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Parable of the Sower (1993), Parable of the Talents (1998) — Octavia E. Butler

(No spoilers.)

According to notes by author Octavia E. Butler at the end of Parable of the Talents, she originally intended to write one book of the fictional autobiography of the character Lauren Olamina.  It became longer than planned, so she “found a way to end” Parable of the Sower and then to write the sequel Parable of the Talents.  This was good fortune, for while Sower is faster and more fun, it is a formula zombie book, while Talents is a startlingly accurate prophecy of American politics gone bad.

To skip ahead, what could be more chilling than for Butler to write, in Talents, published in 1998, of a presidential candidate who wraps himself with Christian evangelical righteousness, campaigns on a platform of reviving America to some magical time of the past, and whose slogan is “Make America Great Again”?

To make matters worse – and more shameful for us non-fictional, real Americans of 2020 – is that this President Jarret was elected in 2032 when America was ten years into an era of the complete breakdown of society.  The economy was a shambles, with barter or Canadian dollars as the only means of exchange, public education no longer available, and crime and extreme violence a way of life.  At least in Butler’s fictional account, the despotic Jarret was elected by an electorate desperate for politics to restore law and order, as compared to our non-fiction reality show in which Trump was elected in a time of stability and prosperity.

These two books, written in 1993 and 1998, respectively, tell the story of American society 2024 from 2035.  They cover the life of Lauren Olamina, beginning as teenager of suburban Los Angeles, through her maturity as the creator of a new social/religious movement.  These years open in a dystopian nightmare of ultra-violence and depravity, and end, notwithstanding the one-term presidency of Jarret, with a society mending its way back to stability, albeit was horrible scars.  This renewal permits new entrants of social belief, thereby permitting the growth of Olamina’s new perspective on God and human destiny.

But, back to basics and reading fun.  Parable of the Sower is a simple, formulistic barrel of unhinged anarchy and violence, as we find an America in which society has somehow completely disintegrated.  There are various hints of causation, ranging from global warming to budgetary imbalances and cuts to social and education infrastructures.  However it occurred, the book opens with our recognizable American society – not some other science fiction world, or even some other country – in complete and violent freefall.

For readers, this rewards us with 329 pages of old-fashioned zombie revelry.  Middle class neighborhoods, such as Olamina’s, construct walls to try to keep out the crazies.  A new addictive drug induces an almost sexual euphoria for fire.  The addicts, many of whom were once from the privileged classes, shave their heads and paint their naked bodies in vivid colors, and set fires.  These fires draw scavengers who kill, rape and pillage.  It is an anarchy of illiteracy and joblessness and unpunished crime.

Lauren Olamina eventually finds herself homeless, and along with tens of thousands of other homeless people, heads for the roads to walk north.  It is widely accepted by all that somehow the north – the Pacific Northwest and, in particular, Canada – remains relatively stable and represents a chance for a fresh start.  She gradually meets other refugees, and by the fierce power of her personality creates a large, armed group to defend itself on the journey.

The Sower becomes a road-trip book, with each new night and turn of the road revealing some new atrocity by predator criminals who bear a closer resemblance to zombies than murderers.  Any vulnerable female is inevitably gang-raped.  Any defenseless walkers are killed for the clothes on their back.  The predators range from organized gangs to armed opportunists.  And, of course, there are the painted addicts who revel in killing and burning.  There is the requisite gruesome scene of starving children roasting a human thigh on a spit.  A survival mentality is adopted by all, including Olamina, to scavenge any dead bodies or burned houses.  There are countless instances where Olamina and her companions find recently dead bodies that they pilfer for clothing, weapons and money.

It is a fast-moving thriller, located deep within the American nightmare that thrills of unlimited and unaccountable violence.  What makes Olamina’s survivor story different is that she is a young woman of command, who wants to more than just survive, and who believes – knows — that she has a path forward for the human species.

She is the daughter of a minister who protected his family and neighborhood for as long as he could, who raised her to be both literate and proficient with guns and survival techniques.  At a young age, she discovers a different way of defining God and human destiny, and it becomes her inevitable mission to promote the truth of what she calls Earthseed.  She writes a testament, passages of which are provided at the start of every new chapter in the Parable books.  The truth for Olamina is that God is whatever we project, that God is change itself, and that we create an ever-changing God.  God is like a law of nature rather than an entity, and is completely impersonal.  Our existence is of no account, other than to the extent we create change and accountability for ourselves.  And the cool twist is that the human condition is but a small blip on the evolutionary stage of Earth, unless we use our abilities to migrate to other worlds in other star systems where humans will have a longer opportunity to evolve.

In the Sower, Olamina seeks a homeland her group can defend and develop, as they build a new and better community founded on the philosophy of Earthseed.

Cue to the second book, Parable of the Talents.  It is also violent, but it is much more interesting as it covers the creation and organization of Olamina’s community, the evolution of her understanding of how best to promote and expand Earthseed, and of particular interest to me, the development of a political movement under President Jarret to make America great again.

Even the violence is more nuanced.  Rather than a chaotic landscape of murderous highwaymen, Talents plays out the consequences of physical servitude made possible by the use of electronic collars controlled by masters.  The collars coerce obedience with severe physical pain.  These masters range from pimps controlling their sex slaves to large corporations controlling their workers, to unofficial religious militias loyal to President Jarret’s church controlling the apostates.

Olamina goes through the grinder of collars and rebellion, and eventually develops a successful methodology to expand Earthseed based on decentralized missionary outreach and education, rather than the physical creation of residential communities.

Butler spends much time in both books on a condition called “sharer” that afflicts Olamina and several other characters.  This occurs when a mother abuses certain drugs during pregnancy, and causes a permanent condition in which her children feel the exact pain they see in others.  They likewise experience the pleasure, such as sex, of others.  This condition obviously makes them vulnerable, because they are constantly at risk of debilitating pain by just seeing someone else in pain, and such empathetic pain undermines their ability to strike others in self-defense.  And yet, as neat as this concept is, Butler never really develops it to significance in the story.  If anything, she treats the condition inconsistently so it comes and goes as a convenience of plot development.

