Morning News Tournament of Books

Favorite Books has blogged about the The Morning News's [@TheMorningNews] Tournament of Books--I was first alerted to this interesting exercise by my good friend and proprietor of Mar's Cafe in Des Moines, Iowa, Mark Movic (thank you Mark!).

Find TMN's announcement here:
http://www.themorningnews.org/article/announcing-the-morning-news-tournament-of-books-x

It is worth it (to me anyway) to list the Long list first because it includes Dissident Gardens and Night Film, both reviewed just now in this very blog. (The long list also includes a book I completely disliked but I won't mention its title or give it any undue publicity).

S by J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst
Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón
Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
MaddAddam by Margaret Atwood
Traveling Sprinkler by Nicholson Baker
Stay Up With Me by Tom Barbash
Frances and Bernard by Carlene Bauer
The Incrementalists by Steven Brust and Skyler White
We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
what purpose did i serve in your life by Marie Calloway
Return to Oakpine by Ron Carlson
Eleven Days by Lea Carpenter
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
Y by Marjorie Celona
The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto
Necessary Errors by Caleb Crain
Harvest by Jim Crace
Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat
Duplex by Kathryn Davis
Pacific by Tom Drury
The Circle by Dave Eggers
The Virgins by Pamela Erens
Percival Everett by Virgil Russell by Percival Everett
The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan
Middle C by William H. Gass
& Sons by David Gilbert
The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
Hild by Nicola Griffith
The Explanation for Everything by Lauren Grodstein
Tirza by Arnon Grunberg
Local Souls by Allan Gurganus
The Morels by Christopher Hacker
Enon by Paul Harding
NOS4A2 by Joe Hill
You Are One of Them by Elliott Holt
How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
Mira Corpora by Jeff Jackson
The Residue Years by Mitchell S. Jackson
The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards by Kristopher Jansma
Doctor Sleep by Stephen King
The Dinner by Herman Koch
The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
Long Division by Kiese Laymon
Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem
Two Boys Kissing by David Levithan
The Facades by Eric Lundgren
Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel
A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra
A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing by Eimear McBride
The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
TransAtlantic by Colum McCann
Hill William by Scott McClanahan
The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud
The Son by Philipp Meyer
Want Not by Jonathan Miles
The Returned by Jason Mott
Tampa by Alissa Nutting
A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Red Moon by Benjamin Percy
Night Film by Marisha Pessl
Rontel by Sam Pink
Visitation Street by Ivy Pochoda
Bleeding Edge by Thomas Pynchon
Love, Dishonor, Marry, Die, Cherish, Perish by David Rakoff
Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
In Times of Fading Light by Eugen Ruge
All That Is by James Salter
Tenth of December by George Saunders
Motherlunge by Kirstin Scott
Ghana Must Go by Taiye Selasi
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul by Bob Shacochis
Mary Coin by Marissa Silver
The Silence and the Roar by Nihad Sirees
Sisterland by Curtis Sittenfeld
Brewster by Mark Slouka
The Burgess Boys by Elizabeth Strout
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
The Isle of Youth by Laura van den Berg
The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez
The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P. by Adelle Waldman
The Kings and Queens of Roam by Daniel Wallace
The President in Her Towers by Tom Whalen
The Last Policeman by Ben Winters
The Interestings by Meg Wolitzer
The Maid’s Version by Daniel Woodrell
Wash by Margaret Wrinkle
The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara
Snow Hunters by Paul Yoon
Lotería by Mario Alberto Zambrano
Stupid Children by Lenore Zion

Not a bad way to stay in touch with the year's best (except for that one I won't be mentioning)? Where to start? Here is the short list:

Finalists for the 2014 Tournament of Books

• At Night We Walk in Circles by Daniel Alarcón
• The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
• The Tuner of Silences by Mia Couto
• The Signature of All Things by Elizabeth Gilbert
• How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid
• The Dinner by Herman Koch
• The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
• Long Division by Kiese Laymon
• The Good Lord Bird by James McBride
• Hill William by Scott McClanahan
• The Son by Philipp Meyer
• A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
• Eleanor & Park by Rainbow Rowell
• The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt
• The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara
• [Winner of the Pre-Tournament Playoff Round]

Pre-Tournament Playoff Round

• Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
• Woke Up Lonely by Fiona Maazel

 All the links take you to Powell's book store, but don't forget to check out Philly's bookstores, The Penn Book Center, Joseph Fox bookshop, Bindlestiff's (right in my neighborhood!), House of our Own on Spruce Street in University City, and Penn's own hardworking bookstore, The Penn Bookstore (you won't find books on their Web site, but they do have them!)

The tournament of books is something along the lines of the collegiate basketball playoffs. Judges take on pairs of books, with only one from each pair moving on to the next round. You can follow the judging and the reviews at The Morning News.

 Go Tournament of Books!

