The Sorrow of War by Bảo Ninh

    Bảo Ninh’s The Sorrow of War is a destabilizing experience and Ninh knows exactly what he’s doing.

    The Sorrow of War is a novel and maybe-memoir that focuses on Kien, a young man bound up in the Vietnam war. The novel begins, though, in 1976, where Kien works in a troop trying to find the bodies of MIA soldiers from the war. What’s most striking is that the novel opens with such rich, beautiful imagery: it’s at a complete disconnect from the content of the story. The death and darkness is, by contrast, overshadowed by lush images of Vietnam.

    There’s a note I should have written down, but I failed to be a good reader. Essentially, after about thirty pages Ninh narrates how Kien is writing a novel that is characterized (read this in italics) exactly as what you’ve just read. He describes the violence and death as being at a disconnect from the imagery as I just have. It’s a profoundly self-reflective moment where Ninh shows that he knows exactly what he’s up to as a writer.

    What makes the moment so incredible, though, is that the metafictional aspect of the book serves the thematic interests of The Sorrow of War beautifully, giving the book a cohesive quality beyond its disorderly approach. When I consider the wave of metafictional writing that took hold in the postmodern period, a lot of it seems to be commentary on truth and writing itself, and often ends there. At its worst, metafiction is a wink and a nudge to how clever the author is.

    There are, of course, exceptions that are truly stunning, and with that in mind I’d like to draw an unlikely comparison. The work of Samuel Beckett often has a metafictional quality where the storytelling is so disrupted yet speaks beautifully to subjecthood. In a posthumanist lens, the narration of Beckett’s works points to the inconsistencies, the incompleteness, and the potentialities for human existence. Here, Ninh does something similar that is well worth a closer inspection.

    The Sorrow of War, in the first place, is a blur of memoir and novel. One would assume that Ninh is the main character, yet the truthfulness and subjecthood of the central figure is immediately questionable because the character’s name is Kien. Moreover, Kien is (presumably) writing a novel about his experiences, and once again the truth of his experience is called into question. It is consistently referred to as a novel rather than a memoir, which implies a layer of fiction, and then the narration of Ninh’s book is repeatedly, repeatedly interrupted to comment on Kien’s novel. So, the book you’re reading is commenting on the book Kien is writing, which comments on the book you’re reading. It has a circularity which challenges your own sense of stability, similar to the way Kien’s characters experience the Vietnam war.

    Ninh’s book reads as a series of vaguely connected episodes. There will be stories of a troop playing cards and then being unceremoniously killed. There are stories of amorous affairs that dissipate into a mist of contradictions. The story works, in some ways, backwards, and the climax of the story is Kien being enlisted in the war. The novel explores the disruptions to the experience of time and forces the reader into that experience by playing scenes out of order and making it impossible for scenes to exist simultaneously.

    Related to the disruption of subjecthood and the nonlinearity of the story, Kien recounts his interactions with Phuong, a young love. Partway through the novel, following the return from war, it appears that Kien and Phuong are neighbours. It suggests that they love one another, and yet Phuong appears to be ‘unworthy’ of him (it’s implied she’s a sex worker) and then she seemingly transforms into a different woman, a mute woman. Meanwhile, Kien seems to be disassociated from his identity and becomes ‘the author.’ There’s a surreal quality that reflects what I assume is post-traumatic stress disorder and lack of cohesion in memory. When Kien finishes writing his book, he presents it to the mute woman. She notes that it’s all out of order and he himself acknowledges that “the novel was the ash from this exorcism of devils” (109). 

    As I’ve mentioned, the novel is largely a commentary on time, as well. Aside from being presented out of logical sequence, there are several moments where characters comment on the way the Vietnam war disrupted time and how they are no longer connected to time as it was. In one scene, Kien narrates: “The future lied to us, long ago in the past. There is no new life, no new era, nor is it hope for a beautiful future that now drives me on, but rather the opposite. The hope is contained in the beautiful pre-war past.” The idea of the future reaching into the past is worth exploring, as is the death and impossibility of the future [c.f. the work of Mark Fisher—the erasure of the future is a motif explored in a different but analogous context]. The idea of hope only existing in the past is also a surprising turn, since hope is nearly by definition a future-reaching sentiment. Elsewhere, Phuong recognizes a similar experience. After some traumatic events (I’ll tell you later, I’m following the out-of-order approach), Phuong tells Kien: “You go your way, I’ll go mine. We had such a beautiful life. You and me, my love for you, your love for me. My mother and your dad, and I would have been your wife, no doubt. That was in the past. Now we have a new future, a new fate. We had no choice in the new circumstances, it was an unlucky coincidence. Now I’m like this, you go your way, I’ll go mine” (212). She comments on the impossibility of their future, but what I find most engaging in the passage is how Ninh uses verb tenses. She begins by referring to the past: “We had such a beautiful life.” She then goes through a series of sentence fragments with no verb tenses before switching to the conditional statement “I would have been your wife.” She places that conditional, though, “in the past.” There’s something about the conditional being relegated to the past that I find so compelling, as if there’s an even greater distance between the potential and the actual. Not only is the future only what could have been, but the future is a possibility withdrawn so far into the past it is doubly impossible.

