reading summary
Aug. 16th, 2013 12:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitIt's not Wednesday, but since this is the first time in almost six months that I've managed to do one of these, I'm not going to be fussy about days.
Currently Reading:
Charles Glass, The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II. Interesting but so far not as generally informative as I'd hoped, because it's following that annoying but apparently obligatory pop-history structure of "we will follow a handful (three, in this case) of individual stories in enormous detail and will only very rarely bring in the broader picture."
Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin. So far this is mostly reiterating ideas I've pretty thoroughly picked up from Gould's other work (e.g., evolution is not telological or progressive). But I like Gould and enjoy his writing even when I'm not learning anything new from it, witness the fact that I regularly re-read his books for pleasure.
Recently Read:
John Le Carré, A Delicate Truth. Le Carrs latest tells the story of a retired diplomat and a young, rising civil servant who try to piece together what really happened during a covert anti-terrorist operation in Gibraltar undertaken by a private American defense contractor with British cooperation. It's a bit preachy, as Le Carré's recent books have tended to be, because Le Carré is really, really angry about the corporate national security state undermining democracy. This is an honorable anger, and the book is very enjoyable in that depressing Le Carré way.
Jonathan Barnes, The Somnambulist. I picked this up from the library, despite my reservations about Barnes' The Domino Men because I was having trouble finding anything else appealing. I liked The Somnambulist better than The Domino Men; it turns out that Domino is actually a sequel, of sorts, to Somnambulist, though they can be read separately. Somnambulist is set at the very end of Victoria's reign; its protagonist, the professional mentalist and conjuror and amateur detective Edward Moon (who may or may not have actual paranormal powers), is trying to solve a mysterious murder with the help of his stage assistant and friend the Somnambulist, an enormously tall and strong man who never speaks. The murder, as is the way of such things, soon shows connections to an old and once much-beloved friend of Moon's, to a sinister agency called The Directorate, and to a supernatural threat hanging over London. The book isn't as creative as it thinks it is, and there are more loose ends than I'm comfortable with (I don't require everything to be tied up tidily--in fact I often dislike that kind of overly-pat plotting--but I'd like a bit more revelation and sense-making than we get), but it's page-turny and I found Moon and the Somnambulist fascinating. The ca. 1900 setting helps me over some of my issues with The Domino Men, such as the lack of characters who aren't white. This book is also somewhat better with queer characters than The Domino Men, in that it strongly hints that Moon is bisexual. (I thought it was really obvious, but I couldn't find any online reviews that mentioned it, so perhaps not.) Not great on women characters, though. Overall I'd say The Somnambulist is not a must-read, but it's entertaining.
Padma Viswamathan, The Toss of a Lemon. This is a long (over 600 hardcover pages) family saga set in South India in the first half of the twentieth century, whose central characters are Sivakami, a Brahmin woman who is widowed at 18 and eventually, not trusting her brothers to look out for her children's interests, decides to stay in her late husband's house and manage his properties, and Muchami, the servant who helps her. Now, normally I'd walk a mile to avoid a multi-generational family saga, but the cover blub informed me that Muchami is a closeted gay man, so I gave this one a try. Alas, Muchami's sexuality is not much explored, and neither is any other aspect of Muchami's life: he's pretty much just the Faithful Servant. We do learn that he was in love with Sivakami's late husband Hanumarathnam and that he meets men at night for sex in the countryside outside the small town where he lives, but he never tries to have an actual relationship with a man and his emotional life is entirely centered on Sivakami and her children and grandchildren. It's not that this is necessarily implausible, but it is, as I said, a bit of a stereotype and is symptomatic of what I found to be a strain of nostalgia in the novel, a sentimentalizing of old, conservative social structures. A lot of the novel is about caste, specifically the privileges of the Brahmin caste and also its restrictive social conventions. The novel does imply some critiques of this system, but weighed against that is the fact that the conservative characters are also the most sympathetic ones, while the most radical character, Sivakami's son Vairum, is a selfish jerk who is inconsiderate of other people's feelings and outright cruel to his self-sacrificing mother. There are no positively portrayed "progressive" (Viswanathan's word) characters, and the anti-Brahmin-privilege movement is shown as violent and savage.
