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Sarah Goodwin-Nguyen’s Review of “The White Tiger”

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“The White Tiger” by Aravind Adiga

Reviewed by Sarah Goodwin-Nguyen

Free Press, 2008, 304 page      The winner of this year’s prestigious Booker Prize focuses on a young man’s rise from the slums of modern India. Balram Halwai is the owner of a taxi fleet; he is also a wanted killer. He tells his life story through letters (written in English) to the Premier of China who is soon to visit Balram’s city of Bangalore .  Outsourcing for American companies is the main industry in Bangalore, but Balram explains that this sort of entrepreneurship is not available to India’s lower classes, who do not receive proper education, and very rarely have electricity.  Balram suggests to Premier Jiabao that there is another, darker form of entrepreneurship alive and well in India in the form of criminal activity. 

As a boy, Balram excelled in school, a rarity for boys of his caste.  His family dubbed him “The White Tiger,” then pulled him out of school to work.  Balram’s station in life seems fixed, but Balram continues his education by eavesdropping on customers.  Eventually, he ingratiates himself to a wealthy family of landlords and moves to Dehli to become their driver.

Balram is treated as an object of convenience for his despicable masters.  Balram lives in a tiny, filthy room, and is on call at all times.  He is expected to give foot massages, care for the master’s lap dogs (who are better fed than he is), and endure any humiliation the employers see fit.  His immediate master, Ashok, was educated in the West.  At first, Balram admires Ashok’s worldly ways, but soon learns to despise Ashok’s inability to stand up to his father, his failure to hold onto his sophisticated wife, and his weakness for whiskey.  

When Balram is expected to take the blame for a hit-and-run which killed a homeless child (Ashok’s wife was drunk behind the wheel,) Balram confronts the lack of humanity with which the rich are allowed to treat the poor.  Balram describes life as a servant in India as “the Rooster Coop.” The entire class system is devised to keep him in.  He laments the complacency of the other servants and the arrogance of their masters who fear no retribution for their abuses. 

Balram is aware that India is changing, being influenced by Western capitalism.  But, despite promises by the Socialist government, the prejudices of an ancient caste system are still in place, and a stupendous gap between rich and poor remains.  Balram, recently saddled with a young nephew sent to him by his grandmother, becomes desperate for a way out.  He decides to murder Ashok, steal a bag of money Ashok plans to use to bribe an official, and drive off in his master’s air-conditioned Honda to a new life.    

Adiga has created a sympathetic anti-hero in Balram.  Balram is decidedly
not sorry for murdering his boss, or for stealing, or for abandoning his family who will probably pay with their lives for his crime.  How else, Adiga seems to asks, could Balram escape the poverty and oppression caused by India’s caste system?  The problem is not necessarily Balram’s lack of scruple: it is that a man locked in cage may try to tear his way out. 

Balram’s ambivalence is complicated by the fact that Balram’s murdered boss, Ashok, is not a cruel man.  He is spoiled and weak.  He bribes officials, sleeps with prostitutes, and drinks English whiskey because that is what men of his station do.  He is unable to relate to his thoroughly modern wife, or to be with the woman of a lower caste he once loved.  Ashok seems as trapped in his life as a landlord as Balram is in his as a servant.  

There is nothing magical or sensuous about the India of The White Tiger. The author, through Balram, offers a scathing portrait of a country rife with gritty poverty, corrupt officials, and elitist mores. Adiga’s Dehli is drawn as two very different cities.  For the rich, Dehli is a land of swanky malls and nightclubs.  Meanwhile, the poor keep warm with fires set in trashcans and urinate in the gutters.  The existence of each world is dependent on not looking to closely at the other.  In a moment of drunken indiscretion, Ashok visits Balram’s room in the servants’ quarters and is shamefully unaware that such squalor exists in his very own home.     

           Adiga-as-Balram is irreverent and sly.  He uses language that is suitably coarse and without poetry,  a counterpoint to more lyrical literature by Indian writers like Salman Rushdie or Bharati Mukhergee. Overall, the effect is a smart, engaging, and entertaining read. 

The novel’s one flaw may be its utter lack of surprise or suspense due to the narrative framing device;  Balram admits to murdering his boss at the beginning of the book.   Luckily, the novel echoes the mystery magazines enjoyed by Balram’s fellow drivers, promising “Rape, Murder, and Mayhem:” Though the outcome is foretold, the interest lies in the lurid details.  

Chavisa Woods’ Love Does Not Make Me Gentle Or Kind -Reviewd byPhilip Gounis

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          There’s a girl in New York City

          She calls herself the human trampoline

          And sometimes when I am falling, flying

          Tumbling in turmoil I say

          Oh, so this is what she means

                  -Graceland (Paul Simon

           It seemed eerily significant that in the same week that I first met Chavisa Woods, scenes of youthful violence and victimization filled the media outlets. YouTube videos of teenage girls in Florida bloodying one of their own was broadcast ad nauseum; over four hundred children of a polygamous sect in Texas were taken into protective custody; and Virginia Tech noted one year since its on campus massacre. A societal landscape of pervasive brutality and ubiquitous perdition. This also is the milieu of Woods’ short story collection, Love Does Not Make Me Gentle Or Kind. Her stories are at once a true-life chronicle of growing up absurdly in rural America and a surrealistic survival book on how to transcend the same.

              Readers may have trekked some of this toxic terrain before with writers like Dorothy Allison, but Chavisa Woods leads us through these narratives with a Doris Lessing-like metaphysical clarity.

It is the author’s understated, wise beyond her years psychological perceptions that are the binding emulsion of this collection. In response to an interviewer’s comment on this, Ms. Woods response was,” Don’t they say it’s the mileage not the years that matter?” Indeed.

    It is a mark of the writer’s syntactical brilliance that she opens this book with a textbook precise description of the honeysuckle plant only to then adroitly immerse the reader in the paradoxical childhood realm of vulnerability and acute awareness. “Where I was growing up, violence was as common as a sneeze”, Ms. Woods stated to me matter- of- factly. Characteristically the children in “The Smell of Honey” have become acclimated to an atmosphere of violence to the point where this acclimation has become their device for survival. This is a reoccurring thread throughout the book.

    The vivid characters and scenarios are depicted with such sagacious nuance, that the reader is drawn into a childlike vision of rich metaphor that belies the knife sharp actuality. It is both a trenchant literary memoir and a searing indictment of a pitiless society. “Sundown in the Land of Lincoln” tells of a novice African-American grade school student who realizes that “People were processing the information of him and trying to fit him into the category of human being, without compromising the integrity of their own status…” Later, his dilemma is only finally resolved with a magical jolt of cultural and chemical shamanism.  

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               By the time the reader reaches only the third story, “Kicking”; they find themselves vicariously enveloped in the complex vortex of adolescent sexuality. In just four pages, the writer vibrantly brings alive all the fear, anticipation and wonder of youthful physical discovery. All of this in what is ostensibly a short description of everyday playground shenanigans. This alternating sensibility of empowerment and vulnerability is the vehicle that transports and thereby transforms those who partake in all of Chavisa Woods’ art. It is an artistic statement that brings to mind the observations of French philosopher Jacques Lacan and his extensive explorations of his concept of “the Other.” In other stories, the female protagonists respond to their exploitation with a violent, brutal act. Mutilation or dismemberment is not disallowed. At the same time there is always a transcendent panoramic truth, both ontological and emotional that fills the page. 

       “Never Enough” is a narrative from her book that has a section that Ms. Woods often delivers as a performance piece. In it, the narrator, a female proto-punk dyke Holden Caulfield type declares: “ Or maybe I don’t believe in GOD anymore, ’cause my God was always talking about how he died for me and I had to die and be reborn for him all the time, or else spend all my afterlife dying, and I only have the energy to die for one thing at a time right now, and right now I’m dying for love. Maybe I’ll die for love right now, and later I’ll die for God. Or maybe I already died a little for God. Anyway. Fuck it.”

     It is in fact, the philosophical undercurrent of these stories that drive them and distinguish them from the genre of transgressive literature. And it is not as if these stories necessarily unfold in an orthodox linear manner. It is more accurate to say that the brilliantly descriptive prose barrels the reader through a Hieronymus Bosch like tunnel of images and deep perceptions. One rich in societal and psychological revelations. These seemingly shuffled chapters of one novel suggest progression and development simultaneously with freeze frame cinematic scenes that stop time for both the characters and reader. Beyond the constraints of linearity, the author is free to impart to the reader incidents in scenarios that are unbounded by cause and effect. What then surfaces and are truly experienced by the reader are the most profound of emotional and at the same time political truths.

            Chavisia Woods’ prose explodes the connection between patriarchal tyranny and fascism. It is within that spectacle of explosion that the contemporary American Zeitgeist becomes illuminated. . Love Does Not Make Me Gentle Or Kind is as much an indictment of the ignorant and sadistic among us as it is of the collective atmosphere of indifference that nurtures the same. What level of indifference must exist in a society that celebrates ignorance and pain? Is this indifference the only natural human response to an unfeeling, modern super- sized technological environment? And to what degree are these factors the result of a system of Darwinian economics? 

 

     Only the best narrative writing can provoke as this collection does. This is an extraordinary book. Woods’ impeccable use of language involves the reader in a high level of intense vicarious physicality, while it provokes an equally intense emotional and intellectual response. This is well crafted art in the form of effective, dynamic literature.

                                                                                               – Philip Gounis

To purchase this book visit:

http://www.amazon.com/Love-Does-Make-Gentle-Kind/dp/1930083122

Review of: Ma Jian, Beijing Coma, trans. Flora Drew (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)

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Jim Feast

Review of: Ma Jian, Beijing Coma, trans. Flora Drew (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008)

In Remembrance of Things Past, as we’ve all read, the author is able to recall events from the distant past with tremendous sensory detail after tasting a madeleine  cake. In Ma Jian’s Beijing Coma, a similarly monumental recall is instituted, not by an experience, but by a unique situation. Struck down by a bullet to the head, the protagonist lies comatose in bed, but, while unable to move, communicate or see, he can still think clearly. Being taken care of by his isolated mother, a retired singer, he has little to occupy his mind but memories, particularly of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests in which he was one of the leaders, and at which, when the military cracked down, he was shot.