One last plug in this blog posting of plugs. Many of these books have been reviewed at Full-Stop: Reviews, Interviews, and Marginalia, so please check it out.

Jonathan Lethem's Dissident Gardens

Jonathan Lethem. Dissident Gardens: A Novel. Doubleday, 2013.

One of my favorite Jonathan Lethem books was his 1997 novel As She Climbed Across the Table. This is a great comic novel of academia. The main character refers to himself as Mr. Interdisciplinary and his girlfriend, a physicist, falls in love with the lack she and her colleagues have created in the lab (the "she" that crawls across the table...into the lack). I bring this up, because this novel is rarely listed in the blurbs on the backs of Lethem novels that extol Lethem's literary prowess [Wait -- it is mentioned in his biographical blurb on the back flap!]. One of my best friends, someone with his own brand of literary prowess, recommended this 1997 gem to me and it remains at the top of my favorites ... so check it out. I'm talking myself into reading it again.

But, this isn't a review of an academic lack, this is a review of Dissident Gardens--something very far from the light and easy Table. This novel requires some attention and thought and probably some re-reading--but don't let this dissuade you--it also rewards this same attention and thought.  Do you like to have something to think about and ponder? Dissident Gardens provides a picture of post war (World War II) America from the perspective of New York City and the American Communist Party--or at least a few of its most devoted. [And before I'm done I have to say something about Inside Llewyn Davis (the film) and Dawn Powell's Golden Spur, and Philadelphia in fiction.]

This novel deserves a visualization. It would start with Rose Angrush Zimmer at the top, the matriarch, conscience, and avenging angel of Sunnyside Gardens. The novel opens with Rose's ejection from the local Communist Party cell. As the novel progresses, it is clear that Rose may be the one true remaining Communist in the American Communist Party with her daughter Miriam and her nephew Lenny who were brought into the fold by Rose willingly or not, both of whom come to separate but early and tragic deaths. Lethem is all about character in this novel. Rose haunts everyone--driving them away with her intensity and her bordering-on-crazy single-mindedness. She is the constant in this novel that spans decades, but remains geographically centered in Queens and Manhattan, with diversions to Philly and rural Pennsylvania, Germany and Nicaragua.

Back to the visualization: Rose's daughter Miriam is next in line (by my estimation) in importance. Her father, Albert, also a Communist, leaves Rose and baby Miriam to do the work of the party in Germany. Later, we learn something about Albert in the letters that he writes to Miriam after she re-establish contact with her long absent father. Miriam has all the iron will and determination of her mother, forged through her constant rebellion against Rose's authority. She marries at a young age, Tommy Gogan, one of the Gogan Boys, who together and apart, garner moderate fame during the NYC folk revival. Miriam and Tommy bring Sergius into the world, and Sergius spends most of his childhood and young adult years at a Quaker school in Pennsylvania following the death of both of his parents in the jungles of Nicaragua.

So, we have Rose and Miriam, Albert a bit off to the left, Tommy and Sergius a little below and to the right of Miriam. Now a little to the left and below Rose, we have the American Communist Party and Douglas Lookins, Rose's African American cop lover. Her affair with Lookins catapults her out of the party--is it because he is a cop? is it because he is Black? Either way, the American Communist Party is wrong and Rose is right. His son Cicero becomes Rose's protege. Under her vise-like tutelage, Cicero rises to the top of schools and scholarship competitions to land at Princeton, and then, ultimately, as a professor at a small liberal arts school in Maine. Cicero, like Miriam, does not know whether to love or hate Rose, to be grateful for the direction in which she rocket launched him, or to resent her powerful grip.

Archie Bunker is another of Rose's lovers and it is up to you, the reader, to decide whether he is a flesh and blood man who in every way resembles Archie Bunker, or an entity existing only in Rose's mind. Not least among the characters, and perhaps the most tragic of all the characters, for being the most lovable and the most unlovable a the same time, is Lenny Angrush, a brilliant chess player, expert in numismatics, devoted Communist and man of the people, baseball fan, and hopelessly, tragically in love with his younger cousin Miriam. Lenny's judgment fails him and puts him in the way of the blood thirsty, almost evaporated into thin air.

There you have the beginnings of a visualization and yet you still know so little of this novel. Each character has their own tragic center. Rose tenaciously holding onto everything even as she loses everything and everyone who has ever been important to her. Cicero, not her own child, is the last living member of her circle to remember and care for Rose. Cicero is himself an orphan, with Rose being his only connection to family as he is hers. After her death, she continues to be very much part of his burden of memory. Sergius also survives Rose, but of all the Angrush's he is the only one to be mostly untouched by Rose. Orphaned at 8, he is prevented from being taken under Rose's wing by his a letter that his mother posts to her friend Stella Kim and that arrives posthumously. Sergius barely remembers his parents having worked to forget them and the brief period in which his life overlapped with theirs. Miriam, Rose's only child, is driven by her love-hate relationship with her mother and mirrors her mother's tenacious need to control and mold. Miriam embodies the peace and non-violent movements of the 60s. She and Tommy leave Sergius in the hands of the Pennsylvania Quakers as they seek to kindle their folk sensibilities within the Nicaraguan revolution.

