Finding the power underneath (Books - The Cat's Table by Michael Ondaatje)

Two qualities are evident in Michael Ondaatje's The Cat's Table right at the outset. The book involves the memory of a writer named Michael, originally from Sri Lanka, who at age 11 travels without a guardian on a ship across the Indian Ocean, Suez Canal, and the Mediterranean to reach his mother in England, where he will start a new life. On that ship he spends his time with two other boys - Ramadhin and Cassius. The first quality of the story is an instantly elegiac nostalgia, a wistful tone that says - I was never as innocent and happy as I was then.

The second quality is an isolation, the sense that this world exists unto itself. The twenty-one day journey is nearly free of adult supervision for the boys. It seems the ship has its own rules of relating to others and it stirs the emotions of all the passengers, bringing them cauldron-like to a boil. Although a ship is a real place, it seems a fantasy world in this novel. There is a prisoner with two keepers who walks the deck in chains late a night, a millionaire dying of rabies who is attended by an ayurvedic doctor, a botanist who keeps a garden of rare and poisonous plants, a kennel, a jazz pianist with two names.

It felt as if a city had been added to the coast, better lit than any town or village. He went up the gangplank, watching only the path of his feet - nothing ahead of him existed - and continued till he faced the dark harbour and sea. There were outlines of other ships farther out, beginning to turn on lights. He stood alone, smelling everything, then came back through the noise and the crowd to the side that faced land. A yellow glow over the city. Already it felt there was a wall between him and what took place there. Stewards began handing out food and cordials. He ate several sandwiches, and after that he made his way down to his cabin, undressed, and slipped into the narrow bunk...

I try to imagine who the boy on the ship was. Perhaps a sense of self is not even there in his nervous stillness in the narrow bunk, in this green grasshopper of little cricket, as if he has been smuggled away accidentally, with no knowledge of the act, into the future.

This is The Magic Mountain on water, but instead of dying in this rare place. Michael grows up. He learns of love for others, of secrets, of responsibility. The experience gives birth to a certain vision of the world, driven by unanswered questions of events he witnesses on that ship that go underground but that fuel the voice that he develops to record the mysteries of the world around him. It is on that journey that Michael is formed as a writer.

Sometimes we find our true and inherent selves during youth. It is a recognition of something that at first is small within us, that we will grow into somehow. My shipboard nickname has "Mynah." Almost my name but with a step into the air and a glimpse of some extra thing, like the slight swivel in their walk all birds have when they travel by land.

The pleasures of The Cats Table are soft and tinged with reminiscence. They are found not so much in the action of specific adventures the boys have - although these can be funny, and a few of them quite intense, as when Ramadhin ties Cassius and Michael to the deck during a storm. The novel has the rhythm of the 21-day sea voyage it recounts. The greatest pleasure I experienced in reading The Cat's Table was the way Ondaatje found to be simultaneously the boy on the ship and the adult writer long after the events, but permanently marked by them. This book is built on layers of memory and even though Michael the character doesn't perfectly understand them, Michael the writer has learned to navigate the world by painstakingly observing the details and recording them, and that in doing so he can make art that reveals even more than he knows.

"But art is never safe. All of this is only one small room in a life." For a man who supposedly loved art, I felt he was scorning it.

"Come with me." And he took my elbow carefully, precisely, as if this was on place on the anatomy which was socially acceptable to touch and therefore take part ownership of. He walked me down the hall until we were in the Grand Rotunda, where a sixty-foot tapestry hung. He lifted a corner and held it up so I could look at the underside, where the colours were suddenly brilliant and forceful.

"This is where the power is, you see. Always. The underneath."

He walked away from the tapestry to the centre of the circular hall, knowing his voice would carry to the perimeter as well as up towards the distant ceiling.

"Probably more than a hundred women worked on this for a year. They fought for the chance to work on it. This thing fed them. This kept them alive in the year 1530, during a Flanders winter. That is what gives truth, depth, to this sentimental tableau."

Georg Grosz meets Bridget Jones's Diary starring Madonna... no really (Books - The Artificial Silk Girl by Irmgard Keun)

I learned of German, Weimar-era novelist Irmgard Keun from a post by Bookslut about a New York literary event on the subject of her life and work, as I mentioned here. My friend and I each bought a book and I got The Artificial Silk Girl which, we learned, is a staple of a contemporary German High School education. Thanks to Caroline and Lizzy's German Literature Month, I actually read it in a timely fashion and in the context of lots of other discerning readers tackling German authors. Check out GLM's pages, they're chock full of links.