    The shift in time, again, is self-reflexive: “At first I tried to rearrange the manuscript pages into chronological order, to make the manuscript read like the sort of book I was familiar with. But it was useless. There was no chronological order at all. Any page seemed like the first, any page could have been the last. Even if the manuscript had been numbered, even if no pages had been burned, or moth-eaten, or withheld by the author, if by chance they were all there, this novel would still be a work created by turbulent, even manic inspirations [...] The flow of the story continually changed. From beginning to end the novel consisted of blocks of images. A certain cluster of events, then disruptions, some event wiped off the page as if it had fallen into a hole in time” (223).

    The novel is rightly described as occurring in blocks. In that respect, it’s sometimes difficult to latch onto and feel invested. Characters will be introduced only to be slaughtered, or characters will shift in a way where suddenly you’re unclear on who is who and where is where.

    That said, there were pockets where I felt myself truly compelled and enthralled in the action of the story. One scene that comes to mind is when Kien is leading a troop and looks the other way when they withdraw nightly for amorous trysts, despite it being against the rules. The women disappear and then the troop seeks revenge against the Americans that presumably raped and murdered the women. There’s a scene where the Americans have been ordered to dig their own graves and they plead for their lives. The tension in the moment is so tightly wrought that it’s hard to deny its force.

    Even more impeccable is the climax of the novel, which is a longer stretch that is just stunning. The fact that the climax of the novel is actually chronologically one of the earliest events is interesting in its own right: the past has retained its force. Kien has been called to war and we know from what happens ‘later’ (but earlier in the book) that there are harsh punishments against perceived or actual deserters. Phuong and Kien want to have one last night together before going to war and the whole sequence is rife with sorrow. Essentially, there’s an air raid warning so they have to hide, which means Kien misses his train, and they’re panicked that he’ll be imprisoned or killed for not showing up for service. So, the two try to race against time (and the train) in order to get Kien to his destination on time. It has the intensity and the fog of war effect that I loved so much about the climax of Kazuo Ishiguro’s When We Were Orphans. Kien and Phuong end up stealing a bicycle and there’s a carefree childishness bound up with the emotional complexity of leaving for war. They then end up on a train and the train gets bombed, Phuong is raped by a group of Vietnamese men (maybe), and Kien tries to find her after they are separated. The scene flashes forward and backwards by years and more information is revealed that makes the entire scene questionable. The bond between the characters is tragic and beautiful and the scene is so bittersweet; their shared mission to get Kien to war is exhilarating and yet it’s strange for them to race towards an event that you know produces their sorrow and doom and so on. It’s a pretty incredible ending stretch to the story, giving backstory that alters your perception of the events that follow chronologically.

    Kien and Phuong are rich characters, but beyond that the characters often read as somewhat flat. I think it’s largely purposeful. In one scene, Kien reflects on his father’s career as an artist, which is interesting in its own right because his style is at a disconnect with the political climate of the time. In his father’s paintings, “human beings wore dismal expressions, their faces were long and drawn, their bodies stretched. The colours were strange, too. The paintings were utterly depressing, the subjects moronic. [...] with no exception they were all done in varying tones of yellow. Yellow. No other colours, just yellow. [...] the characters wandered aimlessly across unreal landscapes, like withered puppets joined to each other like cut-out figures” (121). I’m tempted to read the novel in terms of the artist’s vision. The human beings in the novel are all pretty dismal and could be interchangeable in the same way that the figures in the painting are all done in the same style. Describing the characters “like withered puppets joined to each other like cut-out figures” I think is an equally appropriate descriptor.

    The book itself is pretty punishing. It’s full of sorrow. It’s full of death. It’s full of pain. The whole text reads as, basically, one block of text. There are paragraph breaks but there are no chapter breaks or clear delineation between sections. As a result, it feels like relentless blocks of text. It really emulates the sensation of an endless, ongoing war.

    Ultimately, The Sorrow of War is a crushing novel / memoir. In many respects it’s compelling, if not actually -pleasurable-. What Ninh does with narrative and seeing his twist on metafictional tropes is surprising and warrants further study. The book subverts expectations around memory, time, and identity in ways that I’ve rarely seen replicated elsewhere. The historical milieu is engaging to me—I’ve been fascinated by the Vietnam war since a high school politics teacher used it as the foundation for our course and I’m often drawn to literature that speaks to that time (I highly recommend em by Kim Thúy). From a story standpoint, some points hit and some points don’t—I’m sure it will be a matter of personal preference what resonates. Because the book makes itself hard to latch onto and because of the dark subject matter, I can’t say it’s the most enjoyable book I’ve read, but it is one that will leave me thinking. 

    Happy reading!

Shadows in the Darkness by Elaine Cunningham

   Elaine Cunningham’s Shadows in the Darkness has been sitting on my bookshelf for a while. Let me set the stage. It’s St. Patrick’s Day 2012. The Queen’s University bookstore is having a sale where you cram as many books as possible into a massive tote bag and for everything that’s in there you pay…twenty dollars? You’re launched into a book-buying frenzy and just start grabbing whatever looks remotely interesting. You pick up a hardcover of a book called Shadows in the Darkness and, in the frenzy of the moment, you’re tricked into thinking it sounds deep, when in fact it’s nonsense that ‘sounds cool.’ Later, you calm down while you add 40 or so books to your shelf and promptly leave Shadows in the Darkness untouched for the following fifteen literal years.

