I return to Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea
Ernest Hemingway

I am a feminist. And I am a Hemingway fan. A huge, gushing, lover of that man’s writing, ever since 11th grade AP English and A Farewell to Arms. But in the last couple years, as I came to grips with my identity as a feminist, I realized that his work has some pretty problematic elements. Since I started blogging, I was hesitant to read anything by him, as I’d have to actually engage with the more problematic aspects of his writing. That made me nervous.

Fortunately, The Old Man and the Sea lacks the overtly misogynistic elements that can be found in some of his other works. Instead, there’s merely (harumph) the complete absence of women. Honestly, it’s not all that aggravating, as there are pretty much only two characters in the book. There’s the old man and the young boy. Other people exist somewhere offstage, but don’t play a central role.

My favorite thing about Hemingway’s writing is that there is just the perfect sentence, that says exactly what it says, but so much more at the same time:

The line went out and out and out but it was slowing now and he was making the fish earn each inch of it.

Here’s an old man, by himself, way, way out in the open sea, attached to a hugely muscled fish by some rope and a metal hook. He’s not had a real meal in recent memory, and hasn’t caught a fish in eighty-four days. If he can’t bring a fish into the market soon, his situation is going to become even more desperate than it already is. Clearly, from the quote above, he catches a fish. But then what?

The Old Man and the Sea is not my favorite Hemingway. It’s pretty simplistic. I think that Hemingway’s fable-like works are better when they’re shorter. I don’t think that this book could have been much shorter to convey the same effect, but at the same time, it feels too long to be rather one-note.

Italia, Islamic Style

Divorce Islamic Style
Amara Lakhous

So this book isn’t really about divorce. It’s about an unsuspecting court interpreter being recruited to help infiltrate a suspected terrorism ring in an Italian neighborhood with many Muslim immigrants. Only Christian, our undercover hero, really isn’t given any training that we’re aware of. He’s told, basically, to make friends with people at Little Cairo, a cultural hub and telephone shop.

Given that it’s a book about stopping a bomb plot, you might expect that it’s pretty serious. Nope. A funny book about terrorists? Maybe funny is going too far, but it is certainly witty. You get the feeling that there is something not-quite-right with Christian’s entry into the spy world. After all, his code name for his handler is Judas.

Christian spends much of his time calling his “family” back home from Little Cairo, chatting with the proprietor, Akram, and trying to navigate life as a supposed Tunisian immigrant. Along the way, he meets the lovely Safia.

Safia, or Sofia, is an Egyptian woman in a pretty traditional marriage to Felice. Back home, Felice was an architect, but in Italy, he works as a pizza maker, who has to worry about whether or not it’s haram for him to handle the ingredients required for his job. Safia has a passion for hairdressing, so when Felice told her he expected her to where the veil upon marriage, she wasn’t too happy. Who goes to a veiled hairdresser?

Safia and Felice have been divorced twice. This is where I had a bit of an “aha” moment. I had heard that in Islam you can get divorced by saying “I divorce you” three times. In my head, I always pictured that as a man just saying “I divorce you I divorce you I divorce you.” End of story. In Safia’s case, it’s clear that each of the first two “I divorce you’s” are separate incidents that require family intervention. It’s almost like a call for help, that says hey – something is not right in our relationship. Now, I am in no way extrapolating this one fictional account to a wider applicability, especially since I am so ignorant about the subject. Still, it was pretty interesting to get this perspective.

I really liked Safia. While she’s naive in some ways, she’s also thoughtful and smart and observant. The book switches between her perspective and Christian’s, and I definitely preferred her chapters. They had a much more reflective tone, while Christian’s were a bit heavy on the bumbling non-adventures. Safia is much more an actor, while Christian is acted upon. Interesting take on gender roles.

Bottom line? Fun book, quick read, smart ideas.