One might think The Artificial Silk Girl a serious, historical artifact, written as it was in 1932, depression-ridden German against the background of the rise of the Nazis. Indeed, it is revelatory about what it was like for a poor but beautiful girl with stars in her eyes to grow up in this period and try to make something of herself, careering from actress to prostitute. But really, thanks to the approach of translator Kathie von Ankum, it feels like a contemporary confessional novel or even more, a film. Indeed, Ankum sees this novel as the German answer to Anita Loo's 1925 novel Gentlemen Prefer Blondes a runaway bestseller in the America of its time, and would like the reader not so much to think of Christopher Isherwood or Lotte Lenya as to think of Bridget Jones or Carrie Bradshaw.

It must have been around twelve midnight last night that I felt something wonderful happening inside of me. I was in bed - I had meant to wash my feet, but I was too tired after that hectic night the day before, and hadn't I told Therese: "You don't get anything out of letting yourself be talked to on the street. You owe yourself some self-respect, after all...."

After then I felt so sick at the office, and the old man isn't rolling in dough anymore either, and could fire me any day. So tonight I went straight home and to bed, without washing my feet. Didn't wash my neck either. And as I was lying there and my whole body was asleep already, only my eyes were still open - and the white moonlight was shining on my head, and I was thinking how nice that goes with my black hair and what a shame Hubert can't see me like that, when he's the only one, after all, whom I've ever loved. And then I felt the aura of Hubert surrounding me, and the moon was shining and I could hear a gramophone playing next door, and then something wonderful happened inside of me - as had happened before, but never anything like this. I felt like writing a poem, but that might have to rhyme and I was too tired for that. But I realized that there is something unusual about me. Hubert had felt it too, and Fraulein Vogelsang from my school as well, after I presented them with a rendition of Erlkonig that knocked their socks off. And I'm quite different from Therese and all those other girls at the office and the rest of them, who never have anything wonderful going on inside them. Plus I speak almost without dialect, which makes a difference, and gives me a special touch, particularly since my father and mother speak with a dialect that I find nothing short of embarrassing.

And I think it will be a good thing if I write everything down, because I'm an unusual person. I don't mean a diary - that's ridiculous for a trendy girl like me. But I want to write like a movie, because my life is like that and it's going to become even more so.

Initially, the 21st century diction disoriented me. But as I spent time with it, von Ankum's approach wooed me. I realized that if I were to experience Doris's story as having any immediacy and if I were to understand who this young woman was in our own society's terms, that this language was the perfect vehicle for her innocent star gazing and tremendous ambition. She talks of "Women's Lib" and "beer bellies," and uses words like "gross me out" or "yuk," and describes one character late in the novel as "looking like a piece of pukey shit." Her breathless narrative voice reads, but exactly, like a contemporary film voice over, which combines the pleasure of light, no-thought, entertainment with the creeping realization that the sleazy Berlin of 1932, the one of Georg Grosz paintings, is about to implode around her. But coming of age doesn't wait and the world doesn't know it is about to experience an important period of history, and neither does Doris who, despite the Nazis, wants to learn how to come in to her own sexuality and find a way to live independently in her world. Keun's writing, however, is not merely a showcase for von Ankum's thesis about literary parallels, it is vivid in its own right.

If the doorbell rings, I'll go crazy. Dear God, please help me. This is the end of my stardom. It's all over - but for me that means it's just beginning. My heart is a gramophone playing inside of me, scratching my bosom with a sharp needle. Of course I don't have a bosom because it smack of the ordinary, like breastfeeding or an old opera diva where you can't tell what's bigger, her breasts of her voice...

The sense of what Germany of that time was like, the economic depression, and the brewing political unrest reveal themselves as just one more part of this girl's landscape.

So Therese helped me skip town that night. I was trembling all over and full of fear and expectation and joy, because everything would be new now and full of excitement and adventure. And she also went to my mother to fill her in and told her that I would pay back both her and Therese handsomely, if it all worked out. And I know that my mother can keep a secret, which is amazing because she's over 50, but hasn't forgotten what it used to be like for her. But they can't send me any clothes. That would be too dangerous - and so I've got nothing except for one shirt which I wash in the morning and then I stay in bed until it's dry. And I need shoes and many many other things. But it'll come. I also can't write to Therese because of the police who are undoubtedly looking for me - because I know the Ellmanns, how tenacious she is and how she enjoys making criminals out of people.