The significance of the book, for me, was Butler’s absolute prescience, in the 1990s, of a political no-nothing rationalization that provides the foundation of support for a president like Jarret.  President Jarret cynically wraps himself with a religious mantle called the Christian American Church, knowing the value of dividing the population in order to conquer and rule.  As Olamina says in Earthseed, “To be led by a liar is to ask to be told lies.”

I hereby personally predict that the most significant step by President Trump on the road to tyranny will be the formation of unofficial armed militias to intimidate his critics.  The lack of a private paramilitary force is what separates our American experience from that of other democracies gone awry:  the brownshirts of Hitler, the motorcycle-oriented vigilantes in Venezuela and Iran, and the silent quasi-military enforcers of strong-man rule in past years in various other South American countries.  In Talents, Olamina’s first Earthseed community was attacked as heretics by the Crusaders, an unofficial and unacknowledged armed affiliate of the Christian American Church.

We are not so special that it could not happen in America.  What was the Klu Klux Klan, anyway?  When you hear in Trump’s second term of the unofficial formation of armed groups who train with military techniques, then you will know we have arrived.  And, you know, for sure, that Trump will implicitly countenance these groups.

 

The Corner That Held Them — Sylvia Townsend Warner (1948)

Tina Jordan of the NY Times Book Review recommended Sylvia Townsend Warner’s 1948 novel The Corner That Held Them on a recent NY Times Book Review podcast.  Ms. Jordan said it is one of her top 10 books of all time, no less!  Ms. Jordan is one of my favorite people on the podcast hosted by Pamela Paul, because she speaks with clipped, clear diction, with good fellowship in her voice, and because she reads so many diverse books.  She reads more books in a week than I read in two months.

If Hobbes, in the relative cleanliness of the late 17^th century, believed that life was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short, then he would double down upon seeing the community living in a poor English convent in the 14^th century among filth and cold and very bad food.  The wonder is that the girls, given (abandoned) to the convent by their families and living in isolation, develop a quiet ambition as adults, if only for a scrap of implied authority to support their dignity while living out their lives within, perhaps, a three mile radius of the manor.

This is the story of Oby, a small convent of a dozen or so nuns and sundry hanger-ons located on a manor among swampy lands in southeast England, and supported by local tenanted poor peasants.  The convent was established in 1170 by a local rich lord, in memory of his adulterous dead wife who had hated him throughout their marriage and whose dowry included the manor.

Warner spends but a few paragraphs describing the convent’s history from 1170 to 1349, to wit:  in 1208 came the Interdict, and in 1283 hornets built in the brewhouse roof and the cellaress was stung in the lip and died, and so on, for a page.

The remaining 374 pages of this novel cover the history of Oby from 1349 to 1382.  Given the very short lives of the day, the arrivals, assimilations and deaths of the Novices, Nuns and peasants feel like five generations.  Warner could have chosen a different 33 year period during the first 200 years of Oby without much adjustment in plot or characters.  However, Warner was also an expert in early English polyphonic church music, and perhaps she chose the late 14^th Century so that she could include a marvelous scene of lepers singing newly composed polyphonic music.

The characters come and go, and Warner does not vest us in the characters.  We might follow the jealousies and accomplishments of a prioress for 15 years, and then she might die in her sleep.  That done, and with perhaps a half sentence of sentiment, the novel moves on to the next prioress. Warner gives us the texture of the era and the environment, rather than plumb of character.  Amidst the incongruous vanity of the characters, we see the boggy ground, the body numbed with cold, the chilblains, the strangury (a marvelous word), the mud, the mold of the sanctuary.

Warner describes the Black Death of 1349 with the same degree of description and emotion in which she might describe a peasant matter-of-factly picking out the flies from her gruel.

Ironically, some of the most developed of the characters are men.  The priest of the convent, Sir Ralph, spans all the years of the novel, and is an indulgent, bumbling, fat, insecure fraud of a priest, but he has a certain endearing appreciation for life and the absurdity of his position.  The most grating of the characters are the succession of bishops for the region, each of whom is successively more annoying than his predecessor in self-important haughtiness.  Oby, like all convents, is under the titular supervision of the bishop, but each bishop really could care less about the frivolous and irrelevant women of the convent.  In fact, each bishop in his own way takes a certain malicious delight in seeing to it that Oby is underfunded and mis-managed.

A prioress is elected for life by her peers within the nunnery.  For one particularly dreary set of years, the Nuns accidentally elect the vain, stupid, unlikable Dame Johanna, who had been hounded by the prior prioress.  Each of the voting Nuns assumed that the logical candidate, Dame Matilda, would receive a majority of the votes.  “Feeling sure of Dame Matilda’s election, grateful to be relieved of the old prioress whose temper had grown so disturbing, nun after nun yielded to the same thought: Why not vote for that poor Dame Johanna? – one vote can’t upset the result, and it would please the poor wretch.”

Her novel is wonderfully dense with the vocabulary of the medieval church.  I turned to the dictionary many times at the names of various prayers, holy days, holy rituals and church positions.  We learn that a convent has a cellaress, a treasuress, and an infirmaress, each appointed by the prioress.  I still do not know what it means for the Nuns to be guided by The Rule.

Warner also knows her Bible.  I often googled at the mention of some obscure figure in the Old Testament.  When a particularly mean-spirited bishop was dying, his aides called to Oby to send his grand-niece, a young Novice, to minister his health.  Warner compares the young virgin attention supplied by the Novice to the virginal heat provided by Abishag to King David.  Look it up, my prurient readers, it is but another ludicrous holy story.

