#56 in 2024
There is a darkness that presses in on you out here when your car slows or turns a hairpin curve.
Perma Red by Debra Magpie Earling is set on the Flathead Indian reservation in the USA in the 1940s. I found this love-story-cum-thriller on one of the NYT lists for the best ten books of this century, and I’m so glad I did. (Thank you Stephanie Land, author of Maid.) Who can resist lovers with names like Charlie Kicking Horse and Baptiste Yellow Knife?
Both men are vying for the heart of Louise White Elk who lives in tremendous poverty on lands where snakes are so prevalent that you expect someone to speak Parseltongue. Her underwear is gray and riddled with holes and still she is gorgeous. She runs away from a white school where she is called a Dirty Indian, and she cannot resist being misused by men, especially by the hypnotic Baptiste who wears boots with golden leather roses. Still, she wanted something more than a dusty Indian man from Perma who drank his days away. The author is a professor emeritus at the University of Montana of Bitterroot Salish origins and she sure knows how to enchant and also how to forgive.
The night was thick with her near-misses, her lazy troubles, her wildness, her grandmother’s downward glances.
He had become a man who would not bathe to make a good impression.
She stepped off the porch like a whisper.
#57 in 2024
Jung Chang’s Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China is one long litany about life in China over three generations of women. If nothing else, this personal story provides a great overview of recent Chinese history, especially the Cultural Revolution. Sure, millions could feel grateful that the Maoists ended the practice of foot-binding and made everyone share their food. But Mao also unleashed tremendous collective violence. This is a story both of the cult of personality (Mao) and the cult of impersonality (submitting your individual self to the control of Mao) affecting a population of 900 million. Chung says that for Mao, her mother was ready to go up mountains of knives and down seas of flames, to ‘have our bodies smashed to powder and our bones crushed to smithereens.”
The author managed to leave China and now lives in England. The library copy was well-thumbed. Reading it as the American election looms, all I could think about was the dangers of dictatorship and the insidious practice of whipping up hatred, and how people can turn into an army of snitches.
This was a key invention of Mao’s — to involve the entire population in the machinery of control. Few wrongdoers, according to the regime’s criteria, could escape the watchful eyes of the people, especially in a society with an age-old concierge mentality… because of personal vendettas, and even gossip, many innocent people were condemned.
#58 in 2024
One night at a barbecue, I chatted with a woman who came from Bangladesh. When I lamented my ignorance regarding the Great Partition and the history of India, Tazeen urged me to read Amitav Ghosh’s Shadow Lines. Today Ghosh is a literary celebrity, and yet this novel was relegated to the Reference section of the Toronto Public Library, where books are buried when readers no longer request them. I had to dig a copy out of my university library stacks.
….all those pictures of dead people — in Assam, the north-east, Punjab, Sri Lanka, Tripura — people shot by terrorists and separatists and the army and the police, you’ll find somewhere behind it all that single word; everyone’s doing it to be free…And then I think to myself why don’t they draw thousands of little lines through the whole subcontinent and give every little place a new name? … How can anyone divide a memory?
Ghosh wrote Shadow Lines at the beginning of his career, in 1988, so one might forgive him for its shortcomings. The action leaps back and forth from contemporary Calcutta to the Blitz in England to a riot in Dhaka to the swinging sixties in London and pretty soon I was hopelessly confused. The book boiled with vats of emotion but only an insider could join the boil. I’d never heard about the Great Terror in the Calcutta of the ‘sixties and ‘seventies, so Ghosh’s references simply passed me by.
It didn’t help that his protagonist sexually assaults a female friend while drunk, and that the next morning, she accepts his lame apologies with an unironic wink, saying she hadn’t realized that she was still attractive. My sexism-o-meter whipped its arrow and I finished the book through a cloud of dislike. And yet for this stranger-at-a-party, Shadow Lines was a touchstone. Perhaps she loved this book because of passages like this one.
… we were stupefied by fear./ That particular fear has a texture you can neither forget nor describe…It is a fear that comes of the knowledge that normalcy is utterly contingent, that the spaces that surround one, the streets that one inhabits, can become, suddenly, and without warning, as hostile as a desert in a flash flood. It is this that sets apart the thousand million people who inhabit the subcontinent from the rest of the world — not language, not food, not music — it is the special quality of the loneliness that grows out of the fear of the war between oneself and one’s image in the mirror.