    Elaine Cunningham’s novel is a crime / fantasy novel that focuses on Gwen, a disgraced ex-cop turned private investigator on the hunt for a missing girl. The cynic in me suggests that there’s more than a little wish fulfilment in Cunningham’s impossibly cool character. Here’s, essentially, the first introduction to Gwen:

“Sometimes she tried for a traditionally professional image, but today wasn’t one of those days. She wore jeans so snug they looked as if they’d been spray painted on, a sleeveless black shirt that stopped a couple of inches north of her pierced navel, a leather jacket she’d bought second-hand during the Reagan administration, slim-heeled ankle boots, and far too much makeup. Her eyes, which were wide and very blue and slightly tilted at the corners, tended to remind people of Siamese cats. Gwen liked to play down the feline aspect with a few layers of judiciously applied paint, which had the added benefit of making her look older. Or at least, it made her look like a high-school kid who was trying to look older” (26).

The book was published in 2004 but retains the fingerprint of the 90s. Gwen’s style is just soooo coooooool. Gwen was that over-the-top quality reminiscent of Lara Croft in the first few Tomb Raider releases. Gwen’s character, among other things, makes the novel feel dated in turn. It becomes even more obvious when one of her central character quirks is that she hates using computers. The ‘techy’ character in the story at one point has to explain what a USB key is for (which feels even more surreally antiquated when he refers to it as a thumb drive). In addition, when conducting the investigation we get the following glorious line from the technophilic character: “Fingerprints, that’s one thing, but pictures? Even if there was a way to do a computer search on a picture, there’s no database for civilian mugs.” Oh, poor Cunningham, how quaint this reads today!

    On the topic of the investigation, there are some moments of intrigue but it’s ultimately marred by two flaws. The more superficial flaw is the timeline: it’s often unclear or overly convenient when events happen. Real life is often nonsequential; while I’m marking, I might get an e-mail from a parent that I need to address and while I’m doing that, my dog might need a walk, and so on. This book sees Gwen zipping around town and issues popping up sequentially—at the end of one meeting, a phone call comes through to give her her next step.

    The more critical flaw is in the construction of the investigation and the lack of narrative payoff. I am by no means an expert in the mystery genre, but I feel like what makes the genre compelling and fun is watching the mystery unfold and seeing the character put pieces together to solve the case. Shadows in the Darkness has a trend where people just bring Gwen information. For instance, she’ll interrogate someone who says they don’t know anything, but there are at least two instances where the person returns to her unprompted a few days later to reveal new details, having experienced a sudden and largely unexplained change of heart. Rather than following clues, it feels like Gwen is led through the case via a series of video game sidequests where people just tell her things.

    What makes it even more difficult for Cunningham to bring the narrative arc to a satisfying conclusion is that Gwen has magic powers. In the prologue, a character is eye-rollingly revealed to be an elf. Luckily that plot thread is left mostly untouched for half the novel, however, Gwen has psychic powers where if she touches something she can experience memories of other people. She uses that to locate a missing girl early on, and then later her visions help her get to a new clue. It’s frustrating that it is not really Gwen’s thinking or investigative skillset that drives the mystery, but her identity. It comes down to an intrinsic feature of her bloodline that is at the core of the mystery and, in my opinion, that just deflates her heroism.

    In turn, there’s a predictability to the story that makes the payoff lacklustre. To give an example, Gwen is on a date with her ex boyfriend and about to take things to the bedroom when she gets a phone call from her techy friend who was doing some investigative work that she outsourced to him. He tells her that there’s something she needs to see and she tells him to wait until the morning. The moment he asked her to come over I knew he’d be dead by the time she got there. Called it. The epilogue reveals a more genuine twist, I suppose, about a secret villain, but even then my reaction was just like, “k.”

    I suppose my apathy towards it is fueled by the fact that by the time I had thirty pages left I realized Cunningham was setting up for a sequel. In the final phase of the novel, Cunningham uses a significant amount of time introducing a character and having Gwen bond with him. It felt like a waste when the case was at its most pressing. 

    Tangentially, this points to an issue with some of the tone of the book that reads as untrue for Gwen’s character. Gwen is driven by a sense of purpose, and yet there are inconsistencies. She is artificially put on pause for her investigation, which coincidentally aligns with the funeral of her former partner, at which she meets his son for the first time and the two share an intimate, vaguely romantic conversation. I just didn’t buy it that she’d be receptive to that scenario. In another, she emerges naked from the shower and there’s a man she barely knows in her house and they just kinda chat about the case. In another scene, Gwen tells an informant that the informant’s contact has died and that the funeral was happening the following week. The conversation literally ends with, “Okay,” and the man walks away. It’s weird. Similarly, the dialogue in the novel strives for a bunch of short, quippy exchanges that sometimes just read inappropriately to the situation. Those same dialogue tropes from a show like CSI: Miami that have been panned and parodied abound here. It seems unrealistic to me that they would be talking about human trafficking and then add some joke about Gwen not liking computers in the middle.

    Other than that, the writing is largely competent. There is good clarity to the text, if a little wonky when transitioning between scenes and establishing timelines. There were some moments of solid imagery and figurative language. While the writing is predominantly perfunctory from a stylistic point of view, I didn’t have too many complaints. There were a few strange moments, though, that a more careful editor might have found. 

    Overall, the book was not as painful as it might have been. It was a reasonably engaging story, I suppose, but it definitely reads more like a TV cop episodic rather than a high art concept film. 

