On the one hand, I found Mandanipour’s description of the agonies of being a censored writer fascinating. An American writer can simply sit before their computers and let the words flow, but an Iranian writer must constantly think about whether or not a sentence or word may be seen as provocative or corrupting in the eyes of the Islamic Republic. And isn’t it interesting that use technologies purchased from the hated West in order to monitor and purify their literature? Talk about hypocrisy.
However . . .
On the other hand, the love story was quite dull, not to mention ridiculous. Dara was an insane stalker, in my opinion. Rather like an Iranian Florentino Ariza (from Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera). My impression of Sara is that she’s a spoiled child. She liked male attention in a society where it was banned. Liked watching their jealousies and the rivalries for her love. First Sinbad and Dara, then Dara and Farhad. She kept insisting that Dara prove his love for her in idiotic and childish ways, as if she actually wanted him to get arrested. Until, that is, it happens. But does she learn her lesson? No. She just has to flirt with the good doctor at the wedding. See? Ridiculous!
There is one good thing about the love story: I also kind of liked the idea of a Hashashin in modern-day Tehran. It was an interesting twist to the story. I was also amused by the references to other novels an stories integrated into the text.
Censoring an Iranian Love Story is certainly an enlightening read, but not very entertaining.
Ramachandra Mangaraj was a zamindar – a rural landlord – and a prominent moneylender as well, though his transactions in grain far exceeded those in cash. For an area of four kos around, no one else’s business had much influence. He was a very pious man indeed: there are twenty-four ekadasis in a year. If there had been forty such holy days, he would have observed every single one. This is indisputable. Every ekadasi he fasted, taking nothing but water and a few leaves of the sacred basil plant for the entire day. Just the other afternoon, though, Mangaraj’s barber, Jaga, let it slip that on the evenings of ekadasis a large pot of milk, some bananas, and a small quantity of khai and nabata are placed in the master’s bedroom. Very early the next morning, Jaga removes the empty pot and washes it. Hearing this, some people exchanged knowing looks and chuckled. One blurted out, “Not even the father of Lord Mahadeva can catch a clever fellow stealing a drink when he dips under the water.” We’re not absolutely sure what was meant by this, but our guess is that these men were slandering Mangaraj. Ignoring their intentions for the moment, we would like to plead his case as follows: Let the eyewitness who has seen Mangaraj emptying the pot come forward, for like judges in a court of law we are absolutely unwilling to accept hearsay and conjecture as evidence. All the more since science textbooks state unequivocally: “Liquids evaporate.” Is milk not a liquid? Why should milk in a zamindar’s household defy the laws of science? Besides, there were moles, rats and bugs in his bedroom. And in whose house can mosquitoes and flies not be found? Like all base creatures of appetite, these are always on the lookout for food; such creatures are not spiritually minded like Mangaraj, who had the benefit of listening to the holy scriptures. It would be a great sin, then, to doubt Mangaraj’s piety or unwavering devotion.
Jonathan Swift – about whom I speak solely from reputation and hearsay – felt the need to create believable characters and put them in situations strangely reminiscent of reality to perform his satire. Fakir Mohan Senapati, in his Six Acres and a Third (translated by a veritable army consisting of Satya P. Mohanty, Rabi Shankar Mishra, Jatindra K. Nayak and Paul St-Pierre),feels no such need. His characters are all caricatures, his Orissa a land that exists only inasmuch as it helps him make his point, but I believed in them nevertheless.
When I finished this book, I thought this was a ‘great’ book in the same way that Citizen Kane is the greatest movie ever made, because of its importance. It is widely touted, to the extent that it is touted at all, as being the apex of nineteenth century realism in Indian literature, as showing the ‘view from below’ before most of India had heard of anything along the lines of Marxism, as … well, quite a few more things, as described in Satya P. Mohanty’s (rather averagely written, even if makes good points) introduction. But, now, five days after having finished it, I realise that there may be more to the greatness this book than just importance. Not that I ever thought it wasn’t a very good book, but it just didn’t strike me as a candidate for greatness merely on basis of quality. Now, as I was typing up that quote, I realized that not only had Senapati got me to believe in the caricatures while I was reading it, I still believe in Ramachandra Mangaraj and co.
All he does is make no pretensions at depth, or naturalism. His narrator is nothing more than a ‘dispassionate’ (I’ll come back to these quotation marks) observer, who tells us merely what he sees, what he ‘concludes’, and the results of his ‘research’. This, you would think, isn’t very hard to do. Take, for counter-example, Albert Camus’s The Outsider, a review of which was my first post on this blog. My primary complaint with it was that it felt as if Camus wasn’t trying hard enough to convince us, because everything from the plot to the characters apart from the protagonist struck me as very poorly thought-out. Max Cairnduff commented saying that it wasn’t intended as a naturalistic piece in the first place. Which is a fair reason for disagreement; the primary reason we disagree about quality of art is that some things are more important to some people than they are to others. My point in bringing this up was that I felt no such irritation while reading Six Acres and a Third, which I feel even works as a naturalistic piece. This is so because Senapati makes so little pretence, makes everything he says sound so provisional, that I can take it as the version of truth as offered by someone not completely disinvolved.
