Reading List

  

Though I spend a lot of time doing art, I also make time to read, fiction and non-fiction. Yesterday, I made a list of all the books I finished in the last 3-4 months. I have also rated them, five  stars being the highest. 

1. Perumal Murugan: Seasons of the Palm (English translation from Tamil)*****

2. Hari Kunzru: White Tears ****

3. Akhil Sharma: Family Life ***1/2

4. Stephen King: On Writing ***1/2 (non-fiction)

5. Walter Mosley: Charcoal Joe ****

6. Jesmyn Ward: Salvage the Bones ****1/2

7. Joe Ide: IQ ****1/2

8. Rahul Mehta: No Other World *** 1/2

9. Kathleen Collins: Whatever Happened to Interracial Marriage ****1/2

10. Rakesh Satyal: Nobody Can Pronounce My Name ***1/2

11. Lisa Congdon: Art Inc. **** (non-fiction)

12. Austin Kleon: Show Your Work ***1/2 (non-fiction)

On my desk: 

13. John Farrell: Richard Nixon (non-fiction)

14. Elizabeth Strout: Anything is Possible

As you can see, my taste in fiction runs towards either those written by non-white authors or about non-white lives. It was not always so. When I first started reading English fiction, there were only books written by whites and almost all men. Thankfully, in the last two decades, the world of book publication has expanded significantly to include Black, Asian, Latino and gay voices. More importantly, the local libraries are also stocking them in greater numbers. In the list above, all but three were borrowed from my local library. It is my guess that my town library relies on the New York Times Book Review and its best seller list to help determine its purchases and that works out fine for me.
 
What have you been reading in recent times? Any from my list? Please share in the comment section.

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Ways to Disappear by Idra Novey

Do-Something-Everyday, June 7, 2016

This is the sketch I did for what was going to be a review of Idra Novey's Ways to Disappear. At this point, I am not inclined to write a review. The sketch is of the main character, Beatriz Yagoda, a Brazilian novelist. When the story begins she is more than sixty years old, morose and physically going to seed. She was a beauty once with light pale skin, green eyes, long slender, foreign-looking nose and red hair. Even after she had lost her figure and most of her looks, "when she moved...it was like watching an aging leopard slink through a forest. They'd all been mesmerized, trying to imagine how effortlessly she must have hunted once". She is also a smoker, of cigars. So, in the sketch I have tried to show all these elements while taking some artistic liberties (her hair, for example).

Linked to Show Your Face.

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Book Review: Marriage Material

Do-Something-Everyday, May 9, 2016

Told with tenderness and occasional caustic humor, Sathnam Sanghera’s Marriage Material is a novel about three generations of a Sikh family settled in Wolverhampton, England. The familiar ingredients of this genre, struggle, filial duty, inter-generational conflict, cultural misunderstanding, language barrier, assimilation, to name a few,

Do-Something-Everyday: My Name is Lucy Barton

Yesterday evening I finished Elizabeth Strout's latest novel My Name is Lucy Barton. Strout is a Pulitzer prize winning author of Olive Kitteridge, as well as The Burgess Boys, Amy and Isabelle and several other acclaimed novels. Lucy Barton received excellent reviews from all leading newspapers and magazines but I found it somewhat less compelling.

It is a kind of meta novel in that it is a memoir of Lucy Barton written by Lucy Barton. Central to the story is Lucy's memories of her impoverished childhood growing up in rural Illinois in the 60s. The material and physical aspects of desperate poverty are precisely etched on her mind. Here is how she describes it:

"We were oddities, our family, even in that tiny rural town of Amgash, Illinois, where there were other homes that were run-down and lacking fresh paint or shutters or gardens, no beauty for the eyes to rest upon. These houses were grouped together in what was the town, but our house was not near them...we were told on the playground by other children "your family stinks" and they would run off pinching their noses with their fingers...I was often ravenous, and what I had for supper many nights was molasses on bread...Our home was down a very long dirt road. We did not have any neighbors nearby. And we did not have a television and we did not have newspapers or magazines or books in the house".