    When I think about that book sale from oh so many years ago, I mourn the fact that I’ll never experience that same format again. At the same time, I know that I still have some residual books from that day. I think I’ve picked through most of the better ones, but there are a handful of ex-popular fiction books on my shelf that will likely be there for a few more years. I can pretty much guarantee, though, that I won’t follow up with the sequel to Shadows in the Darkness: Shadows in the Starlight.

    Meh.

My Art Is Killing Me by Amber Dawn

    In the foreword to Amber Dawn’s collection of poetry, My Art Is Killing Me, ______________ writes, “As I read the poem ‘Dear IncorrectName,’ I began to wonder why we expect artists to do our emotional labour for us. Is the violence of consumption inherent to experiencing art in our late-stage capitalist societies?” (13). I love these questions for their broad reach, and asking them set up a framework for reading Dawn’s poetry.

    Before I go into the questions My Art Is Killing Me inspires, I want to offer a brief comment on why I found ________________’s questions so thoughtful. The first question—about why we expect artists to do our emotional labour—is an incisive one. Typically, I think we have an expectation that reading books is in itself an act of healing, as if healing words will, by osmosis, make things better. That perception seems to undercut the challenging personal work necessary for actual emotional labour; the same goes for quoting e. e. cummings to your beloved. I appreciate the way the question simultaneously elevates the status of artists while undercutting the falsity of their supposed purpose (i.e. in this framing, as opiate of the masses). As for the second question, the idea of consumption and art is a meaningful one—a problem that even (and especially) I succumb to: observing art without being generative or allowing it to truly force me to reshape myself and the world.

    These questions prompted others in my reading of Amber Dawn’s poems. One question that sprung to mind for me is what it means to have an oeuvre. In a collection like My Art Is Killing Me, the poems deal directly with sexism, homophobia, sex work, rape, abuse, and so on. It first struck me how many of the poems deal with the same topic; I then considered how many famous poets built their careers on writing about the same topic and whether I am any different. If I can read and write poems about time and find some new nuance to the topic each time, why not for issues of social justice?

    Dawn’s approach threads the needle for social justice poems. We should consider the question: what is poetry for? Dawn seems to agitate, never veering so far into the didactic that her work ceases to read like poetry, never so esoteric that it loses sight of the real issues. In fact, the focus of the poems is what gives them their force. One poem is an extended examination of the relationship between Hollywood and sex work. It has the background research to read like an academic paper, but the stylistic arrangement worthy of poetry. Dawn documents how many actresses have won Oscars for portraying sex workers while simultaneously advocating against the decriminalization of sex work (Meryl Streep! A flaw?!). The hypocrisy runs throughout the collection and integrates passages of speeches from film and to the UN. She includes a passage from Mira Sovino’s role in Mighty Aphrodite that just gains profoundly terrible force for its being embedded in the footnotes of the poem: “And so there I am on the first day, on the set, and there’s this guy fucking me from behind, right, and there’s these two huge guys dressed like cops in my mout at the same time and I remember thinking to myself, ‘I like acting’” (40).

    Dawn has a special talent for giving those thoughtful, brutal gut-punches. Again, in critiquing the film industry and its role in society from an oft-unconsidered angle, Dawn writes, “I grew up with motives that taught me the meek / shall inherit the prom. Or the Geek shall inherit / access to a blackout drunk cheerleader.” The line break and the internal rhyme just make the line ring that much more powerfully, that much more critically of our social mores.

    Some of the lines echo between poems. It’s particularly powerful when there are recurring motifs that build up the characters in the poems. For instance, there are a series of lines that reference a lecherous professor guiding younger female students. The vignettes construct a ‘type’ of person—a stock character common in real life. Within the poem, Dawn acknowledges that he’s a composite and yet he feels so true to life in his toxic horror, both as a systemic and particular figure.

    Social justice poems are best when incorporating the personal. Dawn allows her poems to balance both in a way that is emotionally resonant and linguistically sound. There’s a narrative poem about a queer woman taking care of her homophobic relative and tracing the history of abuse and silence in the family. She writes about a letter she received that reads:

e   m   o  o   r   a    l

in context: “your emooral life”

a small tear between “o”s where his pen

heavily retracted the vowels

like an infinity symbol (42)

I like the way Dawn breaks down the misspelling in its particularity and then the descriptive simile of the ‘o’s as infinity symbols, as though she is forever emooral because of her identity as a queer person. I don’t know how true-to-life the account is, but the misspelling is telling. There’s an intimation of being ’unmoored’ in this spelling at the moment of her expulsion from the family. In a line shortly after she recounts how “All my abusers are survivors after all. / Nonno           no different”, referring to a family member. I love the repetition of the ‘no’s and how it bridges the disapproval and the family member as though the two are one. The moment is then punctuated with one of Dawn’s particularly poetic images: “My ma told me he died in a trailer so / poverty gnawed she could see the sky // through the aluminium walls.” It’s an evocative image that encapsulates the decrepitude and bleakness of the moment. I have a minor complaint about there not being a hyphen between “poverty” and “gnawed” but I’ll let it slide (along with a few other spelling and punctuation errors in the collection).

    In My Art Is Killing Me, Dawn writes that “an anagram for ‘creative writing’ is ‘tragic interview’” (22). The linguistic cleverness may be a bit much, but I can’t help but enjoy it. It also feels appropriate for the confessional tone of the collection (indeed, one poem is a compilation of DMs that people have sent in response to Dawn’s work, often of a triggering or re-traumatizing nature). The headline here is that the collection offers a fine balance of the personal and political.

