Happy Hump Day to all you readers out there. Today, I will explore a few excerpts from two novels and one collection of short stories in this edition of Wondrous Writer Wednesday.
The first, The Blind Man's Garden, explores a fiction version of events in the months following 9/11 in Pakistan (and at times, Afghanistan). Moving from one character's point of view to the next, Nadeem Aslam explores a different perspective and understanding of the 9/11 story, one which many of us Americans more than likely fail to even consider. Adam Mars-Jones, critic for The Guardian's The Observer, focuses on the incoherent passages and magical realism in his review of The Blind Man's Garden. Unfortunately, I have yet to read Aslam's 2008 novel, The Wasted Vigil, to properly compare his past and present work. That being said, I finished this novel in two days (jaw clenched, fingers turning the pages as quickly as possible). I thought very fondly of the story days later, with Jeo and Naheed still taking up space in my head. What stuck the most in my mind was the idea of coming and going, moving from one country or region to the next. The main character, Mikal, goes away with his best friend, Jeo, to help with the war, then tries so hard to return home once Jeo is killed. Yet, when he returns home everything seems to have changed but himself (apart from a few scars and missing fingers). He goes back out into the Al-Qaeda chaos a second time, causing the reader to hope he'll return safe to his lover. However, at the same time, something inside me hoped that he would never return, that he too would die. While I certainly didn't go back and forth between two war zone countries, I do know the feeling of wondering where I actually belong. That feeling seems to have caught my interest in sections of the other two works I'll explore in this post as well.
I've loved Jhumpa Lahiri's work since my first English literature course freshman year of my undergraduate studies. I decided to give Intro to South-Asian Literature a go and ended up working with the very same professor for my senior thesis. We read both The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies in one semester. Both caught my attention and fueled my hunger for literature that describes and dissects the question I always have bouncing around in my head. Which culture do I truly belong to? Lahiri's second novel was different from what I was expecting, yet those underlying themes still jumped out at me as I read each chapter. Below are four of my favorite excerpts: two sections describing this sense (or lack) of belonging; two exploring the Internet and its ever-expanding reign over humanity's capabilities.
"It was a portrait of a city Subhash no longer felt a part of. A city on the brink of something; a city he was preparing to leave behind" (33).
"End to end, he was told, the wires of all the suspended cables would span just over eight thousand miles. It was the distance between America and India; the distance that now separated him from his family [...] He didn't belong, but perhaps it didn't matter. He wanted to tell her that he had been waiting all his life to find Rhode Island. That it was here, in this minute but majestic corner of the world, that he could breathe" (65).
"She turns on her laptop, raises her spectacles to her face. She reads the day's headlines. But they might be from any day. A click can take her form breaking news to articles archived years ago. At every moment the past is there, appended to the present. It's a version of Bela's definition, in childhood, of yesterday" (265).
"So much of it, she observes, is designed to eliminated mystery, to minimize surprise. There are maps to indicated where one is going, images of hotel rooms one might stay in. The delayed status of a plane one need not rush to board. Links to people, famous or anonymous- people one might reunite with, or fall in love with, or hire for a job. A revolutionary concept, already taken for granted. Citizens of Internet dwell free from hierarchy. There is room for everyone, given that there are no spatial constraints" (265-6).
Finally, I'd like to highlight Sarah Hall, a British novelist who, despite her numerous accolades and achievements, never crossed my mind until I browsed the section of weekly featured works, hand picked by the local librarians. Sarah's first collection of short stories blew my mind. The first story took some time to dive into, but quite frankly I believe that's a result of my failure to continue reading this genre past graduation. While each story was equally disturbing, entrancing, and direct, I appreciated how each character was somehow flawed, grasping for something else (known or still to be discovered) in life. Two stories really hit deep in the gut. The first excerpt comes from "Bees," found halfway through the collection. The main character focuses so hard on these insects, dying, dead, or about to have their life turn in that direction. While reading this story, I was reminded of my little French students who became so upset by these daily occurrences. Even I remember holding funerals for the dead creatures my sister and i came upon while playing. Why does death seem so unfair for smaller creatures?
In this story, Hall also focuses on leaving, going somewhere new, not knowing a thing, but knowing that what you left behind is not worth your energy any longer.
