What to read next?

You, dear reader, are treated, see above, to a generous sample of my handwriting. And now you know why, as I read the second Mrs. de Winter's description of Rebecca's neat slanty handwriting, I sympathized more with Rebecca than with the narrator. Why this dubious treat? That question will be answered at the very end of this post.

What to read next? That is the question. It comes upon me frequently in many a midnight dreary and often sets me on the kind of restless mood that set Ishmael off to sea. What to read next?

I'm not an expert in literature; I don't study literary analysis nor do I, strictly speaking, analyze the books that I read. Nope, I'm a simple bookworm who always want to read more. However, not all books were created equal and, like any other reader, I enjoy some books more than I do others. I'm sure that when I was very young, I didn't have literary taste and eagerly pounced on every book that was handed to me or recommended to me, but such a time has long passed. Though I used to be naive and a great believer in the ability of young people to change, I now think that people may take some time to develop into who they become, but that process must eventually end, after which we just "know" who we are and spend some time adjusting to being comfortable in our own skins and living in this world, and then we must face a whole new younger generation, which we will see as worse than ourselves in all possible ways, whose ways we will not be able to adapt to - the wiring of our brains having been set in stone - and spend the rest of our old age reeling against a world which we no longer feel ourselves to be apart of, which we then scoff at with scorn or, if we are very nice, treat with indulgence, affable but distant and removed. But still, however far I am from being crotchety and set in my own ways, I still have preferences.

... but what are these fabled literary preferences of mine? I don't know.

I generally like classics but I really loathe Jane Eyre. A lot. One of my very intellectual acquaintances commented that he didn't like Harry Potter because of its simplistic philosophy. I love the Harry Potter series for the rich imagination therein and very adorable writing. One doesn't read Harry Potter to understand its philosophy; no, one had better stick to Fear and Loathing or Thus Spake Zarathustra for that. But I really didn't like People of the Book for precisely that reason - it was too simplistic in everything. I usually avoid overly popular books and bestsellers because their prominence somehow makes me associate them with other prominent books that I have disliked. But Suite Francaise was on many "must-read" lists and it is now one of my favourite books.

I like reading books that have been seasoned by knowledge of many centuries of previous books; I'm reading Moby Dick now and I like the passage when Ishmael is comparing the counterbalancing of a sperm whale's head with that of a right whale with the counterbalancing the head of Locke with the head of Kant. So, perhaps it stands to reason that, conversely, I probably wouldn't like early literature. This is, however, very wrong because I love early literature - I think the Iliad is perfect! (It begins with the wrath of Achilles and ends with the funeral of Hector. Such a feeling of an odd kind of symmetry! And just so perfect! And it reads well! I could just read it again and again and never get tired of it! I remember one line which Paris says to Hector when scolded for lying about with Helen and polishing armour that he never uses while other men die for him: "Never to be cast away are the gifts of the gods, magnificent, which they give of their own will, no man could have them for wanting them." And the similes are so poignant - "As when some Maionian woman or Karian with purple \\ colours ivory, to make it a cheek piece for horses \\ [...] \\ so, Menelaos, your shapely thighs were stained with the colour \\ of blood, and your legs also and the ankles beneath them." when Menelaos was shot by Laodokos. And isn't it odd that the Iliad is written entirely in third-person narrative, except for this one line, where the blind bard Homer is clearly addressing Menelaos ("your shapely thighs"), the wronged man coming to fight for his and his honour? And correspondingly, in the Odyssey, there is just one or two spots where some character is addressed directly by the third-person omniscient narrator, the bard himself. In that book it is Eumaeus, the swineherd who remained loyal to his absent master Odysseus through the long passage of time and much injustice/heartbreak, to find his master come home again. I think it is no accident and those two characters, Menelaos and Eumaeus, embody something of the spirit of their respective works. But, okay, enough babbling about Homer.)

Anyways, there doesn't seem to be a general rule as to why I do or do not like books, or if there is, I haven't read enough books to be able to state exactly what it is. Which is why the hunt for the next book that will blow my mind is slow, drudging work. Having watched a very uplifting movie, Julie & Julia, and hence am inspired to make some short term goals ... here goes!

When: now until end of October (approx. 2 months in duration)
Who: me!
What: will read one representative book from as many Nobel literature laureates as will make the piece of paper in the picture at top of this post, on which I've copied the names and year of each laureate and highlighted in purple the ones of whose work I've read at least one book, mostly purple. At least more purple than white.

Frequent (well, hopefully frequent anyway) updates of the little piece of paper will be posted.

By the way, I welcome recommendations of particular books as long as you tell me why.