    The collection has an authenticity that is sometimes lacking from similar collections. While I sometimes find myself troubled by the propensity of poets to repeat similar subject matter, I have to give credit to Dawn’s force for her particular set of concerns. Overall, I gotta say: it’s a pretty good book.

    Happy reading!

How To Get Filthy Rich In Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid

    You will be forgiven if, after you read Mohsin Hamid’s third book, How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia, you find that your bank balance has failed to increase. Masquerading as a self-help book, Hamid’s novel takes place in “rising Asia,” though the specific country is never quite identified. I suspect it’s meant to be Pakistan, India, or Afghanistan. Each chapter begins with some advice, ostensibly, on how to pursue wealth. Smuggled through its pages, though, is a narrative with you at the center.

    The book makes use of the second person throughout, which recalls Hamid’s earlier book, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. I find that one of the most compelling stylistic elements of both texts, and I see a fair deal of nuance in how that use of second person is deployed. In Hamid’s sophomore novel, the use of “you” places the reader in the role of American interlocutor with a potential terrorist; the politics and the reader’s ambiguous affect are fascinating to me and what lingered with me. Here, the use of “you” is less profound, but still interesting in its usage, oscillating between a prescriptive mode and an immersive one. The prescriptive mode tells you how to become rich and the immersive one tells you your life story. Ultimately, the ending of the book has some meditations on what it means for a writer and a reader to be in communion: “I too contain you, who may not yet even be born, you inside me inside you [...] and so may you, may I, may we, so may all of us confront the end” (222). Admittedly, the ending fails to land with the same force of Hamid’s previous novel, but it still felt narratively satisfying.

    To take a step back, the book recounts how you grew up, how you worked as a delivery boy for a film bootlegger, how you met a pretty girl, how your parents passed away, how the pretty girl moved away, how you married someone else, how you started some shady business dealings, how you were under attack, how you lost your business, and how you passed away. Due to the structure of the novel, each chapter reads like a vignette or short story. This allows Hamid to really focus on a few key moments in your life.

    The approach has some advantages and some drawbacks. One advantage is that the book never feels like it overstays its welcome and another is that it allows Hamid to go through a variety of moods to great effect. There are tender moments, hopeful moments, and dark, tense moments that stand out beautifully against the others. The drawbacks are that your characterization is somewhat lacking and that there are some moments that are dropped or underdeveloped.

    I’d like to start with one of the moments that really impressed me. About a fourth of the way through the novel, your mother is diagnosed with cancer. When the doctor calls for someone to explain the diagnosis, you are chosen because you are the most educated family member. So you go in to serve the family. It’s a gut-wrenching scene. Your mother keeps asking about the practical concerns: how much will the treatment cost? (It’s more than your father’s annual salary.) Your mother then asks what will happen without the treatment. (Death.) You watch while your mother considers her options. You have to negotiate what to do: surgery, radiotherapy, hormones, and so on. The staging of the scene with you in the middle evokes so much sympathy for the novel’s central character and then it gets even more powerful: you explain everything to your family. Then, “Your father looks at you repeatedly, and each time you nod. He is tearfully grateful to the matriarch for agreeing to pay for the surgery. He smiles and blinks and shifts his weight. [...] You have not seen him in the presence of one of his employers since you were a child. To observe him like this disturbs you” (65). Meanwhile, your other “has until now utterly refused to believe that she will not soon return to health” (65). It’s a complicated dynamic. Your mother, knowing she will die, agrees to something for the benefit of your father, who does not have the capacity to pay for what is ultimately a favour to him. The scene has a rich bittersweet tone that really demonstrates Hamid’s prowess as an author.

    By contrast, Hamid is able to ramp up the tension in other scenes. In one, you are involved in a strange criminal enterprise. You bring an idea to your armed boss that would increase profits, but he is skeptical of you (rightly so: your money-making method is to buy expired goods, remove their expiration dates and replace them with consumer-friendly ones). The conversation teeters on the brink of an outright conflict, but instead it simmers beautifully. Later, your life is under threat and a murder takes place to protect you. Later, a boutique is subject to a heist, resulting in the death of another character following being hit with the butt of a rifle.

    Between these moments is a wistful thread where you are pursuing a pretty girl from your village. She gets a fair amount of narration, as well, and her backstory is compelling, though palpably male-drafted. Essentially, she is looking for a new life and resorts to sex work in the hopes of becoming a model. She is ultimately successful, becoming a model and an actress before becoming a furniture dealer. There are tender moments between you and this girl. It’s perhaps true to life that she appears in infrequent blips throughout your life before the two of you ultimately form a partnership, but the lack of development both romanticizes the relationship while also feeling somewhat underdeveloped. I suppose the storyline follows the first rule of show business: “always leave them wanting more.”

    All this to say, the variety of moods throughout the novel make it engaging to me even in moments where the story dips. Unsurprisingly, the moments of ambiguity are still what most grip me. Hamid makes reference to various organizations that are supportive to you—-because it’s unclear in which country, exactly, this story takes place, it makes it hard to determine. I somewhat suspect that the shadowy organization of which you are a part is a communist group, but I can’t say for sure. Then, the shadowy politics of a government contract for water permeates throughout, but it’s always unclear exactly how you fit into a grand scheme. The penultimate chapter refers to the narrator’s sneakiness: “I suppose I should consider at this stage confessing to certain false pretenses, to certain subterfuges that may have been perpetrated here, certain of-hands that may have been, um sleighted” (197). It’s an intriguing line because it does not feel, entirely, that the hand has been shown. The book feels like one where the more you examine it, the more the mystery will deepen, and I really appreciate that about it.