"It is fair to say that since arriving in the city you've been noticing details. You've been gathering them up, storing them away. You're a receptacle for information. This is a new disposition for you - this vacancy. Always before you felt full, heavy with what had made you and who you were. You wonder if it's a prerequisite for living in the metropolis, the scraping out of past existence to make way for a new, enormously complicated one. You are a recent settler. You've come down from the far north. You've left behind the yellow moors and drenched fields. You've left the people who know you, who have reared you, inured you" (70).
"For a week or so you think about going back to the north. The regret passes. You sit outside in your shorts and a vest. The sun is strong, liquefying. You relax. The garden remains littered with bees. You never see them dying. You don't see them tumbling from the sky, or twitching on the ground, pedalling upside down on their backs, their frail wings vibrating into stillness. They are simply corpses. All you witness is evidence of their extinction" (78).
The other story that drew me in was "The Nightlong River." Hall focuses on friendship, death, and determination in this story.
"I thought I would miss her and I did miss her prettiness and her mirth. I did miss her gentle candour. But my dreams were not of Magda. The truth of death is a peculiar thing. For when they leave us the beloved are as if they never were. They vanish from this earth and vanish from the air. What remains are moors and mountains, the solid world upon which we find ourselves, and in which we reign. We are the wolves. We are the lions. After so many nights treading the banks with the dogs and my brothers, intent on some mettlesome purpose I did not truly understand, night after night I dreamed of the river. I dream it now: a river of stolen perfumes, winding its way through our inverse Eden" (166).
Beautiful, don't you think?
I was going to end this post like a local book club, briefing you on all of the books I currently have out from the library, and the two unread hard covers still sitting on my shelf from the National Book Festival that need to be read. Instead, I'll leave you with this recent Bustle article to peruse. It caused me to think back to my English literature courses, my French literature courses, even my bad habit of going to the same area of the library to browse "new" titles. I have to fully agree with the opinions explored in this article. If you can't leave America physically, at least try to in the fiction world. For all of my non-American friends, please leave me a note with your favorite non-American book. I'm ready to explore!
Good night and happy reading,
La petite pamplemousse
The first, The Blind Man's Garden, explores a fiction version of events in the months following 9/11 in Pakistan (and at times, Afghanistan). Moving from one character's point of view to the next, Nadeem Aslam explores a different perspective and understanding of the 9/11 story, one which many of us Americans more than likely fail to even consider. Adam Mars-Jones, critic for The Guardian's The Observer, focuses on the incoherent passages and magical realism in his review of The Blind Man's Garden. Unfortunately, I have yet to read Aslam's 2008 novel, The Wasted Vigil, to properly compare his past and present work. That being said, I finished this novel in two days (jaw clenched, fingers turning the pages as quickly as possible). I thought very fondly of the story days later, with Jeo and Naheed still taking up space in my head. What stuck the most in my mind was the idea of coming and going, moving from one country or region to the next. The main character, Mikal, goes away with his best friend, Jeo, to help with the war, then tries so hard to return home once Jeo is killed. Yet, when he returns home everything seems to have changed but himself (apart from a few scars and missing fingers). He goes back out into the Al-Qaeda chaos a second time, causing the reader to hope he'll return safe to his lover. However, at the same time, something inside me hoped that he would never return, that he too would die. While I certainly didn't go back and forth between two war zone countries, I do know the feeling of wondering where I actually belong. That feeling seems to have caught my interest in sections of the other two works I'll explore in this post as well.
I've loved Jhumpa Lahiri's work since my first English literature course freshman year of my undergraduate studies. I decided to give Intro to South-Asian Literature a go and ended up working with the very same professor for my senior thesis. We read both The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies in one semester. Both caught my attention and fueled my hunger for literature that describes and dissects the question I always have bouncing around in my head. Which culture do I truly belong to? Lahiri's second novel was different from what I was expecting, yet those underlying themes still jumped out at me as I read each chapter. Below are four of my favorite excerpts: two sections describing this sense (or lack) of belonging; two exploring the Internet and its ever-expanding reign over humanity's capabilities.
