Orphans of Eldorado - Milton Hatoum

Continuing with the Canongate Myths series, Orphans of Eldorado represents the sole offering from South America. Blending the legend of Eldorado with the Amazonian myth of the Enchanted City, Hatoum offers us a journey into desire and despair, a dark river of longing.

Orphans of Eldorado follows the deteriorating fortunes of Arminto Cordovil, third generation Amazonian landowner whose spiralling descent into poverty mirrors the fortunes of pre-war Brazil. In Arminto’s case it seems that his desire, in particular his desire for Indian women, is his downfall. First there’s an affair with his nursemaid, Florita, which condemns him to a solitary existence in Manaus. Later, after his father’s death, Arminto becomes obsessed with a mysterious orphan, Dinaura. His desire consumes him, culminating in the sinking of his ship the Eldorado, the loss of his fortune and the eventual loss, too, of Dinaura.

Orphans of Eldorado is a strange kind of book and one I think I’d like to understand better. One of the things I’ve noticed when reading the myths is that a background understanding of the mythology is advantageous, and in this case I felt that the lack of it inhibited my understanding of the story. There is a blending of culture, a question of segregation between the Catholic ‘white’ aristocratic landowners and the Indians with their shamans and mythologies. In the middle of this is Arminto, a deteriorating Brazil with its collapsing rubber industry and landslide into poverty. There is the strangely problematic relationship between Arminto and his father Amando, a coldness which is never really quite explained but seems to be seated, somehow, in Arminto’s mother’s death in childbirth and, perhaps, the chequered past of Amando’s father. There are many questions of relationship. What is the relationship between Amando and Florita, how is Amando linked to Dinaura and is there, too, a secret relationship between Arminto and Dinaura beyond their desire (there is some suggestion that Dinaura is the child of Amando or, perhaps, his father)?

This seems to be a novel of secrets and mystery, interwoven with the exoticism of Amazonian mythologies. I didn’t quite get it, and was left feeling somewhat dissatisfied but also with the certainty that what was missing from this story was my own lack of knowledge and understanding. It certainly made me more interested in Amazonian mythology and, time permitting, I hope to do some more investigation into this and perhaps slot some of the missing pieces together.

One of the most surprising gifts this novel gave to me was a desire, also, to learn more about the poet C P Cavafy whose poem The City prefaces the story. Not having read anything by Cavafy before, I was strangely moved by the poem and would like to share it here. Another writer I’ll be investigating further.

The City by C P Cavafy (1910)

You said, ‘I’ll go to another land, I’ll go to

another sea.
I’ll find a city better than this one.
My every effort is a written indictment,
and my heart – like someone dead – is buried.
How long will my mind remain in this decaying state?
Wherever I cast my eyes, wherever I look,
I see my life in black ruins here,
where I spent so many years, and ruined and
wasted them.’

You will not find new lands, you will not find
other seas.
The city will follow you. You will roam
the same streets. And you will grow old in the same
neighbourhood,
and your hair will turn white in the same houses.
You will always arrive in this city. Don’t hope for
elsewhere –
there is no ship for you, there is no road.
As you have wasted your life here,
in this small corner, so you have ruined it on the
whole earth.

Orphans of Eldorado receives a slightly confused 7 out of 10 Biis.

  

Weight - Jeanette Winterson

Aside from reading books by female writers, I am also exploring mythologies so I was overjoyed when a friend reminded me of the fantastic series, Canongate myths. In this series, Canongate Books have asked various writers to exploit and retell their favourite myths. There’s a real range in the series which ranges from retelling of well known stories like Theseus and the minotaur, to more controversial retellings like Philip Pullman’s ‘The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ’ (which I’m getting to) to lesser known myths, at least to those of us in the Western world, like Binu and the Great Wall and the Japanese myth of Izanaki and Izanami. In total there are 17 myths (one of which has not been translated) and sadly it doesn’t appear that Canongate are doing any more.  

My starting point was one that was recommended to me: Weight by Jeanette Winterson. Weight is Winterson’s take on the myths of Atlas and Heracles, the two strong men of Greek history. But this is no ordinary story. Winterson has woven very loosely together the Titan’s and hero’s stories and injected to it her own idea of how those two beings might have been. What results is Atlas the philosopher meeting Heracles the grunt man who, through their meeting, suffers a strange kind of crisis of identity after offering to bear Atlas’s burden and then later reneging on the deal. Interwoven into this, somehow, and almost as an afterthought, is Winterson’s own story in a short, final piece which explains, cajoles perhaps, the reasons why she writes. It is a strange blend which in less capable hands wouldn’t work. But Winterson shows herself, here, to be a masterful storyteller. She translates the tale of Atlas, the story of Heracles, and makes them real conveying a great deal with real economy.  