    Hamid’s humour is also a nice touch and, while sometimes on the nose, I appreciate his insights into the reader-author relationship. While this book pretends to be self-help, Hamid comments on the distinction between genres pretty early in the text to mitigate the imagined critique. He writes that, “It’s remarkable how many books fall into the category of self-help” (19). He elaborates, “Why, for example, do you persist in reading that much-praised, breathtakingly boring foreign novel, slogging through page after page after please-make-it-stop page of tar-slow prose and blush-inducing formal conceit, if not out of an impulse to understand distant lands that because of globalization are increasingly affecting life in your own? What is this impulse of yours, at its core, if not a desire for self-help?” (19). Hamid frames the novel here in a self-referential wink but one that appeals to the political backdrop for the production of the novel. In considering novels as a form of self-help, Hamid then says “At the very least they help you pass the time, and time is the stuff of which a self is made” (19)---and I quite like that idea of identity. In deconstructing the genre, the narrator says “all books, each and every book ever written, could be said to be offered to the reader as a form of self-help” (20). So, here we have a book that offers self-help, even if that self is the author, the narrator, the reader, or an amalgam of each.

    Reading the book in a diasporic context gives the telling of a self-help story an additional dimension. Towards the end of the book, the narrator admits that it has been pretty useless as a money-making venture. Instead, the book becomes a project of introspection and broader social considerations. All things considered, the novel’s main character is full of regrets or paths that never materialized, and as the end approaches the melancholia of the book becomes all the more evident. In some ways, it reads like Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.

    I leave one representative quotation from the novel that I think encapsulates the ‘vibe’ of the novel and its ultimate purpose:

“We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create” (213).

In between we can create.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

    This book has no business being as good as it is. 

    I’m late to the party on Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2005 Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Despite the fact that many people have spoken highly of his writing, I’ve only ever read two of Foer’s other books—his experimental cutaway novel Tree of Codes and his nonfiction Eating Animals, and that I only read this year.

    Anyway, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close is great despite all odds. The novel is, in every way, implausible, and my suspension of disbelief has rarely been tested as it has been here. The novel is about Oskar Schell, a nine year old who lost his father in the September 11th attacks two years prior to the opening of the novel. He’s a precocious young boy who has a wealth of knowledge and imagination. While I don’t think we ought to be in the habit of diagnosing fictional characters, particularly without having the necessary qualifications, in this case I would speculate that Oskar seems autistic-coded, and when he finds a key in an envelope labelled Black, he goes on a quest across New York to track down what the key is for.

    The premise of the book draws in the imagination. A mysterious key has an inherently intriguing quality that is hard to dismiss. When Oskar finds the envelope labelled Black, he is then extraordinarily lucky that an art store in the area has an at least two-year-old marker-testing station where his father’s writing appears and he then deduces that Black is a name. It’s implausible. Oskar then decides to track down the Blacks in New York alphabetically. How many of them are there? How likely is it that he’d find the right person? It’s implausible. During most of his adventures, he’s travelling alone across New York as a nine year old and people are receptive to talking with him. It’s implausible. Endlessly implausible.

    And yet, the book is extremely touching, leading to emotional highs and lows that are beautifully constructed, despite their artificiality. (I’ll mention, briefly, my thanks to Maddy for framing the novel as ‘fantasy’ — that’s a great way of framing the logical realities of the text). I think what really carries the text is the voice of the novel, or rather voices of the novel. Oskar’s first person narration is so central to the story and so wonderfully achieved. Foer achieves a child’s voice and cadence without falling into the category of a YA novel. It is not the hopelessly naive voice people like to attribute to children, nor is it the overly emotionally intelligent narration granted to the child savant.

    Running throughout the text is such profound sorrow. Oskar’s quirks and habits are endearing, and moreover the questions he asks himself (and others) wrench the heart. He engages in frequent speculation and the kinds of questions he asks to alleviate his pain are just so authentic, despite the artificial elements the book requires. There’s a nearly free-association nature of his conversations and when you latch on to the logic it feels that much more painful. Even more so, there are specific moments that are heartbreaking; for instance, Oskar has a binder called “things that happened to me” full of things that did not happen to him, but rather gruesome and grotesque images pulled off the internet. The way these moments articulate his trauma through an oblique angle are wonderful.

    Oskar Schell’s sadness is not the only one that permeates the text. This is a novel that hops around between narrators: Oskar, of course, but also his grandfather, his grandmother, and a few scrapbook-esque items. Each of the other storylines resonate with the attack on the Twin Towers in various ways, whether it’s the Dresden bombings or a scrap of an interview from a Hiroshima survivor. Again, it’s implausible, but the way these stories intertwine and elevate one another is well-wrought.