Who would have known the process in which convents are supplied with young girls who enter as Novices and eventually become Nuns.  These are usually the youngest daughters of a family of some means, who seek to lighten their load by sending the girls to a convent for a lifetime.  The convents expect some legacy asset from the family, whether an icon, or a rental property, or something of value to sustain the addition of another mouth to feed in the nunnery.  Woe to the convent on whom a novice is thrust, without recompense, as occurred to Oby several times by a grumpy bishop.

The Nuns are to renounce personal identity and materialism in their communion with Christ, but the fact is that while they provide a grudging wicket to feed the poor, they also indirectly manage the peasants on the manor who work the fields.  The reality is that they spend much of their time, justifiably, worrying about the financial viability of the convent.

This materialism means, of course, that everyone in the local community — the bailiff, the peasants and the traveling poor – faithfully and gleefully resent the Nuns and their hypocrisy and their assets and their reliance on the labor and resources of the community.  So, there is a long tradition by the community of undermining the Nuns whenever possible.

It is a novel to appreciate for its brilliant language and its learnedness.  To appreciate it, however, is not to love it.  At first I slowed down the pace of my reading in order, I told myself, to savor a master writer and historian at work.  But, then I slowed down because it became actually slow.  There are so many Nuns arriving and dying over the 35 years that it was easy to mix them up.  Their names don’t really matter, because each really only served to describe the environment and the human condition.

However, this is a novel that I will re-read.  It is just too beautiful, challenging, and intelligent to go without a chance to appreciate Warner’s brilliance again.

Note:  The Corner That Held Them was  recently reissued by the New York Book Reviews Classics.

 

Exhalation –Ted Chiang (2019)

Note:  Ted Chiang has won four Hugo, four Nebula, and four Locus awards.  The movie Arrival was based on a story from his 2002 collection Stories of Your Life and Others.

The nine science fiction short stories in Ted Chiang’s Exhalation philosophically explore the consequences arising from alternative physical laws or technological inventions.  It reminds me of the I, Robot stories by Isaac Asimov in which Asimov played out thought experiments based on his Three Laws for Robots with a variety of situations and characters.  (First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.  Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Laws.)

As with Asimov, each Chiang story gently pushes characters along as they learn to cope and adjust to the logical outcome of the story’s laws, and most of the stories conclude with a bit of a twist of wry appreciation for the primary character’s self-discovery.  It felt like old-fashioned science fiction for a 21^st century sensibility.  Many of the nine stories were published over the past ten years in collections such as Fantasy and Science Fiction and The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities.

Unlike Asimov, Chiang creates unique physics laws or technology for each story, and then takes us all down a path of discovery of the consequences.  In “Anxiety Is the Dizziness of Freedom,” a technological tool is created in which a person can obtain a video connection with a parallel alternative world that exists under the random chances of quantum physics.  This allows people of our world who procure the tool to communicate with their alternate self, and to see the variety of consequences that occur to their other self as chance and choice evolve over time.  As an easy early example in the story, a fickle woman in our world decides not to accept a marriage proposal.  She worries over her decision, and is able to second-guess herself by communicating with her alternate self in another world who accepted the proposal.  These alternate selves are as real as we are, but exist in parallel existences.  There is a catch – each tool that a person procures to communicate with the other world eventually wears out, so that the person forever loses contact with that world.  If they procure a new tool, it will open into a different parallel universe with a different alternate self.

As interesting as it is to see the logical impact over time of a life-changing new technology, the stories do not create an emotional pull that drives the action and the reader.  It is more about the philosophical consequences arising from the situations than about the personalities.  However, Chiang is gentle and kind, and one always senses his empathetic ear for all the characters in all the stories.

Chiang does our logical work for us by letting us see the characters gradually come to grips with the consequences of a piece of fantastical technology or alternative physics.  In many cases the technology is developed for profit by entrepreneurs and initially appears apt to undermine our human nature.  In “The Truth of Fact, the Truth of Feeling” a technology allows perfect and accurate recall of all past personal experiences.  One of Chiang’s most personal characters, a single dad, cringes at all his past mistakes as a husband and father that the tool exposes.  The dad comes to realize that as everyone sees all the vulnerabilities of each other, the survival instinct seems to result in people becoming more forgiving of each other.

Many of the stories involve a play on the logic of time, putting characters in a variety of situations in which they can participate in time travel to the past.  But, in all cases Chiang creates a world in which the participant cannot go to the past to change the future.

The opening story, “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate,” is told in a style akin to the stories of the Arabian Nights.  A soft-spoken merchant, Fuwadd ibn Abbas, of Bagdad, is presented the opportunity to step through a portal to travel to his life exactly 20 years in the past and then is able to return to the exact moment he stepped through.  The past cannot be changed, but Abbas obtains new revelations and appreciation for how his life arrived at its present condition.  This story is beautifully told in a lilting voice that captures the polite and gracious voice of Arab culture.

My personal favorite is “Omphalos.”  This is another world, much like our earth, in which secular science repeatedly and consistently finds evidence of creationism.  The first person narrator is an archaeologist who finds evidence in growth rings on ancient trees that demonstrate the trees were created in whole at a particular moment exactly 8,912 years ago.  This date is consistent with every archaeological artifact that science evaluates.  Mummies are discovered who have no navel – evidence that these primordial human beings were created rather than birthed.  Virtually all scientists are united and exhilarated to continuously confirm the presence of God who created their world as the center of the universe for mankind alone.  Chiang displays such kindness, such empathy, for the narrator as she comes to grip with a new discovery that may suggest the universe actually revolves around a different planet.

 

 

Educated — Tara Westover (2018)

Tara Westover’s memoir Educated is a best seller and has enjoyed amazing critical success.  I’m not sure I fully trust her memory, because some of the events seem so unlikely.  But, I don’t doubt for a moment that the book accurately reflects her memory.

Tara is the youngest of seven widely spaced children in a family living off the grid on a mountain slope in rural Idaho.  Her father makes a living selling metal from his ever-changing junkyard, while her mother provides mid-wife services and sells medicinal herbs.