I don't care if she's in trouble because of me, because she was the one who cooked and ate Rosalie, which was our cat - a sweet creature with a silky purr and fur like white velvet clouds with ink spots. She used to lie on my feet at night and keep them warm - now I have to cry - I ordered a piece of cake for myself, Dutch kirsch, and now I can't eat it because I'm full of grief at the thought of Rosalie. But I took a doggy bag.

I found particularly striking, the stark contrasts which Keun suddenly springs upon the reader to remind one that this was indeed no ordinary time. In one, Doris describes her body to a blind man whom she befriends, seducing him, but as she does she notices a cockroach in a corner. In another, a girlfriend (Hulla) has suffered a beating from her husband (Rannowsky), who spends time in jail. They kill the husband's goldfish and...

And the fish continued to swim belly up. Three others hit him with their snouts. The dead fish's tummy was pale. And that overweight Hulla was kneeling on the floor praying. And she's terrified - "take care of my beloved fish, woman..." He's so brutal. And I say to her: "Hulla, I'll get us some cognac!" - after all, she was completely shaken up.

And Tilli wasn't there. So I say: "Albert, give me the bottle please!" He's drunk and he grabs me. I say: "No - Albert, please, the goldfish!"

Why is it that God gave him this aura that I like - and I was so excited anyway. His eyes. Only for a moment. All that running on the staircase. Tilli - Hulla! And as I come upstairs, there's lots of people there. And Rannowsky. And Hulla jumps out of the window, the moment he enters the room.

Sometimes there are mirrors that make me look like an old woman. That's the way it's going to be thirty years from now.

What a magnificently written moment. The drama and surprise of the chaotic atmosphere, the image of the fish floating belly up, the ridiculousness of it being more dear to Rannowsky than his wife is, and then the woman simply slipping out of the window - one barely notices it - this followed by Doris's reflection on (what else) how she looks! A selfish moment but one that conveys real despair that is somehow the world's despair, not just her's. That's what I found the experience of reading The Artifical Silk Girl to be. On its surface, the light, amusing text about a naive teenage girl swept by like the flow of a quick river, yet at any moment its tide might reach up and threaten to pull you under.

If you find yourself curious about Irmgard Keun, you might also be interested to read to what Isabella has to say about her After Midnight, which I understand Caroline is giving away at her site, which I link above.

Occupying Wall Street and what the Left has done for the American dream, (Books - American Dreamers by Michael Kazin)

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. - Oscar Wilde, 1891

Given the recent developments in the Occupy Wall Street movement, Michael Kazin's book American Dreamers is a timely one. It recounts the history of the influence that radical, leftist movements have had upon United States history. He allows that the very definition of the left has been historically muddied, as both Barack Obama and Noam Chomsky, who hold polarized views on many aspects of U.S. policy, would be said to be on it. Kazin's definition:

The left is that social movement, or congeries of mutually sympathetic movements, that are dedicated to a radically egalitarian transformation of society. There is, of course, a broad spectrum of ways to attempt such a transformation - from quietly distributing anti-capitalist leaflets on street corners to organizing a revolutionary army to smash the state...but the egalitarian dreamers who form an unbroken chain from the 1820s to the present need a common name, "Left" is what their counterparts in other nations would call themselves, and there is something to be said for adhering to international custom.

These radicals have been abolitionists, feminists, and labor organizers, socialists, communists, and anarchists, they have been evangelical christians, jews, and atheists, they have been black, white, and hispanic. As a political movement they have been plagued by

internal conflicts, a penchant for dogmatism, and hostility toward both nationalism and organized religion

and for this reason, Kazin writes, they have rarely posed a serious challenge to the ruling elite in either a government or economic sphere. However, what Kazin claims the left has been able to do is "articulate big dreams." They have given voice to those who felt alienated from authority and have given voice to their outrage, helping to accomplish (though usually as a catalyst or a "junior partner in a coalition driven by the establishment") the end of slavery, the passage of Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, eight-hour work days and the minimum wage, and a gradual expansion of our culture's acceptance of equal opportunity and equal treatment for women, people of color, and gay and lesbian people, even if these are practiced irregularly, opposed by some, and still have a way to go.