Ma Jian, himself an exiled dissident, living in England, in this 600-page novel meticulously recreates the events of those seven weeks in the square. Indeed, some readers might find his documentation overwhelming. He lays out a massive amount of information on such particulars as coordinating the distribution of the donations of food, shoes, clothing, tents and electronic equipment from Beijing citizens; the setting up of a broadcast station at the foot of the Monument to the People’s Heroes; and the leadership infighting, including the setting up of a rival broadcast station (with a more powerful transmitter) on the opposite side of the Monument, to which the first group responds by putting their speakers in a van that can drive around the square, drowning out their opponent’s sound. Though the accumulation of facts is dense, if you want the inside story of how a small group of inexperienced leaders cope with an out-of-control, highly dangerous, yet historically decisive situation in which they attempt to bring greater democracy to an authoritarian regime, this book provides it.

There have been attempts to portray uprisings in literature before, such as Zola’s brief depiction of the Paris Commune in The Debacle and Flaubert’s depiction of the 1848 revolution in France in Sentimental Education or, for that matter, Malraux’s depiction of a Communist uprising in Shanghai in the 1920s in Man’s Fate. But, for all that, this is still an historical first. Never before Beijing Coma, has the story of a (failed) uprising been told with such intimacy and complexity from the novelistic inside.

One might say further that the novel gives more than a glimpse into how large social movements are generated and function, which leads to thoughts on their place in current history. Let me say a few words on that before proceeding with an evaluation of the book’s literary qualities.

The book makes clear that guiding such assaults on the state are fraught with hazards. Battling over who will control the broadcast stations is a minor skirmish compared to the three major internal disturbances that put a fearsome strain on the leadership. These are:

1.  A few days in, given the government’s total intransigence in the face of the students’  simple demand — the opening of a dialogue between upper echelon party leaders and student representatives — hundreds of protesters decide to engage in a hunger strike. This quickly gathers widespread national support, yet, also creates a rift in the leadership. As the food refusers grew to more than 1,000, their coordinators wrest power from the first wave of instigators. The new directors are taking charge of a much more complex situation in that the starving have to be monitored and taken to emergency tents or hospital when they pass out.

 2. Meanwhile, as the movement swells, copycat groups spring up all over the country and tens of thousands of provincial supporters pour into Beijing where, if they don’t move into the square, they have to be housed and integrated into the action. With this influx, there are eventually 100,000 protesters camped out in the public space. By the later days of the occupation, these newcomers vastly outnumber Beijing students and they unseat the current leaders so as to assume control of the protest. It is they who set up the rival broadcasting post.

3. Once it becomes clear, and only after it becomes clear that the Chinese Communist rulers are split on how to handle the rebellion, and so are not going to crack down immediately, do the intellectuals, journalists and professors come out of the woodwork and try to capture the movement for their own, more circumscribed ends, such as freedom to publish in foreign magazines. However, because of their prestige and clout, these people can be of significant aid to the students, and so have to be treated generously if carefully. This is shown when the students establish Democracy University in the square and need to cultivate prominent members of the intelligentsia as teachers.

And there is a big question here, posed and answered. What is an occupation?

A glance through recent history, looking especially at the 1988 Tompkins Square riot and the Oaxaca protests of 2006, reveals that the massive, lengthy takeover of a public space is the central revolutionary strategy of our time, involving the setting up of a shanty town of proletarian resistance and DIY squalor in the most sacred sites of the nation-state.

1.The Place Occupied:

It might be said that Tompkins Square’s Tent City was less provocative than these other actions in that what was under contest was simply part of a public park. The striking teachers in Oaxaca more abrasively set up their camp in front of city hall while the Chinese students were blocking entrance to Mao’s mausoleum and the Chinese Historical Museum. However, in other ways, it outdid them in radicalism insofar as, beyond simply occupying a public space, supporters squatted in abandoned buildings in the vicinity, all of which networked into a kind of zone of “liberated” real estate.
2. Outside Support

Also, in distinction from the Mexican and Chinese experience, Tent City received little support from the wider Left. While its longevity depended on the sustained, creative and large-scale support of the Lower East Side neighborhood, and its fame depended on the wide international and national news coverage it garnered, in the city its existence was downplayed until the riot. Even the Village Voice ignored it. Clayton Patterson has argued this was because the respectable Left was deeply allied to the city’s Democratic Party, which tolerated (since it jibed with the idea of planned shrinkage) while condemning this occupation. As he writes in The Front Door Photos & Other Artistic Reminiscences:

          It is interesting to note that the established Left was against us, because NYC was a Democratic Party city. This is to say that the Democrats were in control of all the housing agencies that funneled money into various (scanty) tenement rehabilitation programs. So all the abandoned buildings in the neighborhood were considered their turf, not to interfered with by the homeless or those desperate to get a roof over their head.
          I think because of the NYC Democratic Party adamant opposition to the squats even those who generally standing up for the rights of all people, such as Amy Goodman, were nowhere to be found.

Whatever the reason, as the book Resistance documents, only a few intrepid reporters, such as Bill Weinberg and Sarah Ferguson for Downtown, a handful of WBAI hosts and some lone cultural outposts, such as Steve Cannon’s Gathering of the Tribes gallery, stood shoulder to shoulder with the homeless and squatters.

The Beijing students, depicted in Coma, are not ignored, but attacked, by all the mainstream press and TV stations, which, after all, are under direct state control. However, they are embraced by the left, and all China’s most famous, older dissenters pledge solidarity. And, as we’ve seen, the students set up their own pirate radio stations, as well as printing their own newspapers to spread the word.

3. Rationale

Clearly, the rationale behind an occupation  is what Cloward and Piven call the “politics of turmoil.” This arises when a powerless group, (such as Blacks in the South in the 1950s), that is, a group with nothing to offer in trade to gain concessions from the elite, can still achieve limited ends by messing with the smooth running of society through marches, sit-downs, freedom rides, riots and other disruptive activities.

Felix Kolb in Protest and Opportunities: notes how this strategy was adopted by the civil rights movement:

    The actions of the civil rights movement in the early and mid 1950s were overwhelmingly locally organized and its tactics such as …. the sit-in best suited to address local injustices.  However, the civil rights leadership became frustrated with … the persistence of white resistance to any meaningful change in racial policies. … Therefore the subsequent tactical innovations – the freedom rides and the community-wide campaign – were designed to create crisis on a national scale, which would force the reluctant federal government to intervene.

In a parallel way, the Tiananmen Square occupiers offered a quid pro quo to the government. We will stop our occupation if you meet our simple demands, namely, that the government establish an open dialogue with the their representatives and that the university groups be able to set up their own student organizations, outside of Communist Party control.

However, when the first cards were dealt, it seemed the students had an even stronger hand than they would have subsequently, for they were counting on more than interfering with the everyday functioning of the system. The occupation was set up originally in anticipation of the visit of the liberal Soviet leader Gorbachev, who was scheduled to appear in the Great Hall, whose entrance was through Tiananmen. It was believed the government would settle quickly to avoid the embarrassment of having to drage the Russian through the hordes barricaded in the square. However, the authorities sidestepped the conflict by moving the reception, which precipitated the escalation into a hunger strike.

The disruptive tactics in Tompkins Square, to quote from Patterson again, were based on the following premises:

          The L.E.S. radical movement worked to get the homeless off the sidewalks to set up camp in Tompkins Square Park, which would make the problem, to which the government turned a blind eye, more noticeable. This Tent City homeless camp was impossible to ignore. It got plenty of news including international media coverage. We may not have had the wealth and power of the system, but we were a formidable force that gave out as many black eyes as we received.
          We felt change was a-coming. We did not see using the park as a Tent City a solution for the homeless crisis, we saw it as a way to force the city to deal with all of the people on the streets.

4. State Reaction

Now, to return  to Kolb, he argues there are three broad options a government has when faced with a major disruption. It can ignore the whole thing, suppress it or make concessions. The second choice, the  violence which eventually drowned the Tiananmen occupation with blood or broke up the Tompkins Square encampment, is not without cost to the state. Kolb notes, “Sometimes social movements have already aroused strong sympathy among groups that are crucial supporters of the regime; unless the protesters have a total outcast status, the use of force is risky, because the reactions of other aroused groups are impossible to predict.”

In any case, inaction on the part of the powers that be, neither suppression nor conciliation, for seven weeks in relation to Tiananmen and for more than a year in New York City, indicates the elite are split, something of which the Beijing students were well aware. They constantly speculate on the rifts between hardliners, such as Deng Xioaping, and more liberal elements, such as General  Zhao Ziyang, who was later sacked for showing to much sympathy toward the protesters. Indeed, the Chinese students’ first action, predating the occupation, was a series of marches on the square to lay wreathes for Hu Yaobang, the prematurely deceased reformer.

In the case of the period when the Tent City was ignored, I think divisions among the elite were not so much over the occupation as on how to deal with homelessness. After all, the city’s strategy of planned shrinkage depended on making the neighborhood unlivable enough so the poor could be rousted out (as a first step toward gentrification), and the presence of the homeless in the park was a help toward that end, even while it showed the city’s lack of consequential policies. The shrinkage plan, though, was partially undermined, when, instead of being scared away by the raggedy homeless, a large part of the  immediate community bonded with them and provided food and supplies.
5. Leadership/Tactical Shifts

We have seen that in Tiananmen Square, there were shifts in leadership as different groups became more prominent in the struggle. Steve Cannon has rightly remarked on the enervating and dispiriting effect of the endless infighting and jockeying for power that these changes entail. On the other hand, at least ideally, such a constant reshuffling makes for an estimable flexibility. And note that the leadership alterations accompany a shift in tactics. The pattern looks something like this:

Action 1:  march to the square to lay wreathes (which demands in leadership positions, parade marshals and coordinators from the individual universities).