And what was the house like? For the first eleven years of her life, she, her two siblings and her parents lived in a garage that belonged to her great-uncle and in the garage there was "only a trickle of cold water from a makeshift sink". When the garage got too cold in winter, Lucy would stay late at school in the warm classroom doing her homework and reading books. She makes perfect grades and in her senior year gets full scholarship to attend a college outside Chicago. Leaving Amgash and her family behind, she makes her way from Chicago to  New York, gets married, has a family and becomes a writer.

But Amgash and the effects of poverty never quiet leave Lucy. They follow her in her ignorance of popular cultural knowledge, an absence of dress sense and, muddled hazy memories of mental illness, trauma and abuse she may or may not have witnessed.  In one poignant moment in the book, looking back on the early years, Lucy thinks may be it was not that bad. But "there are times, too--unexpected-- when walking down a sunny sidewalk, or watching the top of a tree bend in the wind, or seeing a November sky close down over the East river, I am suddenly filled with the knowledge of darkness so deep that a sound might escape from my mouth, and I will step into the nearest clothing store and talk with a stranger about the shape of sweaters newly arrived. This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can't possibly be true".

Exactly what was that dark knowledge Lucy never quiet tells us. She mentions the Thing, meaning an incident of her father 'becoming very anxious and not in control of himself'. Eventually, the readers with a couple of contrived narrative devises, come to understand that her father who fought in World War II suffers from PTSD and is prone to sexual exhibitionism.


I had two problems with the book. First, I did not find Lucy believable. I did not get a sense of what made her tick. Apart from the fact of her deprived childhood, her life moves forward without major bumps with strangers inexplicably smoothing her way. There is the high school guidance counselor who gets her admitted to college on full scholarship and even drives her there the first time. In college she has an affair with an art professor and at the age of twenty marries a well educated young man with a job in the city. While raising two daughters, she gets two stories published seemingly without much struggle. At the hospital, the doctor bills her for only five visits when he has been attending to her for months! Even as her marriage is falling apart, her husband pays her to attend a writing workshop where the teacher takes a personal interest in her work. As a writer, she becomes rich enough to pay for her own therapy and botox injections. The second time she gets married to a brilliant cellist. Really, what made her so effective? At one point, she calls herself ruthless, but exactly how so?

For a writer, she is completely uninterested in knowing how it was for her siblings to grow up in that household. Were their memories of their parents same as hers? Why was her brother, who at the age of thirty six still living with their parents, and sleep at night with the pigs that will be taken for slaughter next morning? As an author and as a sibling she fails totally.

The second problem I had with the novel was the ambiguous references to the father's mental illness and the nature of abuse. Without knowing what exactly that Lucy was struggling with, the elisions became a distraction and after a while you stop caring.

My name is Lucy Barton is a short novel that can be finished in one sitting. I wish it had been a richer book with the details filled out.

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Do-Something-Everyday: Tales in Foreign Lands

Boule de Suif

 
Do-Something-Everyday, April 6, 2016

In an odd coincidence, the last two weeks I read three novels all set in foreign countries (relative to the U.S.). They also had few other things in common: one is an English translation of stories by a French novelist, another one is about an American translator of Portuguese novels by a Brazilian author and the third one is an English language novel set in a former French colony in the Caribbean. The three books are: The Necklace and Other Stories: Maupassant for Modern Times, translated by Sandra Smith; Ways to Disappear by Idra Novey and, Peacekeeping by Misha Berlinski. The last two are 21^st century American novelists while Guy De Maupassant was a late nineteenth century French author. I will be posting a review of each starting with the best first.

Guy De Maupassant: The Necklace and Other Stories(translated by Sandra Smith)

I was first introduced to Maupassant via a South Indian movie adaptation of his famous novella Boule de Suif. Later after I had moved to the U.S., I read the English language version of it in a fat volume that included all of his 300+ short stories. That was a while ago. Recent events in Paris and in Western Europe have rekindled my youthful interest in European literature and when I saw the above-mentioned book on the recent arrivals section at my library, I was curious if these stories would hold my interest still. Most did. Even though the stories are set in 19^th century France, many of them feel real and true almost 150 years later.