 One of the great successes of this book is how distinctly Winterson conveys the characters of Atlas and Heracles. Take the following, a typical musing of the philosopher, gentle Atlas:

“I can hear the world beginning. Time plays itself back for me. I can hear the ferns uncurling from their tight rest. I can hear pools bubbling with life. I realise I am carrying not only this world, but all possible worlds. I am carrying the world in time as well as in space. I am carrying the world’s mistakes and its glories. I am carrying its potential as well as what has so far been realised.

As the dinosaurs crawl through my hair and volcanic eruptions pock my face, I find I am become a part of what I must bear. There is no longer Atlas and the world, there is only the World Atlas. Travel me and I am continents. I am the journey you must make.”  

and contrast with the introduction we receive to Heracles:

“Here he comes, the Hero of the World, wearing a lion-skin and swinging his olive club.

‘Have a drink Atlas you old globe. We’ve all got our burdens to bear. Your punishment is to hold up the universe. My punishment is to work for a wanker.’”

But it is the philosophy and beauty of the book which is its true strength. I have, frequently, been critical of female writers on account of their failure to engage with the world of ideas, but here Winterson is all ideas. The book is philosophically heavy, but it is a philosophy delivered with such a light and masterful touch that it is easy to become lost in its beauty. There are so many passages in this book to which I could return and return. As Winterson says ‘I want to tell the story again’ as I want to read the story again and again. To return to this:

“Always boundaries and desire...

It is fit that a man should do his best and grapple with the world. It is meet that he should accept the challenges of his destiny. What happens when the sun reaches the highest point in the day? Is it a failure for morning to become afternoon, or afternoon to turn into peaceful evening and star-bright night?”

“I am good at walking away. Rejection teaches you how to reject. I left my hometown, left my parents, left my life. I made a home and a life elsewhere, more than once. I stayed on the run. Why then, did the burden feel intolerable? What was it that I carried?

I realise now that the past does not dissolve like a mirage. I realise that the future, though invisible, has weight. We are in the gravitational pull of past and future. It takes huge energy – speed-of-light power – to break that gravitational pull.

How many of us ever get free of our orbit? We tease ourselves with fancy notions of free will and self-help courses that direct our lives. We believe we can be our own miracle, and just a lottery win or Mr Right will make the world new.

The ancients believed in Fate because they recognised how hard it is for anyone to change anything. The pull of past and future is so strong that the present is crushed by it. We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behaviour. The burden is intolerable.”

And that, in essence, is what this book is about: the burden of weight we carry with ourselves. In Atlas’s case the burden was physical, and yet there is a recognition that the burden is somehow self-imposed, that Atlas is complicit, even defined by his burden of the world on his shoulders. In Heracles’s case the burden is one of birth, his Fate to be the Hero of the World, and to die as one too. The burden of his birthright, his parentage, the anger of a goddess he had no power to change. In our case it is our lives that are a burden, as Winterson says “We lie helpless in the force of patterns inherited and patterns re-enacted by our own behaviour”. We are burdened by ourselves. The weight is inescapable.

Yet in the end there is a message of hope. Atlas joins forces with another being, Laika the dog propelled into space by the Russians, another being who escaped the pull of past and future. Like Atlas, who in the end accepted his fate. Who carried the burden with care and love and attention and who, in the end, decided to let it go.

A stunningly wonderful book, beautifully written and intricately woven. Weight receives a mythological 5 out of 5 Biis.

I really need to get better at this

Okay,  so it's a really really long time since I published anything on my blog. Bad, naughty me. Since my last post I've read about a gazillion books and thought a lot about them and written not a jot. I am committed to catching up. Watch this space, reviews will follow...

Apologies.

Bii

Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner

Hotel du Lac was the 1984 winner of the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, a slim, deceptively lightweight novel which is totally captivating and more complex than it first appears.