Orlando

Orlando: A Biography
Virginia Woolf

Basically, Orlando is this young nobledude in the reign of Queen Elizabeth, well known for his awesome legs, and his way with a water bowl. Yes, seriously. He loves the ladies, and ice skating, and hanging out in the great outdoors, especially under his gigantic oak tree. Then his heart is broken and he runs off to Constantinople to act as England’s ambassador. A pretty pedestrian plot (written gorgeously, of course) until, after a night of civil unrest, violence, and looting of the ambassador’s residence, where Orlando sleeps through the mayhem, he then wakes up as a she.

Woolf’s subsequent musings on gender and sexuality are pretty awesome. Yes, this is a book of it’s time, but also, since it covers 300 plus years of Orlando’s life, it is a book of many times. Orlando’s legs are still the stuff of legend, but now instead of securing him an ambassador’s post they must be covered completely lest the glimpse of a calf send a sailor tumbling from the mast to his death.

One of the things I really liked was how Orlando still is attracted to woman after he becomes a woman. It’s pretty radical to realize that Woolf was separating out gender identity from sexual orientation back in the 1920s. It seems to be a concept people today still struggle with.

On a side note, I’m reading The Island at the Center of the World, about Manhattan when it was a Dutch colony. It contained a copy of this painting of James, Duke of York, that made me think of Orlando and hir legs:

Great legs, yes?

This is one of my favorite Classics Club reads to date. I’m glad the Classics Spin and Modern March pushed me to reading it now rather than later.

Have you read Orlando, or anything else by Woolf? What did you think?

Bloggiesta: The Starting Line!

Here’s where I’ll be posting my progress throughout the weekend.

Here’s my first task, completed:

Follow my blog with Bloglovin

And of course you’ll want to follow me with bloglovin, since Google Reader is shutting down and this is clearly the most awesome feedreader that you should have been using all along. Don’t believe me? Check out Jenn’s post comparing your options: The Pros and Cons of Popular Feed Readers.

I’ve found the first new item to add to my list of tasks: Explore StumbleUpon
Thanks to April’s mini-challenge, I’ve now added a StumbleUpon button to my posts. I’ll be creating an account and submitting content before you know it!

And where was that original list? Oh, right – here it is:

Link reviews to books read list (Nope)
Update bloglovin’ with wordpress account
Reviews! Reviews! Reviews! – more specifically, write the catch-up reviews for my Classics Club list (Um, I wrote 1)
Catergorize any “uncatergorized” posts
Copy at least 10 reviews over to goodreads

Black Boy

Black Boy
Richard Wright

Black Boy is Richard Wright’s memoir about growing up black in America. Born in 1908 near Roxie, Mississippi, his early life was marked by frequent moves, his mother’s illness, and his strict, extremely religious grandmother.

He lacked supervision for much of his early years, which may well have contributed to his inability to conform his behavior to what society at large expected from a black boy. He did not have institutions and authority figures over him from the start. When he and his mother moved into his grandmother’s house, he frequently clashed with her and other family members over his inability and unwillingness to play the submissive.

The clashes with his family aren’t the only ones Wright experiences. Violence and the threat of violence are constant companions to him and those he knows. You can sense the fear that his fellow black Americans feel as they so desperately try to get Wright to conform. They are acting at least partly out of real concern for his safety.

After years of work and struggle in the south, he makes the move to Chicago. Along the way, he discovers that there are actually white people that care about the way blacks are treated. I had to grimly smile a bit to myself, as the dominant cultural narrative of today sometimes feels more like this:

Did I mention I wasn’t a big fan of The Help?

In Chicago, Wright learns about Communism, and eventually joins the party. He’s impressed by their views and actions on race, but comes to realize that eliminating racism will not eliminate all the world’s ills. The conclusions he reaches and they way he presents them at the end of the book are just heart-wrenching.