Action 2: Tiananmen occupation (which called for a larger, more integrated leadership that dealt with information, provisioning, waste disposal, PR, and, at the top, negotiation with the government).

Action 3: the hunger strike (with a new leadership, especially concerned with the medical staff and health issues).

Action 4: the spread of the democraticization movement across the country and various student groups sending of representatives to Beijing (with the rise of a leadership more drawn from the provincial members, who need to integrate the incoming students into the evolving culture of the square).

I don’t know of a study of similar tactical/leadership shifts in relation to Tompkins Square, but, clearly enough, a new set of tactics emerged when Tent City was expunged, as new homeless emplacements were set up on vacant lots, supportive punk concerts were held and more rioting took place over the next two years. I believe a closer study would show a shift in leadership strata as new strategies came to the fore.

6. The Growing Threat of the Occupation

Even as tactics branched out and mutated while leadership fought and developed, the longer an occupation lasts, the greater are two central threats to the state. For one, as the occupation persists, it continues to develop chains of sympathy, which, as we saw, became particularly extensive in a case such as Beijing where the students are standing up against an authoritarian state, which most citizens join them in resenting, but whose power they fear too much to openly oppose. We saw also that as Tent City stayed in place, it gathered more friends and sympathizers in the surrounding neighborhood.

Second, as long as the occupiers remain, they hold a sacred space in a new status. It has been converted from a ceremonial or recreational enclave into a seized stronghold for living out a (at times carnivalesque) confrontation, which calls into question schemas of public/private as well as those governing private property. Even for those at a distance, it stands as a potent symbol of the limits of the system and the ability of autonomous groups to self-organize.
At this point, we can return to the novel, having, I believe, shown that it raises in an act of stunning imagination and translucent grandeur a powerful view of one of the towering incidents of our time (in the way that Tolstoy did with the Napoleonic conflict in War and Peace).  But Beijing Coma is a two-stranded story and, up to now, I have neglected the second string, that of the mother’s devotion to the care of her son, which involves ten years of feeding the protagonist through a tube, washing him, massaging and rotating his limbs, and emptying his waste jar.  This last, though, in one of the many comic incidents in the book, becomes quite lucrative when his piss is discovered to have medicinal properties and people queue up each day to buy a flagon, which they usually quaff on the premises, piping hot!

This is one of the mother’s only means of getting funds to pay for medical treatment, since she is existing on her small pension and, as she finds, no doctor can treat her son and no hospital admit him in that he is one of the now-stigmatized Tiananmen protesters. To try and bring him out of his coma, she is forced to rely on alternative practitioners and faith healers, and even with them has to use forged or unreadably smudged  medical certificates to explain his condition. She can’t afford the antibiotics he needs to treat his bed sores so has to buy outdated drugs on the black market.

She ends up connecting with Master Yao of the Falun Gong sect, a link that gets her into more hot water when the government cracks down on this group, underlining the fact that, by the time this new persecution starts, in 1999, there has been no let up in the state’s heavy-handed policies.

The mother is not saint or, could we say, she is a saint by inadvertence, since she constantly begrudges being homebound and condemned to endless drudgery by her son’s condition, and tells him she wishes he would die and put her out of his misery.

Truth is, riddled with flaws and weaknesses, the two main characters, Dai Wei and his mother, are believable, tinsel-less heroes. 

In other words, the novel is strong in the two areas that, before postmodernism, were considered the hallmarks of valuable work: a plot that wasn’t just exciting and surprising, but divulged something significant about how the world worked and the presentation of characters, who were not only vivid and credible, but are struggling with the most troubling issues of their time. Judged by those worthy criteria, Beijing Coma must be branded a triumph.

Sound Unbound – Review

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Aaron Hayes

When reading great thinkers, it is natural to wonder whether these people’s lives were any different from ours, whether their insights into the nature of reality and the world we live in allowed them some sort of super powers, or at least greater happiness, or something – especially nowadays with these intellectuals who can ‘see through’ the false images of society into the deeper forces working below us.  But I suspect that today, like any age, the philosophers remain blinded by the truth and so stumble around without actually doing anything, sightless oracles revealing to us the truths of postmodernism, etc., expecting something from those who act in the world, hoping for others to live guided by their wise instruction, to be able to understand the implications of what has been revealed to them.

Or maybe today might be different, in that the truths that are interpreted and discussed by the philosophers are precisely those forces and flows which everyone already participates in, and so the task is better understood as a coming to terms with what is here already.  Still, there remains a very interesting social gap between the thinkers and theorists in the academic towers, and the doers and the practitioners on the street level.  This gap, a strange fence which causes undue drag on the flows between the two preventing the otherwise natural movement, hides the fact that the dichotomy it hopes to perpetuate (pick your favorite name) doesn’t really work anymore. 

We all know that, yet it still operates.  It operates because few of us are able to move as individuals between the two.  We specialize in thinking about something, or in doing something, and taking up both as a task leaves our authority in either open to question.  But the answer was never really the generalist; the generalist could only draw diagrams (though valuable ones).  The answer lies in how we discuss, who we talk to, and what we talk about.  The general practice of talking to each other, learning, teaching, and playing in groups, requires some change if we want to get any of these flows of ideas to work right.

(Sound Unbound)

Without grasping the challenge facing contemporary discourse, it is easy to miss the significance of the recent MIT Press publication, Sound Unbound.  Edited by DJ Spooky (that subliminal kid), or Paul Miller, whichever name you feel more appropriate for an editor, this book contains interviews with composers, essays by important lawyers, cultural studies theorists, and many others.  The subtitle, otherwise known as the feeble attempt at thematizing an immensely eclectic series of essays (and a CD mix) is: sampling digital music and culture.  Sampling, the art of the DJ, is driven by musical aesthetics, and the aspect of intuitive groove among all the essays is perhaps the only unifying factor.  10 years ago, digital music and culture might have referred to a somewhat small and relatively rich segment of civilization (a nice, clean, focused topic), but today encompasses much more of the mainstream, and hence much more of the important, powerful, and decisive issues which artists create and audiences experience.

This is not to say there are no strong themes which unify many of the essays in the book.  Much of the work of Sound Unbound comes together to create a well thought out strategic positioning about intellectual property rights against the brutal legalism of the large media conglomerates who, in grand efforts of self preservation (or total domination, depending on your optimism or pessimism), are trying to criminalize the use of media in the face of increased technological freedom.  For those who tire of the shallow moralizing of the mainstream discussions of digital rights, many of the ideas in Sound Unbound are very refreshing.

Another common theme, though by no means ever-present, is a head-on look at the development of technology as it relates to musical creation and the changes of musical styles, not only concerning Boulez and the avant-garde, but also jungle, hip-hop, and easy listening.  Of course, the discussions of music and technology are an almost essential part of 20th century music history.  But this is not your average lab coat and thick glasses theorizing about the implications of spectral analysis on real time quadraphonic distribution.  Flowing naturally into these discussions come ancient deities and pop music producers, asking to be taken just as seriously as the latest IRCAM experiments.

In fact, one of the main weaknesses of the book is the contributions of Boulez and Reich.  Containing almost no reflections of any broad significance, the interviews and Riech’s introduction to the book read like some boring fanzine: ‘well, I used some technology, then I used some different technology, then I stopped for a while, and now I am using some technology again.’  However seriously one takes the other discussions of the book, it would have been nice to read the thoughts of these composers today, and not the same thoughts they have been having for 20 years (which, by the way, was 1988, in case some of you old people forget).

In an interesting way, this book is actually lacking in the traditional style of scholarship and the scholarly music – not through negligence, but in an appropriately destructive manner.  Sound Unbound is not a scholarly work, it is better.  In the past, these sorts of discourses were given voice out of some liberal moral obligation to let everyone be heard and respected.  But now, this book shows that the life of musical thought and thoughtful music can be found in many places, that the musical realization of our most profound ideas can be found in many other styles and practices than could have been previously admitted.

To illustrate the diversity of the book, consider a few highlights: writer Jonathan Lethem’s essay “The Ecstasy of Influence” traces all of its phrases to other sources; Cultural Studies scholar Dick Hebdige writes about the differences and similarities between US culture in the ‘60s and today; Google lawyer Daphne Keller writes about intellectual rights and copyright law; Philosopher Manuel DeLanda writes about the connections between evolutionary systems and musical systems; Artists Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand discuss their use of sonoluminescence in one of their recent installations; Chuck D offers some raps — and many more, all coming together, not in any thematic way, but in a much more subtle, aesthetic grouping which just somehow works.

Included with the book is a CD mix of DJ Spooky (who also contributes his thoughts via printed text).  This mix uses material culled from the Sub Rosa sound archives (www.subrosa.net) and contains samples of James Joyce, Sonic Youth, Phillip Glass, and quite a few other recorded voices and sounds mixed together in interesting ways.  The amount of information it contains and plays with is overwhelming, in some ways like the whole project, as many interesting ideas and sounds as possible fit into one publication. 

The scholarly validity of this collection of essays is of no importance; it creates its own validity by opening up a new way of connecting ideas and people.  As a consequence, it must be approached on its own terms.  If, in the end, the stories of crazy cyberpunk numerologists or the Deleuzian nature of dub and jungle isn’t accessible to you for whatever reason, there is still something for everyone.  What makes this book different is that these other voices are not so easily ignored.  Other worlds are opened up next to each other, and the flow increases.

Journey into Sadness

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      “Sight for Sore Eyes”

      recent work by Jeri Coppola.

      Black and white photography

      at Tribes Gallery through March.

 

“Journey into Sadness” Paul A. Honea, 3/10/00

 

As the title suggests, this show is in some way, the resolution of a journey. Through her use of several interesting techniques, Jeri Coppola transforms simple, ordinary images into a haunting foreboding landscapes of danger, sadness, and questions.

