Midnight's Children (1981) By Salman Rushdie

Coming to a theater near you!  Maybe, maybe not.  Late last year famed Indian film director Deepa Mehta released a movie adaptation of Salman Rushdie’s book Midnight’s Children, though you’d never know it by looking at the cinema listings in Chicago, home to a huge Desi diaspora (Indian and Pakistani) population.  Part of the reason the movie hasn’t opened here yet is because controversy seems to follow Rushdie (author of The Satanic Verses).  But perhaps a bigger reason it’s not playing in Chicago is the decline in the number of “art” theaters in the city, a sad commentary.  If this movie is even a fraction as entertaining as the book, it will be packing movie houses, if they ever get it distributed coherently. 

Click here for: Movie Trailer

The book Midnight’s Children is a historical epic masked as a fable; or perhaps a fable masked as a historical epic.  It tells the story of 1,000 children born at the stroke of midnight on August 15, 1947 – the time and date of India’s independence from British colonial rule.  Their life stories parallel that of their country’s modern history. 

Each of the children grows up to discover they have some magical power, though they don’t at first, realize why.  The main character in the fable is Saleem Sinai, whose magical power is telepathy.  He hears other peoples’ thoughts and has the ability to convene a teleconference of the other children during their dreams.

Saleem is born to wealthy parents … well actually, no.  Saleem is born at the same time as a rich kid.  The nurse at the hospital makes the life altering decision to switch babies while no one is looking – destining poor to be rich, and rich to be poor.  The two boys will meet again when Saleem accidently convenes the first Congress of “midnight’s children” in his dreams one night.  They will hold vastly different perceptions on everything, mirroring the rich/poor divide of India as a whole.

An excellent read, read it for the history, read it for the fable, and hopefully see the movie.

The Gift of Rain (2008) By Tan Twan Eng

The cover of The Gift of Rain by Tan Twan Eng includes a review blurb calling it "Glorious," praise so over-the-top it nearly prevented me from buying the book.  If a book needs such intense marketing, I figured, there must be something terribly wrong with it.  Fortunately, I purchased the book anyway.  It now joins James Baldwin's Another Country and John Steinbeck's classic The Grapes of Wrath on the list of the best books I've ever read -- all the more amazing when one realizes it is Mr. Eng's first book.  Praise indeed.

One might categorize The Gift of Rain as a war narrative, though forcing it into that genre does not begin to explain its impact.  Yes, World War II underlies everything in this book, yet the individual relationships in the story are what make it “glorious.”

The tale Mr. Eng tells is set in Penang, a large island off the northwest coast of Malaysia, and covers the time period of 1939 through the end of World War II.  The story is told to a Japanese woman who has come to Penang some fifty years later in an attempt to find answers about a Japanese diplomat/soldier's final years.  His story is told to her over a period of weeks by a now elderly man named Philip Hutton. 

Hutton is a native of Malaysia, born to a British colonial industrialist and his Chinese immigrant wife. When he was a sixteen year old boy he met the woman’s friend, named Hayato Endo, known as Endo-san.  Hutton’s father had rented Endo-san a small island near the family mansion, not realizing he had been sent to Penang to begin exploring the Malay Peninsula in advance of the Japanese invasion of the country.

The younger Hutton soon becomes a pupil of Aikijutso, with Endo-san serving as his sensei, or tutor/mentor.  This is a subplot that plays a key role in the book, preparing him mentally and physically to be able to navigate the occupation.  The relationship between these two characters survives through a horrific backdrop of war, when little else does.

For an American, or even a Britain (Malaysia was a British colony before and again after the war), this is a version of the war we seldom read – Pearl Harbor is mentioned once, because it occurred the same day the Japanese invasion of Malaysia began, and the Americans are not mentioned again until the news of Hiroshima is announced over Radio-India.  Yet, if one is a war history buff, the Bridge over the River Kwai history is alluded to several times, as Malay prisoners of war, including Hutton’s brother, are sent as forced labor to construct a rail line to China; and there are heart wrenching reports on the Rape of Nanking and other atrocities on the Chinese mainland. 

Late last year, Tan Twan Eng published his second book, The Garden of Evening Mists.  To say the least, it has been added to my summer reading list ... with great anticipation.

Acts of Faith: The Story of an American Muslim, the Struggle for the Soul of a Generation (2007) By Eboo Patel

A few months ago, I read Acts of Faith by Eboo Patel but never got around to writing it up for my Book Blog.  Sadly, this delay has only served to make this post more relevant.  In the days since the bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, the cause of terrorism against noncombatant civilians has once again entered our consciousness.  In the immediate afterward of that stunning week, the President phrased it correctly, despite his critics, when he underscored that perhaps the most important question we should be asking in the ensuing investigation is not how, but why.  Why do two young men, American citizens no less, resort to indiscriminate acts of terror.