It is interesting, in light of recent politics, to watch the patterns in history repeat themselves in Kazin's book, since most of the news media reports on the obstinance of our ruling parties, behind doors dealing, the establishment of third parties, and the involvement of race and religion in politics as if they had never happened before. For instance, I learned in American Dreamers that in 1840, leftist activists founded the Liberty Party as a mean of opposing the agreement Whigs and Democrats fashioned to keep abolition from interfering with their competition for white voters. The party's slogan was "Vote as you pray and pray as you vote." In other words, they used evangelism to support a liberal position - quite a switch from its current use. But the new party would not stand outright for the federal abolition of slavery, eventually causing a splitting of the movement. Kazin observes:

...the schism of 1840 did reveal an inescapable aspect of left tradition, and that of any other ideological movement: the ongoing clash between self-righteous purists and anxious opportunists.

Indeed, the clash of idealists and pragmatists is replayed again and again in his book, as a seemingly natural outgrowth of the personalities of the players. Kazin's chronicles those activists in the latter half of the 19th century, for example, whose brand of religious idealism led them to preach against the exploitation of the poor by supporting the labor movement, a very different manifestation of the non-sectarian socialist movement that swept through Europe around the same time. The preachers of this "social gospel" included Edward Bellamy, whose novel Looking Backward might be considered early science fiction or future fantasy, as his wealthy protagonist falls asleep during his own age of class warfare to awaken in the year 2000

to a marvelous new America whose inhabitants live an idyll both efficient and harmonious. Every man and woman between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five is a member of an industrial army. As in any well-run military force, they receive instruction in "habits of obedience, subordination, and devotion to duty [I wonder where Stalin got it?]. Whether retired or active, all Americans now live in blissful dependence on one another. They do their wash in communal laundries, eat in communal restaurants, and shop with debit cards at vast communal stores. When it rains, they stroll along sidewalks sheltered by an unbroken covering that replaces the ridiculous single-person umbrellas of old.

Bellamy understood that most Americans mistrusted the very idea of socialism and sought to persuade them of its merits in other ingenious ways. He called his good society nationlist...Edward knew he had to rebut those who worried that incentive would wither in a society where everyone earned the same income. So the new America depicted in Looking Backward features abundant opportunities for workers to rise to higher ranks, where they practice advanced skills and compete for medals and other types of (non-pecuniary) prizes. Talented writers and artists in this imagined future easily find readers and audiences, free of censorship. And all citizens have a standard of living that, during the Gilded Age, was enjoyed only by the comfortable and well-educated. In Looking Backward, everyone dresses for dinner.

Kazin's look at a 200-years swathe of a variety of related political movements makes the choice to be broad. I think his best chapters the ones on labor and socialism. It is not included in typical looks at American history, for example, that when granted statehood, Oklahomans elected to their legislature six Socialists. Between 1908 and 1916 the party won an average of 12% of the vote. Certainly not the picture of the American West 100 years later. Kazin is good at explaining the appeal of socialism in various manifestations in the U.S., how it arose from its historical and economic context, and how the movement differed from its European counterparts. I find Kazin less clear-headed in the chapter on communism. True, communists were virulent foes of fascism early on, except for that little slip-up when they signed a pact with the Nazis.

Knowing that the tyrants in the Kremlin approved all these activities does not diminish their positive impact on American society. Rank-and-file Communists helped make the U.S. a more tolerant, more democratic society - and put pressure on Franklin D. Roosevelt and other New Deal liberals to dismantle barriers between people who were deemed worthy of government help and those who were not.

Kazin makes a structural writing choice in this book that does him no favors. The first five to ten pages of every chapters devotes itself to a broad overview of what the chapter will then get into in detail. The above excerpt is from one of those introductory paragraphs. However, he ends up making poorly supported blanket statements and covering huge tracts of time for which his reader may have little or not context. Although the chapter on communism covers the 1920s to the 1950s, he begins in 1939, skipping the period between the first and second world which includes the Great Depression, major motivator for those motivated to make choices on the right or the left. The above sentence struck me because, although Roosevelt is distinguished from the Socialists as an establishment Liberal (which he was), today there are probably many who would spin him and his heir Lyndon Johnson as practically socialists because they believed in using government to help the poor by employing them. Two pages later, still in his introduction, Kazin's best case for the Communist influence on American culture is listing writers, filmmakers and other artists who were in (or near) the party, who created in such works as The Little Foxes, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Citizen Kane.