Her father is an intense, charismatic man who is totally distrustful of the government and secular society.  He sees conspiracies everywhere, from public education to the Illuminati.  He stashes guns and fuel, readying his family for the coming Days of Abomination or for the Feds.

The family is Mormon, like most of the nearby local population and the residents of the nearest town.  While the Westover family attends church with the community, it appears that most of the local folks keep their distance from this peculiar man and his family.  Tara’s mother is essentially estranged from her mother and sisters, having chosen loyalty to her husband and his way of life.  Indeed, Tara’s father has a strained relationship with his own parents, who live in a nearby house on the family land.

Tara and the other children are deemed home-schooled by Tara’s mother, but there is rarely any time spent on education.  The one fundamental skill of all the children is reading, but the few books available are the Book of Mormon, the Bible and a few old textbooks of the Founding Fathers.

The tension driving Westover’s memoir is provided by abuse from several sources.  The first is her father who routinely places Tara and the family in harm’s way.  The junkyard is a menace as heavy machinery is used to chop the metal and gather it into large bins.  Her older brothers were the primary junkyard workers for dad, but as they get older and leave the home for their own families and jobs Tara’s father taps the 12-year old Tara to pick up the slack.  Her father seems oblivious to the danger, even though each of her older brothers has been seriously injured at some point while working the junkyard.  Likewise, there are several horrendous family auto accidents, caused by her father’s insistence on driving in dangerous conditions.

Part of this Tara attributes, later in college after taking a psychology course, to her sense that her father is bi-polar and that he is manically impatient with getting his work done.  Part of it may also be his sense of fate and that he simply places the health and well-being of himself and his family to the Lord.

Much worse, Tara is physically and emotionally abused by Shaun, a sadistic older brother.  He is contemptuous of women, especially those who “whore” with clothes that expose skin or who talk to other men.  He is a classic abuser, who lashes out in anger at one moment, only to be filled with contrition the next morning.  Tara latches onto the morning version, hoping against hope that the contrite Shaun is the real Shaun.  Her mother and father are ostensibly unaware of the abuse even though many females – Tara, Tara’s older sister, Shaun’s girlfriends, and eventually Shaun’s wife — endured it.

Somehow in this chaotic family, several of the older boys decide to seek a formal college education.  For all his faults, the father believes in freedom of choice and does not stand in the way.  With the encouragement and guidance of an older brother, Tyler, who moved away for college, Tara begins to educate herself with all the material available to her – religious texts and an old math text.  She saves money and buys an ACT study guide and algebra textbook.   She eventually, incredibly, scores high enough to enter BYU, even though she had to fabricate a history of home-schooling on the application.  She later excels in everything academic and attends doctoral programs at Cambridge and Harvard.

While the tension of junkyard injuries and a bullying older brother are vivid scenes, the real turmoil is the guilt Tara feels of leaving the family and its values.  She feels like she is wrong and immoral for seeking independence away from her family and its values.

Recall in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that Huck actually felt horribly guilty about helping Jim run away, even though under today’s eye he should have felt proud about it.  Likewise, Tara can’t but help feeling that something is wrong with her for separating from her family for the secular world of education, even though it seems the right choice for her readers.  For at least a year in graduate school, Tara is seriously depressed, alone, listlessly binge-watching TV and nearly losing her place in the doctoral program.

Her parents make a last ditch effort to return her to the fold by actually traveling to Boston, bastion of liberal secularism.  By then Shaun’s behavior has been revealed – or alleged – by Tara’s older sister.  Essentially, her parents force Tara to make a choice –stand with the family, including Shaun, or move on without her family.  She loves her family, but just can’t go back to a life that will surely eventually consist of subservience to a husband as an isolated housewife and mother.

I wonder at the accuracy of her memory, particularly whether she was as un-educated as she recalls.  She knew no math, no history, no literature, no science, and yet somehow self-educated herself within a couple of years to top scores on college entrance tests.  I guess if Shakespeare could write his plays on an unfinished grammar school education, then Tara could learn so much on her own.  Accounts of other family members, even Tyler her mentor, point out that three of the seven children have obtained doctorates.  The suggestion is that Tara may have received more of a home education than she recalls.

I have no reason to think that she intended to exaggerate her situation.  I listened to her interview with Pamela Paul on the NY Times podcast, and she was careful to play down the drama or to offer any sense of exaggeration.  One of her top priorities was to be accurate.  She interviewed many of her family members and others for verification of her memories, and she identified instances in the book where others recall events differently than she does.  She knew she would pay a heavy price for her honesty.  Today it appears that she has decent relationships with some of her siblings, but virtually no relationship with her parents and other siblings.

Her open and honest reflections are what appeals to so many readers.  Certainly, it is a harrowing tale, an unbelievable tale of self-education, an uplifting tale of personal perseverance, but it is the raw honesty and wrenching decisions that draws us gawkers.

The Transit of Venus — Shirley Hazzard (1980)

Shirley Hazzard writes vividly of young women in affairs with married men, engaged men, older men.  In The Transit of Venus, she writes dialogue, internal and external, so well that sometimes I did not want to keep reading, because I knew the outcome of one affair or another would end badly.  I wanted to shout out to the women, “don’t do it, not him!”

My sample size is small.  I read and reviewed Hazzard’s slim 1969 novel, The Evening of the Holiday, which featured a young single English woman on holiday in Italy in an affair with an older married man.  It was a beautiful and simple narrative of an older man’s search for someone or something to energize his middle age malaise, and the young woman’s ambivalent acquiescence to the man’s overtures.

The Transit of Venus is much more ambitious, and complex, and revolves around the lives of two Australian sisters, born in the mid-1930s, orphaned, who move to England as young women, and of their lives and loves through the 1970s.  The language is dense with color and intense meaning, with three or four similes or metaphors on each page, and with obscure words every couple of pages that I had to look up in the dictionary.