 

In a blurred photogragh of an abandoned farm house taken through the drivers side window, centered on the rear view mirror, she first displaces the perspective by shooting from slightly lower and forward, the hands on the steering wheel position. She then uses a grease pencil on the negative to exagerate the shadows in the farm house enhancing its damage, and completely blacks out the auto bodies frame, creating a looking at the shards of a broken mirror effect. These lines converge where the dash should be, in total darkness. The real mirror perhaps reflecting the setting sun, is burned a pure white, suggesting a motion from the light I have passed into the emptyness of the future. I am in the drivers seat. My hands control my journey. Is this where I end up? Normally, the sun over my shoulder illuminates what is before me. I can step or drive forward with confidence. Here, my assumptions shattered, I step back, from the void.

 

Continuing in the shot through a moving car’s window motif, are a series of seductive curves, at first glance a horizon of rolling hills, or an outline of a reclining woman. On closer inspection these lines are guard rails, serpantine white lines of demarcation. The division between safe travel and a decent into a gorge. The grease pencil erased everything else. We see only the boundary of one darkness to another.

 

On the floor, pasted on black plywood, leaning against the wall, is the image of a young girl in a white dress kneeling in front of an imposing brick house’s doorway. Looking down at her from a height similar to that of standing on the stoop, she is exiled, surrounded by a sea of black. The next grouping, is a vertical tryptic, of lakeside scenes; the first being, the prow of a small sail boat; the second, a group of waders; the third, people leaning on the guardrail of a pier. These images are mounted on heavy dark steel, set at an angle from the wall, resting on angle iron, here, the method of presentation detracts from the strengths of the photograghs. The choice threatens to drown, or overpower the sentimental beauty of the images themselves. In the first two, we are finally offered the chance to see something more than darkness beyond the dividing point, but we can not easily cross the guard rail seperating us from the enjoyment of sailing on the lake, or wading in its gentle waters. The last image, takes on a shocking significance as I realize the artist has chosen to violently crop through it at the eye level of the innocent veiwers. Their heads are lopped off.

 

Am I implicated? Of course. Do I enjoy it? Of couse not.

 

Here, I must ask a question of the artist echoing my view towards this show as a whole,”Is it that I can’t see beyond the lines because it is too painful for me, or is it because you do not want me to see?” Perhaps, I have a limited tolerance for artistry which displays tenative fleeting moments of questioning with such a force. I know a basic threat does exist, if we use images from our collective language, without concern for the other underlying, hidden meanings, which they contain. I just wish she, Jeri Coppola, could be a little friendlier towards me, as I follow her journey.

 

“The Nightmare and the Dream”

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Tompkins Square Park by Q. Sakamaki

powerhouse Books, 2008

 

Reviewed by Michael Carter

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“Tompkins Square Is Everywhere!” was one of the more profanity-free rallying cries in the battle against the forces of gentrification, waged in the alphabet blocks of the East Village from the late 1980’s into the mid-‘90’s. Q. Sakamaki’s searing and lyrical document of that struggle, Tompkins Square Park, provides intimate glimpses into the daily lives of the homeless who were encamped in and around the Park, and captures as well the then-raging conflict between neighborhood activists and police, which ultimately resulted in the expulsion of the homeless and the preponderance of squatters from the neighborhood, eventually ushering in an era of ultra-gentrification, sapping all but dry what was once a bubbling cauldron of cultural creativity. Dried up like a homeless encampment soup pot in the Park. Dead or long dispersed, as so many of the participants in these photographs. That East Village was a dangerous, messy and often altogether thrilling place, which now only exists in memories, a handful of videotapes, books such as Clayton Patterson’s Resistance, Seth Tobocman’s graphic-history War in the Neighborhood, pastel drawings by James Romberger and pictorial essays such as these. Sakamoto’s gritty B&W photos vividly capture the desolation, desperation, pathos, and even promise of an alternative subculture uneasily situated within Tompkins Square Park and environs, and the actions of a local police force that sought its demise.

            As someone who remembers well many of the subjects and actions depicted in these full-page bleeds, what is most compelling about Sakamaki’s numerous riot scenes (annotated, as are the rest of the photos, in a pictorial index) is the degree to which they present an ongoing struggle comprised of multiple skirmishes. Memory tends to blur the many late nights and precise faces of the participants on the barricades in Avenues A and B, as well as the particular “cause” of each protest. In this respect, these photos are an invaluable mnemonic aid: The abstracted fiery gyre on the book’s cover references a 1989 action for affordable housing for the homeless, but pretty clearly I remember being one of the protesters visible in the periphery, locked arm in arm behind that huge bonfire in the middle of the street, shutting down Avenue A much of the night, ‘til The Man forcibly removed us. Sakamaki assays that battle, as well as protesters arrested in the aftermath. Likewise, his empathetic pictures of the homeless in the Park, bring back faces and names, especially of the resident-activists of Tent City in the Park itself and later “Dinkinsville” (a lot off the park the homeless were allowed to inhabit after eviction from the park): mostly black activists like Keith Thompson, the late Terry Taylor and Ron Casanova, who sought autonomous housing and services for the Park homeless, or Tya Scott, who was burned out of her squat on 8th Street. (Of course a fair number of Hispanics were amongst the park displaced—such as the Puerto Rican poet Jorge Brandon aka El Coco Se Habla—and many were active in the squatter resistance, but Latino housing activists did not as a rule become involved in the early Tompkins Park struggles, except for some of the more civil protests and marches.)

            There also many shots of the cadre of (largely white) artists, musicians and politically-activist squatters who rallied to their defense, not only with protests but with public events such as 1991’s “Resist To Exist” at the now-demolished Tompkins Park bandshell–where no less than Jimi Hendrix and the Grateful Dead held forth in the’60’s. There, international luminaries like poet Allen Ginsberg and The Fugs’ Steven Taylor performed, as well as musicians of more local notoriety such as Stephen Ielpi and the False Prophets (along with David Peel, the East Village’s in-house protest band), and the ever-incendiary Missing Foundation. Q. also exposes the mostly concealed, bandanna’d faces of the more violent protesters and provacateurs, caught behind battle lines with their arsenals of empty bottles, and in full bombardier mode. While most protests surrounding Tompkins Square had peaceful aims and constituted non-violent resistance, it was these self-styled anarchists or their stooge stand-in’s who invariably set off clashes with the police, and Sakamaki’s photos utterly capture the queasy thrill of those dangerous moments. (But Sakamaki also gives us images of mostly white ladies arm-locked around the park in peaceful protest of the Tompkins Park curfew. The cops too make some compelling cameos, and one particular plainclothes cop, shown tackling a protester, brings back ugly memories.)

            For such a revelatory and rounded view of those times, it is curious that none of Sakamaki’s photos deal specifically with the signal event of that era: the Tompkins Park police riot of 8/6/88, sparked by the original imposition of curfew in Tompkins Square. Of course that fateful night, when cops covered their badges and went on a night-long beating spree of anyone within baton’s-length around the Square and adjoining blocks, has been documented by dozens of other photographers and in the videotapes of Paul Garrin and Clayton Patterson. Did Q. have the photographer’s “bad luck” to be out of town that night? Not exactly; as he recounts in an expository essay in the book; he was avidly shooting the melee when police destroyed his camera. “ I tried to photograph an officer who gabbed a girl by her ponytail and dragged her through the middle of the street; she was just wearing a thin tank top, and the ground she was pulled over was full of glittering broken glass. As soon as I tried to take out my camera, I was tackled by another cop in full riot gear, and my equipment was broken.”

            But despite any surviving photos from that particular horror show, Sakamaki’s shots of a dozen other street confrontations vividly evoke the atmosphere of chaos and violence that reigned unchecked that sweltering summer night in 1988. (I myself somehow managed to escape the fracas un-whacked, though they would catch up with me some eight years later…). In addition to Sakamaki’s own insightful Afterword, a brief essay by Bill Weinberg– a journalist who covered the riot and protests first hand–adds historical and social context, charting the forces and detailing events which would culminate in the ’88 riot as well as various confrontations in its aftermath, eventually leading to the violent expulsion of buildings on East 13th Street full of squatters by police with automatic rifles and an armored personnel vehicle in the mid 1990’s. Though the forces of gentrification clearly “won” the war, the aggregate effect of these protests did forestall the inevitable outcome for years and yielded small victories, as some Squats eventually won recognition from the City, and some community gardens were saved. Moreover, as Weinberg concludes: “the preservation of images from the Tompkins Square struggle itself provides some small resistance, at least, to the forces of historical erasure.”

 sakamaki-vacant-lot-guy-2.jpg             sakamaki-tompkins-square-may-27-1991-2.jpg                sakamaki-womens-housing-protest-2.jpg

            Sakamaki is an accomplished photojournalist who has also documented conflicts in Iraq, Palestine, Burma and Haiti, and the night footage especially in this book has likewise all the grainy immediacy of a war-zone, which indeed the fenced-in park and outskirts resembled when conflict erupted sporadically over the three years following the police riot of ’88; a veritable occupation zone with its own civilian casualties and refugees. His portraits of the displaced are as emotionally wrenching as the riot scenes are riveting: in one, a begging lily-white skin and bones figure (more than probably ravaged by AIDS) resembles a starvation scene from Darfur; in another, an older homeless migrant, also known as Julius the Dog Man, scavenges garbage for his many black dogs and himself; another shows a homeless man sits smoking in front of his makeshift hut, as if lord of all he surveys: an otherwise desolate vista of bombed-out vacant lot.

            Yet incidental, candid shots most evidence Sakamaki’s unshakeable empathy with his subjects’ humanity; one of my favorite pictures zooms in on a newly evicted young “white dread” squatter and his dog asleep on separate cots in heavy blankets; in dreams, they both appear to be smiling.  

