Review: "Gardens in the Dunes" by Leslie Marmon Silko

This is the second book by Leslie Marmon Silko I've reviewed, the first being one of my all-time favorite novels, "Ceremony."

I didn't like "Gardens in the Dunes" as much as I liked "Ceremony." "Ceremony" was more experimental, with a non-linear time structure, and also more ambitious in what it was trying to achieve from a technical perspective, in that the physical text of the novel is gradually revealed to the reader as an integral part of the ceremony described in the story of the novel. It invites the reader's participation in the ceremony via the act of reading, rather than asking the reader to be a passive witness to the events as presented.

"Gardens in the Dunes" is a more conventional novel that lacks the meta-textual complexity of "Ceremony," but is ambitious in other ways and always entertaining. I didn't feel the least bit disappointed with "Gardens," not like when I read Monique Truong's "Bitter in the Mouth," the far-inferior sophomore effort from the author of my other favorite novel, "The Book of Salt."

The story "Gardens" is told from the perspective of multiple characters and incorporates a wide variety of
settings, from the Arizona desert to jungles of Brazil to the citron groves of Corsica. It also addresses themes and events outside of the American Indian experience, which surprised me more than it should have. A lot about this book surprised me in ways that made me newly aware of the limits our society places on American Indians, right down to the narrow and rigid narratives we allow them in mainstream literature. I kept expecting bad things to happen according to my own expectations of American Indian lives, but while some bad things do happen, they never happened in the way I expected, and frequently good things happened instead. Families are re-united instead of being torn apart; children live instead of die; dreams come true instead of dying; land is secured, not stolen.

When the Indian Police take the main character, Indigo, away from her sister and put her in the government school, I expected the rest of the novel to be about how horrible the government schools were to the children stolen from their parents and forced to live there. But Indigo escapes to find her older sister, Salt. And I expected the novel to be about her re-capture and punishment in the school, or maybe about the abuse she suffers as she searches for Salt in the lawless desert. But she's taken in by Hattie, a recently-married white woman living with her husband on his citrus farm in the Californian desert. So I expected Hattie to try and force Indigo to be more like a white child, cutting her off from her heritage, but Hattie actually ends up being a Harvard-educated liberal who is a very supportive surrogate mother to Indigo. They go on a trip to Long Island, England and Italy, and I then expected Hattie to want to keep Indigo away from Salt and adopt her as her own child. But Hattie actually returns Indigo to her family, leaving Indigo better off, with both world experience and a trunk full of exotic plants and seeds that she and her sister then plant at the titular garden in the dunes.

This is just one story-line of many that took me by surprise. "Garden in the Dunes" may not be as technically ambitious as "Ceremony," but it more than makes up for that with the ambition of the story itself. I don't know if it was Marmon Silko's intention to play with the reader's expectations the way she did, or if I'm just a lot less enlightened and knowledgeable about the literary traditions of people of color than I think I am, but this book was an eye-opener for me in any case.

The standard cultural narrative is that the American Indians lost everything, and maybe that's a comfortable narrative for the mainstream audience because it absolves us of responsibility toward the current American Indian population. An extinct plant can never be brought back, so there's no need to waste effort or time trying. But a narrative about American Indians who endured and even thrived is trickier to digest because it demands attention be paid to issues that the mainstream considers settled and done with, which is actually quite disrespectful to the people still confronting these supposedly "settled" issues every day (see my review of "The Round House" by Louise Erdrich).

Final Grade: B+. Recommended for those interested in plants, American Indians, travel stories, stories about sisters, and the American West.

Review: "Wide Sargasso Sea" by Jean Rhys

I wanted to like "Jane Eyre" so badly.

And I did like her--Jane Eyre the character. Jane wasn't the problem. It was that fucking Lord Rochester. What an asshole. I want to dig up his imaginary corpse and punch him in his dusty, moldering nuts.

Fortunately, there's a version of that story where Rochester isn't portrayed as a smoldering aloof hero--a Batman of the English countryside, if you will--but rather the greedy, insufferable white devil I suspected him to be all along.

Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" is about Rochester's first wife, the madwoman in the attic, Bertha. In "Jane Eyre," Bertha is said to be Creole, a woman of British descent born and raised in the Caribbean colonies. Rhys shifts the timeline of her book to coincide with the emancipation of slaves in Jamaica, and re-imagines "Bertha" as Antoinetta, a daughter of slave owners who lose everything when they were unable to make the shift to a post-slavery world. An unnamed English nobleman, whom we assume is Rochester, marries Antoinetta for her stepfather's money when she's barely seventeen and fresh out of the convent school. While at first they are happy together at a small house in the Jamaican countryside, a man claiming to be Antoinetta's half-brother by her biological father and a former slave contacts the nobleman. The man tells him that Antoinetta's mother went mad, that Antoinetta herself had shown signs of madness as a girl, and that Antoinetta's stepfather and stepbrother swindled in nobleman into marrying an obviously defective piece of merchandise. The nobleman then refuses to touch or speak to his wife, who doesn't understand why he's suddenly treating her so coldly, and then she actually does go mad when the nobleman dismisses all of her servants, takes her to England, and shuts her up in the attic so he won't have to look at her anymore.