And, therein lies the crux of the narration; the book is narrated by a person, or persons – even common people from Orissa and Bihar tend to use the royal pronoun, and the narrator could well be an investigator for the English, so I can’t be sure though I lean towards it being just one person –, who’s not involved but is making a thinly-veiled pretence at being one of the people whose life depends on these people whose dealings he talks of. I can say this because of the way it is said: looking at the quote, you can see three levels of narration, so to say. First, we have the fact that he is using Western courtroom logic to defend Ramachandra Mangaraj. Then, we have the fact that he is revealing facts that can only incriminate the man. Then, he is using the worst logic available to save him nevertheless, inasmuch as he will then be safe in a (caricaturised) court of law. He’s attacking Mangaraj, and thinly veiling it as a defence. The whole book – which, compliments to the author, is very short, less than two hundred very loosely packed pages – passes in such a flurry of multiple but obvious levels of deceit, most of the time more thinly-veiled than the rest of it. Sometimes, we even see trickery in the narrator’s mention of his target audience.
There is a plot, but it only comes in the second half of the book. Senapati packs most of it with a set of vignettes showcasing corruption at various levels – and the various branches of each level – of society, going as high as is relevant from the villagers’ point of view. Brahmins, peasants, zamindars, policemen, lawyers – especially lawyers, since it is their language which is used as the medium of satire –, they all come under scrutiny. There are six acres and a third, not to mention a cow, that are seized, and which go to court etc. Interestingly, even the victims of the seizing aren’t completely honest. Most interestingly, the only good people in the book barely talk; there are two, and one of them gets one scene with three, maybe four, barely functional dialogues. The other one? He only gets a few actions to perform.
It sounds so complex (here, I’m talking about morally complex, all the little implications; my ‘levels of writing’ are actually fairly obvious, even necessary for a book claiming to be a satire). But, when I read it, I thought the book was written in a simple, lucid style with few depths I was surprised to have plumbed. It is nothing more than the highest compliment to Senapati that all of his meaning came across so clearly. After I finished the book, I read Mohanty’s introduction, and there’s very little of this write-up that uses things I’ve learnt from Mohanty. Not because I found the points unworthy but because I already knew them. It was valuable only as a history lesson on this book. It is this simplicity, supported strongly by the cultural – it was the apex of nineteenth century realism in Indian literature – as well as historical – as a burning critique of the British administration – importance that makes this a great book. And I never even mentioned the anger simmering beneath the narrative, with about as much obvious force as this sentence.
Here in the United Kingdom there is a nice weekly periodical for women who aspire to be, and are, ladies. It is called The Lady and it has some interesting household tips, information, interviews and other things that interest ladies.
The Lady, Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP as found on http://www.guardian.co.uk
The problem, in my experience with the magazine, is that it caters to the older generation, mainly those over 50. I find it rather offensive that I, a 24 year-old lady, have to choose between mind-numbingly superficial rubbish like Glamour and Cosmopolitan (which is meant for the young women in society) or The Lady, which caters to a much older group. I would love to be able to read a cultured, ladylike, intellectual magazine which does not include power chairs, frou-frou clothing. I would like a ladies’ magazine to show a sophisticated, youthful, sexy but tasteful clothing styles. I still like reading The Lady, because it is the only periodical I know of that is decent and doesn’t go on ad infinitum about sex, dating and fashion trends. Any lady would tell you that trends are temporary, but elegance is timeless.
This year Wombat is old enough to part in the nativity play, ‘so with his heart full of hope and his head full of dreams, he hurried along to the auditions.’ It’s hard to find a part that’s just right for him and when all the parts have been handed out, he’s a very sad wombat indeed. Everyone crowds around to comfort him but then Bilby has a brilliant idea.
The Australian animals go on to put on the ‘best Nativity ever.’ Our favourite page is where all the animals are sitting about eating pudding on Christmas Day, talking about the Nativity. (Platypus is dozing, maybe he ate a little too much pudding.)
This picture book is a favourite at our house. And the good news is – we have one copy of Wombat Divine to give away! To enter, tell us how you heard about Soup Blog by leaving a comment in the comments box for this post. We will draw a winner at random on 10 December 2009 and ask the winner to contact us with their posting address.
Wombat Divine by Mem Fox, illustrated by Kerry Argent, Omnibus Books for Scholastic Australia, ISBN 9781862918412
This book was selected for review from the Editor’s own collection but we also received a review copy – the prize in the giveaway.
I feel like I’m the last person to read this book. Given that it involves time travel, it’s theoretically science fiction, but really it is more properly filed under romance. I don’t read enough romances to really evaluate it as part of that genre, though, so all I can say is on that score is that while the story can be justly criticized for being melodramatic, Niffenegger is pretty successful in pulling the strings.