    Each of the stories have their own sorrows, and the specifics are already beginning to fade on me. The visceral gut-punch of some of them, though, will refuse to fade. For instance, Oskar’s grandfather’s muteness is deeply sad in its own way and yet there’s a beauty to moments of connection. In one scene, we find out that Oskar’s grandfather gave his grandmother a typewriter to write her life story. She has claimed all along that her eyes are “crummy” but proceeds to try. For months, she retreats to the other room to type her memoir. When she’s finally done, she presents it to Oskar’s grandfather. He then reveals something mortifying and depressing beyond words: he did not have an ink ribbon in the typewriter, but his wife assumed she was typing and could not confirm because of her eyesight. It’s devastating. The story is filled with those moments of beautiful sadness and sad beauty. 

    The presentation of the book helps to elevate these other elements, as well. In terms of influence, Foer seems to draw from Mark Z. Danielewski and W. G. Sebald. The text is arranged differently for different narrators, there are sections that are annotated, there are pages that fill up with text typed on other text on other text to the point of oblivion (O-Babelv-ion?). By contrast, Oskar’s narrative interest in photography is carried through the text with photographs inserted in between the narration. It’s similar to W. G. Sebald’s work, though the two have different intentions. In Sebald, I think the photographs are meant to resonate in more oblique ways with one another and add depth to the narration. Here, I think Foer selects images nicely but it’s a more literal approach. Despite being more straightforward, I still found the images a nice addition.

    If I have a central complaint about the novel, it is not in the different formats or narration, but simply the length. Oskar goes through several Blacks before coming to the truth, as one would expect. (It would, after all, be the peak of implausibility if the Black relevant to the story was the first Black alphabetically in New York). That said, it meant that the plot was not progressing naturally per se, but rather being presented in a series of nearly-isolated vignettes. As such, maybe some of the details could have been cut for a tighter novel, but even then it’s not too bad. There’s also a beautiful short story embedded in the text about New York’s Sixth borough. Note to future me: that chapter alone would be a great section to present to a class. It has it all!

    My review here appears short. Shorter than I’d imagined it would be for a book that I liked. I’ll posit a theory: the book spoke more to the heart than to the mind. I feel like because the novel was so bound up with emotion, I skirted along the surface a little more than I engaged in deep reflection, not that deep reflection is not possible for the book. Particularly in noting parallels between stories, considering the role of language across the different characters’ experiences, thinking about how trauma manifests in people, and so on, there are good reasons to spend more time with the book.

    The scope of this review feels insufficient in both breadth and depth. I ought to have taken more thorough notes, but instead I’ll just add myself to the roster of people who recommend Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close as a beautifully touching novel that is well-worth the time and that still feels fresh so many years after September 11th.

    Happy reading—or at least happy reading in the kind of happysad beautiful sorrow kind of way.

Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom by bell hooks

    bell hooks is consistently an insightful person who is prescient in all sorts of areas while serving as an example for living to the rest of us. Teaching Critical Thinking: Practical Wisdom is a more education-driven book, but would certainly offer wisdom for everyday people, as well.

    While bell hooks’ work is always worth reading, the subtitle “Practical Wisdom” is a bit misleading for the teachers I imagine in the target audience. The book is essentially philosophy that sets the foundation for teaching and learning. One of hooks’ recurrent themes is that of love, which I find consistently inspiring and engaging. Drawing from Paolo Friere’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed, hooks discusses how important it is for teachers to be authentic humans with integrity and a love for their students. The spirit of compassionate understanding that drives all of her work, including her social justice work, is inspiring to me, particularly when tensions and divisions are so easily demarcated—and even recognizing it, I’m not immune to it (I dismiss pretty much all conservatives out of the gate), so it’s a helpful reminder of the greater sense of purpose we have and the methods that actually work to get there.

    hooks makes use of personal anecdotes and storytelling to great effect, especially in these tricky issues of social justice. For instance, one chapter is devoted to tears in the classroom. hooks talks about times that she and other teachers have cried. She then talks about times students have cried in class and, in particular, about times White students have cried in response to the injustices committed against Black people. The examples are instructive because, while hooks is always compassionate, she does not allow tears to detract from her sense of purpose in the classroom to guide the discussion towards meaningful critique. 

    To take a step back, Teaching Critical Thinking is an extension of hooks’ previous texts, specifically Teaching to Transgress. The books address similar concerns: engaged pedagogy, democratic education, a sense of purpose, integrity, the importance of storytelling and conversation, the role of the teacher and the intellectual in society, and so on. Teaching Critical Thinking is set up in 32 chapters, each of which is framed as a response to a question or follow-up to issues that arose in previous works. This means that one of the downsides of the text is that hooks recycles ideas, including quoting from her previous books. I suppose that’s the nature of academia, but it might have been nice to have some more original content here to justify a completely new text from Teaching to Transgress.

    That said, some of hooks’ most instructive and resonant essays appear in this book. There are two I’d like to discuss in particular as timely and insightful. The first is called “Learning Past the Hate.” In this essay, hooks recounts her love of Emily Dickinson and William Faulkner, delving in particularly with the latter, and the relationship she has with troubling works. The essay is beautiful. It documents her experience with Faulkner and how his work resonates with her, despite his racist and sexist insertions. The essay is a moderate one: its central thesis is essentially that even when books have problematic backgrounds, there may still be reasons they are worth reading and they may prove instructive in other ways. The essay then discusses how those books ought not be removed from classrooms, but rather be historicized (cue Fredric Jameson). Books like those of Faulkner can be instructive for their stylistic ingenuity or depth of feeling towards characters and so on; the problematic aspects can also be instructive in examining the historical influence of white supremacy, patriarchy, and so on on the text. I also appreciated that hooks notes how she would be much less sympathetic towards current books that voice similarly hateful attitudes. It’s a great balance that proves instructive for selecting texts for high school curricula.