Here I have to digress. While reading Dissident Gardens, I took a short break and read Dawn Powell's Golden Spur. In her novel, the Golden Spur is a bar frequented by artists. This is in the 50s. By the time of Lethem's narrative, the Golden Spur is a home to the folk movement. This is the same early, pre-Dylan era that is portrayed in  the film "Inside Llewyn Davis." Interesting that this novel and film should come out so closely together. Powell's novel was written in the 50s, so the only coincidence is that I read it at the same time that I was reading Dissident Gardens and viewing Inside Llewyn Davis. In Tommy Gogan's portion of the novel, Lethem has Tommy thinking about his place among the folks as Bob Dylan takes over the stage and the air waives:  "He was disgruntled less on his own behalf than on that of Van Ronk, Clayton, so many others, all swallowed and disgorged, all eclipsed, all savaged by the splenetic fusillade pouring from the radio . . . to think yourself defined, however cursory one's own talent, by immersion in a collective voicing deeper than that of which any sole practitioner could be capable, and then to have every third remark be did you ever open for Dylan, did you ever meet Dylan, was Dylan there is Dylan coming was it like Dylan I think I saw Dylan he's a second rate Dylan...." Tommy finds his last inspiration far away from Dylan with first love and muse Miriam in Nicaragua.

Tommy and Miriam's trip to Nicaragua leaves Sergius to reinvent himself. He, the most distant from Rose, and the least affected by her often cruel intensity, brings the novel to a close. Trying to reconnect himself with the ghosts of his family, Sergius seeks out Cicero, a meeting that does neither one of them any good. As the novel ends, Sergius is making taking a personal stand against Homeland Security in a nondescript room in a nondescript airport in Maine.

More about Jonathan Lethem.

Infoglut by Mark Andrejevic

Mark Andrejevic's Infoglut*: How Too Much Information is Changing the Way we Think and Know. Routledge, 2013.

We have all been hearing about Big Data. Many a magazine has devoted an issue to the topic, and libraries are exploring ways to provide access to and storage for Big Data in all of its many manifestations across the disciplines. In the humanities, at least one way that we think about big data is in terms of large searchable text databases derived from collections of novels, letters, newspapers, perhaps legislation, the files in full text databases, or even phone books. When we talk about mining these troves of raw text data, we take note of the way a query is constructed and the kind of stop list that is created because we know that these things can drive our results. We know that results are not precisely replicable. Conducting research with big data in the humanities requires attention to detail and process, but it seems pleasantly benign after reading Infoglut.

Variations on this catchy title carry through the table of contents with the chapters “Intelligence Glut,” “Emotional Glut,” “Future Glut,” “Glut Instinct,” “Neuro-Glut,” “Theory Glut,” and finally, “Cutting through the Glut.” These clever and descriptive chapter headings are the only cheery aspects of the book. For good news on our info world, cozy up with Richard Harper’s Texture: Human Expression in the Age of Communications Overload (MIT Press, 2010). Settle in for some serious reflection on life as a consumed consumer as you embark on the journey through Infoglut.

Andrejevic takes us through the monitoring, tracking, quantifying and auctioning off of our online lives as we share on social media, shop, and send emails. He describes a “post-truth” world of politics beyond the imagining of George Orwell, that takes advantage of the noise of information to float half-truths and inaccuracies, and you can add post-narrative and post-comprehension to your political vocabulary as well.  This is just the smallest taste of Andrejevic’s dark, but carefully argued text. While we see the advantages of the rapid advancement in technologies, we are not surprised that it comes with its cost. Server farms are energy hungry, privacy is easily relinquished, and truth is hard to come by. We are not strangers to these concerns in the library profession and this book reminds us of our roles in providing access without discrimination, protecting the privacy of our communities, and making available a wide range of perspectives with an eye to quality and reliability. So, I encourage you to take a look at a chapter or more of this book, but cue up your favorite comedy before calling it a night.



*Infoglut, according to the OED has been in the English language since at least 1984 appearing in the book The Netweaver's Sourcebook. It (almost) achieved title status early on in David Shenk's 1997 Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, and again in the Guardian in 2005. It also appears as the title to a book, the title of which, sounds more like a party:  Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences: Research in an Age of Infoglut by Kristin Luker (You can get this book at the Free Library of Philadelphia). Find Infoglut at a library near you.




Any thoughts on info glut? There is plenty of room in this blog for a little more.

Giersbach on Night Film by Marisha Pessl

An Artist Needs Darkness

Marisha Pessl's Night Film, Random House, 2013.