Hazzard makes a slow reader even slower, as lines are read and re-read to make sure they are understood.  The words are so rich and evocative that you want to savor every allusion.  She likes to make decisive statements to lock in a change of perspective, a hidden desire, a decision, often triggered by only a key phrase in a snippet of polite conversation.  Here, there is an educated, good-looking, kind, young married couple, Ted and Margaret, in which the husband secretly and impossibly loves, unrequited, another woman:

He said [to his wife], “If you knew your beauty.”

Even the cat listened. Margaret said, “If I did, what then?”

“You’d set the world swinging.”

They knew he meant, You would find a man who truly loved you.

Or here, in just three consecutive paragraphs on a single page, the reader can see the dense, vivid imagination of Hazzard, describing the internal and the external:

She wished to rise to some solitary height. From ignorance she had an unobstructed view of knowledge – which she saw, on its elevation, stately, pale, pure as the Acropolis…

…The possibility that he might never, in a lifetime, arouse her love in return was a discovery touching all existence. In his desire and foreboding, he was like a man awake who watches a woman sleeping…

A bark, a bell, a farmer calling in an animal, a baby’s wail. These were the only sounds, but they struck eternity. On the hillside below them, a door standing wide on the yellow light of a shabby hall was a declaration of peace.

The women are of an earlier era.  The men pursue, while the women are passive, silent, knowing what is to happen, waiting for the brush of hands, waiting for the kiss, waiting to decide until the last moment whether to respond to the touch.  Late in the novel, in the 1970s, there is a one-night stand, that Hazzard dismally contrasts with an earlier time:

A generation earlier and this episode would have had to mean something to her. She would even have had to pretend it meant something to me [the man]. That deception is the one thing we are being spared.

There are cads aplenty, often men of means, of manners, debonair.  Men who are a “catch.”  But, woe to the man who does not know how to end an affair in a way that affords some measure of dignity to the woman.  Our main character, Caroline, is self-sufficient, smart, handsome, and finds herself, repeatedly over many years, in the orbit of the most educated, urbane, well-read, polite, self-centered, handsome man to be imagined by a once poor and neglected orphan.  Hazzard finally dispatches him with a marvelous 2-page description of his departure from Caroline on a foul, wretched, crowded, litter-strewn NYC subway car of the 1970s:

These [riders] might have been the founders of a new race that disdained expression and was indifferent to cruelty or compassion, or their own disease. If, here among them, Paul fell dead on the dirty floor, he would be no more than an obstacle to the exit.

This novel is a marvel of the senses, of dense description of controlled emotion.  It makes no compromises of convenience for the characters or the readers.  It demands close attention.  It also demands a second reading to appreciate the clues to its ambiguous and unexpected conclusion.

I think I will expand my sample size of Shirley Hazzard.  I wonder whether she will claim, again and again, the territory of a smart pre-feminist woman who impassively receives the attentions of a man who desires to consume her intelligence and vulnerabilities.

 

Reading Lolita in Tehran, A Memoir in Books  — Azar Nafisi (2003)

Azar Nafisi’s 2003 memoir is a first-hand account of the life of a female academic intellectual in the post-revolution Islamic state of Iran.  It is an unhappy account of the oppression of Western ideas and feminism, though in private the spirit of debate and female empowerment occurs vigorously, if not dangerously.

One could emphasize any of many angles of this book – a story of the intellectual underground in Iran, a story of female survival in Iran, or even a collection of English literary criticism.  My angle is the tragedy that is the Islamic revolution of Iran.

It’s a story of “watch what you ask for.”  I went to college in Nebraska in the mid-1970s and the campus (like most colleges across America at the time) was chock full of secular Iranian students who simply hated the Shah.  They were fixated on the injustice that the Shah royal family was installed by the CIA.  These students were smart, educated and informed — and obsessed by the priority to rid Iran of the Shah.  I remember once that an Iranian student on my dorm floor showed me a cassette tape that contained speeches by someone named Khomeini who, my friend told me, was operating out of Europe and developing a following to depose the Shah.  He was excited to be part of an informal conspiratorial black market of these cassettes.

I didn’t listen to the tape, and I’m not sure that my friend did either.  Rather, the student was willing to throw his support behind anyone who could develop enough power to take down the Shah.

Azar Nafisi recounted a somewhat similar tale of her experience as a college student in Oklahoma.  She didn’t mention throwing any support to Khomeini, but her sentiment, at the time for change, any change, was familiar to what I heard.

Look at what the Iranian people wrought for their anti-Shah obsession – a religious state that imprisoned and executed thousands of counter-revolutionary Iranians for their support of communism or decadent western ideas.  A state that enforced its moral code with cultural police who examine women on the street to see whether a few strands of hair peek out from the scarf or whether they are accompanied by men other than their husbands and brothers.

There are worse regimes – Saudi Arabia, the most obvious – but that doesn’t give Iran a pass.  Officially religious states, whether Islamic, Jewish, or Christian, are, by definition, oppressive of their religious minorities and their “others.”

Enter the scene one female intellectual, Azar Nafisi, an expert on English-language traditional literature, especially Nabokov, Jane Austin, Henry James, and Saul Bellow.  Having been terminated from several Iranian universities in Tehran for her failure to conform to religious laws of dress and speech, she decides to conduct a weekly class in her home with a carefully selected group of female students.  Each young woman arrives at her door each week in the veil and black dress, and then flings off the shapeless chador to reveal jeans and t-shirt underneath.  Their private time together is sacred, discussing literature and current events.  Each student has a story to tell of callow men who seek a traditional Islamic marriage, and of cultural police who look for female dissent.  Some of the students have been previously imprisoned and have had close friends executed.

