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.

Review: "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay"

We're in the middle of Passover right now. Let's celebrate by reviewing a book about Jews!

Michael Chabon's "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay" won a Pulitzer, so it's not going to be earth-shattering when I say that it is a great book. It's about the American Sam Clay and his Czech cousin Josef Kavalier, who team up in 1939 to create one of the most famous comic book superheroes ever, The Escapist. The Escapist is a Chabon invention--no such character exists in comic books--but the circumstances of his creation and the cousins' rise in the newly-created comic book industry is factual, an amalgamation of the many real artists and writers that found success and failure in this uniquely American form of art.

The Escapist is an escape artist who goes around the world liberating the trapped and oppressed. The artist part of the duo, Josef Kavalier, was also an escape artist, or at least he was training to be one in Prague before he came to America. The book begins with Kavalier escaping the Nazi occupation of his city by smuggling himself out in the coffin of the Golem of Prague.

The Golem of Prague is a figure from Jewish folklore, a proto-superhero that a rabbi creates out of clay and animates by carving the name of God into its forehead, in order to protect the community from people who get the itch to beat and kill their Jewish neighbors. The most famous Golem was created in Prague in the 16th century by Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel, and this is the Golem that Kavalier accompanies to Lithuania so the Nazis can't get their hands on either Kavalier or the Golem. His new life in America revolves around him getting enough money to get the rest of his family out of Prague and give them a new start in his adopted country.

It's a short leap from there for Kavalier, with his cousin Clay, to create a superhero who continuously escapes and helps others escape from evil men. The theme of escape and liberation runs through the various events of the novel, which follows the two cousins through 20 years of love, war, and personal and professional setbacks. While I initially picked up this book because I wanted to see Chabon's take on rise of the comic book industry, I was pleasantly surprised to see how the story was about so much more than just comic books: it was about dreams, and freedom, and the inability to escape from your own basic nature, no matter how hard you try.

Final Grade: A. A smashing read. Recommended for those interested in comic books, Jewish history and folklore, World War II, and magical realism

Baldwin Blowout!

The BF and I were watching clips of "Totally Biased" online and a drag queen made a joke about the Stonewall Riots that I didn't understand. She said, "And I think James Baldwin was there, too," and the studio audience laughed and laughed. Every schoolyard instinct in my headspace lit up like a Chanukah Bush: everyone is laughing and I don't know why, so it must be a joke at my expense!

So the BF loaned me his copy of "The Devil Finds Work" to convince me the TV people weren't mocking me, and we find ourselves here today. I'll be reviewing "The Devil Finds Work" (1976), "Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone" (1968), and "Giovanni's Room" (1956), all works by writer, activist and world traveler, James Baldwin.

Baldwin (1924 to 1987) was an important literary voice in the black civil rights movement. You may be familiar with Baldwin's more famous works, "Go Tell It on the Mountain," and "Notes from a Native Son," both of which deal with the experience of being black in America. He was also gay, which explains the "Totally Biased" reference that confused me so, and brings me "Giovanni's Room."

This was only Baldwin's second published book, so he was pushing the boundaries of social mores in literature right out of the gate. The main character is an American man living in Paris in the 1950s. He is engaged to another American, but she goes out of town for a while and he moves in with a young Italian man, Giovanni. The book opens with the narrator sitting up all night, getting drunk in a small rented house on near the coast because Giovanni is going to be executed in Paris the next day. The narrator backtracks from there, relating how he fell in love with but ultimately betrayed Giovanni and left him in the state that lead to his execution. It's a story of shame, love and lost, not exactly good times, but an interesting read that provides a frank and honest description of homosexuality from a time when the topic was still very taboo.

"Tell Me How Long the Train's Been Gone" is also about homosexuality--or rather, bisexuality--but mostly it's about art, specifically the experience of the black artist in America. The main character of the book is a very famous black actor who suffers a heart attack on stage, which leads him to consider the life choices he's made and the people he's met along the way. I like this book because of the gulf it describes between the artist as an individual and the artist as he exists as a symbol for his audience. The main character struggles with his desire to live an unorthodox life that is true to his chosen craft, because it is at odds with the expectations his family and community has for him. They want him to be a preacher, like his older brother, or at least get a regular job and raise a family of his own, while he would rather travel, be on stage, and fuck a lot of people (wouldn't we all). Not that his vision of himself as an artist is perfect either, though. He has to struggle for many years, playing the roles of servants and bootlicks on stage because those are the only roles available to black actors, before he gets his break. I really enjoyed and admired how "Tell Me" so thoroughly explored the profound ambivalence that comes with being an artist and a public figure, especially as the artist realizes that the things he holds most dear are the things that most alienate him from others.