#59 in 2024
Ah, Colette, so glad to see you again!
Are there really people who remain unmoved and never feel their throats tighten with a childish sob when they hear the sound of a trotting horse upon a frozen road, the bark of a hunting fox or the hoot of an owl struck by the light of the passing carriage-lamps?
My fellow connoisseur Paul urged me to deviate from reading her works chronologically, and jump instead to her later books, My Mother’s House, and Sido (translated by Una Vincenzo Troubridge and Enid McLeod). This memoir about her mother and father was like resting in the shade on a hot day. Until mothers became writers, it’s been my theory that most literature has been written by angry children, which is why Colette’s remembrance is so unique: every page throbs with love for her mother, who smells of laundered cretonne and newly-watered lettuces.
It is no bad thing that children should occasionally, and politely, put parents in their proper place.
There are great descriptions of Colette’s brothers and the sister with the Rapunzel-like hair who read all day, in a grim kind of way with a cup of chocolate grown cold beside her. The sketches of her one-legged father, and his all-absorbing love for her mother are ravishing and reminded me that ‘Colette’ was actually a surname.
My father and I have no use for pity: our nature rejects it. And now the thought of my father tortures me, because I know that he possessed a virtue more precious than any facile charms: that of knowing full well why he was sad, and never revealing it.
#60 in 2024
A strange man shows up with a little girl in tow, searching for his wife. We don’t know if he has good intentions or bad ones. The drama takes place in Pittsburgh in 1911 and the location is a boardinghouse. The men and women who drift in and out of the house are all emerging from the deep shock of slavery.
Nobody knew what was gonna happen traveling them roads. We didn’t even know if we was gonna make it up here or not. I left her with my mama so she be safe. That was better than dragging her out on the road having to duck and hide from people.
You might know the writer August Wilson because you’ve seen his plays Fences and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, perhaps on television. Joe Turner’s Come and Gone hasn’t been on TV yet, though it was recently revived at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago. Most of us don’t know enough about the Great Migration, when some six million Black people moved from the American South to the North. Families were split up, people lost each other, and wandered from town to town trying to knit themselves back together. The strange man with the little girl was kept captive by a white guy for a whole seven years and finds shelter at the boardinghouse, where the soothsayer Bynum promises to locate the lost wife through his visions.
BYNUM Alright. Let’s Juba down! (The Juba is reminiscent of the Ring shouts of the African slaves. BYNUM sits at the table and drums. He calls the dance while others clap hands, shuffle and stomp around the table. it should be as African as possible, with the performers working themselves up into a near frenzy. The words can be improvised, but should include some mention of the Holy Ghost. In the middle of the dance HERALD LOOMIS enters.)
LOOMIS. (In a rage) Stop it! Stop! …What’s so holy about the Holy Ghost?…Why God got to be so big? Why he got to be bigger than me?
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Currently reading
There was so much violence in the first three books on this list — domestic, political and cataclysmic — that I was glad to step out of it for a moment with Colette and Wilson. There’s a lot more violence in what I’m reading now. I’ve been (dammit) living with the 900 pages of Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 all summer. He is testing my patience. My bookish friend Marni called me a book soldier, and I am trudging forward. I’m on the last fifty pages, and I feel like I’m at a rally for Kamala Harris because I can hear Beyoncé’s ‘Freedom, freedom’ chorus ringing loudly in my ears. Stay tuned for more.
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The New List:
Featured Author: Colette, My Mother’s House, or Sido, 1926 (see above)
Second Latest Title Saved: Mary Roach, Stiff : the curious lives of human cadavers, 2021
Reader Recommended: Amitav Ghosh, Shadow Lines, 1988(see above)
Oldest Title on the List: Mo Yan, Pow!, 2012 (novel by Nobel laureate, translator Howard Goldblatt)
The Random List:
Roberto Bolaño, 2666, 2008 (Nr. 6 on the NYT top 100)
Debra Magpie Earling, Perma Red, 2002 (see above)
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers (life, death and hope in a Mumbai undercity), 2012 (acclaimed non-fiction)
Upamanyu Chatterjee, The last burden, 1993 (Indian novel)
Teju Cole, Known and Strange Things, 2016 (very excited, love Teju Cole)
J. M. Ledgard, Submergence, 2012 ( a novel, know nothing)
If you’re wondering how my list is put together, check out my system here.