The story follows the character Edith Hope who is taking an impromptu vacation at the Hotel du Lac after some unnamed event in which she has somehow embarrassed herself and her friends. The hotel is in Switzerland in an unnamed place on an unnamed lake and this very lack of naming serves to highlight the exile to which Edith has been subjected. The hotel itself does not advertise, but relies on word of mouth to fill its rooms. It is the end of the season. The hotel is beginning to run down, the town is quiet, its residents are either locals or exiles like Edith. Not surprisingly, the hotel residents are mainly cast off women.

Edith, back in London, is a successful writer of romantic fiction (under a pseudonym, of course. One cannot, as a single woman of this era, be both free and successful) and approaches her exile in a defiant spirit, intending to work it out whilst working through her next novel. Instead she finds herself drawn into observations of, and the lives of, her fellow cast-offs serving their own exiles in the hotel. This includes Mme du Bonneuil, an elderly widow moved from hotel to hotel, cast off by her son. Monica, a beautiful aristocratic woman with a troublesome dog, cast off by her husband for failing to produce a child. Iris and Jennifer Pusey, less cast off than cast adrift, rich soulless women enraptured by their own self-absorption. And then there is Mr. Neville, an irreverent and somehow enticing man who offers Edith a way out of her imposed exile and isolation. Through the hotel residents Edith finds herself drawn into their small dramas, and through their dramas we come to understand Edith’s own.

This is a book of contradictions. Edith is presented as a woman who is quiet and timorous, lacking in boldness or direction. And yet she retains a core of defiance, an unwillingness to change in order to achieve that mythical, fairy tale ‘happiness’ that all women are supposed to desire (marriage). You get the impression that Edith is neither sad nor regretful of her actions, and that where she is happiest is living in her own space according to her own routine; the only thing which causes her regret or sadness is the way others expect her to do and be something different.

Don’t expect a lot to happen in Hotel du Lac, it is a book full of melancholy and grey reflections. Much of the action is ‘told’ by means of letters from Edith to David (a man with whom Edith has been having a secret affair), or through conversations on long, sad walks or over coffee and cake at the quiet local cafe. And yet in these quiet reflections there is a powerful message, a surprisingly unexpectedly feminist novel, expressed in the manner of passive resistance rather than direct action. In Edith we find an unapologetically individual woman, uncompromising in her own way, unwilling to sacrifice herself for the sake of expectation. It is a story I am sure many women will relate to. Perhaps it will make some readers mad, perhaps the slow pace and quiet resistance will be a bit frustrating. But in its quiet, withdrawn way this is a magnificent book. Lightly told, deceptively simple, and beautifully written. A joy to read, and a future classic in the making.

Hotel du Lac receives a stately 9/10 Biis.

State of Happiness by Stella Duffy

Never before have I been so lied to by a title. About to embark on what turned out to be a sub-zero camping trip, after the heaviest, most stressful beginning 3 months of the year of my working career, I bobbed down to the library and saw this lovely looking book – State of Happiness – with a lovely blue sky, sea, sunshine and flowers cover and thought ‘that’s it!’. I’ve read something by Duffy before (Theodora – see earlier review) and as one of those great female contemporary writing gems I discovered last year, I felt assured that this was the book that would soothe me into a state of relaxation in those long days lounging around in the tent.

How wrong I was.

State of Happiness follows the story of Cindy, a New York mapmaker and writer, who falls in love with Jack, an Englishman in New York, who she meets through her friend Kelly. Cindy is enjoying some success from the publication of her thesis and is a minor celebrity, as well as teaching on the side. Jack is a newsmaker. An unlikely pairing that surprises them both. Aside from mapping her own life, Cindy begins to map her life with Jack and finds it to her liking.

Then Cindy suffers an unexpected health scare, a sudden collapse whilst teaching. At the time nothing was found and Cindy and Jack continue their life together as normal. A minor bump in the road, that’s all.

Then Jack is offered a job in California. Cindy, a New York natural, has some questions about following, but after some soul searching and sage advice from her friend Kelly, decides to take this new fork in the road and follow him out there. After a short period of disappointment she, and Jack, begin to settle into their new life together. Cindy embarks on a project she’d been thinking about for some time, exploring the link between memory and maps, personal maps. Then one night she wakes to a pain in her chest and a new knowledge that the truly undiscovered country is the one we carry around with us, that the map of ourselves is inside us and as out of our control as the country around us.