8: Soul Mountain

Gao Xingjian, Soul Mountain

Gao Xingjian (Gao is his surname) is a Chinese-French writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2000. He grew up in China during a period called the Cultural Revolution, which had a lasting impression on him. Due to his plays, he has since emigrated to France and been declared a persona non grata in China. Soul Mountain is one of his major works.

How to introduce such a book? What kind of book is it? What is it about? These are hard questions which I will try to answer. In any case, this is an extraordinary book and is somewhat of a faithful portrait of facets of Chinese culture. Gao Xingjian took a long journey into rural China. The narrator of this book is journeying, autobiographically, in search of a place called “Soul Mountain” which, due to its isolation and the lack of easy transportation, takes on a mystical aspect befitting its name. He traces a journey to the outskirts of Han (Mandarin) civilization, into panda reserves, temples, and the lands of Qiang and Yi ethnic minorities, which are seldom visited by outsiders.

Storytelling runs deep in Chinese culture. When the narrator of Soul Mountain visits with a friend that he hadn’t seen in a long time, they stay up all night talking and their talk eventually strays to histories and legends. The narrator under the guise of “you” (in sections written in the 2^nd person narrative) tells many wondrous stories of questionable veracity involving the places around him – an abandoned temple, ruins of what appears to be a great house, an old theatre – to his lady friend. This casual storytelling as a normal form of conversation seems familiar to me because I notice that whenever my dad is with his old friends, their inevitably converges on some historical anecdotes and myths. One person would say, “wasn’t it so-and-so who became emperor after this or that emperor?” and the talkers would then try to trace the threads of history. Chinese history is, after all, so very long and rich. Further, there are little anecdotes that the inhabitants of some little village may know, but not everyone else for it is not found in books that anyone but a serious historian would read but relates to the locals in some way. For example, my dad tells a story of a friend of his whose surname is “Zhu”, an uncommon surname. This friend always claimed that he was descended from the House of Zhu, who had been dethroned and driven from the capital to hide, according to some local legend, in a mountain – the same mountain where my dad’s friend’s family hailed from. Thus history lives on in tall tales and like ilk.

Another reflection that is apparent in this book is the presence of the Cultural Revolution. It is a period of time that I don’t understand well, but I do understand what it meant, beneath the politics, to the common citizen. There was a movement which reviled Western things and old things, in an effort to build a new China. Almost every young person had to go to rural farm and work alongside the farmers – schools and universities were closed for some years. Many of the intelligentsia suffered much persecution during this time, under the branding of “Western thinking” and “Old Things”. This led to a new breed of literature, called scar literature, written by these self-same intelligentsia, having survived the horrible times. These works are clever, poignant, dotted with anecdotes of acute suffering and enveloped in a seasoned and resigned bitterness. I suppose Soul Mountain is somewhat related to a brand of scar literature, perhaps a wayward cousin, several times removed.

The reason why the narrator and Gao Xingjian took these journeys is ostensibly to avoid being set to correctional labour camps due to their political opinions. He relays to the reader many stories of unhappy people persecuted during the Culture Revolution – a poor girl who wrote something in a diary which condemned her to life in prison, for example. This tastes strongly of scar literature. However, it is different because those stories are a part of the overall web of stories, not the focus, and the overall web is a story of one man’s journey within his own past and his own stories, mingled with the mystical places that he frequents.

No ill effects of the exile to the country side nor any lasting bitterness on the narrator’s part is actually described. In fact, it was probably due to this exile that Gao Xingjian was introduced to the ways of the ethnic minorities that he sounds fond of in his description. Most people I know who lived through the farm labour days in fact remember them quite fondly. My dad’s best stories from his youth always start with “when I was with the farmers” and continue with “I had a friend, a Yi friend, who told me ...” or “I went bear hunting with a friend who lost an ear during a previous bear hunting expedition”, etc. My friend’s mother has very happy memories of herding cows and accidentally making one fall over in a stream, whereupon she was sheepish from being laughed at by the supervising farmer. Soul Mountain has many traces of contact with parts of China without skyscraper or pollution or advanced technology, which are still steeped in shaman’s tales and mystical superstitions. It doesn’t really fit into any partitioning of literature that I know of, which makes up some of its charm – I can’t characterize what kind of book this is, I can only tell you similar stories and try to show you how it lies close to my heart and hope that you get the gist of it.

7: Eugénie Grandet

Honoré de Balzac, Eugénie Grandet

In a sleepy French provincial place called Saumur , old Grandet is a known rich miser. He keeps his wife and daughter, Eugénie living in minimal comfort, while he counts his tinkling, sparkling gold at night and schemes to enrich himself further. One day, Charles Grandet, old Grandet’s nephew, arrives in Saumur, sent by his own bankrupt father to be sheltered from his failure and subsequent suicide. In a few short days, Eugénie falls in love with Charles, Charles learns of his father’s death and bankruptcy, Charles decides to make his fortune in the West Indies, Eugénie gives Charles all her father’s gifts to her to start his journey, and Charles finds himself caring for Eugénie, all under the nose of old Grandet who wants nothing more than to be rid of his poor relation for fear of being asked for his gold. The long denouement of these events occupies the rest of the book.