...certain leftists who understood what the market would welcome attained an audience larger than any previous Marxist had found. The fact that Stalin was, at the same time, sending freethinking artists in his country to the Gulag or to death added a harsh irony to this episode in the history of the American left.

Now hang on a minute there, buddy. I can see referring to O'Henry's famous story about the woman cutting off all of her hair to buy her husband a watch fob which he sells his watch to get her combs as irony, this qualifies as something closer to tragic self-delusion. Once Kazin gets into the meat of his chapter, he offers a more nuanced understanding. The American CP made serious contributions to advancing democracy in the workplace, they were better at putting their money where their mouths were when it concerns the involvement of black Americans in politics than either of the ruling parties (this included putting a black man up for office in the 1936 federal election), and there is a legacy of valuable literature from people like John dos Passos, Richard Wright, and John Reed, and critical scholarship from writers like Irving Howe, Edmund Wilson that adds much to the body of work that helps us understand our recent past.

Kazin's covers 1950s - 2010 in his last two chapters, both periods of decreased structure for leftist movements in America, or at least, that is his analysis given the lack of perspective afforded by our proximity to these events. Kazin characterizes this period as one during which our culture's idea of whose voice counts broadened. He sees both strengths and weaknesses to the resulting identity politics that emerged in this time. The book makes a good attempt to cover recent events, such as the protests against the International Monetary Fund, but I feel its energy petered out at the end. Kazin's final two chapters had a wandering feel to them, but I found myself supplying my own coda. I was reading them amidst the ever-growing Occupy Wall Street movement which, although some criticize it for taking no positions, is doing exactly what Kazin said the left is best at - being a voice for the outrage of the disenfranchised - which has historically led to some of the most influential social-political shifts this country has undergone.

The book makes a strong case for American as a project of utopianists. This has had its costs but explains, for example, why our democratic system is forever pitting two extremes against each other instead of negotiating coalitions with influential minorities as European parliamentary systems do. On trips through the U.S. over the years, I've made a few stops at communities founded by idealists, like the Amana Colony in Iowa. It's an influential legacy for us and they are not all religious. I think I'd like to do some more reading about other utopian movements in the U.S. to understand this influence better. Do you know of any good ones to visit?

Bookish things...

As avid bookish folk, I thought you would like to know about the following:

Writer Sarah Salway author of the novel Tell Me Everything, a favorite of mine, will have a new book of poems published by Pindrop Press in March 2012. I don't know what it's called, but it is bound to be juicy. Check out her happily sensual Love and Stationary here.

Lucy Caldwell is an Irish novelist (Where They Were Missed, The Meeting Point) and playwright (Carnival, The Luthier, Guardians, Leaves, Notes to Future Self) whose work has been roundly praised in the English press but, I must admit, was unknown to me. Her The Meeting Point has won the University of Wales Dylan Thomas Prize, a prestigious and generous award for young writers given out annually on the poet's birthday. Now how did she write all of that before age thirty? This, her second novel, concerns a minister and his family, who move to Bahrain and have the certainties that have formed the basis of their lives shaken. I think I will have to become acquainted with her work.


The Bookslut informed me of an event in October about the author Irmgard Keun at Deutsches Haus, which does programming about German language and culture. The panel discussion and short film concerned the life and work of author Irmgard Keun. Who was she, you ask? Keun was German, born at the turn of the last century, and wrote fiction about her society and women coming of age through the Weimar years (between the wars), continuing as the Nazis rose to power. Keun's books, e.g. - The Artificial Silk Girl, After Midnight, Child of all Nations - both gave a less wholesome picture of women than the Nazi's desired and was highly critical of their regime. Consequently, her books were burned and Keun escaped to Holland. However, she missed her home and eventually snuck back in with a fake passport during the war. She survived and eventually wrote again under the name Charlotte Tralow, but without her initial success. The speakers: critic Ruth Franklin, literature professor Maria Tartar, and translator Michael Hoffmann, each read from her novels, and discussed their views on her writing and why it may have fallen from favor. It won't come as a great surprise that the event ended with my buying The Artificial Silk Girl and my friend Radio Woman buying another of her books. We'll trade when we're done. Thanks Bookslut, for the great recommendation! Anything else I should know about coming up?

James Wood had a wonderful essay in the November 7th issue of The New Yorker entitled "Shelf Life." It was an appreciation of his late father-in-law, written after emptying his large library. If you enjoy, as I do, features like Thomas's Shelf Esteem, through which we can imagine the lives of others through their bookshelves, this might be considered a more sober treatment of the same theme.

