mysteriously beginning to disintegrate into millions of pieces, so he begins to tell the story of his extraordinary family. He begins with his grandfather, Aadam Aziz, a foreign university trained physician who falls in love with his wife piece-by-piece as it is shown through a hole in a sheet, so he falls in love with her before he even sees her face. Their daughter Mumtaz steals her older sister’s boyfriend Ahmed away from her, but upon marrying him, she realizes she does not love her husband. She resolves to fall in love with her husband piece by piece, much like Aadam did with Naseem. She saves the life of a Hindi entertainer from a Muslim mob, and he reads her palm and predicts she will have an extraordinary son. In Bombay, where they rent a mansion from a Britisher, William Methwold, Amina and another poorer woman become pregnant at the same time, and both deliver right at midnight. The babies are switched by ayah Mary Pereira, so that the rich baby will be poor and the poor baby will be rich. Saleem is actually the baby of the British Methwold and the poor woman, who dies after giving birth, but he is unknowingly raised as the son of the Sinais.

Saleem is not a beautiful baby. He has patchy colored skin, very light blue eyes, is unable to blink, and has a huge nose. Soon afterwards, his sassy sister Jamila, also known as the Brass Monkey, is born, who grows up as a tomboy-ish attention seeker, setting fire to people's shoes and breaking stuff. Saleem gets all kinds of special gifts during the novel, such as reading people's minds, killing people in his sleep, an extraordinary sense of smell, and the ability to communicate with people who are far away in his head. Saleem finds out that the living 581 ‘midnight’s children’ are from all over India, and have special gifts that are more extraordinary the closer they are born to midnight. He creates the Midnight Children’s Conference (MCC), where all of them can meet, in his head, between midnight and 1am every night, to talk about their gifts and what to do with them. Here Saleem meets Shiva, the baby he was swapped with on his birthday and the true son of the Sinais. Shiva has huge knees with which he can crush people, and he is a member of a rough gang. Saleem’s parentage is discovered when Saleem needs a blood transfusion and the doctor realizes that Saleem’s unique blood type could not have come from either Amina or Ahmed. The Brass Monkey has now become the favored child and his father barely acknowledges his existence, and she becomes a famous singer. As Saleem grows, the children of the MCC grow as well, and begin to take on the beliefs and prejudices of their parents, so that no one gets along. He meets up with one of the other Midnight’s Children, Parvati, who has gotten pregnant by Shiva, and they get married and she has her son Aadam on the night of India's Emergency. He has huge ears and doesn't make sounds. The Widow, the leader of India, has found out about the MCC through Shiva, and goes about rounding up all of them when she begins leveling the slums as part of a 'beautification' project. All except those who are dead (Parvati dies) are taken into custody and all have hysterectomies and testectomies to prevent their magical skills from living on. What she does not realize is that Shiva got a bunch of other women pregnant, so the legacy of the MCC will live on.

There was really no way to quickly summarize Midnight’s Children, so I didn’t try; nor did I want to. To do so would not have done justice to the richness of the story and even with my long summary, there are still important plot aspects and symbolism I didn’t get to…but I have to leave you something to discover for yourself. The third section of the book was a little harder to get into with all of the war stuff, and I had to reread that section twice because I felt like I was missing things. There were also many historical personages from the Indo-Pakistan conflict with very similar sounding names so that made it sort of confusing as well. I had to go to Wikipedia a few times while reading to learn about Indira Gandhi (who was apparently the inspiration for 'The Widow’), the Indian Emergency and Partition, and this really helped me understand what was going on in the story.

East vs West, poor vs rich, modern vs traditional….all are struggles that the heterogenous country of India went through to become the democracy that it is today. Saleem tells us on the first page of the book that ‘his destiny is insolubly chained to that of his country'. He is born on the day of India’s independence, of poor Indian and wealthy English parents, with both bloodlines visible in his physical features, and throughout the book, he shares his fear of crumbling into 600 million pieces (at that time the population of India). The struggle between the traditional and the modern is also highlighted in the battle of wills between Naseem and Aadam, as they definitely don’t see eye to eye on the role of women and raising children.

After I read this book, I was mad at myself for waiting so long to pick up a Rushdie novel. I am sure I will again in the future.

Grade: A