By Walter Giersbach 

“Special Projects in Calamity Physics” marked 27-year-old Marisha Pessl’s debut in 2006, garnering a front-page New York Times Book Review.  Pessl writes with a unique “voice” as she follows motherless teenager Blue van Meer into school and introduces a cast of idiosyncratic characters.  A teacher is murdered, Dad is not who he appears to be, and the teenaged Bluebloods are uniquely quirky.  Is Blue discovering life or is she being led by forces she doesn’t recognize?  A tough-but-rewarding read.”

My review above was published November 2012 by the Asbury Park Press.  I was overjoyed to see that Pessl has followed her debut work with “Night Film,” another novel in which things aren’t what they seem.  This captivating almost-thriller follows a newsman’s search for Cordova, the underground film maker who hasn’t been seen in years.  Cordova had won a libel suit against the narrator, but in the interest of news the writer begins investigating the death of Cordova’s 24-year-old daughter Ashley.  Was she an apparent suicide by falling down the elevator shaft of an abandoned building in New York’s Chinatown— or was she pushed?  Careful steps through a Funhouse Arcade of deception, mystery, supernatural manifestations and coincidences take the narrator into the lives of a cult figure.

Interspersed with the narrative are graphic pages from Web sites, police reports, news clippings and ephemera that tell the tale alongside the narrative arc of the plot.  Like David Mitchell’s “Cloud Atlas,” this is less a straight-forward story and more the unfolding of characters, motives and existential questions.

Key to peeling away layers of plot deception is Cordova’s former wife, who explains,

“Darkness.  I know it’s hard to fathom today, but a true artist needs darkness in order to create.  It gives him power.  His invisibility.  The less the world knows about him, her whereabouts, his origins and secret methods, the more strength he has.  The more inanities about him the world eats, the smaller and drier his art until it shrinks and shrivels into a Lucky Charms marshmallow to be consumed in a little bowl with milk for breakfast.”

We need more Cordovas…and more Pessls.  She’s marvelous as a stylist.  The now 35-year-old writer describes, for example, a young hat check employee at the Four Seasons:

According to the police report, she’d been working here only a few weeks.  She was about 5’7” and scrawny as a question mark, with pale blond hair in a French twist — curls around her face channeling alfalfa.  She wore a brown skirt and brown blouse too big for her — the restaurant uniform visible shoulder pads sitting unevenly over her frame….

“Good evening, sir,” she said brightly, removing her glasses, revealing big blue eyes and delicate features that would have made her an “it girl” about four hundred years ago….  She was wearing harsh pink lipstick, which didn’t look like it’d been applied in good light or within two feet of a mirror.”

Don’t let this emerging literary giant — Pessl, not the hat check girl — pass you by!

For more on Marisha Pessl
Find more reviews by Walter Giersbach in this blog or even more at his own blog: allotropiclucubrations.blogspot.com/‎

Long Time No See by Dermot Healy

Dermot Healy. Long Time No See. Viking, 2012.

I loved this book, and, after having put aside a couple of books without finishing them, it reminded me about how wonderful it can be to read an excellent novel. This story takes place in an Irish coastal village in 2006. In many ways it could take place at any time, but we are reminded from time to time that it is in our own time as mobile phones are mentioned or a recent popular song. The narrator is a young man who is just finishing school and preparing for college. We are not privy to his thoughts, it more as though we are hearing what he hears and seeing what he sees. The novel has plot elements, but it isn't plot driven. Overall, we realize what doesn't change with the times is the importance of community, friendship, family, and caring about others. This is not a sentimental book with a simplified message.

Philip, or Mister Psyche as he is called by his granduncle, is spending his summer picking up work around the village, assisting his father on jobs, and looking out for his aged granduncle and his granduncle's aged friend, The Bird. In his spare time, he is building a wall with stones from the ruins of an nearby ancient monastery. Fierce storms, long hours of work, concern and worry for failing friends and family members, loneliness  are all part of this novel. The old are lonely in their old age, the many foreigners, particularly from Eastern Europe, are lonely in their distance from home, the young are lonely as they contemplate leaving home or the loss of a friend. But as Philip tells the story, everyone is cared for by someone else--it comes naturally and is a way of life.

The narrative style is interesting and takes a few pages to settle into ... because we're thrown into the story without context. It isn't exactly stream of consciousness, but it isn't a straightforward telling of a tale. Details emerge and add to the overall impression creating a complete picture. I will look forward to other novels by Dermot Healy.

Mikhail Epstein. Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto (1)

Epstein, Mikhail. Transformative Humanities: A Manifesto. NY: Bloomsbury, 2012.

Epstein is diving into the broad discipline of humanities and starting anew. I hope to bit by bit write about what he is laying out in his manifesto. Writing from a Russian intellectual tradition he looks at, among other Russian intellectuals, Mikhail Bakhtin, in particular comparing his ideas of community, birth, unity, and culture to those of Foucault (to greatly oversimplify). Epstein does this in part to support his concept of moving from a world of post- to a world of proto-.