The pity, all the more bitter, as Nafisi relates, is that the Iranians brought this on themselves.  And yet, today as I write this, on May 14, 2019, I open the NY Times to the story White House Reviews Military Plans Against Iran in Echoes of Iraq War.  Again, the American government, we, us, me, countenance the political and military mobilization of a war based on the vaguest of cynical pretexts.  It may be Republicans who instigate this self-destruction, but in fairness, it is all the more bitter that with our democracy we bring it upon ourselves.  (Memo to self: a war against Iran will make the war against Iraq look like a walk in the park.)

Nafisi sees herself, at her core, as a literary critic and essayist, more than a novelist.  She confesses, unnecessarily, that creating a story, a dialogue, a descriptive scene, is not her strength.  So she weaves in intermittent chapters of academic literary analysis of the works of Nabokov and other authors.  These are the weakest chapters, and she should have just powered through the memoir with only her experiences.  Some of her best chapters are when the students discuss English fiction and the analogies of the fiction to the struggles and forces at play in their own lives.

In the end, as is foreshadowed throughout the book, Nafisi moves to the United States to escape the suffocation that is the Islamic Republic of Iran.  Many of her students also move abroad.  It is a shame that such a proud and ancient intellectual culture should be lost to religious ideology.

I think of those secular, intelligent, proud Iranians of the 1970s seeking anyone and anything other than the Shah.

The Fifth Season — N.K. Jemisin (2015) Hugo Award 2016

The Obelisk Gate — N.K. Jemisin (2016) Hugo Award 2017

The Stone Sky — N.K. Jemisin (2017) Hugo and Nebula Awards 2018

The Broken Earth Trilogy is a rollercoaster of creative fantasy.  Its unexpected twists keep the reader moving forward, though its main characters are not particularly engaging.

My guess is that author N.K. Jemisin had a stupendous thunderbolt idea of the history of an alternative world populated by some very inventive groups of human-like beings.  This world suffers epochs of damage, change and mass death instigated by the conflicts and interactions of these groups.  The epochs are fantastically created and developed.

But, Jemisin needed to find individual characters to populate the world, and these characters do not quite have the personal resonance to match the brilliance of the setting.

The world that is called Earth in this 1400 page trilogy is nearly identical with our world.  The behavior, the forms of language, the commerce, and even the social structures are nearly the same, albeit the era is more like our pre-industrial age.

The main difference is that this world has regularly suffered environmentally catastrophic Seasons brought about by massive destructive substrate events, such as supervolcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and natural gas eruptions.  These events usually set off a series of species extinction, agricultural failure, and environmental collapse that kill off major portions of the population.  Each Season wipes out the urban and rural infrastructures, and the surviving population is forced, generation by generation, to begin again to rebuild and re-generate the next society.  There are at least a dozen Seasons in 12,000 years of recorded history, each with its own unique form of destruction and rebirth.  Each emerging group of survivors adds to the lore of survival techniques to aid future generations at surviving the next inevitable Season.

This novel, of course, has its own, most catastrophic of all, Season, and the plot follows the lives of the main characters prior to and during this Season.

A particularly compelling concept is the hint, tantalizingly developed over the course of the three volumes, of the existence of ancient civilizations – deadcivs.  These deadcivs pre-date all lore and knowledge, such that the existence of these civilizations of billions of people, with incredibly advanced technology, are virtually unknown.  However, there are some groups of isolated beings who appear have knowledge of an inscrutably distant past.  But, I won’t spoil it any more than to say that these deadcivs and those who remember them are the best and most memorable parts of the books.

Jemisin is really onto something with her concept of deadcivs.  It is just amazing how quickly we, as human beings with fantastic capabilities of memory and communication, forget our past.  I don’t mean forgetfulness as in the cliché that history repeats itself.  I mean that we really, utterly, forget the past completely.  Why should it take scouring by archaeologists to discover Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, or the cave art of Europe, or the Olmec of Mesoamerica? Even when discovered, we know next to nothing about the people of these cultures.  How do we lose knowledge of our history so quickly?  How many great and powerful prior civilizations – each of which surely reveled in their might and renown — are completely unknown to us?

My take is that the culture of war and identity is one of the only constants in our world.  Every civilization will eventually be sacked, and to discredit the merit of the sacked society the victors cannot resist deliberately wiping away the monumental structures and belief systems of the defeated regime.  One difference between our world and Jemisin’s Earth is that its history does not include frequent warfare; therefore, lore survives for thousands of years.  But not even a lack of warfare can avoid, over the course of many tens of thousands of years, the complete loss of memory of the deadcivs.

I loved this historical perspective of the Broken Earth Trilogy, and fortunately the dynamics of the deadcivs powered the plot of The Stone Sky, the last of the three books.

Our main character is introduced as a rural girl named Damaya who is born with the inherited powers of an orogene, which permit her and others of her kind to mentally manipulate the substrate of the earth in ways that are both destructive and constructive. They can kill others, sometimes impulsively, by mentally reconstructing the surrounding terrain.  Orogenes are relentlessly discriminated against by non-orogenic humans, apparently for cultural reasons born of a fear of otherness as evidenced by the powers of the orogenes.  Damaya is removed from her village and taken to the main city to reside with other orogenes.  The orogenes are isolated from others, bred to maintain a population of orogenes, and trained to use their powers for the public good.  Damaya has unusually strong orogenic powers, and as she matures she changes her name to Syenite.  Syenite is a self-centered and cynical woman, given to erratic bursts of anger.  Later, on the eve of a Season, she blends in with a Comm (small rural town) as the re-named Essun, a married mother of two.

Whether as Syenite or Essun, she essentially resents just about everyone she meets, orogene or not.  We are, I believe, expected to sympathize with her, due to the culture of discrimination and the social isolation suffered by orogenes.  But, this didn’t offset my weariness as she raged against the world.

She connects with another powerful, equally anti-social, orogene named Alabaster.  They have plenty of angry arguments about just everything.  It gets to the point where the reader tunes out the conversation, while being propelled forward by the worldwide catastrophic events.