I’ll end with this passage:

“I was building up in me a dream in which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle. I was feeling the very thing that the state of Mississippi had spent millions of dollars to make sure that I would never feel; I was becoming aware of the thing that the Jim Crow laws had been drafted and passed to keep out of my consciousness  I was acting on impulses that southern senators in the nation’s capital had striven to keep out of Negro life; I was beginning to dream the dreams that the state had said were wrong, that the schools had said were taboo.“

Want more like this? Try:

• The Autobiography of Malcolm X, Malcolm X, as told to Alex Haley. Another prominent black leader, this time from the North. One thing that really impressed me with this book was the ability of Malcolm X to revisit his head space and recreate the way he felt at different times in his life. So often as a reader, you get the sense that the author is who zie is at the time of writing the book, and zie is telling their life story only from that vantage point.
• How Racism is Bad for Our Bodies, Jason Silverstein. A recent article in The Atlantic that discusses what the constant strain of living with the threat of racist action can do to your health.
• Lessons on What it Must Be, Not What it Could: Growing Up Black and Boy in America, Hashkin Pipkin. I was taking a break from writing this review when I (completely coincidentally) stumbled across this post in my feed reader. Apt, no?

Bloggiesta is coming!

Since moving to WordPress, I’ve realized that there are some blog tasks that I really need to accomplish. Bloggiesta sounds like a good time to try to get some of them done, at least. Of course,weekends are tough for me, as the hubby works out of town Monday-Friday, so I don’t know how much time I’ll actually have to devote to the tasks. At least I’ll have a to-do list, though!

Here’s a started list. I’m sure I’ll think of more tasks over the next few days.

Link reviews to books read list
Update bloglovin’ with wordpress account
Reviews! Reviews! Reviews! – more specifically, write the catch-up reviews for my Classics Club list
Catergorize any “uncatergorized” posts
Copy at least 10 reviews over to goodreads

The Remains of the Day

The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro

Bummed the Downton Abbey crew won’t be back with anything new until, oh, forever from now? Take a motoring trip through the English countryside with Mr. Carson – erg, I mean Mr. Stevens.

Mr. Stevens’ father was a butler, and he has spent his life as a butler in a great house. However, the times they are a-changing. It is after the Second World War, and many of the large British estates have been broken apart. An upstart American, Mr. Farraday, has purchased the estate of Lord Darlington, Stevens’ former master. The staff has been reduced dramatically, and many of the rooms remain sheeted. Somehow, though, Stevens believes he might be able to reemploy Miss Kenton, a former housekeeper.

Mr. Farraday is to be absent from the estate for a time, and he gives Stevens permission to use his car for a trip to the countryside. Stevens is a bit unsure about this holiday, but decides that it is for the good of the estate that Miss Kenton come back to work. Mind you, he really doesn’t know if she is even interested. And she’s actually Mrs. Benn, and has been for quite some time. And it’s been twenty years since she worked at Darlington Hall. No matter.

Obvs, there’s something else going on here. All these repressed !feelings! Musings on how all-important dignity! trumps human connections. A scandal lurking about the good ol’ Lord Darlington.

I like how the book was written diary style, as Stevens made his way to Little Compton and Miss Kenton. I imagine that driving through the countryside for several days, with no one to take care of but yourself, would be the most time a butler like Stevens would have to be alone with his thoughts. So he ponders a lot about life – what his has been, and not been. It’s clear by the end that he has regrets, but he has put off having to think much about them. Now, towards the end of his days, when there is more time for reflection, they begin to weigh heavily on his mind. How will he process and move forward? Can he return to Darlington Hall the dignified butler that he has always been? Ishiguro leaves the reader to ponder these questions.

All in all, a beautifully written book.

February in Review

Well, this will be quick. In February I read… drum roll please…TWO BOOKS!

I reviewed one already, The Devil’s Pool. I’ve yet to write up a few thoughts on Richard Wright’s Black Boy, but that will happen soon.

So why the nearly non-existent reading? Well, February was pretty much a horrid month. I had an unexpected death in the family that meant I was out of town doing family things for two weekends, and then there was the missing car key incident which I will not even go into, plus work and regular life stuff. It left me just exhausted. I was having trouble connecting with a book.

Here’s hoping that March is mo’better. I’ve been reading Orlando and loving it. I’m also reading 101 Great American Poems, which is a collection of accessible  famous poetry. Not a bad start to the month.

My stats:
2 books total
1 Fiction                50%
1 Nonfiction         50%
1 Female author 50%
1 Translated        50%