In this post I will just write a few lines about his idea of word formation. In Chapter 6, entitled "Semiurgy: From Language Analysis to Language Synthesis," Epstein explores that idea of word coinage and formation. He briefly describes three types of sign making, combinative (most textual writing and in particular philosophical and literary writing), descriptive (words and their definitions as in dictionaries for instance) and the third being formative, or sign formation, the introduction of new signs into language. Epstein himself is developing a new vocabulary throughout his book, which includes an eight page glossary of new vocabulary. He predicts that "sign makers" and "sign givers" will become as important as "law makers," because he sees these two distinct activities as complementary. "[L]aw makes everyone subject to self-restriction, while the new sign creates for everyone a new opportunity for self-expression" (98). The combination of signs (as in philosophical and literary writing) will move from the bringing together of old signs, to the generation of new signs.

Along with the creation of new signs comes the evolution of new concepts bringing with it "new layers of meanings" and "new shades and nuances in the range of feelings, actions and intentions" (99). As an example Epstein presents nine new words for love including dislove, "a deeper feeling than 'dislike', a matter of personal relationship rather than taste" and siamorous, "closely connected by a psychic symbiosis based on love" (100-101). Epstein calls these new words protologisms, "a freshly minted word not yet widely accepted" (101). The name for the next phase for the newly created word as it moves into common use (aided by the prevalence of the Internet) is neologism.

To support this active development of language, Epstein calls for a fourth branch of Semiotics that he calls Semionics (the first three being semantics, syntactics,  and pragmatics). Semionics would be the study of the activity of generating new signs (99) complimenting Semiurgy, which is the practice itself of creating new signs.

Epstein talks about the development of new words and the augmentation of language in the same way a cosmologist might talk about the universe. He exhorts all those tied to words and language to give back.

"A new word is like a mini-meme; it contains the strongest power of propagation, since the maximal meaning is generated with the minimal sign. Cultures that worship Logos as the Word that was before everything must also pay attention to the Neologism, or anticipation of the new word, still silent in the depths of language, until the moment when it bursts into life. In this respect, I wish to make a plea to all writers, lecturers, orators, linguists, literary scholars and teachers, and journalists. We are all users of language's treasures, drawing from it words and phrases and turning them into the means of our very existence; in this way, language value turns into monetary value. We are all dependent on language for our lives. However, language has no Internal Revenue Service agency, to which each of us must pay back with at least one new word for each thousand or tens of thousands of words we have used. And yet, we still can repay our debt (if only in part), enriching language with new words. Let it be a matter of our professional honor" (104).

Greek and Roman Historians, II: Should We Read Them

Revisiting Greek and Roman Historians: Information and Misinformation by Michael Grant (Routledge, 1995) and in particular his penultimate chapter, "Should We Read the Ancient Historians?"

Not surprisingly, the answer is yes and in some respects an unqualified yes. The qualifications make their way into the assessment if you ask, "should we read them in order to know exactly what happened in ancient history?" Grant takes a quick look at all histories, whether written last week or a couple of thousand years ago. He writes that "the truth is hard to capture" despite the fact that it is the truth toward which historians aim. Grant evokes the 19th century and its turn toward a scientific approach to the reliance on facts, events, and dates supported by evidence found in documents and observation. But facts are of little use without interpretation. Historians must present the facts, as well as the ideas behind the facts. He quotes Ranke who wrote that historians must, "show why things happened and . . . the forces which were at work." Ranke urged the historian to note "changes, relationships, causes and consequences, and to explain the sequence and connection of events" (92).

But science is not without its biases and how we think, the values we've inherited, color or influence what we see and how we interpret what we see. No amount of science or evidence can do away with the bias that comes with recording history. Isn't this why we exhort students to critically assess the sources they are working with--author affiliation and previous works, supporting entities such as publishers and associations, and sources cited in any particular work. Isn't this why we have controversies over smoking, global climate change, immigration policy, the trade offs of nuclear power, and so on.

Grant offers that each generation of historian has a greater share of historical experience than the previous generation, but despite the availability of more and more accurate documentation, each historian is a product of his or her time and place. He offers three caveats regarding the difficulty of objectivity--concepts to keep in mind when reading history:

1) Every age rewrites history and revisits the past, this can shed new light and new perspective, but, he writes, "that can result in anachronism when the past is being considered" (92).

2) Any person, any one writing history, cannot escape their own personality. Grant quotes Theodore Mommsen to elucidate this, "history is neither written nor made without love and hate" (92).  In addition, he invokes Benedetto Croce to point out that "history is always contemporary history," and the past is meaningless "except as it exists for us" (93). Historians are always present in their work.

3) Finally, historians have to select. Grant devotes a significant amount of attention to this detail in the body of his book. Historians can only select from what they know--what is buried or otherwise lost might reveal a different story, but it is a story that is lost to us.