Maupassant’s stories are well known for their surprising plot twists and often leave you wondering “what if”. Take the Necklace (La Parure), for example, which ends with a surprise revelation that the diamond necklace that Madame Forestier loaned to Madame Loisel was really a fake. Now that both women know it was a genuine diamond necklace that Madame Loisel returned to Madame Forestier, would she ask for it back? Would Madame Forestier’s initial honesty extend to giving it back to the rightful owner? I wonder what that conversation would have been like. 

In the Question of Latin (Le Question du Latin), when a former Latin teacher, now a prosperous grocer, exclaims “Oh! Good Lord, Latin, Latin, Latin. A man can’t live on Latin alone!”, could Maupassant have imagined that 150 years later that question would be extended to English literature, Art History, Music, Anthropology and all other disciplines unconnected to commerce? 

Finally, his most famous Boule de Suif (Boule de Suif). It is a good story but surprisingly also a trite one. In making Boule de Suif, a generous, patriotic, sensitive prostitute misused by her hypocritical fellow passengers, the real hero of the story, Maupassant had succumbed to the male fantasy of a hooker with a heart of gold. In the one hundred fifty years since he wrote that story we have seen many versions of that trope (a trope that found its cinematic apotheosis in Julia Roberts’ Pretty Woman). In the post-feminist era, this is one story that does not hold up well.

To sum up. In the skilled translation of Sandra Smith, Maupassant’s stories get a fresh modern update. Give them a try. 

Next week: A review of Ways to Disappear by Idra Novey.

I have posted several photos of Santa Fe Folk Art Museum on this blog post. Click here to view them.

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H is for Hawk: The Story of a Woman Who Flew with a Hawk and Came Back

 

When I first read a year ago the excellent review of Helen McDonald's H is for Hawk by the New York Times, I made a mental note to read the book when I got the time. And it stayed there half forgotten. A few weeks ago, it was jogged back into my memory when I saw  a red tailed hawk securing a nice afternoon snack of a squirrel from my backyard. In the pictures below you will see the tail of the squirrel among the leaves while its head was pinned under the bird's claws. The backyard carnage disturbed me quite a bit. I wondered if I had created the conditions (I have several bird baths scattered around the yard from which squirrels drink) that made my backyard a hunting ground for the hawks. Anyway, this incident sent me to get the aforementioned book from the library. I read it in one go. Then, I read it again and, again. And then I picked up my pen and wrote down several of the best passages in the book. Below is a synopsis.

Red Tailed Hawk in my Backyard with the Squirrel

H is for Hawk is a three-part memoir that McDonald wrote a few years after the sudden death of her beloved father. The first part narrates the shock of loss, various stages of grief and the healing. Interwoven into the narrative of her loss and grieving, is the story of a goshawk that she decided to train while mourning for her father. The third part is a biography of T.H. White, the author of The Once and Future King, who too many years ago tried to train a goshawk with tragic results and chronicled his efforts in a book titled  The Goshawk. 

McDonald, an experienced falconer herself, does not make the mistakes that White made. In her hands, the baby goshawk blossoms into an excellent hunter and  it is the telling of this tale that captivated me. Goshawks  (genus:Accipiter gentilis), the most ferocious of all raptors, can be tamed and trained by humans. Yet, they are not warm and cuddly domestic pets loyal and devoted to their masters. They are visceral creatures primed to hunt and kill. As one falconer explains to the author, "If you want a well-behaved goshawk, you just have to do one thing. Give 'em the opportunity to kill things. Kill as much as possible. Murder sorts them out". To her credit, unlike T.H. White, McDonald never attempts to make the hawk human. (In fact, in her current state, she wants to be more like the hawk, "solitary, self-possessed, free from grief". ) As she moves through her reclusive life with the hawk in the middle of a bustling urban setting, she becomes extraordinarily attuned to the bird's moods. Here she writes: 

The first few days with a wild new hawk are a delicate,reflexive dance of manners. To judge when to scratch your nose without offence, when to walk and when to sit, when to retreat and when to come to close, you must read your hawk's state of mind. You do this by watching her posture and her feathers, the workings of which turn the bird's shape into exquisitely controlled barometer of mood...Feathers held tight to the body mean "I am afraid". Held loosely mean "I am at ease"...A frowning contraction of the crines around her beak and an almost imperceptible narrowing of her eyes mean something like "happy"; a particular fugitive expression on her face, oddly distant and reserved, meant "sleepy".