I feel like there should be a name for this genre, where non-western or minority writers re-tell a classic Western story from one of the non-western or minority character's point of view. Rhys re-tells "Jane Eyre" from the perspective of the madwoman in the attic; David Henry Hwang re-imagines Puccini's opera "Madama Butterfly" as a spy story with an actual Peking opera star as Butterfly; Alice Randall re-writes "Gone With the Wind" with Mammy's daughter (and Scarlett's half-sister) as the narrator.

These types of stories are fascinating to me because one, there are not enough minority voices in literature, and the further back in history you go, the less there are; and two, it's a valuable exercise to contrast how white writers see and portray minority characters and how those characters see and portray themselves. These works break down white constructs of what it means to be black, or Oriental, or Creole, and re-define them based on how actual black people, Orientals, or Creoles experience race and identity.

By doing this, the writer also breaks down and re-defines the concept of whiteness, which hitherto has been the unexamined default, the norm, defined by what it is not rather than what it is. The apparatus of societal power is exposed  by those crushed underneath it, to those who are its beneficiaries but are barely aware of its existence. James Baldwin in "The Devil Finds Work" talks at length about how white people can never really know black people, but how black people know white people better than white people know themselves because such knowledge is necessary for survival in the white man's world.

Works like "Wide Sargasso Sea" reveal aspects of "Jane Eyre" and the character of Lord Rochester that weren't present in the original novel, in addition to offering a richer and more meaningful back-story for a marginalized character from the original work. The relationship between the colonizer, England/Rochester, and the colonized, Jamaica/Antoinetta, moves to the forefront of the story and illuminates how larger societal ideas about life and civilization affect individuals. "Jane Eyre" presents the events as one unlucky individual with an insane wife without examining the very ideas of sanity and insanity and how they relate to colonialist attitudes about the effects of geography and environment on individuals living away from the civilized motherland.

I could go on in this vein--I haven't even really touched on Rhys's shifting of the timeline of her book to coincide with emancipation and how the black characters in her book deal with freedom and have to re-define their relationships to the whites in Jamaica. But I've already written way more than I planned to about "Wide Sargasso Sea" and I'm afraid that the only people who will find this interesting are other scholars of postcolonialism (which my spell-check doesn't even recognize as a word, so I know I'm drifting pretty far from the mainstream with this review already).

I recommend Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" for fans of classic literature, especially "Jane Eyre"; people who enjoy the hard-to-name genre of non-white authors re-telling white stories from the perspective of non-white characters; and anyone interested in the history of the Caribbean and the Age of Imperialism.

Final Grade: B+.

Bonus Review! "WE3" by Grant Morrison and Frank Quietly

Get ready to cry: this is a comic book about a doggy, a kitty and a bunny trying to find their way home.

Writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely are one of the most popular comics teams working today. Individually, they are masters of their respective forms, but together they're a powerhouse. In the same way that people will line up to see "the new Brad Pitt," comics fans line up to get "the new Morrison and Quitely." Their names alone move the product.

That's just a bit of background for the comics layperson. Actual comics readers may feel like a film buff who just had me explain who Alfred Hitchcock was, but we try to be inclusive on Big Island Rachel's media empire.

Anyway, "WE3" is an original miniseries by Morrison and Quitely about three house pets stolen from their homes who have been fitted with weaponized exoskeletons and given the ability to talk. The military created them to test the possibilities of using animals in war zones instead of humans, and the experiment was successful--so now they're going to kill the animals and move on to the next phase of the experiment with new, more dangerous animals. Our three heroes break out of the laboratory and hit the road, battling their way across town and country to make it home again.

If you aren't already crying, you're dead inside.

Story-wise, the plot is pretty simple and the characters fall in to some basic archetypes. The dog, called 1, is the stalwart leader, the cat, 2, is the ruthless, cynical wildcard; and the rabbit, 3, is plain-spoken and sweet.

I think I just described the make-up of the Powerpuff Girls: head, hands, and heart; brain, brawn, and spirit; Leia, Han, Luke. As I said, this story's been done many times over, but in a case like this, where it's done so well, you can see why the archetype has endured for so long. There's great drama and pathos in the ragtag team of rebels battling the empire while trying to address their internal conflicts; or, if you want to draw from the Eastern tradition, in the master-less ronin wandering the countryside in search of closure and justice.

The fact that "WE3" tells this story with cuddly-wuddly animals instead of humans heightens the emotional impact. Animals are, to draw again from the Eastern tradition, like cherry blossoms: beautiful, but short-lived and transient. (If you're ever watching a Kurasawa film and see cherry blossoms, impress your friends by saying that the blossoms represent mortality and a character is probably about to die.) Animals trip our emotional triggers because their lives are so short and intense compared to our own. Most of us experience the death of a beloved pet long before we ever experience the death of a human close to us, and the knowledge that animals we grow to love aren't long for this world makes them intensely sympathetic characters.