Grant views the ancient historians as working within the genre of literature. They are literary artists, focusing on people and events they deemed to be important. They elaborated, created speeches, made choices about which tales and stories to incorporate and which to leave out; they aimed to please their audience. Despite this, they are our best single source of information, and they represent their particular universe regardless of the veracity of their assertions. Grant recommends that readers apply literary analysis when interpreting the ancients. "The glory of the ancient historians is unrelated to any particular age, because it is timeless. We must read them because of the  wonderful and influential literature that they wrote" (99).

The Prisoner of Paradise by Romesh Gunesekera

Romesh Gunesekera. The Prisoner of Paradise. Bloomsbury, 2012

This novel of the Colonial English and to a minor extent the French and their colonized subjects takes place on the island of Mauritius in 1825. Lucy, recently orphaned has traveled from England with her Aunt Betty to settle on the island and all the promise of a new start with her aunt and Uncle George who live at the lovely garden estate of Ambleside. Uncle George has been entrusted with Lucy's inheritance, which is intended to be enough to allow her to live independently (married or unmarried) when she comes of age. Uncle George has an official position and sees the island as full of potential for advancement and reward. "...[T]he British victory in 1810 ended ninety years of French vacillation; ...the subsequent treaty of Paris marked the start of a great enterprise where control of the Cape, Ceylon and Mauritius, would ensure that trade with India would be for ever British and noble" (18). Besides the French and the British, the island was the enforced home to an enslaved population of prisoners from Britain's other nearby colonies. Interestingly, the "prisoner" in the title of the novel is singular, but there are many prisoners, literally and metaphorically, in this novel.

In many ways, Prisoner of Paradise resembles E.M. Forester's Passage to India, but with the perspective of the colonized more intimately portrayed. In addition, Gunesekera juxtaposes the condition and status of the colonized, both slave and independent to that of, in this case, British women. The island environment suggests freedom from social constraints of class, rigid behavioral codes, and divisions formed by racial, ethnic, and cultural differences. And yet, the island is full of enslaved prisoners, Lucy and her aunt or at the mercy of the whims of the uncle. And even Uncle George and those who share his power and privilege must adhere to a some vestige of social decorum. Other central characters in the novel include the gifted linguist Don Lambodar and the exiled Prince for whom he is a translator, and the prince's cousin Asoka, all from Sri Lanka. They have their own sense of the barbarity and inscrutability of their Island hosts.

Lucy and her Aunt Betty share much in their view of their location and condition. Betty, coming from an older generation, has a carefully constructed view of her place in the household and working within the confines of an unhappy marriage, has made the most of her situation. She has maintained a kind of control through developing a careful routine and maintaining a standard for her expectations. In addition she has lavished much care on her garden even to the extent of creating a private space where she can be assured of being left to herself. Aunt Betty is strikingly different from her husband in that she treats her servants respectfully, addresses them by name and has provided opportunities for education and personal development. She lives perhaps unconsciously by a code of humanity, rather than by a colonialist's code. George is essentially a slave master, referring to his servants as boy or by other insulting terms. He must flaunt his status and power and is at the same time corrupted by both.

Lucy, was raised in a less restrictive environment and arrives on the island ready and waiting to be experience freedom. Her head is filled with the romantic novels of travel and adventure she grew up reading. From her reading, Lucy has a particular expectation for what the "Orient" has to offer her. She is immediately, though guardedly, taken with Don Lambodar, the handsome and cultivated multi-linguist in the service of the exiled Prince. She and Don Lambodar are a perfect illustration of cross cultural miscommunication. Neither understands the other despite being strongly attracted to one another. While their relationship is not explicitly forbidden, it is on the threshold of impropriety.

Aunt Betty is anxious for Lucy to marry and becomes more anxious as the narrative plays out. Aunt Betty's marriage gradually reveals itself to Lucy as a very unhappy situation--not to be sought after. Aunt Betty's husband, George, at first appears to be a jovial, indulgent husband and uncle, but his character becomes more and more sinister as the novel progresses. There are hints that his interest in Lucy, even as a small child, was more carnal than protective. His tendency toward drunkenness brings out this dangerous side of his character. While the reader senses the precarious situation of the household within the triangle of Betty, George, and Lucy, there is never any indication that Lucy considers herself to be threatened by her uncle's prurient interest in her.

Lucy's mind is on imagining her own freedom and her waxing and waning interest in Don Lambodar as the household's tenuous balance begins to shift toward instability. While she begins to note that things are amiss, she really has no sense of what the troubles might be. Aunt Betty's ability to put appearances and practicality ahead of calling her husband to account of his marital lapses, has lulled George into a false sense of security. In a final hubristic act, George bring his mistress and her daughter into the household to act as a maid. Lucy, thinking that mother and daughter are sisters, brings them into the house when her aunt is not at home. Although Lucy is unaware of their connection to George, Aunt Betty is very much aware of who they are and why they are there. Eulalia, the mother and mistress (and daughter to a respected former slave on the island), shows a lack of respect to Aunt Betty and makes no pretense to playing out her role as housekeeper.