The book's take on child marriage is similar. We do see change over time, but the oldest girl to get married in the novel is 17, and her mother and grandmother were married as prepubescents and went to live with their husbands and consummate the marriage as soon as they'd had their first menstrual period. All but one of the book's many child marriages are shown as happy, emotionally warm and loving, and even sexually fulfilling for the young woman. The first time Viswanathan did this, in showing Sivakami's marriage, I thought it was a refreshing change from the usual stereotyped catalogue of horrors. But after a while it began to read as sentimental, nostalgic, and kind of disturbing. Admittedly, the bad marriage is very bad, but it's also, unlike the good marriages, only shown from the outside. We're never in the POV of the unhappily married woman, only the happy ones.
The Toss of a Lemon is basically the same kind of thing as those western historical novels that, while occasionally acknowledging unpleasant facts about the past (slavery, child labor, exploitation and poverty, women having few or no legal rights, and other pesky little details) nevertheless mostly want to show the past as a warmer, happier, more loving time. This is a trope I think is silly but verging on dangerous because of its political implications.
ETA: I'd be curious to know what Indian readers and critics thought of this book. It seems to have been written with a western audience in mind, because there's a lot of cultural explanation and an enjoyable, to me, but also slightly touristy-feeling focus on food. I ended up cooking sambhar and curd rice last night because the book made me crave south Indian food.
ETA2: The few such reviews I've found online (a couple from Indian-diaspora readers, one from a critic in an Indian magazine) are positive.
What I'm reading next:
Don't know. I'm waiting for interlibrary loan to send me a book about the demobilization of British soldiers after the Second World War. It's been three weeks and I hope it gets here soon.
Currently Reading:
Charles Glass, The Deserters: A Hidden History of World War II. Interesting but so far not as generally informative as I'd hoped, because it's following that annoying but apparently obligatory pop-history structure of "we will follow a handful (three, in this case) of individual stories in enormous detail and will only very rarely bring in the broader picture."
Stephen Jay Gould, Full House: The Spread of Excellence From Plato to Darwin. So far this is mostly reiterating ideas I've pretty thoroughly picked up from Gould's other work (e.g., evolution is not telological or progressive). But I like Gould and enjoy his writing even when I'm not learning anything new from it, witness the fact that I regularly re-read his books for pleasure.
Recently Read:
John Le Carré, A Delicate Truth. Le Carrs latest tells the story of a retired diplomat and a young, rising civil servant who try to piece together what really happened during a covert anti-terrorist operation in Gibraltar undertaken by a private American defense contractor with British cooperation. It's a bit preachy, as Le Carré's recent books have tended to be, because Le Carré is really, really angry about the corporate national security state undermining democracy. This is an honorable anger, and the book is very enjoyable in that depressing Le Carré way.
Jonathan Barnes, The Somnambulist. I picked this up from the library, despite my reservations about Barnes' The Domino Men because I was having trouble finding anything else appealing. I liked The Somnambulist better than The Domino Men; it turns out that Domino is actually a sequel, of sorts, to Somnambulist, though they can be read separately. Somnambulist is set at the very end of Victoria's reign; its protagonist, the professional mentalist and conjuror and amateur detective Edward Moon (who may or may not have actual paranormal powers), is trying to solve a mysterious murder with the help of his stage assistant and friend the Somnambulist, an enormously tall and strong man who never speaks. The murder, as is the way of such things, soon shows connections to an old and once much-beloved friend of Moon's, to a sinister agency called The Directorate, and to a supernatural threat hanging over London. The book isn't as creative as it thinks it is, and there are more loose ends than I'm comfortable with (I don't require everything to be tied up tidily--in fact I often dislike that kind of overly-pat plotting--but I'd like a bit more revelation and sense-making than we get), but it's page-turny and I found Moon and the Somnambulist fascinating. The ca. 1900 setting helps me over some of my issues with The Domino Men, such as the lack of characters who aren't white. This book is also somewhat better with queer characters than The Domino Men, in that it strongly hints that Moon is bisexual. (I thought it was really obvious, but I couldn't find any online reviews that mentioned it, so perhaps not.) Not great on women characters, though. Overall I'd say The Somnambulist is not a must-read, but it's entertaining.