 

 

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Review of “Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child”

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Review of “Scuse Me While I Kiss the Sky: Jimi Hendrix: Voodoo Child” by David Henderson
By David Blake

In many ways, Buddy Holly epitomizes the idealized 1950s. His geeky yet winsome bespectacled face. His giddy, earnest, and charmingly innocent music. Those lyrics telling of pure, proper, and just-so-wild teenage love. These characteristics provide the grist to untold reminisces of the decade, whether through Happy Days, American Bandstand, or untold Time-Life collections. Forget the turmoil, the social upheavals, and the disintegration of the so-called American dream family through empowered, rebellious teenage leisure; the 1950s is lily-pure, and Buddy Holly is its role model.

Of course, Buddy Holly is considered as such because, through tragic fate, he did not outlive the 1950s. He is eternally young, eternally a memory. Because he cannot defend himself, he becomes eternally an ideological figure, a figure whose connotations have unavoidably trumped his personality. Dead men tell no tales, so men with agendas do so for them.

The same can be said for the subject of David Henderson’s biography, Jimi Hendrix. Hendrix, of course, died in 1970, likewise cast in eternal youth. Unlike his contemporaries Eric Burdon and Eric Clapton, he never shifted into 1970s styles or shifted his guitar virtuosity towards mainstream lite-pop.  He remains stuck with his unkempt Afro and broad features, gazing with his lazily poignant eyes and asking: Are You Experienced? He has become inextricably bound up with the 1960s, the figure most representing, depending on who’s doing the associating, free love, peace, and a better world, or drug-fueled, Dionysian amorality. Hendrix, like Holly, has shifted from flesh and blood to spirit. His spirit, though, has been converted to superficialities no deeper than the posters on countless dorm room walls bearing his face and signifying nothing more than thinking smoking pot is cool because the parents are no longer there.

The task becomes for a worthwhile biographer, then, how to resuscitate Hendrix the person, and separate him from Hendrix the concept. This question is thankfully undeniably on the mind of David Henderson, acclaimed author and poet. Henderson had the benefit, as a young rock critic, to meet and talk to Hendrix before his death, and it would be an understatement to say he made an impression on the author. The book jacket exhorts that the biography is a promise to Jimi. Henderson clearly deeply appreciated Hendrix, not just his music or image.

It is this desire towards understanding Hendrix, not just describing his life, that drives Henderson, and that makes this biography an enjoyable and insightful read. Both Henderson’s obvious perceptiveness, as well as his poet’s sense of aesthetic and art, help paint a picture of Hendrix that sees him not as a Rock Star, but as a shy, awkward, idealistic young man who spoke better through tones than language and sought nothing more than to express himself and find inner peace in a forcedly nomadic and poverty-stricken existence.  Henderson teases flesh and psychology out of Hendrix, and does so in a way that reins in the idealization that comes part and parcel with such a task.

Nowhere is this desire to humanize Hendrix more apparent than in the opening salvo that attacks whether Hendrix died of a drug overdose. The morning of September 18, 1970 has remained a mystery, but the public assumes that Hendrix’s red-wine-and-vomit-stained end came from a drug overdose. This is of course not a neutral claim; implicit in such a judgment is that he died because he was a sinful, hard-living hedonist whose death is a lesson for the dangers of drugs. Henderson’s response on page 6, italicized and set off from the rest of his text, claims simply, but powerfully, “Jimi Hendrix did not die of a drug overdose.” During this section, Henderson succeeds in providing facts that throw enough doubt into Hendrix’s last moments to question his final moments. Monika Dannemann and Eric Burdon do particularly poorly under Henderson’s gaze. Towards the end of the book, Henderson’s characterizations of the Mafia, the anti-Black Panther movement, and Hendrix’s undeniable depression and exhaustion likewise call into question conflating his death with ‘60s psychedelic haze. By taking on popular accounts of Hendrix’s unfortunately most famous moment, Henderson lays his ideological cards on the table, saying in essence that Hendrix deserves better.

Henderson importantly never lets you forget that he was African-American, and that the difficulties in his childhood and during his days gigging and traveling as a sideman have racial overtones. He also ensures that Hendrix’s political stance is resuscitated from “free love;” his anti-Vietnam stance and relationship with the Black Panthers are emphasized. Henderson is also not an apologetic for Hendrix’s behavior; his drug use and sexual promiscuity are described matter-of-factly, as an important part of his personality and ethos.

Henderson is too poetic to write just prosaically, and his text is enlivened by his extended quotation of interviews with Jimi. These provide a way for Henderson to let Hendrix speak for himself. Henderson is careful to describe at length the publicly shy and quiet Hendrix as well as the at times excited, at other times exhausted public Hendrix. These quotations both provide direct insight into Hendrix’s thoughts (Henderson is thankfully aware that he can’t help but be a filter) as well as help tell Henderson’s story.

Unfortunately, one device that Henderson uses that is less successful is his insistence on turning Hendrix’s lyrics into stories when he describes his songs. Hendrix, by the author’s own insistence, communicated more authentically through his music than his words, both lyrics and speech. I feel that Hendrix’s lyrics should not be taken literally, but rather are sonically pleasant approximations and intimations of states of mind that Hendrix understands prelinguistically but fumbles at describing. Though Henderson, being a poet, is naturally drawn towards the written word, I believe that such lyrical focus does not capture the essence of Hendrix’s message. Moreover, his paraphrase of generally known material seems uncharacteristically clumsy in the midst of his generally assured prose.

A metaphor for how I consider Hendrix’s lyrics can be actually seen in Henderson’s description of his music. Henderson is not a trained musician, and his use of musical terminology is best digested figuratively, not literally. Painting music with words is a difficult, if not ultimately futile task (if it wasn’t, why would music be so powerful and mysterious?). Henderson gets around this by describing the music not through rigorous analysis and carefully placed description, but through grasping gestures whose spirit seems to mesh well with Hendrix’s gestures. More care with accurate use of musical terms would be appreciated, but Henderson understands well that, when clarity isn’t possible, the aesthetic of the word/prosodic gesture can communicate just as effectively. Hendrix’s lyrics are likewise predicated on the aesthetic of his words, and it would have been better for Henderson to deal with them on that level.

Despite these misgivings, I found Henderson’s prose illuminating, provocative, and edifying. While Hendrix will always be ideological, Henderson’s portrayal is as realistic and sensitive as can be expected, and accurately challenges the myths that have grown in the nearly four decades since his death. One has the sense of the man, his charms and flaws, outside the psychedelic smoke clouds that surround this decade. We need all the help we can get to keep from superficial mythmaking of the 1960s, perhaps the most lionized decade in recent memory, and Henderson does an admirable job towards this goal.

America’s Child

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AMERICA’S CHILD by Susan Sherman

       reviewed by Bonny Finberg

The phenomenon of the Sixties did not arrive via Zeus’s head, pre-fab with a face and a name. It was the frisson created between dissidents and revolutionary thinkers, from both the political and cultural spheres, and the powers that be. And let’s not forget those whose survival depends on the powers that be, at any time in history, which covers just about everybody.

The Sixties were a bend in the river—-a river that seems to be in danger of going the way of the Rio Grande—dried up. Susan Sherman traces the gathering currents of this river at the confluence between some of its major tributaries. For her it begins in Los Angeles in the Forties and Fifties, which was by then the heart of America’s image-making machine. Her transformation follows the larger social trajectory of a country that rose victorious and prosperous from a world war. First are her frustrated early attempts to keep step with the world of toothpaste smiles, tidy lawns, backyard barbeques, martini cocktail hours, and non-filtered cigarettes. With her move to Berkley at nineteen, and the ensuing, age-specific progression of influences, relationships and their resulting liberations and limitations, she begins her five-decade investigation into political and social change and the power and beauty of language.

America’s Child, Susan Sherman’s moving and engaging book, begins in a movie theater watching the documentary “Control Room.” This takes her back to a memory of sitting in a similar room in Havana in 1969. As one of a small group of Americans among a larger group of Vietnamese students, she watches a documentary about the American bombing of North Vietnam. There is footage of an American plane being shot down. The audience, both her American companions and the Vietnamese, applauds and cheers wildly. In her characteristic way, Sherman doesn’t leave it at that. She reminds us that she is recalling these events from an older and wiser place, explaining that she remained silent, feeling conspicuous and conflicted. This is very much a personal history not an analytic one. We are never left to wonder about her perceptions and reactions. Her memoir reads like a novel where the depth of its characters and the way they initiate or react to events are windows into a historical place and time. Considering the current, sometimes scandalous, fashion of offering fiction as memoir, Sherman’s ability to weave together events and people provides the merits of both.

1969 was a pivotal year of the 1960’s. It was post May ’68 when it could be said that the Flower Children went postal. It was many complications after the underground burblings of a few, isolated individuals found each other and began constructing communities made up of intellectual revolutionaries dedicated to social change. By 1969 the media had created its own version of “rebellious youth,” Hippy Fashion had pervaded large department store windows and had taken root in the very suburban lifestyles it meant to undermine.  Starting with that glimpse of where she had landed in 1969, she then takes us further back to Berkley 1958. We are allowed an intimate view of the awaking of a young girl: a developing poet increasingly involved in acts of peaceful civil disobedience, also discovering that she loves women. Her romantic enthusiasm, not yet fully activated, had yet to find its wave. At what point might she have realized she was part of its force?

In 1958 “Nonconformist” had become a buzzword for a relatively small group of ”free thinkers” and dissenters. They challenged the material and social achievements of the post-war middle class, threatening to dismantle most of the fundamental beliefs in the American ideal. The American character had transformed itself from the struggling, industrious, average Joe into the white-collar corporate ideal living a cookie cutter, suburban lifestyle. This was actually just an updated version of the poor worker enslaved by 19th century industrialists transplanted into the expanding corporate, service industry structure. The only difference was that now the slaves wore grey flannel suits and ties. This new group of bearded, long-haired people who didn’t clean under their nails or wear make-up saw themselves as the true “rugged individualists”—Americans who would exercise, and, thereby protect, the U.S. Constitution as fervently as any Conservative Republican ever claimed to.