    The other essay that resonates most with me as an English teacher is “The Joy of Reading.” While the essay is ostensibly about the importance of reading in our lives and the value it provides to nourish our spirits, it also provides an incisive critique of the aims of education. People generally have the perception of education as an instrumental good: it is worth being educated so that you can get a job and make money. That has and remains, in my mind, an inherently harmful viewpoint that makes people subservient to capitalism rather than as agents capable of critiquing it. Similarly, the low rates of literacy in the United States and beyond preclude meaningful participation in democracy. It’s a wonderful essay I’d like to share with my students to show why learning, reading, and thinking is so important as more than a simple instrument for wealth.

    Another component that I love about that “Joy of Reading” essay is how it intersects with Marxist sympathies and concerns. It actually evokes Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” hooks talks about the associations of books and perceptions of wealth. She notes that “there was a time in our nation’s history when purchasing a book (rather than checking it out from a public library) was usually a sign of being a member of an affluent class or that one was striving to move from a lower class position” (130). She then talks about the abundance of reading material and mass consumption that has devalued reading: “this world of abundant reading material has not created a culture where reading books is the ‘cool’ thing to do. It has made it possible for more people to own a book, even to throw a book away” (130). She notes the way that books have been devalued as a commodity and how that feeds into an atmosphere of anti-intellectualism. If these reviews were illustrated, there would be an innocuous map of Florida inserted here without comment.

    Actually, it would be worth commenting on a passage that sets up the central ‘problem’ for the book that is likely to bring people together, though for backwards reasoning. hooks comments on the lack of thinking in society and its relationship with schools. She writes, “Most children are taught early on that thinking is dangerous. Sadly, these children stop enjoying the process of thinking and start fearing the thinking mind” (8). She continues, “By the time most students enter college classrooms, they have come to dread thinking. Those students who do not dread thinking often come to classes assuming that thinking will not be necessary, that all they will need to do is consume information and regurgitate it at the appropriate moments. In traditional higher education settings, students find themselves yet again in a world where independent thinking is not encouraged” (8).Taken out of context, the political right would likely find that a lot of that quotation resonates with them. The so-called ‘liberal’ indoctrination that they see so rampant at colleges would assume the same qualities that hooks identifies here, though each sees the critique from a different lens. The question, in some ways, comes down to what counts as thinking.

    As I’ve mentioned, bell hooks is well-versed in intersectional critique of the world. She considers students as whole beings, not shying away from their spirituality, eros, or emotional well-being. It’s quite common these days for the school system to focus on those who are most obviously struggling, but hooks helps to highlights concerns for even, and sometimes especially, high-achieving students. In one essay, she writes about “nerds or geeks, students who are often gifted at book learning, carry the residue of pain and trauma” (70). There’s a beautifully caring passage that follows regarding the relationship between trauma and academic pursuits. I’ll quote the passage in full here, but note the intersectional concerns with race, gender, and class:

“Many of us are simply emotionally numb, shut down, disassociated. I was not a fun girl at school or at college. Laughter, humor in general, was associated in my mind with letting go. My biggest goal in life during high school and undergraduate college years was not to let go, but to hold on–to keep a hold on life. Very little appeared ‘funny’ to me, and almost nothing was worthy of laughter. // When I entered graduate school, it became all the more unnecessary for me not to be seen as a fun girl. Striving for success in the world of sexist academia, a male-dominated environment where female students were told every day by professors that we were not really as good as men, made it all the more important to appear serious. It was important to be perceived as capable of doing academic work. When race and class was added to the equation, for a black female it was all the more vital to adopt a persona of seriousness. Throughout my college years friends and colleagues would often let me know that they would ‘sure like to see you drunk or stoned’ because they believed I was too serious, that I could have more fun if I just lightened up a bit” (70).

hooks then goes on to talk about bringing humor into the classroom and the vulnerability of it in the classroom. It’s a wonderful short chapter. Humor becomes a pathway to intimacy, which I think feeds into the idea of love. Essentially, that’s what it all comes down to: to teach is an act of love, and love is what compels people towards thoughtful care and is at the core of revolution.

    I’d like to close out this short review of hooks’ work by referring to one of the final essays in the collection. The essay is called “Moving Past Race and Gender” (note how moderates can likely find some middle-ground here). hooks responds to the criticism of her writing for a broader audience by suggesting that she remains as militant but takes an approach of reaching the masses “who are seeking life-changing theory and practice” (176). It’s an act of love to share learning with a greater audience. She concludes the passage with a statement that seems fundamental to her oeuvre: “Hence they will not understand that it is the most militant, most radical intervention anyone can make to not only speak of love, but to engage the practice of love. For love as the foundational of all social movements for self-determination is the only way we create a world that domination and dominator thinking cannot destroy. Anytime we do the work of love, we are doing the work of ending domination” (176).

    I hope I can carry that optimism with me in doing the work of teaching and learning and advocating for others. May we carry the patience, care, and genuine desire for everyone to thrive in the work that we do. Certainly divisiveness has its place (e.g. trans rights is a non-negotiable), but replicating the hatred that drives dominator thinking may not, in fact, get us anywhere.

    Happy reading—it changes the world, after all!