After such a lovely start we then follow Cindy and Jack on their new path, a journey with terminal illness. An uplifting story, this is not. Poignant, sad (I actually cried when Cindy told her friend Kelly that she was dying) and written in a starkly unsentimental way, State of Happiness forces us to face the reality of what it means to lose the battle for life. Working with a subject which could all too easily becoming cloying, over emotional, sentimental, cliché ridden, Duffy manages to bring both clinical examination and raw emotion into the mix. Juxtaposing Cindy’s scientific, slightly obsessive mapping techniques and the stripped-painful reality of facing the uncertainty of facing a future which offers only pain and death, if anything, heightens the emption of the story, stripping it raw.

It’s not an easy read, and it certainly wasn’t what I was expecting (never judge a book by its cover, my son sagely reminded me) but it is an excellent book. Painful, certainly, but also enlightening and perhaps just exactly what I needed to read. Because as Cindy marches on her journey towards her end we are reminded that we are all on that journey but, unlike Cindy, we just don’t know it, or perhaps recognise it. And we should, wherever we can, live for the moment and enjoy what we have because the future is uncertain and unknown and we never really know how long we have or how our story, the map of our lives, will end.

A beautifully written, unflinching examination of one woman’s battle with terminal illness.

State of Happiness receives a brave 8 Biis.

And Stella Duffy – well, I’m definitely becoming a fan!

Rape a Love Story by Joyce Carol Oates

So, you may be wondering if I have some kind of obsessive compulsive disorder to return to an author I've read only recently so soon, but when I find a new author I like I like to read their other stuff too, and having read something by Joyce Carol Oates and enjoyed it I really wanted to read something more. So if that's OCD so be it. I liked her work. I wanted more.

So when they had a copy of Rape: A Love Story in my local library I figured 'why not' and so I did and with an intriguing title like that it was an easy grab off the shelf moment (I didn't steal it, just loaned it. Honest). And I wasn't disappointed. Not an easy read, but a rewarding one. Well I think so anyway.

Rape: A Love Story follows the story of Teena Maguire, a single mother, slim, young, attractive, sexy if you like, and her 12 year old daughter Bethel and the 4th of July night when Teena decides to walk through the park to get home, rather than take the long way around. It's a nice night. They've been to a party. It's late. The decision is made.

In the park they run in to a gang of lads who have also been partying. Drunk, high on drugs, they drag Teena and her daughter into a disused boat house. They then gang rape Teena and beat her daughter who, fortunately, is too young to take their interest and instead merely has to listen to her mother being repeatedly raped and beaten while she hides behind some disused boats. When the boys have finished they leave Teena for dead.

And then the story starts. Because in spite of the evidence, in spite of her injuries and the testimony of her daughter, many of the townspeople turn against Teena. Teena the tart. Teena who dresses too provocatively. Teena who was asking for it, who wasn't raped but who was only assaulted when a deal to prostitute herself and her daughter went bad.

And this is the uncomfortable part of the story, because through her delicate, beautiful prose Oates leads us into the minds of a town torn apart by this terrible crime. Into the minds of the rapists whose only regrets are that they didn't kill Teena and her daughter, that they left them alive in order to identify them. Into the minds of the parents of the boys who raped Teena who don't want to believe their sons did this terrible thing, who also maybe know that they did but will do anything to stop their sons' lives being destroyed by terrible, expendible Teena, that floozy woman who is trying to ruin their sons' lives.

Into the minds of Teena and Bethel, especially Bethel, whose childhood ended in that park. Who lost a mother and instead...found love?

Because there are two sides to this story, two sides to the title in fact. This is Rape / A Love Story. And the love story is Bethel's. Bethel falls quietly in love with her rescuer, the police officer who was first on the scene, the strange, enigmatic Officer Dromoor. Not that she ever mentions how she feels.

As the court case begins, and the families of the rapists collectively hire a shark lawyer who twists the events to make them sound innocent, and make Teena sound guilty, Teena withdraws into depression. She refuses to take part in the case, in spite of her terrible injuries, the fact that she only just survived, in spite of her attackers continuing to threaten and harass her, she is portrayed as the villain. And at this point she walks away.

And then her attackers start to go missing, one by one. The first one is openly killed by Dromoor, apparently in defence of another after Teena's ex-boyfriend was attacked in a pub car park. Then two others go missing. Then another appears to commit suicide. The remainder confess. And Bethel knows why. The town moves on.