Sherman sets out to bridge the separation in time between who she was and who she has become. The turning point for her is moving to Berkley where she fortuitously meets and lives with the poet Diane Wakowski and her lover, avant guarde musician, La Monte Young, also students at the University. Wakowski and Young take a somewhat protective role, much like surrogate parents. The apartment building on Telegraph Avenue is filled with artists and writers who pass their work around, reading aloud in dark, candle-lit rooms strewn with empty bottles of cheap jug wine. This living situation provided a sense of finally having found one’s true family. It was as if, despite having grown up with one’s birth parents, feeling you’ve been left with foster parents, you now discover a new, exotic life—the one you can and will choose:

 

To discover the world you have known since childhood is not the only world is probably the most important discovery in a person’s life, because it is to discover the possibility of, not one, but many alternatives. It is to discover the possibility of choice.

 

Of course this was at a time when the American economy was booming and it was possible to work just enough to pay your rent and live on the fringe if you didn’t mind eating rice and beans and whatever you might be able to shoplift now and then. It was a generation that prided itself on rejection of TV and advertising, creating its own, alternative media. The phenomenon of the internet might not have evolved in the free-for-all, anarchistic way it did, at least in its early days, without the preceding flood of grassroots media, like The East Village Other, WBAI, street and avant guard theater, most importantly, the Living Theater, decades before. Art and literature thrived with new blood and ideas; movements were started. There was cross germination among writers, painters, dancers and musicians. It was a time of prolific cultural activity in the company of acute political self-education. The Living Theater, the Performance Group, Joe Chaiken’s Open Theater, Larry Rivers, Jasper Johns, La Monte Young, Charlotte Mormon and Fluxus. Among these was Sherman’s IKON magazine. The struggles with financing and governmental surveillance that she describes, the dedication and sacrifice often required for survival, can be applied to all radical artistic venues of that time. Although the Beats had become an icon to the mainstream by then, they still lived and worked within this larger community of poets, visual and performance artists, part of a bigger wave. In a sense it was America’s Renaissance. But, unlike the earlier European one, it flourished in opposition to the Church and wealthy elite, rather than its sponsorship. 

Herbert Marcuse had written “Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory” less than twenty years before Susan Sherman entered Berkley. But these students and artists had incorporated the idea, whether knowingly or not, that only rational thought should determine the rights and freedoms of the individual, a member of a species whose determining characteristic is the capacity for reason, or rational thought. In the midst of this cultural renaissance and political awaking were sources of moral outrage. Desegregation of the schools had been unanimously voted as upholding the 14th amendment of Equal Protection Under the Law in 1954. However, true racial integration would still be a long way off.

The overriding issue was the Vietnam War. Feminism and Gender Politics would eventually grow out of the internal struggles of the movement itself, but in the early stages the perception was that an illegal and immoral war stood for all that was wrong in Western society and economic policy. Sherman’s journeys to Cuba, for example, proved to be not only moving experiences for her on a social and interpersonal level, but on a more practical one as well. Doctors in New York had diagnosed her with an enlarged gall bladder and duodenal ulcer, requiring a month long stay in a hospital. Having no health insurance, she was given some codeine and sent on her agonized way. On a previous trip she’d met Castro’s doctor, René Vallejo. After some correspondence, he invited her to Cuba to receive treatment. It was on this trip, after her recovery, that she was given a private meeting with Castro at a gymnasium where he played basketball with his ministers after midnight, the only free time they had. They spoke for almost an hour about her experiences in a Cuban hospital and the status of the student movement and the New York art community’s reactions to the Vietnam War. The details of this dialogue make for fascinating reading. It is a rare, open discussion between the successful leader of a large revolution, maintaining order and his own power against the antagonism of a larger, more powerful nation, and a poet living on the Lower East Side of Manhattan struggling to keep an underground literary journal going against the antagonisms of the same nations. The accessibility of Castro to someone who had no name or status beyond a small group of young poets and activists is what impresses the reader as much as the discussion itself.

Sherman’s explorations, and it does almost read like those 19th century, adventurous journeys into untrammeled territory, covered every aspect of the richly textured time and place in which she lived. It brought her into contact with many of the major figures that formed our current perceptions, attitudes, values and artistic vocabularies. Her experiences with psychedelics, for example, are not merely the same tired hallucinatory revelations of many who tried to convey such experience, but are infused with her characteristic humor as well. She goes to the Fillmore East, a large rock palace on Second Avenue, to see a lecture by Timothy Leary. She’d heard some horrible stories about the man, but tried to keep an open mind. But when he instructs his audience to “Just pretend for sixty seconds I am the wisest man on earth,” she tells her friend, “I don’t have that good an imagination,” and heads for the nearest exit.

By the author’s own account, she sees her memoir as an imagined conversation between the girl she was and the woman she is now. Fortunately, for us, and for future generations curious about what the Sixties were all about in New York City, she has chosen to write it down.

 

-Bonny Finberg

June, 2008

 Paris

Reseña de: / Book Review of: Los detectives salvajes (1998, Editorial Anagrama)

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Los detectives salvajes (1998, Editorial Anagrama) Autor: Roberto Bolaño

The Savage Detectives (2008, Picador) Traductora al inglés: Natasha Wimmer

 Autora: Linda M. Rodríguez Guglielmoni, Catedrática, Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. Dirección: P.O.Box 5959, Mayagüez, PR 00681. Correo electrónico: lindamgug@yahoo.com

          Al igual que Bolaño, yo he sido poeta, aunque me gusta decir que escribo narraciones en prosa. Y hablando desde una perspectiva personal, para un poeta, escribir en prosa, representa un experimento. Es un experimento que incluye la precisión de la palabra y las estructuras poéticas, y que de alguna forma descubre las vías misteriosas del pensamiento humano—porque como Freud ya había observado en sus apuntes sobre los escritores creativos, fueron los poetas que inventaron el subconsciente. El psicoanalista europeo nos dice que los poetas se otorgan un permiso amplio, un permiso para soñar despiertos, como todos lo hicimos durante nuestra infancia. Además, añade que el escritor creativo es como un niño que juega… crea un mundo de fantasía que considera seriamente… que invierte con gran emoción… mientras se mantiene separado de la realidad. En este punto sobre la realidad deseo diferir, o divagar, si desean: es cierto que el escritor se mantiene aislado de todo mientras compone su obra, pero le duele agudamente la separación y desea, con ansias, ser parte de la realidad, la realidad que espera ser descubierta fuera de las puertas y ventanas de su estudio de trabajo. Así regresamos a la narración de Bolaño, su novela Los detectives salvajes, que con precisión científica, capítulo tras capítulo, lleva a cabo un experimento que debe repetir para verificar resultados. Entonces podemos decir que Los detectives salvajes aparenta tener como objetivo penetrar una vasta realidad, una realidad ridículamente humana.

 

          Y me imagino que como Bolaño, quien fue un lector hambriento y hasta llegó a robar libros cuando joven, cuando yo leí a García Márquez y su obra, Cien Años de Soledad, se me abrieron los ojos junto a todos mis otros sentidos. Por otro lado, a la misma vez me sentí caer en el sueño sofocado de una América Latina y un Caribe atrapados en el tiempo y en su geografía. Sí, una América Latina y una cuenca de islas, atrapadas ambas entre la jungla voraz, bella y triste como aquella que circunda la Garganta del Diablo en Iguazú, y la jungla de una historia aún más voraz, llena de precipicios por donde a menudo todavía hoy nos tiramos con abandono. Como todo lector joven con sueños de transformarme en escritor, yo también consumí a los autores del Boom y del post-Boom, pero sin olvidar, entre otros, a los maestros del Siglo de Oro y a los novelistas ingleses de los siglos 18 y 19; Fielding, y su Tom Jones, siendo mi favorito. En resumen, menciono estos datos biográficos para decir que al leer a Bolaño me encuentro entre una gran pasión, esa locura excesiva del que ha leído tanto (o tal vez demasiado como el personaje Don Quijote) y convierte su obra textual, y su vida, en un tipo de performance.

 

          En el Caribe, el performance es el pan de nuestro diario vivir, de nuestro sudor-ardor y nuestra falta de electricidad y agua potable, y políticas que no nos permiten ni arreglar los huecos-cráteres en las calles. Nuestro performance es uno que se filtra entre las líneas de nuestra literatura y que convierte a nuestros mejores textos en algo extraño. Sobre esta situación el escritor y crítico cubano Benítez Rojo ha observado en su libro, La isla que se repite:

 

…el texto caribeño muestra los rasgos de la cultura supersincrética de donde emerge. Es, sin duda, un consumado performer que acude a las más aventuradas improvisaciones para no dejarse atrapar por su propia textualidad. En su más espontánea expresión puede referirse al carnaval, la gran fiesta del Caribe que se dispersa a través de los más variados sistemas de signos: música, canto, baile, mito, lenguaje, comida, vestimenta, expresión corporal.[1]

 

De hecho, la obra de Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes, recientemente traducida por la norteamericana Natasha Wimmer—quien ha dicho que en América Latina ser escritor significa ser un revolucionario, o por lo menos un reaccionario—es un libro que se debe leer como acto sincrético. Ahora, como crítica literaria especialista en el Caribe, propongo que Los detectives salvajes se debe leer como carnavalesca revolución de la narratología y que recoge y funde toda una gama de signos contemporáneos y transnacionales.

 

          Y para los que todavía no han participado de un carnaval, les recomiendo aquel que se organiza todas las primaveras en Ponce, ciudad al sur de Puerto Rico donde yo me crié. Es un carnaval rigurosamente estructurado tal como la novela de Bolaño. Y como en Los detectives salvajes, en el carnaval ponceño, lo que parece ser excesivo y peligroso, los jóvenes enmascarados, vestidos de vejigantes en las calles y plazas, en realidad están al servicio de la corte del Rey Momo y su reina. Así, es en la novela de Bolaño, todos los textos están al servicio de un relato mayor, yo diría, un pensamiento mayor: el concepto del abismo, la idea que la vida misma nos utiliza y nos olvida. Y como la novela de Bolaño, el carnaval ponceño finaliza, aparentemente con una muerte, eso es, se lleva a cabo el Entierro de la Sardina—fiesta de origen pagano que en algunas tradiciones se dice da principio a la Cuaresma y a la prohibición de comer carne o asegura un año de buenas pescas y que atrajo el pincel de Francisco de Goya en el siglo XIX—mientras que Los detectives salvajes finaliza con la escena callejera de un tiroteo, de sangre y de un muerto, el cadáver de Cesárea Tinajero. Pero si quiero ser absolutamente sincera, debo decir que la novela aparentemente termina con una escena de muerte. En realidad, como exitoso carnaval, el texto de Bolaño termina prometiendo más, más vida, más viaje, más sueño y subconsciente, ¿pues, y qué otra cosa puede significar ese rectángulo evanescente, bordes entrecortados, en la última pagina de la novela?