It’s not a new question, Eboo Patel, an “all-American boy” from the suburbs of Chicago, with a family lineage deeply connected to the Muslim community of Mumbai, asked it in the years after 9/11.  His book Acts of Faith, written after the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, examines the topic in a thought provoking series of essays. His mission wasn’t blame, it was prevention. And his conclusion is as strong as it is challenging. 

There is a lesson to be learned from these attacks, and it has been proven repeatedly by civil rights movements around the globe: hatred is learned -- be it racism, religious intolerance, classism between the haves and the have nots, or homophobia.   A child, any child, every child, is born without prejudice.  The prejudices he or she acquires in life are learned from someone, and usually learned without challenge. 

Perhaps it is an over simplification that prejudices are taught, but the consequence of not addressing this viewpoint is clear, painfully clear.  Patel notes, with a sincerity that does not belie the difficulty, that the antidote for such hated is not never-ending warfare, but countering the teaching of hatred with the teaching of tolerance and the acceptance, the joy of, diversity.

Acts of Faith challenges us all to fill this educational void. It is an easy answer for those of us who are advocates of multiculturalism; to borrow a word that defined my generation: imagine.   

Patel’s book was thought provoking, action inspiring, after 9/11.  It remains so in the days after the Boston Marathon.  Someone took it upon themselves to teach those boys hatred.  None of us made it our job to teach them tolerance.  We must address this oversight.

It's Fine By Me (Norwegian, 1992; English translation, 2011) By Per Petterson

There is much to be said for lazily browsing through a bookstore, chances are you’ll find a new author you were unaware of.  Such was the case when I stopped by Sandmeyer's in Chicago’s Printers Row on a wintery day recently and came across It’s Fine By Me, by Per Petterson.  It’s a jewel of a book, plain spoken to the point of being lyrical, and decidely not "purple prose."

First published in Norwegian in 1992, It’s Fine By Me was translated into English in 2011. I guess it fits into the “coming of age” genre, but believe me that is such an insufficient description.  It is, in fact, one of the best written books I’ve read in ages.

Set primarily in Oslo, it is the story of a teenage boy man named Audun Sletten.  He’s the son of an alcoholic; and he’s aspires to become a writer someday.  He’s very well read, and his reading list – Jack London and Ernest Hemingway -- will amaze you, as it clearly inspires him (and Petterson).

Yet, life has its detours.  Just shy of graduation, Audun will drop out of high school and go to work full time, one day a paperboy, the next a union printer.  As the book ends Audun has turned 18, he’s a young man whose adolescence has passed by almost without notice. 

The final chapter details the death of his father, who abandoned the family years earlier.  I doubt there is a son -- in any culture -- who will fail to recognize this near universal father/son dichotomy, a total disconnect between two people who logic says should be close; the funeral, a mourning of a relationship that could have been, more so than one that was. 

In The Garden of Beasts (2011) By Erik Larson

Post analysis is useful only if one learns and acts on it, thus the bar is set by Erik Larson’s book In The Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin.   The book is a biography of William Dodd, the American Ambassador to Germany during Adolph Hitler’s rise to power.  The lesson to be learned however, isn’t the obvious one.

Dodd was a relatively obscure University of Chicago professor when he was selected by President Franklin Roosevelt as Ambassador to Germany.  Well versed in German history, he was a curmudgeon, an academic, an independent thinker.  What he was not was a diplomat.

But, making an accurate assessment of the situation, and advising international diplomacy, were not Dodd’s deficiencies.  His problem was mastering the internal politics of the U.S. State Department, which could validate, or dismiss, his assessments.  Dodd was an outsider from day one within the State Department and although he recognized this as a problem, his failure to resolve it hampered his ability to shape history.

Dodd's personal reputation remains intact, his assessments were accurate, and that should after all be the measure of an Ambassador.  And he even succeeded in getting his assessments noticed by the White House by going around the State Department, with history to judge FDR’s inaction on them. 

Yet, clearly Dodd’s assessments went nowhere at the State Department.  Why? The author makes the case that the State Department’s old boy network (or more accurately, the rich old boy network) was to blame.   Historically there has been a blurring of lines between whether the top diplomatic corps is a social network of goodwill ambassadors or a legion of foreign policy experts.  Then, and to a certain extent now, the most important qualification for an embassy post is a strong resume as a political fundraiser or ally of the President.   The lesson to be learned is this:  In this politicized old boy environment, and in an ever complex world, how does one get one’s diplomatic cables noticed and acted on?