"It was a portrait of a city Subhash no longer felt a part of. A city on the brink of something; a city he was preparing to leave behind" (33).
"End to end, he was told, the wires of all the suspended cables would span just over eight thousand miles. It was the distance between America and India; the distance that now separated him from his family [...] He didn't belong, but perhaps it didn't matter. He wanted to tell her that he had been waiting all his life to find Rhode Island. That it was here, in this minute but majestic corner of the world, that he could breathe" (65).
"She turns on her laptop, raises her spectacles to her face. She reads the day's headlines. But they might be from any day. A click can take her form breaking news to articles archived years ago. At every moment the past is there, appended to the present. It's a version of Bela's definition, in childhood, of yesterday" (265).
"So much of it, she observes, is designed to eliminated mystery, to minimize surprise. There are maps to indicated where one is going, images of hotel rooms one might stay in. The delayed status of a plane one need not rush to board. Links to people, famous or anonymous- people one might reunite with, or fall in love with, or hire for a job. A revolutionary concept, already taken for granted. Citizens of Internet dwell free from hierarchy. There is room for everyone, given that there are no spatial constraints" (265-6).
Finally, I'd like to highlight Sarah Hall, a British novelist who, despite her numerous accolades and achievements, never crossed my mind until I browsed the section of weekly featured works, hand picked by the local librarians. Sarah's first collection of short stories blew my mind. The first story took some time to dive into, but quite frankly I believe that's a result of my failure to continue reading this genre past graduation. While each story was equally disturbing, entrancing, and direct, I appreciated how each character was somehow flawed, grasping for something else (known or still to be discovered) in life. Two stories really hit deep in the gut. The first excerpt comes from "Bees," found halfway through the collection. The main character focuses so hard on these insects, dying, dead, or about to have their life turn in that direction. While reading this story, I was reminded of my little French students who became so upset by these daily occurrences. Even I remember holding funerals for the dead creatures my sister and i came upon while playing. Why does death seem so unfair for smaller creatures?
In this story, Hall also focuses on leaving, going somewhere new, not knowing a thing, but knowing that what you left behind is not worth your energy any longer.
"It is fair to say that since arriving in the city you've been noticing details. You've been gathering them up, storing them away. You're a receptacle for information. This is a new disposition for you - this vacancy. Always before you felt full, heavy with what had made you and who you were. You wonder if it's a prerequisite for living in the metropolis, the scraping out of past existence to make way for a new, enormously complicated one. You are a recent settler. You've come down from the far north. You've left behind the yellow moors and drenched fields. You've left the people who know you, who have reared you, inured you" (70).
"For a week or so you think about going back to the north. The regret passes. You sit outside in your shorts and a vest. The sun is strong, liquefying. You relax. The garden remains littered with bees. You never see them dying. You don't see them tumbling from the sky, or twitching on the ground, pedalling upside down on their backs, their frail wings vibrating into stillness. They are simply corpses. All you witness is evidence of their extinction" (78).
The other story that drew me in was "The Nightlong River." Hall focuses on friendship, death, and determination in this story.
"I thought I would miss her and I did miss her prettiness and her mirth. I did miss her gentle candour. But my dreams were not of Magda. The truth of death is a peculiar thing. For when they leave us the beloved are as if they never were. They vanish from this earth and vanish from the air. What remains are moors and mountains, the solid world upon which we find ourselves, and in which we reign. We are the wolves. We are the lions. After so many nights treading the banks with the dogs and my brothers, intent on some mettlesome purpose I did not truly understand, night after night I dreamed of the river. I dream it now: a river of stolen perfumes, winding its way through our inverse Eden" (166).
Beautiful, don't you think?
I was going to end this post like a local book club, briefing you on all of the books I currently have out from the library, and the two unread hard covers still sitting on my shelf from the National Book Festival that need to be read. Instead, I'll leave you with this recent Bustle article to peruse. It caused me to think back to my English literature courses, my French literature courses, even my bad habit of going to the same area of the library to browse "new" titles. I have to fully agree with the opinions explored in this article. If you can't leave America physically, at least try to in the fiction world. For all of my non-American friends, please leave me a note with your favorite non-American book. I'm ready to explore!
Good night and happy reading,
La petite pamplemousse
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