 

 Los detectives salvajes es un texto revelador que permite al lector recorrer íntimamente el mundo de los literatos y aventureros. Tal vez vivir unos momentos junto a aquellos que se sienten en un estado de estrés causado por la misma literatura y los que han triunfado en este ámbito, como es el caso de Clara Cabeza, secretaria de Octavio Paz, que se nos presenta en el capítulo 24. Clara nos revela sufrir de un incesante dolor de cabeza a la misma vez que nos explica el proceso tedioso de clasificación, incluyendo una pila titulada marginalia excentricorum, de la correspondencia del laureado. Y cuando Clara finaliza su narración nos encontramos con Jacobo Urenda, en el capítulo 25, quien nos lleva, como Joseph Conrad, a través de una prosa fotográfica, al corazón de África, o sea, al corazón del aventurero-periodista-fotógrafo quien se siente más vivo que nunca cuando se encuentra entre la muerte misma y cae en un estado de sueño cada vez que regresa a París.    

 

En Los detectives salvajes, a través de anécdotas y anotaciones, conversaciones y curiosidades, datos y dibujos, vamos conociendo el mundo que nos ha tocado vivir, un mundo en transformación, tal vez hacia un destape ilimitado, sin fronteras físicas ni sicológicas. La novela nos presenta un mundo que nos podría arrastrar hacia el abismo, el colapso, el locus, donde de acuerdo a Bolaño, encontraremos la cura a nuestra condición humana. En conclusión, tengo que decir que en realidad me sorprende que esta obra de Bolaño no se haya considerado, por lo menos momentáneamente, un extraño desastre, como fue el caso de Moby Dick de Melville. Pero, ¿y cuándo ha sido la relación entre los críticos y los escritores una de felicidad? Nada, para los que tengan paciencia y curiosidad, la novela de Bolaño, como toda gran obra de arte, crea su propio universo, y como niño soñador, una serie de imágenes honestas e interesantes. Bolaño, como gran conversador, logra que su libro signifique para el lector ser partícipe de una fascinante tertulia de cómicas y trágicas divagaciones que logran transformarse en una espontánea mezcla de géneros. Abrir este libro de casi mil páginas es entrar a una especie de laberinto claro que ofrece como guía a un mago de la palabra. El lector que desee auto-reconocerse y en este viaje sonreírse, debe adentrarse en Los detectives salvajes.

 

 

Autora: Linda M. Rodríguez Guglielmoni, Catedrática, Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. Dirección: P.O.Box 5959, Mayagüez, PR 00681. Correo electrónico: lindamgug@yahoo.com



[1]Antonio Benítez Rojo, La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna, Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1989: xxxviii.

Reseña de: / Book Review of:

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Los detectives salvajes (1998, Editorial Anagrama) Autor: Roberto Bolaño

The Savage Detectives (2008, Picador) Traductora al inglés: Natasha Wimmer

 

 

 

          Al igual que Bolaño, yo he sido poeta, aunque me gusta decir que escribo narraciones en prosa. Y hablando desde una perspectiva personal, para un poeta, escribir en prosa, representa un experimento. Es un experimento que incluye la precisión de la palabra y las estructuras poéticas, y que de alguna forma descubre las vías misteriosas del pensamiento humano—porque como Freud ya había observado en sus apuntes sobre los escritores creativos, fueron los poetas que inventaron el subconsciente. El psicoanalista europeo nos dice que los poetas se otorgan un permiso amplio, un permiso para soñar despiertos, como todos lo hicimos durante nuestra infancia. Además, añade que el escritor creativo es como un niño que juega… crea un mundo de fantasía que considera seriamente… que invierte con gran emoción… mientras se mantiene separado de la realidad. En este punto sobre la realidad deseo diferir, o divagar, si desean: es cierto que el escritor se mantiene aislado de todo mientras compone su obra, pero le duele agudamente la separación y desea, con ansias, ser parte de la realidad, la realidad que espera ser descubierta fuera de las puertas y ventanas de su estudio de trabajo. Así regresamos a la narración de Bolaño, su novela Los detectives salvajes, que con precisión científica, capítulo tras capítulo, lleva a cabo un experimento que debe repetir para verificar resultados. Entonces podemos decir que Los detectives salvajes aparenta tener como objetivo penetrar una vasta realidad, una realidad ridículamente humana.

 

          Y me imagino que como Bolaño, quien fue un lector hambriento y hasta llegó a robar libros cuando joven, cuando yo leí a García Márquez y su obra, Cien Años de Soledad, se me abrieron los ojos junto a todos mis otros sentidos. Por otro lado, a la misma vez me sentí caer en el sueño sofocado de una América Latina y un Caribe atrapados en el tiempo y en su geografía. Sí, una América Latina y una cuenca de islas, atrapadas ambas entre la jungla voraz, bella y triste como aquella que circunda la Garganta del Diablo en Iguazú, y la jungla de una historia aún más voraz, llena de precipicios por donde a menudo todavía hoy nos tiramos con abandono. Como todo lector joven con sueños de transformarme en escritor, yo también consumí a los autores del Boom y del post-Boom, pero sin olvidar, entre otros, a los maestros del Siglo de Oro y a los novelistas ingleses de los siglos 18 y 19; Fielding, y su Tom Jones, siendo mi favorito. En resumen, menciono estos datos biográficos para decir que al leer a Bolaño me encuentro entre una gran pasión, esa locura excesiva del que ha leído tanto (o tal vez demasiado como el personaje Don Quijote) y convierte su obra textual, y su vida, en un tipo de performance.

 

          En el Caribe, el performance es el pan de nuestro diario vivir, de nuestro sudor-ardor y nuestra falta de electricidad y agua potable, y políticas que no nos permiten ni arreglar los huecos-cráteres en las calles. Nuestro performance es uno que se filtra entre las líneas de nuestra literatura y que convierte a nuestros mejores textos en algo extraño. Sobre esta situación el escritor y crítico cubano Benítez Rojo ha observado en su libro, La isla que se repite:

 

…el texto caribeño muestra los rasgos de la cultura supersincrética de donde emerge. Es, sin duda, un consumado performer que acude a las más aventuradas improvisaciones para no dejarse atrapar por su propia textualidad. En su más espontánea expresión puede referirse al carnaval, la gran fiesta del Caribe que se dispersa a través de los más variados sistemas de signos: música, canto, baile, mito, lenguaje, comida, vestimenta, expresión corporal.[1]

 

De hecho, la obra de Bolaño, Los detectives salvajes, recientemente traducida por la norteamericana Natasha Wimmer—quien ha dicho que en América Latina ser escritor significa ser un revolucionario, o por lo menos un reaccionario—es un libro que se debe leer como acto sincrético. Ahora, como crítica literaria especialista en el Caribe, propongo que Los detectives salvajes se debe leer como carnavalesca revolución de la narratología y que recoge y funde toda una gama de signos contemporáneos y transnacionales.

 

          Y para los que todavía no han participado de un carnaval, les recomiendo aquel que se organiza todas las primaveras en Ponce, ciudad al sur de Puerto Rico donde yo me crié. Es un carnaval rigurosamente estructurado tal como la novela de Bolaño. Y como en Los detectives salvajes, en el carnaval ponceño, lo que parece ser excesivo y peligroso, los jóvenes enmascarados, vestidos de vejigantes en las calles y plazas, en realidad están al servicio de la corte del Rey Momo y su reina. Así, es en la novela de Bolaño, todos los textos están al servicio de un relato mayor, yo diría, un pensamiento mayor: el concepto del abismo, la idea que la vida misma nos utiliza y nos olvida. Y como la novela de Bolaño, el carnaval ponceño finaliza, aparentemente con una muerte, eso es, se lleva a cabo el Entierro de la Sardina—fiesta de origen pagano que en algunas tradiciones se dice da principio a la Cuaresma y a la prohibición de comer carne o asegura un año de buenas pescas y que atrajo el pincel de Francisco de Goya en el siglo XIX—mientras que Los detectives salvajes finaliza con la escena callejera de un tiroteo, de sangre y de un muerto, el cadáver de Cesárea Tinajero. Pero si quiero ser absolutamente sincera, debo decir que la novela aparentemente termina con una escena de muerte. En realidad, como exitoso carnaval, el texto de Bolaño termina prometiendo más, más vida, más viaje, más sueño y subconsciente, ¿pues, y qué otra cosa puede significar ese rectángulo evanescente, bordes entrecortados, en la última pagina de la novela?

 

 Los detectives salvajes es un texto revelador que permite al lector recorrer íntimamente el mundo de los literatos y aventureros. Tal vez vivir unos momentos junto a aquellos que se sienten en un estado de estrés causado por la misma literatura y los que han triunfado en este ámbito, como es el caso de Clara Cabeza, secretaria de Octavio Paz, que se nos presenta en el capítulo 24. Clara nos revela sufrir de un incesante dolor de cabeza a la misma vez que nos explica el proceso tedioso de clasificación, incluyendo una pila titulada marginalia excentricorum, de la correspondencia del laureado. Y cuando Clara finaliza su narración nos encontramos con Jacobo Urenda, en el capítulo 25, quien nos lleva, como Joseph Conrad, a través de una prosa fotográfica, al corazón de África, o sea, al corazón del aventurero-periodista-fotógrafo quien se siente más vivo que nunca cuando se encuentra entre la muerte misma y cae en un estado de sueño cada vez que regresa a París.    