Weirdly, and somewhat awkwardly, the third-person narration of the book is interrupted periodically by a second-person narrative.  Syenite/Essun’s story is occasionally told by a first-person narrator, Hoa, a stone-eater (a type of being) who takes Essun under his care.  This change in narration works, because Hoa’s personal perspective brings warmth to his relationship with her, and his vigilant protection of her helps propel otherwise unsympathetic characters forward.

To say much more of the plot or the characters would be unfair to readers.  I cannot resist, however, noting the unexpected role of the Moon, and I have to believe this was a tip of the hat by Jemisin to Asimov’s Foundation SF series.

The books certainly surface issues of social policy – of motherhood, discrimination, sexual orientation, and violence.  One could take this social culture as an allegorical tale of our world’s comparable problems, and as the trilogy’s dominant take-away, but Jemisin gives the reader enough room to embrace the issues or to move on with the adventure.

At times, the events seem deliberately obtuse, perhaps to create surprise later when secrets are revealed.  It causes one to want to read the books again to seek clarification of all the dense, obscure twists and turns.  One could speed-read a second time by skimming through some dead-end subplots that turned out not be very important to the main story.

Jemisin’s Broken Earth Trilogy is a bit uneven, perhaps because it so ambitiously reaches to create a vast landscape, and thereby has some gaps, but it is a creative and entertaining trilogy of novels.

 

The Evening of the Holiday — Shirley Hazzard (1966)

The Evening of the Holiday is a simple, beautifully written love story of a middle-aged, married Italian man (separated from his wife) and a young British woman abroad in Tuscany, Italy.  While simple in plot, the novel beautifully and sympathetically captures the halting approach of these individuals to each other and the bittersweet understanding of the young woman that it will inevitably end — and that she has the burden of taking the decisive steps for both ends of the relationship.

The writing of the author, Shirley Hazzard, is spare and suggestive.  She evokes the rhythm of the unidentified Tuscan town – of the café on the plaza, the annual festival of its patron saint, the local duomo, and the desultory summer heat of the local hotel where Sophie, the young woman, stays during a visit to her Italian relatives.

She opens the novel with a brilliant description of Tancredi, an architect in his 40s whose beautiful wife has left him (together with their children), as he forces himself, barely, to polite parlor conversation with an older couple visiting his sister on a hot afternoon.  He resents the intrusion and the social effort he is obliged to make; after all, by rights as an Italian of professional class, he should have every afternoon to himself for rest.  But, the older couple has brought along Sophie, who they apparently met several years earlier while she was in Italy for school.  While Sophie is no great beauty, it seems to Tancredi that she may be worth pursuing, for, at the very least the chance of a diversion in his life.

Sophie, for her part, understands the situation, and goes along with his attentions, almost as a matter of politeness and perhaps some curiosity, but with no intention of engaging in an affair.

Most of all, I enjoyed Hazzard’s descriptions of the inner dialogue of Tancredi and Sophie during their conversations.  While the descriptive writing of Hazzard is evocative of time and place, the dialogue is clipped and short as the characters hide their thoughts.  In some ways, the conversation and inner voices remind me of Hemingway, with the mix of cryptic conversation, omniscient inner thought, and scene description.  Here, the end of a chapter as Sophie refuses Tancredi’s first attempt at a kiss:

“I’ll be in the piazza tomorrow” he said – but without confidence, for the first time.

“Please,” she said. “I won’t come.”

The walls of the town were in sight over the slope of the road. He asked her: “Is this because I tried to kiss you?”

“No.” And for the first time she searched her thoughts to give him an honest reply. “It’s because, if things had been different, I would have let you.” The fields dropped away, and they entered the city by the Roman Gate.”

The affair stiltedly unfolds, but to no end, of course, because divorce in Italy at the time is not available.  Sophie knows it must end, and she is the stronger of the two.  She does what she must do.

Hazzard’s book is a brief 138 pages, written a half-century ago.  It perceptively captures mood, a sense of place, the balance between obligation and opportunity, an appreciation of beauty, and the understanding of the poignancy of an affair that is impossible.

Note:  The Evening of the Holiday was Hazzard’s first novel, published in 1966.  She was born in Australia, spent time in many countries and eventually settled in New York City.  Her 2003 novel, The Great Fire, won the US National Book Award.

Mozart – Peter Gay (1999)

To prepare for an upcoming trip to Vienna, I’ve begun to read of music.  I picked up a Penguin Lives biography of Wolfgang Mozart at the local library.

This is actually not a review of Peter Gay’s Mozart, which is a very nice, short, well-organized Mozart biography.  Instead, this account is my realization that, setting aside his musical legacy, Mozart was the rarest of birds — he successfully emerged as a fully-functioning adult from a life as a child prodigy raised by a controlling parent.

Earlier this year, Amanda Ripley reviewed Off the Charts, The Hidden Lives and Lessons of American Child Prodigies, by Ann Hulbert, for the NY Times Book Review.  I recall being struck at the time by the statement:

Child prodigies are exotic creatures, each unique and inexplicable. But they have a couple of things in common, as Ann Hulbert’s meticulous new book, “Off the Charts,” makes clear: First, most wunderkinds eventually experience some kind of schism with a devoted and sometimes domineering parent. “After all, no matter how richly collaborative a bond children forge with grown-up guides, some version of divorce is inevitable,” Hulbert writes. “It’s what modern experts would call developmentally appropriate.” Second, most prodigies grow up to be thoroughly unremarkable on paper. They do not, by and large, sustain their genius into adulthood.

We are all familiar with the outlines of the achingly short life of Joannes Christostomos Wolfgang Gottlieb Mozart.  He was born in Salzburg in 1756 to a musical family.  His father Leopold Mozart was well-educated, and a fine violinist in the employ of the prince-archbishop of Salzburg.  “Wolferl” was the prodigy of all prodigies – he composed piano pieces at age five, he wrote violin sonatas at seven, and he wrote his first symphony at nine.