McDonald names her hawk Mabel, from amabilis, meaning loveable or dear. One day she discovers that the baby hawk loves to play catch with crumpled pieces of paper and peek-a-boo through a rolled up magazine. "Her eyes narrowed in bird-laughter, she shakes her tail rapidly from side to side and shivers with happiness".  

Author Helen McDonald with Mabel

As much as McDonald's prefers this splendid isolation with her hawk, she recognizes that she needs to "man" the hawk and train it to fly to her upraised fist at the sound of the whistle from five feet, ten feet and finally from fifty feet. Every foot of separation from the hawk is fraught with anxiety and "the thump of her gripping talons on the glove was miracle. It was always a miracle. I choose to be here. I eschew the air, the woods, the fields. There was nothing that was such a salve to my grieving heart as the hawk returning".

Finally, the day of reckoning arrives. What she has to do with the hawk. Kill things. Make death. To train a goshawk and "not letting it hunt seemed to me like raising a child and not letting it play".  Hunting with the hawk served another purpose too. The hawk was a "bright, vital", creature,"secure in her place in the world... There could be no regret or mourning in her. No past or future. She lived in the present only and that was my refuge. My flight from death was on her barred and beating wings".

She becomes a co-conspirator in Mabel's hunting games. She flushes out pheasants and rabbits for the bird. The first time Mabel makes a kill, McDonald has a revelation: "I stare at the hawk as she grips the dead pheasant, and her mad eyes stare back at me...And everything changes. The hawk stops being a thing of violent death. She becomes a child. She is a child. A baby hawk that has just worked out who she is. What she's for. I reach down and start, unconsciously as a mother helping a child with her dinner, plucking the pheasant with the hawk. For the hawk". 

McDonald lets her fly higher and higher and hunt free on her own. Mabel turns into an apt pupil. There is a terrific almost cinematic description when McDonald and the bird go hawking together in a dense woodland area: 

"Mabel has grasped  how woodland hawking works, and is hugely attentive. Flying a goshawk in a scape of obstacles and broken sight-lines makes the connection between us hugely manifest. She breaks through twigs to come down to my fist when I whistle, and she follows me as I walk, moving above me like a personal angel whenever I am out of sight. I look up and see her crouching, staring at me with round eyes, pupils dilated with excitement and attention, crayon-yellow toes gripping dead ash branches. "

Magical though the hawk is, McDonald begins to realize that "hands are for other humans to hold. They should not be reserved exclusively as perches for hawks...They are not for breaking the necks of rabbits, pulling loops of viscera out onto leaf-litter while the hawk dips her head to drink blood from her quarry's chest cavity". Soon, with help from family, friends and SSRI, McDonald's starts on the path to recovery. And gets ready to send the bird to the aviary where she will drop all her feathers and grow new ones that will be barred stone-grey and white and her eyes will turn deep orange of glowing coals. For her, this moment comes with a profound understanding that there are "world of things out there which are things in themselves but we make them sensible to us by giving them meanings that shore up own view of the world; goshawks are things of death and blood and gore, but they are not excuses for atrocities; their inhumanity is to be treasured because what they do has nothing to do with us at all". 

Beautifully said.

In reading this book, I learned several new words: austringer; jess; yarak; creance; rouse; bate; manning.

Note Red tailed hawk is a member of genus Buteo also known as buzzards. Goshawk is a member of genus Accipiter gentilis.

Linked to Paint Party Friday. On Jo's  suggestion  (http://jogatheringwild.blogspot.com/), I will be tagging ppf images on my instagram account. The tag will be #ppf. My IG handle is @dharmakarmaarts. If you are on IG, let me know your handle. I will be happy to follow you. 

Red Tailed Hawk

Mabel (young)