 

En Los detectives salvajes, a través de anécdotas y anotaciones, conversaciones y curiosidades, datos y dibujos, vamos conociendo el mundo que nos ha tocado vivir, un mundo en transformación, tal vez hacia un destape ilimitado, sin fronteras físicas ni sicológicas. La novela nos presenta un mundo que nos podría arrastrar hacia el abismo, el colapso, el locus, donde de acuerdo a Bolaño, encontraremos la cura a nuestra condición humana. En conclusión, tengo que decir que en realidad me sorprende que esta obra de Bolaño no se haya considerado, por lo menos momentáneamente, un extraño desastre, como fue el caso de Moby Dick de Melville. Pero, ¿y cuándo ha sido la relación entre los críticos y los escritores una de felicidad? Nada, para los que tengan paciencia y curiosidad, la novela de Bolaño, como toda gran obra de arte, crea su propio universo, y como niño soñador, una serie de imágenes honestas e interesantes. Bolaño, como gran conversador, logra que su libro signifique para el lector ser partícipe de una fascinante tertulia de cómicas y trágicas divagaciones que logran transformarse en una espontánea mezcla de géneros. Abrir este libro de casi mil páginas es entrar a una especie de laberinto claro que ofrece como guía a un mago de la palabra. El lector que desee auto-reconocerse y en este viaje sonreírse, debe adentrarse en Los detectives salvajes.

 

 

Autora: Linda M. Rodríguez Guglielmoni, Catedrática, Universidad de Puerto Rico-Mayagüez. Dirección: P.O.Box 5959, Mayagüez, PR 00681. Correo electrónico: lindamgug@yahoo.com



[1]Antonio Benítez Rojo, La isla que se repite: El Caribe y la perspectiva posmoderna, Hanover, NH: Ediciones del Norte, 1989: xxxviii.

Rescatando a un Anti-Héroe – por Linda Morales Caballero

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luis.jpg
Luis Bandolero Luis
Walter Ventosilla
Paloma Ediciones
En Luis Bandolero Luis, el dramaturgo, cuentista, novelista y artista plástico peruano, Walter Ventosilla narra una historia propia de la literatura romántica, extraída de la tradición oral de las serranías de Perú, con rasgos costumbristas y basada en la vida real.

El personaje principal como el título del libro lo manifiesta se llamó Luis, nombre completo: Telmo Luis Pardo Novoa dicen mis fuentes, pero pasó a la historia como Luis Pardo, un héroe, anti-héroe convertido en leyenda. Nacido en Chiquián, provincia de Bolognesi en el Departamento de Ancash al norte de Lima, el 19 de agosto de 1874 y muriendo el 9 de enero de 1909, a los 34 años de edad.

Luis Pardo es el Zorro, o si se quiere el Robin Hood de Chiquián en la serranía peruana sobre quien han escrito poemas, himnos, canciones, dramas y semblanzas escritores como José Diez Canseco, Alberto Ramírez y Oscar Colchado Lucio.

Ventosilla, en esta época sin héroes reales rescata a Luis Pardo como a una figura de carne y hueso que se sublevó ante al abuso de los terratenientes de su época y quien, a pesar de ser uno de ellos, optó por la justicia comezando por casa, dando así un ejemplo a seguir en contra del abuso de los gamonales para con los peones.

En ese sentido la novela trata un tema actual, tanto en materia de justicia social como en la importancia de volver la mirada hacia las raíces y cultivar a personajes históricos, por lo tanto imperfectos y vulnerables, hombres que se sublevaron ayudando con su vida y sus actos a denunciar el abuso a los más desposeídos, y a la vez legando con su muerte la consumación de una historia que no debía repetirse.

El aspecto humano del personaje aparece en sus debilidades de hombre: mujeriego (medio misógino) y bebedor, las que no son disimuladas, por el contrario, incomodan y ocasionan al protagonista una tragedia irremediable de la que extraer una lección, para que al final quede la leyenda de un hombre imperfecto que intentó hacer algo bien.

La narración de la historia va en dos tiempos, uno en el presente y el otro retrospectivo. La cuentan dos personajes: uno que vivió al lado del bandolero los momentos más importantes de su vida, hombre de la sierra que se expresa con el lenguaje propio de su calidad de peón, y quién se la cuenta al misterioso alter ego del narrador, cuya identidad (aunque quizás sospechada en algún punto de la narración ) se descubrirá totalmente al final de la novela para rematar el desenlace.

Así como los medios y los juegos de video venden, especialmente a las generaciones actuales, héroes ficticios, Ventosilla encuentra a través de este trabajo el modo de reavivar la memoria perdida en una sociedad de globalizado consumo dónde las nuevas generaciones aprenden sobre héroes virtuales con capacidades sobre humanas; esta novela, por el contrario, trae al presente un mundo real en un espacio y tiempos aún vigentes en la historia.

Walter Ventosilla con su novela Luis bandolero Luis rescata a un personaje a través del cual los lectores de esta generación, o sea los jóvenes en particular, dentro y fuera de Latinoamérica, pueden conocer a un héroe de carne y hueso, y no sólo consumir a los “bandoleros” “justicieros” que Hollywood inventa y hace famosos para vendernos una realidad ficticia.

The Inheritance of Loss – reviewed by Sarah Goodwin-Nguyen

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“The Inheritance of Loss” by Kiran Desai

Grove / Atlantic, 2006, 324 pages

$24.00

Review by Sarah Goodwin-Nguyen

Kiran Desai’s second novel (after Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard) earned high

accolades including a Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award.  The Inheritance of

Loss examines weighty sociological themes like colonialism, revolution, and immigration.   To

do so,  Desai shuttles readers back and forth from a mountain village in Nepal to the back rooms

and basements of New York City restaurants.

The most engaging and immediate storyline involves Sai, a teenaged orphan raised in an

English boarding school who has come to live with her grandfather.  In her grandfather’s

decrepit, isolated house in the shadow of Mount Kanchenjunga, Sai falls in love with an educated

but lower-class boy hired as her tutor.

While Sai’s grandfather is immersed in his own memories, Sai is mostly looked after by

the grandfather’s devoted cook.  No one in the house suspects that Sai’s love, Gyan, has been

swept up in revolutionary spirit and involved himself with a loosely-organized, lawless band of

angry young men who call themselves the Gorkha Liberation Army.  The rebellion, which Desai

paints as stemming from an angry response to poverty rather than a noble quest for equality,

suddenly reaches Sai’s doorstep.

Gyan’s foolish betrayal of his young loverñinforming his friends that Sai’s house contains

firearms and liquor and has no young men to guard it– is not revealed immediately, though the

frightening home invasion happens at the beginning of the novel, which then works its way back.

This was a slight misstep on Desai’s part;  this scene is the most intense of the novel and would

have been even more chilling had we known Gyan was responsible.  That early on in the book,

the reader hasn’t yet learned to care for Sai or for the cook: the stakes would’ve been higher for

the reader had Desai waited.  It is the most engaging and well-written part of the novel,  marred

by an unnecessary, offbeat bit of timeplay.

Structurally, Desai also loses points messing with unnecessary subplots.  The main

subplot follows the tribulations of the cook’s son, Biju, an illegal immigrant in New York City.

Biju works in run-down kitchens, sleeping in basement apartments overcrowded with other

illegals.  He finds no reconciliation with his father’s expectations of life in America.  His father’s

misguided belief in the American dream is obvious in his letters to Biju, in which he implores his

son to help the sons-and-daughters of neighbors as they arrive to New York illegally by the day.

Biju avoids “the tribe,”–of course he has no work for them, no food for them, and no where for

them to sleep.   The author’s pointñthat it’s no fun being an illegal alienñis clear.  To top it off,

Biju is robbed by soldiers upon his return home, stripped of his meager savings as well as his

American clothes.    It’s an in-your-face reminder that Biju has failed to absorb anything positive

from his time in America.

The author also offers occasional portraits of Sai’s grandfather as he examines his own

past; first as an impoverished child, then a haughty young man being educated in England, then a

feared Judge and abusive husband to his wife-by-arranged-marriage.  The Judge is a frustrating

character who never repents his misdeeds–only that they come back to him threefold.  His

comeuppance is, sadly, at the expense of his gentle dog, Mutt, so the reader can’t even glory in it.

Bouncing between three major storylines is difficult enough.  Unfortunately, Desai didn’t

stop there.  Biju’s friend Saeed– a ladies’ man from Zanzibar –has his own tales to tell.  Much

time is spent observing an elderly, upper-class pair of sisters who live in Sai’s village as they get

ousted from their home by revolutionaries.   There is also Uncle Potty and father Booty who

accidentally run afoul of the law, plus a handful of other minor characters who frequently pull us

away from more layered stories.

There is a fine line between creating tension by interrupting a narrative at a crucial

pointñthe cliffhanger effectñand allowing a plot to lose momentum.   Balancing big themes with

multiple storylines takes a mature writer.  Desai mostly succeeds, but a more seasoned writer

might have excelled.

To Desai’s credit, she is ambitious and never afraid to take chances in her writing,

playing with poetic form or even shopping-list style passages.  When she is successful, she can

deliver a beautiful knockout of a line: “They took the toy train and went to the Darjeeling zoo

and viewed in their free, self-righteous, modern love, the unfree and ancient bars, behind which

lived a red panda, ridiculously solemn for being such a madly beautiful thing, chewing his

bamboo leaves as carefully as a bank clerk doing numbers.”

When her writing falters, the result can seem jejune:  “…the light shining through thick

bamboo in starry, jumping chinks, imparting the feeling of liquid shimmering.”  Nonetheless,

Desai is a novelist to watch, carrying her readers to an exotic emotional landscape.  Chances are

good that she will continue to grow as a writer, and whatever she writes after Inheritance may

well be her opus magnum.