His father nurtured and educated – and capitalized — Wolferl from the start.  Father and son toured Munich when Mozart was five.  There was a family grand tour across western Europe for three years, from 1763 to 1766.  Mozart was an endearing hit, and Leopold was showered with gifts and money by the aristocracy.  Wolferl came to crave the attention, and we are told that at six he jumped into the Hapsburg empress’s lap and kissed her.  At eight, in Paris, Wolfgang stood by the queen, repeatedly kissed her hands, and had her feed him tidbits.  For all his life Mozart loved dressing smartly, spending lavishly, and working hard for the attention of others.

As Mozart grew older, his father grew even more controlling.  Leopold was especially suspicious of girlfriends and potential lovers who might interfere in the commercial and personal bond of father and son.

At age 25, Mozart somehow summoned the strength to leave his father in Salzburg and move to Vienna.  The correspondence with his father at the time was devastating.  Leopold threw every psychological weapon he could at his son – castigating  him as ungrateful, and blaming his negligence as the cause of Mozart’s mother’s death while on tour in Paris.

In Vienna, finally independent, Mozart began to seriously court Constanze Weber and eventually they were married.  Leopold fulminated against the relationship, writing to Mozart that Constanze’s mother was a witch intent on trapping Mozart into marrying Constanze, and that Constanze herself was no better than a slut.

I have not read Hulbert’s book, but I recognize her point about the crash endings of prodigies.  Mozart was, we must all concede, the prodigy of prodigies.  His father was the stereotype of stage moms.  Add in the ingredients of international acclaim and money as a magical youth, and it is miraculous that Mozart artistically thrived until his death in 1791 at age 36 of rheumatic fever.

Mozart remained respectful of his father.  He stood up for himself in his letters to his father, but always asked for his father’s blessing and understanding.  Leopold could not move on from Mozart’s decision to move to Vienna and marry.  Leopold died in 1787 in Salzburg, and true to his judgmental nature his will favored Mozart’s older sister.

Mozart wasn’t particularly intellectual.  He never acknowledged the contemporaneous movement to revolution in France.  His one social allegiance was to the order of Masons.  He spent wildly and irresponsibly, and was reduced to humiliating requests for loans from friends and benefactors for much of his time in Vienna.

And yet he embraced his natural ability.  While many of us are cynical of the abilities that come to us without much effort, Mozart worked to develop his gift and composed on a prolific scale – from string quartets, to symphonies, to his most beloved, the operas.  These compositions, though seemingly easy for Mozart to compose, became increasingly sophisticated and complex.  It would have been easy for the prodigy to go off the rails as an adult – to drink, partying, and bankruptcy – but he always stayed true to what he seemed to know was his destiny.

 

Less — Andrew Sean Greer (2017)

Andrew Sean Greer’s Less is hilarious.  The novel also won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize, a rare feat for a funny book.  But, save this thought – where was the internet?

Arthur Less is a lovely guileless man in San Francisco who is about to suffer the double indignity of turning the incredibly old age of 50 and dealing with a wedding invitation from his partner who has left to marry another man.  Rather than suffer the whispers and sidelong glances of his friends and rivals at the wedding, Less elects to go on a solo tour around the world.  The action of the novel is organized in his experiences at various stops – New York City, Mexico City, Turin, Berlin, Morocco, India and Japan.

Less brings his incredibly self-conscious inner dialogue to all situations.  He is a spectacle – tall, thin, handsome, blond lanky hair, all gangly knees and elbows.  Whether he has a steady partner or not, he is unable to avoid falling into bed with the next charming, interesting man he meets.  But, true to his innocent self, he is not a trollop; rather, he’s just taken with whatever moment of sensuality and experience presents itself.

Less is a writer of novels, mostly novels of San Francisco gay men processing their lives while aging.  Less is told by a few of his fellow gay authors that he is a “bad gay” because he does not provide uplifting inspirational experiences for his characters.  A large part of the charm of Less is that he is incapable of vindictiveness or cynicism.  When told that he is a bad gay author, he is not angry.  Instead, he is mystified, perplexed, and a bit sad.  He doesn’t write for intellectual literary purposes; rather, he just writes with a wandering, daydreaming imagination of men for better or worse.

You will laugh out loud while reading Less on the subway.  Greer has an easy, effortless yin-yang writing style in which he’ll mention a few facts about a character or scene, and then double back a few pages later to knock your head off with the irony or absurdity of those scenes when revived in a slightly different context.

Less is such a sympathetic daydreamer, and his lack of an edge rewards him, always to his surprise, with lucky turns.  He is the boy who somehow found himself playing in Little League (on a team that was forced to include him).  He is the boy picking dandelions and watching the pretty butterflies in right field while the game is going.  He’s also the boy who, alerted by cheers of fans, looks up to find that a fly ball has somehow landed in his glove.  It is his one and only moment of sports glory.

He travels the world as a moderately successful author, mostly on literary junkets paid by an Italian literary prize competition, a Berlin university in need of a visiting lecturer, and a men’s magazine seeking an article on Japanese cuisine.  We incrementally learn of his relationships to the two steady partners he has had in his life, with reminisces subtly and beautifully interwoven throughout the book.  Arthur Less is a man of a consuming inner voice that blots outs the hustle of the world around him – with a voice worrying of his appearance, travel directions, and the approaching milestone of his 50^th birthday.

The action occurs in our contemporary world, but there is a huge missing ingredient – the internet and smart phones.  Many of the misunderstandings and foibles throughout the book would have not occurred in a wired world in which one can learn in real time of directions, agendas, travel challenges – and changes in relationships back home.  In a significant sense, our innocent Less would not have found himself in many of his hilarious misunderstandings had he simply checked his email.  The suspension of our disbelief of this oversight is worth our while.  In a sense, it reminds us that our phones serve as gigantic spoilers of our wired real-time experiences.

It is hard to not love our Arthur Less.  The fact that he would never have guessed that he is loveable makes him all the more lovely.