"The Devil Finds Work" was the first book of Baldwin's I read, as I mentioned earlier, but chronologically it comes last. It's not really a book at all, but an extended essay on the portrayal of blackness in American film. It was very dense and took the the longest to read of the three, even though it's the shortest. Unfortunately, I'm sure a lot of the essay's brilliance was lost on me, because I haven't seen any of the movies referenced in it (except for "The Exorcist"). The BF writes in the margins of all of his books, so there were plenty of notes to help me along, but I'm hard-pressed now to remember any of the points Baldwin made.

I'm not what you'd call a film buff. Movies unsettle me for their ability to deliver a huge emotional wallop in a relatively short amount of time. I prefer novels, which give me space and time to inhabit the characters' worlds and absorb their struggles; or television episodes, for the the same reason. So it a weird way, "The Devil Finds Work" was a pretty good way for me to explore the deeper meanings of film without having to put myself through the experience (ordeal?) of actually watching the movies.

Since this was a special post, I'm not going to grade any of the books. I'll just end with stating that James Baldwin is one of the Great American Authors and you should read his work if you get the chance (not the later stuff though, my local librarian told me that his last three novels were awful).

Review: "To the Heart of the Storm"

Strangely enough, that title has nothing to do with the foot of snow that fell last night. "To the Heart of the Storm" is a graphic novel by Will Eisner, an autobiographical account of growing up Jewish in New York City. It's the only book I've ever successfully gotten the BF to read.

I don't mean to imply that he doesn't read, it's just that he tends to read non-fiction, mostly for his own edification, writing supplemental notes in the margins that bug the hell out of me when I borrow his books. He doesn't read like I do, constantly, compulsively, sometimes painfully, to the exclusion of all other activities. For a while, I had a half-hearted campaign to turn him into me. I gave him books to read, fantasy and horror and superhero, thinking that he surely must be bored with those film and architecture books, and just needed the right piece of fiction to awaken the true book addict that lurks inside everyone. As you might expect, the whole thing went about as well as his attempts to get me interested in classic episodes of "The Twilight Zone." You just can't force your passions on your partner.

You wait to force them on your children.

He's never going to come to ComicCon with me, and I'm never going to get that excited about spending the afternoon in a museum. (It's cold, you can't touch anything without him scolding you, and there's no place to sit down unless you're cheek by jowl with sticky Midwesterners. I don't understand the appeal.) So imagine my surprise when I handed him "To the Heart of the Storm" and he sat down and read the whole thing in an afternoon. I think I've cracked the code: the BF likes Will Eisner.

A note about Eisner: he was a cartoonist and writer, and one of the inventors of the American comic book, creating titles like Sheena, Queen of the Jungle and The Spirit, the latter of which has never been out of print. In World War II, he pioneered the genre of "instructional comic," producing booklets for the Army during the war, and for private companies and schools in peacetime. The comic book industry awards are called the Eisners (and Will Eisner actually won several Eisners in his lifetime, which pleases me greatly for reasons difficult to articulate).

This was actually the first work by Eisner that I've read. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that as a comic book fan, because it's like being a film buff without ever having watched "The Godfather." As far as introductions go, "To the Heart of the Storm" is one of the best graphic novels I've ever read, and completely explains why Eisner gets to have the industry awards named after him. It's a deeply personal work that showcases his extraordinary talent for sequential art and writing. It's also a deeply political work about Eisner's experiences with racism and antisemitism as a child, told from the point of view of Eisner as young man on his way to fight in a war that's been brewing his entire life.