This book is about misers and their miserly energy. Nearly every character has old Grandet’s miserliness. Eugénie, Charles and old Grandet are all guilty of stinginess. Grandet is the very epitome of a miser, who’s unwilling to part with his money. He keeps his family living in minimal comfort and gets his food for free from his tenants and he avoids spending money at all. In previous times, the people who were rich were bourgeoisie or upper class and they wanted to use their money to maintain their dignity. But after the revolution, anyone could become rich and so we have this new breed of rich people, who at their very roots, are the impecunious peasants who had to hoard their savings little by little in an old sock under the bed and who know the meaning of penury. They have no concept of living with accordance to their income; they still live as though they were poor and don’t want anyone to know that they’re rich, for fear of being robbed. This tendency to cling onto capital is taken to the extreme in old Grandet. Doesn’t old Grandet say again and again that he hasn’t any money, despite the barrels of gold in his room?

Then, there is Charles who is at first a fine dandy with fancy clothes and a generosity disposition. He, in an off-handed remard, offers to give Nanon his dressing robe, which was fine enough to be an altar piece, when he leaves, leaving the old servant with a strong impression of his generosity. In truth, he is just as stingy as Old Grandet. He doesn’t fall in love with Eugénie. He hasn’t room in his heart for her because the drawstrings of his heart are as closely pinched as the drawstrings of Grandet’s purse.

Later, Eugénie also betrays the same stinginess, this time towards herself. She stints herself in clothing and comfort, just as her father did to her. She also stints herself in life because she never leaves that provincial town to find love or a life; she’s to set in the ways of a countrywoman to want to go to Paris and she has no choice but to give up.

So, three Grandets and three different types of stinginess, but all caused by the same ancestral trait of the poor man hoarding all his treasures and hiding them from the prying eyes of his neighbours. And poor Eugénie! Despite her generosity of spirit, she still could not escape the old miserly ways that had enveloped her life for so long. That is the tragedy.

6: Blindness

José Saramago, Blindness

Saramago is the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1998. The book is about a blindness-plague that spreads through a city. The victim of the plague are quarantined and as the city becomes more and more affected, the quarantined people experience increasingly harsher conditions. A group of the blind finally venture out into the city, which has stopped functioning due to its residents being struck by blindness.

A center of focus in all the chaos is the doctor’s wife, who retains her ability to see and her grace throughout the book. She declared that she was blind so that the ambulance taking her husband into quarantine in an unused insane asylum would take her as well. Then, she uses her eyesight to aid the other people in quarantine and to help them as much as possible, without anyone figuring out that she isn’t blind. As conditions worsen and a rebel group begins to hoard the food delivered by soldiers who are desperately afraid of catching the blindness from their charges, the doctor’s wife keeps her eyesight and her grace.

This book is an example of dystopian fiction – the world struck by blindness is nightmarish and the things that people do in their desperation and the lack of governing authority are also nightmarish. As people lose their ability to see, their aims in life converge, quickly, to simply surviving. Many no longer care about starving strangers or cleanliness or order – they are in survival mode.

There are many things that are remarkable about the book, which have become fodder for thought, and the most special thing is that the city could be any city. There are no names anywhere. The characters are “the doctor”, “the doctor’s wife”, “the accountant”, “the girl with the dark glasses”, “the boy with the squint”, etc. There are also no descriptions of any traits that might identify the city. No one is described as blond or dark-skinned. It could be Madrid or New York or Bombay or Beijing.

I used to think about this a lot. Because I am Asian, all throughout high school, teachers forced upon me books by Asian authors, whom they thought I must relate to more than Dumas or Tolstoy (which I loved at the time and even now). It is something that stings today, even after all these years. And those books were not well-written nor were they very deep. Whenever I tried to think more about some facet or another of the story, it just fell apart at the seams. The books were so preoccupied with the culture differences that they had no attention left for the actual story. I didn’t relate to those characters – why could a story not be about just a person, divorced from race and culture? What if a writer just wants to tell a story about a society that he/she has assimilated into? This is like the criticism aimed at Irène Némirovsky because she was of Jewish descent and there is not one Jewish character in Suite Française, which she wrote during the German occupation of France in WWII.

Saramago’s story is very universal. Despite the lack of names of cultural identifiers, his city is very real.