Rape: A Love Story is a difficult read. It reminded me of a time when I was a much younger woman and I first saw the movie The Accused and felt horrified that beyond the terrible experience of rape was an even worse experience. That after the violence and violation comes a further violation - the trial, in which a woman's whole character, her appearance, her behaviour is measured as justifiable reason for rape. And I can understand how women can choose to turn away from that. Having suffered a terrible, dehumanising assault, to then suffer the psychological damage of being subjected to accusations that the crime had been caused by you, because your skirt was too short, you dressed to provocatively, you 'came on' to someone, you lead them on, you asked for it. Well I can see how in some ways that can be worse.

And this book confronts that fact. That people can be faced with a terrible truth, that terrible violence can be done to a person and it is still preferable to think that the attacker is somehow the victim, the innocent one. Oates, with her beautiful prose, is unflinching in her approach to this subject, forcing us to see the victim, forcing us to see into the minds of the attackers. It is a short, but breathless book and one well worth reading.

If I had one criticism of this book, it would be that it felt rather rushed. And I would have liked to have understood Teena more, but then her very withdrawal is perhaps the thing that brought home how terrible the crime against her had been.

A terrible reminder of the soul destroying, unjustifiable crime that is rape. Please spare a moment to think of the many victims worldwide, and if you can spare a few pennies perhaps make a donation to one of the charities listed below.

Rape: A Love Story receives a stunned 9/10 Biis.

Joyce Carol Oates, you are my hero.

http://www.rapecrisis.org.uk/
http://www.rainn.org/
http://www.warchild.org.uk/what-we-do

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie

By now you must be thinking that all I ever do is read books written by ladies. Whilst it's true that I have spent some time shifting the balance to incorporate more works by my fellow female I do, in fact, also read books written by men. And I'm here to prove it. Because as part of my mammoth reading challenge, I read Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie.

So, what's to say about Midnight's Children? For a start off, Midnight's Children was a Booker Prize winner and then the Booker of Booker's prize winner (being the best Booker of Bookers...or something along those lines) so you can feel reassured that it's a pretty good book. And it is. It is an excellent book. Well written, engaging, funny, massive in scope, crazy-confusing-andabitmad. But I didn't like it. Does that make any sense? Not really. Read on and see if you can figure it out.

So the story of Midnight's Children follows the life of Saleem Sanai, a boy who was born on the stroke of midnight on the day of the 'birth' of new India, India's independence from Britain. And later in the novel, but not much later, we learn that Saleem, like all the other children born between midnight and 1am on that day, has special powers, special powers that are a threat to Mother India.

There's so much packed into this novel that it's hard to know where to start to tell you about it. So I don't think I will. Suffice to say that this novel is jam packed full of information, characters, events, thoughts and circumstances. From Saleem's Grandfather Aadam Aziz's hole in his chest where God used to be, to the massacre of hundreds of innocents by the British Army, to Tai the boat man and his unwashed, mad, ravings, to Mumtaz Aziz and her secret fantasies of a lanky haired, podgy poet, to prophesies, to Pakistan, to coups, to pickles and child swapping, this book has pretty much got it all. If you enjoy reading novels which are clever, well written and dizzyingly complicated, this is definitely a novel for you.

And I like all those things, but for me the storytellery approach just made me feel excluded. I felt like I was watching a play that was put on for the benefit of the actors, and as a consequence I just felt a bit left out. And maybe not clever enough to understand it (though I could follow the story well enough). There's a lot to take in with this novel. There are a lot of characters, and a lot of history. There are allusions to the 1001 nights (which I wish I'd read all the way through...maybe this year?) and Indian history, hinduism. The main character, Saleem, talks of himself in the third person, as though he is mythologising his own history. And he's an unreliable narrator, he admits as much. So we're left, at the end, wondering if we've been conned, or whether we've witnessed the inevitable fallability of memory. I don't know. I'm still not sure what to think.

I'm sure I missed 1001 things from this dense, intelligent and well written book. I was left in no doubt of Salman Rushdie's superior intelligence, his skill in story telling, his imaginativeness and brilliance. But it was all so shining I guess it left me feeling a bit dull and grubby. And contrasted with the equally skilled but inclusive writings of, say, David Mitchell (who I totally love, I'll get to him eventually) it just didn't do it for me.

So, in the end, Midnight's Children gets a conflicted 9/10 for skill and imagination, it's definitely an excellent book but 4/10 for enjoyment.

Weird, I know.