What I find fascinating about this book is that Eisner wrote it in 1991, when he was in his seventies.  He'd already lived a lifetime between the events of the book and the time of its creation, and yet "To the Heart of the Storm" feels so immediate and raw, like it all happened to him yesterday. I was struck in particular to the detail he put into his mothers and aunts shoes in flashbacks to their childhoods on the Lower East Side in the late 1890s and early 1900s. And there is such an overall feeling of sadness and anger over the whole work, a helpless and confused kind of anger that only children, with their limited understanding of the world, are capable of feeling. This enormously successful man, having proved all detractors and tormentors wrong decades before, still felt the pain of being called "kike"; of pretending to be gentile so he could go to parties in middle school; of hearing his so-called friends supporting Hitler's actions against the Jews. It never stopped hurting.

I would recommend this book to--well, anyone. It's suitable for children as young as ten or twelve, no swearing or nudity. Even people who don't normally read comic books will appreciate the work of this master of the form. And if being racist knocks you down a full letter grade in my system, creating a thoughtful and biting anti-racist and pro-humanity piece must get you bumped to the top in Big Island Rachel's world.

Final Grade: A+. It gets the + because the BF liked it, too.

Review: "This Book Is Full Of Spiders, Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It"

I called it!

Last week, I wrote about the joys of other people's bookshelves and said I would find my next book to read on R's shelves. And sure enough, this week we're looking at David Wong's "This Book Is Full Of Spiders, Seriously Dude, Don't Touch It" (2012).

David Wong is the pseudonym of Jason Pargin, a senior editor and columnist for the  humor website Cracked.com. Go there now if you want to never get anything done, ever again. I have a feeling that Cracked is responsible for more lost productivity than Lolcats and pornography combined, at least in my own experience. It has a seemingly endless archive of funny columns and lists on any number of topics, updated every day,  and it's affect is best described by this xkcd comic:

This book is actually a sequel to Wong's "John Dies At The End" (which was made into a movie this year). Both are set in a Midwestern town only identified as Undisclosed, an area known to the Iroquois as Seriously, Fuck That Place. It's poor, boring, and quite possibly the portal to Hell, or at least to another dimension of shadow men and monsters. David Wong, both narrator and author, and his best friend John are life-long inhabitants of Undisclosed and self-appointed monster-hunters and protectors of the town. They are also complete drunken fuck-ups. This is a difficult enough situation when they're just trying to save their own skins in "John Dies At The End, " but when they're called on to save their entire town and possible the world from evil brain parasites in "This Book Is Full Of Spiders," they have to somehow rise above their own jackassery  and become heroes after a lifetime of being losers.

It's rare that a book can both make me laugh out loud and have to sleep with the light on. "Spiders" is hilarious, especially in the first third (it gets less funny and more action-oriented toward the end), but it's also terrifying. The humor is in the words, the horror in the situations, and it works surprisingly well. The genre of horror humor is pretty sparse to begin with, but books like this one show that the two don't have to be mutually exclusive. Both humor and fear draw their impact from surprise. We laugh more at jokes when we don't know the punchline ahead of time; we don't fear the monster we see as much as the monster we don't see. Wong the author understands the similarities between the two states and takes us on a wild ride to the end of the world and back again.

At the risk of big ole SPOILERS:

"Spiders" is a book about zombies. The brain parasites that begin multiplying through the town can reanimate their dead hosts, exist only to expand their numbers, and can only be stopped by removing the head of the host or destroying the brain. The twist on these zombies is that the parasites change the physical make-up of their hosts, much like the alien in John Carpenter's "The Thing." The world reacts to the news of the zombie apocalypse much like you'd expect them too: by setting up anti-zombie militias and Tweeting.

I have to confess that as much as I enjoyed "Spiders," which is a more technically accomplished work than its predecessor, on the whole I prefer "John Dies At The End." I'm just not that into zombies, and we've reached such a pop-culture saturation point with them that I've lost whatever small interest I may have had with them (and it was a very small interest, because as we've established, I'm a massive pansy). 

As far as zombie apocalypses go, "Spiders" is fairly standard, from the shady government goons who may hold the key to the cure, right up to the stirring action movie climax. And if you like that sort of thing, you'll love this book. Wong is clearly versed in the tropes of the zombie genre (zomb-re?) and his love and appreciation for his source material shines through in this well-crafted addition to the cannon. It's done well. It's just been done.

Final Grade: B. Recommended for zombie fans, horror fans, readers of Cracked, and people who like dick-jokes.