Animals are also very moving because they articulate some of our most basic needs and fears. WE3 have a limited understanding of the human world and are completely outmatched by it, weaponized exoskeletons notwithstanding, and our hearts are moved by their plight because we, too, frequently feel outmatched and confused by the world and just want to get home. It's a primal fear and a primal need, one that taps into the survival instincts we were all born with, so the characters' drive and motivation are instantly understood and embraced.

And then we all cry and cry and cry. Hopefully not on the subway, like I did. This is not a good book to read in public.

God. Damnit.

Final Grade: B+. Required reading for comics fans. Recommended for people who like animal stories, war stories, science fiction, and sadness.

Review: Julie Otsuka Hour

One of my greatest sources of freefloating anxiety is the possibility that I won't have anything to read.

Literally, that is the fear. I'll be somewhere that I want to read something, and I have nothing to read, so I just have to sit there and not read. Shudder.

Obviously, within the comfort of my perfectly Rachel-sized den, where each of my three sit-spots (couch, bed, window where I blog) has a stack of books in grabbing range, this isn't a problem. But as soon as I step out the door, the anxiety begins.

Do I have a book? Does it fit in my purse? Is it too heavy? Will it crush my lunch?

And that's just on a normal work day. If I have to leave for a longer trip, or God forbid get on a plane, watch the fuck out. People who have witnessed me packing--or more embarrassingly, witnessed me unpacking at the other end of my journey--are stunned at the amount of books I choose to haul with me.

But if I don't bring four books on an overnight trip to D.C., what if I finish Book 1 on the train ride down? And then I have to go to Book 2 and I don't like it, so I have to go to Book 3 and I don't like that one either? Then I'd say, "You all laughed at me for bringing Book 4, but lo, Book 4 is needed!"

The point is, my whole right side hurts right now from dragging a suitcase with four books on four separate forms of transportation over the last two days. There's no excuse for this behavior in this day and age. I own a tablet! If I wasn't so cheap, I could just load up my e-reader app with all the books and comics I'd need for a trip to Inner Mongolia and back. But I am cheap, and the free selection on those things is limited to classics. Frankly, I didn't much care for "Jane Eyre" after Lord Rochester was introduced, and I already read "The Hunchback of Notre Dame." Spoiler alert: everybody dies.

Unfortunately, last weekend when I went to R's parents' house for Passover, my fear manifested itself. I brought Julie Otsuka's "When the Emperor was Divine" and finished it before the train ride was over. I had nothing to read on the way back up. To compensate, this weekend, when the BF and I went to D.C. for his brother's baby's naming ceremony (hi, Big Scientist's Newborn Daughter!), I brought four books. Because Book 1 was Julie Otsuka's "The Buddha in the Attic," and that shit was not happening twice. I finished "Buddha" on the way down to D.C., and Book 2 was sufficient to get me back home to Brooklyn, but if it hadn't been, I had back up.

Both "Emperor" and "Buddha" are very short books, and they deal with kind of the same subject matter, which is why they're getting a joint review. I was in the mood for Asian-themed literature because the BF and I have been watching "Avatar: The Last Airbender" together, and I remembered reading a review of "Buddha" when it was nominated for the National Book Award in 2011, so Otsuka Oeuvre it is!

"Emperor" is about a family of unnamed Japanese-Americans who are forced to leave their home and live in an internment camp in Utah during World War II. The book is told in five parts from five different perspectives: the mother's, the older daughter's, the younger son's, a combination of the daughter's and son's, and finally the father's. The book is more concerned with emotion and tone than plot as it explores the feelings of fear, loneliness and boredom that come with being labeled a traitor and packed off to a camp so the authorities can keep an eye on you.

"Buddha" is also heavily infused with emotion and tone, and the timelines overlap slightly, but it is much more experimental than "Emperor." It's told in from the first-person plural perspective: we, our, us. The "we" are Japanese picture brides coming to America in the 1920s, meeting their husbands, making a life, having children, and eventually being taken away to the internment camps. Although the first-person plural perspective seems like a gimmick at first, it's remarkable how Otsuka manages to keep the whole thing together, conveying a sense of share experience and community while still making every detail unique to a single woman's life experience.

Both books are, as I said, quite short, but the length works for the type of tight, precise storytelling Otsuka employs. The subject matter is very sad, dealing with a dark chapter in American history that isn't as widely known as it should be. The internment and deportation of Japanese-American citizens during World War II is at odds with the narrative we like to tell of that time, when the country pulled together on the home front to build ships and planes and defeat the evil Axis powers. Images of unwanted citizens assigned a number and packed onto secret trains to undisclosed locations is something the bad guys did, and it's hard to face the fact that the good guys were doing it too.

Final grade for both: A. Recommended for those who like experimental literature, American history, Asian-American history, stories about the immigrant experience, and people who aren't going very far from home and want a really light book that fits in a
purse.