You may be wondering how a story that has time travel in it can be anything than other science fiction. Well, definitions of genre vary. The book’s Wikipedia page quotes a critic as saying “uses time travel as a metaphor to explain how two people can feel as if they’ve known each other their entire lives”. So there’s your answer, I guess. I don’t think the book “explains” anything of the sort, but again, I come from an SF background where you start by assuming a spade is a spade. Especially space spades. That doesn’t mean that SF novels don’t have the symbolism, metaphorical interpretations, and so forth, but they are expected to take their surface elements seriously.
I can’t help but approaching it as a science fiction novel, however, and in that role the book is lacking. The time travel is unexplained, but that’s more a relief than a problem. The problem is the plot is a large time travel paradox. If the past and future can’t be changed, yet you can travel into the past, how are we to resolve a case where a man meets and marries a woman precisely because he later time travels back to before they met? The novel shrugs off this concern. If you’re interested in the mechanics of time travel, this isn’t the story for you. Ted Chiang’s story “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” actually uses the very same “system” of time travel to rather profound effect.
So, leaving aside the science fiction elements, what’s left? A chronologically dislocated romance between two people that’s written well enough that I enjoyed it even though I didn’t particularly like either of them. The book is so thoroughly about their relationship, to the exclusion of just about everything else, that it feels as though they don’t really have lives. Harry is a librarian, but he never seems to care too much about his job. He doesn’t need a job since he can use his time travel to generate plenty of money, but he goes to work anyway. Not because he is passionate about what he does, but because he wants to live a normal life. His wife, meanwhile, grew up in an extremely wealthy family (complete with servants…how many people had servants in 1980?) and, having completed her liberal arts education, becomes a professional paper sculptor. That’s fair enough, I guess, but little time is spent on this. They put a studio in the house for her and she has puts together a show of her work, but I didn’t get the sense she had major artistic aspirations.
But these criticisms don’t really matter. The book is focused on the relationship and for most people, including me (despite coming in expecting to not like it, I’ll admit), it presents an entertaining narrative. So as long as you’re expectations are appropriate it can be widely recommended.
Has the social web of drama ever ensnared you in its tangles?
Were you able to find your way out?
Through lists, letters, e-mails, footnotes, and therapist appointments; E. Lockhart spins Ruby Oliver, an apparently troubled adolescent, and the reader into the crudely enticing and messy world of drama in The Boy Book: A Study of Habits and Behaviors, Plus Techniques for Taming Them.
Entering her junior year with the reputation of a promiscuous “leper” after a summer fling, Ruby endures the silent treatment of her friends, the hollow absence of her ex-boyfriend and adapts to her socially deprived status at her private high school. Although the reader may be able to empathize with Ruby, it becomes clear that she is more than applicable for her frisky “leper” status. Ruby juggles boys as if they were rentable relationships, lacks a secure foundation of priorities and decides to childishly channel her hormonal anger and confusion out on her therapist. It seems that despite her countless efforts to redeem herself from the bottom of the social totem pole, Ruby succumbs to even the slightest temptation that boys offer.
Despite the predictable plot that Lockhart creates, The Boy Book is essentially the publishing of social drama of teenagers alike in which both the characters and the reader are able to learn and mature from.
Beauty is a much loved, intelligent, and mostly happy teen. And she is pretty. So when her less attractive best friend and she enter a contest to win the opportunity to be a spokesperson for a popular teen magazine, Beauty is a little anxious but still confident. Toward the end of the contest, though, her confidence gives way to jealousy and her obsession over her physical flaws. The more she looks at herself the less her inner beauty, her Heartlight, glows. (Yes, even pretty girls can be insecure.) Beauty goes on to examine her emotions and is reminded of a message she’s received throughout her life: “True beauty lies within.” She changes, but she does not win the contest. (Yay! This is not a fairy tale in which the girl gets what she most wants just because she’s “seen the light.”) She wins other things.
Many children’s book authors preach their message to children, tell them what to think, but author Debra Gano definitely does not. She has clearly made the decision to allow her readers to learn as Beauty learns, through experience. Gano does not say external beauty doesn’t matter, because it does. And she doesn’t deny girls are judged by, or noticed for, their looks. She encourages girls to enjoy their physical beauty and that of others, and to develop who they are on the inside.
The illustrations in Beauty’s Secret are sure to entice girls 10-14 to read the text. They feature pinks, purples, bold colors, pastels, and strong femininity, all which invite introspection, quiet, and calm. The book is beautifully packaged, and the message (what’s inside) is equally beautiful.
This year Wombat is old enough to part in the nativity play, ‘so with his heart full of hope and his head full of dreams, he hurried along to the auditions.’ It’s hard to find a part that’s just right for him and when all the parts have been handed out, he’s a very sad wombat indeed. Everyone crowds around to comfort him but then Bilby has a brilliant idea.