And finally, Chamber Four would like us all to know that they have just released the second issue of their very cool literary magazine, with lots of fiction, nonfiction and poetry. It can be downloaded in e-book format, if that's the way you do things.

It may be fantasy but it's not for sissies (Books - Tender Morsels by Margo Lanagan)

At a recent party of a friend I will call Radio Woman, the Ragazzo and I met two wonderful writers - Ellen Kushner and Delia Sherman. Delia and I got talking about fantasy fiction, her genre, and whose books we like and I found myself less than enthusiastic about a certain author she admired. What do you like, she asked me? I like dark works with language that can be either inventive or very straightforward but has a sophistication, and, especially if they're written for younger readers, I like writing that assumes those readers to be smart and resilient. I also generally like, if magic is a part of the story, that its use be integral and expressive about something in the world that we come from, not just a fantasy literary device used out of habit because other successful writers in the genre use it. Well then, she said, I think you will love Margo Lanagan. She was right.

Lanagan's Tender Morsels has strong doses of dark. The story begins with, if I am to be plain, a girl's physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her father and a gang rape. The book is graphic about the violence committed by its characters, whether it is intended to secure goods, make mischief, or have unconsenting sex, but this is not for gratuitous sales appeal, as on television and in film, without experiencing the true horror of Liga's circumstances, the reader would not understand why she goes to such lengths to escape. In addition, Lanagan creates a rustic, fantastical prose that both creates the feel of a specific time and place that is similar to this world and yet not of it, and also cradles the reader with its poetry, saying - you will be safe if you read these horrible things because they are part of a story told with intelligence and care, a story in which I am showing you that beauty is important.

"I'm reckoning I could have you here in the street and no one wuld stop me. Am I right?" And I grasped her bum-cheek again.

She turned on me such a face! If I had managed up a fist, it would have withered on me right then and there. It was not that she were cold, or angry, or scornful; it was that she were not a woman. She were not even a person. Her eyes were white as skylit windows; the wind whistled through her earhole, through her hollow head. I let her go. To be sure, where is the fun of outraging someone if they are not a someone, if they do not feel the outrage; if there is no rule to break, no punishment to risk? You might as well fondle a tree, or poke yourself into a hole in the wall.

A despicable character, but not everything in life is appealing,the very richest experiences in life have their dark side. There cannot be strong love without loss, nor growth without risk and that polarity of wild animal and intellect, safety and challenge is the point of Lanagan's unsettling fairy tale. Liga, having been battered by life before she even reaches 16 years old, creates through some combination of nature and magic an alternative world built only of her dreams. She goes there to live and to raise her daughters without the threat of violence toward them. In fact, she creates a world with no ugliness, no friction whatever.

Everything was reassuringly the same as usual - goodwives going about their business, greeting her here and there - and around and among them the mysterious affairs of men went on, which seemed to involve standing in confident attitudes together and talking earnestly when they were not driving cars or toiling in smithies and workshops. If she drew near any talkers, she knew, they would gently recoil, and glance at her and nod without greeting her, not interrupting their talk.

At one point in the story, Liga approaches a young man in her village to offer herself. He can do nothing but passively lay his hand in hers.

"What was that?" She was hot with fear. "What happened to you just now? To your eyes?"

"You asked too much of me, Liga." He lowered his eyes, but she had seen the sky rushing in them again. "I was not made for it."

"For what?" She hardly wanted to ask.

"To...to feel anything for myself. Lonely or no."

Liga was still with terror. The wind, the frost, and worst of all, the bast emptiness she had seen behind his eyes translated itself into his voice. If she could see them now, they would be blank as the moon.

The trouble is, that we all have some wild animal in us, despite our well developed frontal lobes. Lanagan makes this idea live in her story with her version of a bacchanal - she creates a festival in which the strongest men of the village in the "real world," upon coming of age, dress as bears and for a night the entire village runs amok. However, strong desires cannot be kept endlessly at bay in any world, and Liga's younger daughter, being a willful and impulsive 15-year-old, finally brings this conflict to the fore.

Lanagan's tale is one of healing, and I don't always cotton to that genre. Her tale can even be a little didactic, but the story is truthful, and the imagined worlds have great integrity. The circumstances she creates earn the flights of fancy she takes on and I was rapt with attention to this vivid and sensitive tale.