In the meantime, as neither slave, nor prisioner, nor British, Don Lambodar finds himself in an uneasy role between his social position of more or less equality with the empowered and his sympathies for the oppressed. They, the enslaved prisoners, seek him out as one with connections and the ability to communicate. But his efforts to speak on behalf of the prisoners is hampered by his inability to understand the minds of those with whom he attempts to negotiate. He no better understands the workings of Lucy's mind than he understands the prejudice and grasping, mean spiritedness of George and his ilk on the island.

This arrival of Eulalia and her daughter, coincides with Don Lambodar's decision to let Lucy know exactly how he feels by letter. At the same time Lucy has decided to treat Don Lambodar more kindly and to try to make up for other times when she has been curt and unfriendly to him. There are hints that George has rashly dealt with Lucy's inheritance. As she counts on her future independence, the freedom that will come with that independence, and her ability to choose or not choose marriage, it becomes apparent to the reader, and possibly the Aunt, that George has done the unthinkable by speculating away Lucy's inheritance. With this storm brewing within the household, a terrible hurricane sweeps across the island, overturning everything: a storm within a storm.

In the end Lucy finds her dreamed of freedom elusive. Don Lambodar, with fewer expectations, perhaps, survives the devastation of the storms, but does not emerge unscarred. Uncle George, having indulged his pride in bringing his mistress into the house that he shares with his wife, finds that pride does not come without a fall. Aunt Betty loses everything in the storm, but she retains her humanity and thwarts a colonial justice that favors the conquering class. She does not forget Don Lambodar nor the attachment she knows that Lucy felt for him.

Aunt Betty's final gesture to Don Lambodar and her tragic triumph over George provide an unexpectedness to the novel's conclusion. There is a point of resistance; the desires for change seem  stronger than the impoverished morality and selfish motivations of those trying to maintain a kind of unnatural status quo. The combination, however, of entrenched power and wealth are apparent, overshadowing the small aberration caused by Betty's final acts. Lucy's dream is not for this world and even Betty's carefully constructed life with her garden and privacy, is untenable.

But Gunesekera does not discourage dreaming nor is his message fatalistic. Mr. Amos, a former slave who purchased his own freedom tells Don Lambodar as he despairs his losses, "To imagine is to embrace, not to escape. ...We cannot forget those we love. They shape our lives for ever, by their absence as much as by their presence" (381). Don Lambodar himself sees hope in the development of the younger non-British Mauritians, in particular, a young servant to Aunt Betty. "Don saw in his stride how the future might be improved, if one had the strength to grasp it. He remembered Lucy praising Muru's eager talents. Perhaps this island could become more than one of cane and hurricanes sooner than he imagined. Perhaps, he could yet effect a change and shift the balance in favor of what is right, not wrong, in the world. Do something that both Lucy and Mr. Amos, despite his present dejection, would approve and applaud" (383).

Of course, we know in hindsight that Don Lambodar or those like him would, if he succeeded at all, be able to make only very small changes. The spectre of the Western imperialism haunts us all even as the balance of power begins to shift.

There are many strengths to Gunesekera's beautifully written novel. The depth and complexity of his characters are perhaps a major strength of Prisoner of Paradise. There is no monolith of colonizer and colonized, and somehow what each character knows about another is different than what another character knows about the same character or what you the reader knows about that character. One character may be blinded by prejudice, another merely by lack of experience, and in other cases it is safer to not know than to know. As with any layered novel, there is much to interpret, and any one interpretation is subject to our own vision and blindness.

Greek and Roman Historians: Information and Misinformation

This book by Michael Grant, published by Routledge in 1995, is more or less written as a catalog of the short comings of the ancient historians. Grant is not necessarily comparing the ancient historians with our modern day historians, but does touch on the differences here and there. Primarily, today's historians are writing document based history and the ancients, while they had access to some documents and inscriptions were not that concerned (according to Grant) with supporting their histories through documentary evidence. Grant looks closely at 12 historians, although drops the names of at least a dozen more in his writing. Sadly, or perhaps just as a matter of fact, we are dependent on a lot of what we know from these writers of the ancient world. And, much of our historic method probably directly descends from their preferences to write about wars and famous men (and a troublesome woman here and there).

I don't know if I find it comforting or not that studying the ancients is really like studying our own modern day selves. Is it terrible that since the dawn of recorded history we really haven't evolved emotionally or psychologically? Or is it comforting?

When I was younger I used to think about the crime that I read about during Shakespeare's time or poverty described by Dickens and comfort myself that the world really wasn't less scary then than it was then, just different scary. But now, I'm not so sure. I guess we will always be wise and foolish, caring and selfish, dangerous and protective.

But back to the historians.