Padma Viswamathan, The Toss of a Lemon. This is a long (over 600 hardcover pages) family saga set in South India in the first half of the twentieth century, whose central characters are Sivakami, a Brahmin woman who is widowed at 18 and eventually, not trusting her brothers to look out for her children's interests, decides to stay in her late husband's house and manage his properties, and Muchami, the servant who helps her. Now, normally I'd walk a mile to avoid a multi-generational family saga, but the cover blub informed me that Muchami is a closeted gay man, so I gave this one a try. Alas, Muchami's sexuality is not much explored, and neither is any other aspect of Muchami's life: he's pretty much just the Faithful Servant. We do learn that he was in love with Sivakami's late husband Hanumarathnam and that he meets men at night for sex in the countryside outside the small town where he lives, but he never tries to have an actual relationship with a man and his emotional life is entirely centered on Sivakami and her children and grandchildren. It's not that this is necessarily implausible, but it is, as I said, a bit of a stereotype and is symptomatic of what I found to be a strain of nostalgia in the novel, a sentimentalizing of old, conservative social structures. A lot of the novel is about caste, specifically the privileges of the Brahmin caste and also its restrictive social conventions. The novel does imply some critiques of this system, but weighed against that is the fact that the conservative characters are also the most sympathetic ones, while the most radical character, Sivakami's son Vairum, is a selfish jerk who is inconsiderate of other people's feelings and outright cruel to his self-sacrificing mother. There are no positively portrayed "progressive" (Viswanathan's word) characters, and the anti-Brahmin-privilege movement is shown as violent and savage.
The book's take on child marriage is similar. We do see change over time, but the oldest girl to get married in the novel is 17, and her mother and grandmother were married as prepubescents and went to live with their husbands and consummate the marriage as soon as they'd had their first menstrual period. All but one of the book's many child marriages are shown as happy, emotionally warm and loving, and even sexually fulfilling for the young woman. The first time Viswanathan did this, in showing Sivakami's marriage, I thought it was a refreshing change from the usual stereotyped catalogue of horrors. But after a while it began to read as sentimental, nostalgic, and kind of disturbing. Admittedly, the bad marriage is very bad, but it's also, unlike the good marriages, only shown from the outside. We're never in the POV of the unhappily married woman, only the happy ones.
The Toss of a Lemon is basically the same kind of thing as those western historical novels that, while occasionally acknowledging unpleasant facts about the past (slavery, child labor, exploitation and poverty, women having few or no legal rights, and other pesky little details) nevertheless mostly want to show the past as a warmer, happier, more loving time. This is a trope I think is silly but verging on dangerous because of its political implications.
ETA: I'd be curious to know what Indian readers and critics thought of this book. It seems to have been written with a western audience in mind, because there's a lot of cultural explanation and an enjoyable, to me, but also slightly touristy-feeling focus on food. I ended up cooking sambhar and curd rice last night because the book made me crave south Indian food.
ETA2: The few such reviews I've found online (a couple from Indian-diaspora readers, one from a critic in an Indian magazine) are positive.
What I'm reading next:
Don't know. I'm waiting for interlibrary loan to send me a book about the demobilization of British soldiers after the Second World War. It's been three weeks and I hope it gets here soon.