How a two-paragraph document written in 1917 shaped the modern world (Books - The Balfour Declaration by Jonathan Schneer)

The Middle East may at times seem a small and distant part of the world, but with a land area only slightly smaller than the U.S., a population of more than 200 million people, possessing 40% of the world's oil, and the birthplace of three of the world's major religions, its influence upon world politics is not to be underestimated. Yet, today's map of the Middle East did not come into being until recently. The contemporary borders and the names of the countries Jordan, Lebanon, Iran, and Israel were all created in the 20th Century. Imperialist England and France, as well as Russia were highly influential in drawing this map to suit their strategic needs. Jonathan Schneer's 2010 book The Balfour Declaration contends that this 1917 document, a promise to by the British Cabinet to establish a Jewish homeland in the Middle East, was really a means of manipulating Arab nationalists, the Ottoman Empire (which was allied to Germany), and the world's Jewish population (which because of anti-Semetic stereotypes was seen as much more unified and powerful than it actual was) in order to maintain imperialist domination in the aftermath of World War I. As such, Schneer sees it as the origin of the contemporary Arab-Israeli dispute, and his detailed account provides a strong case for this argument.

The strength of The Balfour Declaration is the sheer volume as well as the richness of historical context that Schneer provides the reader. It begins with a brief history of the region pre-1900 and of the nineteenth century persecutions experienced by the Jewish people. The next 100 pages provides background on the key players in the Arab political scene of the early 1900s, whose territories were often a collection of individual types of rule that served local tribes. The Arabs negotiated with the English because they wanted help defeating the Ottoman Empire. In turn, they accepted a vague combination of self-rule and European oversight via the Sykes Picot Agreement of 1916. This document written by Mark Sykes, a Conservative MP of Britain, Francois Georges-Picot, a French ambassador, and agreed to by Hussein, the grand Sharif of Mecca chopped up the Middle East in 1916 into regions controlled by France and England exclusively, those controlled by the Arabs but under British of French rule, and a territory approximating "Palestine," which they agreed would be under the charge of some sort of international condominium. The agreement is extraordinary considering the hubris of its power structure, a given in that most British imperialists' fantasies included the notion that people with dark skin were incapable of governing themselves, and how few specifics were worked out, particularly around the hotly desired territory that was Palestine.

The next 150 pages Schneer devotes to the story of British Jewry, who were (and in some ways ever are) divided between Zionists (seeing Judaism as a nationality and therefore a homeland as a sort of birthright, though not every Zionist of the time or this one requires that that homeland be in Palestine) and assimilationists (those who saw their Judaism as their religious or cultural identity but saw themselves as integrated and loyal citizens of their country of residence - England, France, Germany - and therefore as deserving of the protections of the laws of that land as any other group). Their primary representatives were, respectively, Chaim Weizmann and Lucien Wolf. Their advocacy on behalf of their positions, first to Prime Minister Asquith and then to his successor Lloyd George, and how they wished to ensure the protection of the law for their people results in rancorous debates within the Jewish community in the period of 1915-1917 on which this books focuses, but the story of the eventual outcome of The Balfour Declaration is an extraordinary lesson in diplomacy.

The Middle East in 1914, click on map for a larger format.

The remaining 200 pages reaps the reward of Schneer's careful sowing in that the fifty plus characters he introduced, their allegiances and enmities, the assurances they have given, and the secrets they have told come together in the creation of The Balfour Declaration.

The Balfour Declaration was the highly contingent product of a tortuous process characterized as much by deceit and chance as by vision and diplomacy.

That being said, one must invest a good deal of careful attention and either have a good memory or frequently consult the ten-page glossary of names to keep track of the leading players and to penetrate the web of their relationships and promises kept or broken. Reading Schneer's book is much like reading a Russian novel. I also found it much easier to remember European names which were familiar to me, than Arabic ones, which were not. After a while, I stopped trying to rush my reading and recognized this cultural blind spot as a playing-out of one of the racial relationships that contributed to this very history. Having done so, I absorbed a lot more of the context which allowed me to experience the tension inherent to the dealings in the swifter moving final chapters. I have to say, this is a dense book but I appreciate how well organized Schneer was in conveying his rich understanding of this critical two-year period of history, and I feel much better informed about how Middle Eastern and European opinions and actions laid the groundwork for today's embittered conflict.