Misinformation and Disinformation: Getting something wrong by accident is misinformation, getting something wrong on purpose is disinformation. In Grant's chronicle of the short comings, this is the last entry: errors. Yes, in the current rendition of the facts of today, I think we can see pretty clearly that we are presented with plenty of both mis- and disinformation. Is it heavy on the side of disinformation? In the future, which type of error will end up as the history of our time? Possibly no history at all, is we madly convert everything to temporarily viable digital files.

Selectivity: Sorting through the available information and picking out what best suits the agenda of the ancient historian. This takes me to the reason I read this book in the first place. I came across a reference to it as I was looking into the last twenty years of writing (and honestly, the 20 to 40 years preceding--he (Martin Bernal) gets the credit and notoreity, but he wasn't the first)  Martin Bernal's Black Athena. There is nothing about the representation of race in this book, but we know that 19th century and even into the twentieth century, historians, classicists, were keen to literally white wash the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians. They were selective in their sources and biased in their interpretations and I find it shameful and disheartening. Which leads me to Paul Ricoeur and his philosophy of time and history. Very briefly, history changes as time passes. I am not an expert, so I won't dwell on this, but it makes every kind of sense to me. As Michael Grant reiterates, history is written by the victors, by the oligarchy in power. As the victors change, one oligarchy fades into another, the libraries are burnt and rebuilt, the facts and their interpretation shift. We see plenty of that on the campaign trail, in Congress, over the air waves, in our own heads. The more we tell a story, the more we consciously or unconsciously shape it.

Imagination: Grant sees Homer as the great model for both history and literature to the Greek and then Roman writers to follow. (And of course we see Odysseus and his travels everywhere in our own modern day literature.) Herodotus, for instance, left a written record, but he read his histories aloud to an audience. He needed to entertain as well as to inform. Some of our ancients were successfully literary; sometimes a good story was more important than strict adherence to the facts. And of course, some of the facts, so to speak, that Herodotus and his fellow historians incorporated into their histories were passed on as part of an oral tradition.

Michael Grant writes, "One must not ... be over critical of [the ancient historians' errors], because they are only human and it is human to make mistakes. Besides, their sources are not as good as those which are available to modern scholars."

I especially like this sentence, in that it reminds us of our frailties, then and now. But, it is a little harder to excuse our mistakes.

Next chapter, does Michael Grant think we should continue to read the ancient historians? I'm pretty sure he will say yes, if for no other reason than that we can see ourselves so clearly both in realizing their mistakes and learning from the past as they describe it. Whether it is completely accurate or not--it is as they believed it to be and it is as they chose to see it. But more on that later.

Walter Mosely: All I Did Was Shoot My Man

This is a relatively new novel (New American Library, 2012) in Mosley's Leonid McGill Mystery series. McGill has a past full of regrets. He is a private investigator with a criminal past, a father that went missing 44 years earlier, three children, a wife, and a former lover. This novel opens as he waits to make amends for one of his more recent wrongs. On request, he framed an innocent woman, implicating her in a massive theft for which she received a heavy sentence. After doing some work to clear her and earn her an early parole, McGill finds that, mysteriously, the crime continues to follow her and its tentacles are wrapping around McGill, his family, and everyone connected to Zella. As he follows the various threads, he attempts to protect his family from the fall out. On the way, McGill's son Twill is learning the art of investigation, his former lover seeks to win him back, and his father surfaces.

Mosley's characters, like the names he gives them (Leonid, Socrates, Ptolemy, Tolstoy, for instance), carry a lot of weight. They are strong with their hands and their hearts, brilliant, and worldly wise. They have insight into the characters and motives of those they encounter, and their senses are sharpened by the injustices and hardships they've had to survive.

I am not a lover of mysteries, although I know there are good ones out there. I don't want to read a book that I can pretty much follow by reading a sentence here or there on the page--its fat, but there are way more words than necessary. Nothing engages with your brain--ho hum. With Mosley, every word is necessary and every word is a pleasure to read. I'll quote a trio of paragraphs from near the end of the novel:

"I'm a twenty-first century New Yorker and therefore have little time to contemplate race. It's not that racism doesn't exist. Lots of people in New York, and elsewhere, hate becaues of color and gender, religion and national origin. It's just that I rarely worry about those things because there's a real world underneath all that nonsense; a world that demands my attention almost every moment of every day.

"Racism is a luxury in a world where resources are scarce, where economic competition is an armed sport, in a world where even the atmosphere is plotting against you. In an arena like that racism is more a halftime entertainment, a favorite sitcom when the day is done.

"That said, Antoinette was one of the racists. She hated her own people because they didn't see her for what she was. She felt betrayed by black men and then I came along. I brought out a thrill in her heart, and maybe her nether regions. That was all good and well; she was a handsome, brave, and intelligent woman, but I was preoccupied with pain so profound that could barely tell if it was mine alone."

Find a copy at your local library or favorite bookstore.