Erik Larson is best known for his mega-blockbuster The Devil in the White City. With In The Garden of Beasts he has again put his considerable story telling skills on full display as he overlays “the big picture” on what is at its base a family history.  It’s a good read, even if one is not into the policy aspects of the book.

Edward S. Curtis: Coming to Light (2001) By Anne Makepeace

It seems appropriate that Coming to Light, the biography of Edward S. Curtis, has been published in “coffee table format.”  Curtis was a photographer who dedicated three decades of his life to capturing for history the culture of Native American Indians in what was clearly a race against time.   The book, by historian Anne Makepeace, is a companion to her PBS documentary of the same name, published by the National Geographic Society.  “Coffee table format” is not normally a compliment in my lexicon, but in this case, Curtis’ photographs coupled with Makepeace’s text is proof that there are exceptions.

At the time of Curtis’ birth a few years after the Civil War, the Anglo-conquest of Native Americans was nearly complete with a just few monumental battles yet to take place:  the Little Big Horn, the Massacre at Wounded Knee, the surrender of Chief Joseph and the jailing of Geronimo.  With defeat at hand, the cultural fate of the vanquished was moving into its final stage, reservation life and forced assimilation.  If documentation of the Indian way of life was to occur, it would have to occur immediately. 

Into this need stepped Edward Curtis, a master of the relatively new technology of photography.  From 1900 to 1930 he made it his life’s work to photograph and document Indian cultures ranging from the Four Corners region to Nome, Alaska, along the way establishing himself as a self-educated ethnologist without peer, befriended and encouraged by President Theodore Roosevelt, and partially bankrolled by none other than J.P. Morgan.  His published work, the 20-volume The North American Indian, remains the classic of its genre.

The presentation of Indian culture by “the white man” has never been without controversy.  Early Anglo attempts ranged from the romanticism of James Fenimore Cooper in print and Albert Bierstadt on canvas (a print of his masterpiece Indian Encampment hangs in my home), to the “scalp” tales of those with a vesting interest in seeing the Indian subjugated -- settlers, gold rush pioneers and “Christian” missionaries.  Curtis’ work covers all of this territory.

His first photographs were often staged to show the majestic power, the serenity and the idyllic – his initial interest being in the “art” of photography.  But as he mastered his craft, he also mastered his topic, expanding his work to recording music, ceremony and spirituality.  He not only photographed The Sun Dance before it was outlawed, but was initiated into the priestly order that put on the Hopi Snake Dance.  In his final years, as Curtis retraced his earlier travels, he recorded the faces of the disillusioned, starved and scarred by reservation life.

Photographs could tell this story alone, but Makepeace’s biography adds a component that is of equal interest and let me emphasize it's a tale of adventure.  She tells of Curtis’ involvement in the glory days of photography, and as a pioneer in the motion picture industry.  If you aren’t impressed with Curtis' connections to T.R. and J.P., then maybe you’ll be impressed with his work for Cecil B. DeMille.

Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) By William Styron

Although beautifully written, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness by William Styron is not a book I picked up for pleasure reading.  I read it on the recommendation of a close friend who thought it would help me understand some of what he has gone through in his life.  The book details Styron’s personal experience with depression. 

The book is alarming in that it forces readers to go back over their lives and examine how many times we’ve known people who have faced this crisis while we as “friends” have turned the other way, not wanting to recognize it, rather on talk about it.  Many questions came to my mind.  In my case, I now can recognize the reality that three people in my immediate circle of friends, and at least one relative, have not only contemplated suicide, but have actually attempted it.  These are not unknown details to me, yet how have I failed to tabulate that statistic?  How many others have dealt with clinical depression undiagnosed, or without it advancing to suicide or attempted suicide?  How many instances am I still unaware of?

Is my group of friends an unrepresentative sample, or do all of us have our collective head in the ground on this taboo subject?

 

William Styron is a Pulitzer Prize winning author whose major works include Sophie’s Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner. When he first wrote about his mental breakdown and hospitalization it was for publication in Vanity Fair magazine in an attempt to break the public silence on the subject. Styron felt confined by the magazine format however, and made the decision to fully tell his story in a book; while still short at 85 pages, it accomplishes its wake-up call.

A word of caution for readers, if you are looking for a definitive answer, there is none.  Part of the difficulty with this illness is that there does not seem be a solitary “cause” of clinical depression. Although many (not all) cases have a relation to a traumatic life event, the nature of the trauma is not necessarily known, and when it is known, not even remotely universal.  But if you are looking for some understanding on what your friends may be going through, or have gone through, then Darkness Visible is an excellent start.  Then you can ask them.