Prudence (2015) By David Treuer

If you are looking for happy endings, stop now. No one in Prudence by David Treuer has a happy life. If you are looking for writing that often climbs to brilliant, you’ve found it. 

Treuer’s novel is set in the woods of Minnesota where each summer a family from Chicago travels north to open up a vacation resort. They are Emma and Jonathan Washburn, and their son Frankie. Other main characters include Felix, a World War I veteran who serves as the caretaker & handyman at the resort, and Billy, who is Frankie’s age. Felix and Frankie are from the nearby Indian reservation. And of course, there is the title character Prudence, also a Native American, originally from Standing Rock Reservation, to the west.

 

The story begins in 1942 when Frankie, having just graduated from Princeton, is visiting his parents at the resort before leaving for basic training, and then on to the war in Europe. But perhaps more important, he is visiting Billy who he has had an ongoing intimate relationship with all the years they’ve known each other.

 

During the week-long visit, Frankie and Billy will join with others to hunt down a German prisoner of war who has escaped from the prison camp across the lake from the resort. With testosterone running high, a shot is fired into some bushes in the belief the prisoner of war is hiding there. He was not. Instead, shot and killed is the younger sister of Prudence. They had been in hiding, having run away from an orphanage that planned on separating them from each other. No charges are filed, because after all it was “just” an Indian girl. The Washburns care for the in-shock Prudence, and bury her sister. As the guilt stricken Frankie visits Prudence’s room, he promises her he will come back after the war and care for her.
 

As the story unfolds over the next ten years, the events of that week are examined in detail and from ever perspective. It has impacted each of them profoundly. It is at this point in the novel Treuer’s writing soars, his ability to capture a character’s hopes, dreams, and heartache, is flawless. His chapter on Frankie’s letter to Billy written just before his final mission in Germany is of award winning caliber. The final chapter, Prudence’s letter to her long dead sister, will make you hurt.

The book ends with Prudence’s suicide in 1952. That’s not a spoiler, it’s the prologue. 

 

I have two disappointments. First, the stereotypes in the book strike me as overplayed, though they are perhaps necessary for readers who may not be aware of the social history of the time period. If one is not aware of them, then much of the story will not make sense. My other disappointment is that Treuer drops the characters of Frankie’s parents -- we know that after the war they stop coming to Minnesota, I’d like to know more.

Recommendation:  Read it for its superb writing, but be aware it is not a pleasant story.

Bombay Stories (Urdu, early 1900's, English translation 2012) By Saadat Hasan Manto

Salmam Rushdie’s quote on the cover of Bombay Stories by Saadat Hasan Manto calls the author “the undisputed master of the modern Indian short story.” In reference to his writing skills, one could hardly disagree. His topic selections however, left me uncomfortable.

Manto did not write a history of India or Pakistan, but his writings are set in that part of history spanning their partition – two countries, before and after. It’s a gold mine of a literary period, a topic central to two of my favorite books: Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy, and Rushdie’s Midnight’sChildren, both which are epic in scale.  Manto’s short stories are the opposite, individual short stories about day-to-day life, with the epic nature of the era being a not-all-that-important backdrop. It wasn’t an easy era to be having a day-to-day life. The social upheaval caused by independence and partition impacted everything, particularly the country’s economy. 

Bombay Stories is a collection of 14 short stories written by Manto about his years in Mumbai, known as Bombay in the colonial period. In a sense, his personal story isn’t that unusual: small town boy moves to the big city to hopefully find success. But again, the era makes it anything but the usual story.

Concurrent with this time period was another culturally significant series of events, the early days of what would become Bollywood. The more autobiographical of stories are about how he came to the city as a writer, yearning to be a scriptwriter.  He worked as a reporter while waiting for that dream to play out, taking whatever job paid.  He wasn’t alone in this career path, as anyone familiar with the waiter-actor connection to the film industry can attest. Manto ended up having some success both as a reporter and as a scriptwriter, receiving writing credits for some early Bollywood films. 

Perhaps my favorite of the selections is a story titled Mummy. In it the character referred to as Mummy takes under her wings an assortment of aspirants to acting careers, to literary fame, and to marrying-for-money dreamers; caring for all of them through life’s ups and downs -- while managing a prostitution ring on the side. 

Hamid’s Baby is also an interesting short story. It is about a married man who may, or may not have, fathered a daughter by a prostitute. Economics dictate the girl will probably grow up to be a prostitute, which is okay if it’s not his child, but horrifying to him if it is his child. He’ll never know for sure.

Prostitution, the world’s oldest profession, plays a major role in most of these stories. In Bombay Stories it’s an accurate reflection of the economic times, and it’s not unlike the aspiring writers and actors -- you do what you gotta do to survive, until you no longer have to do it. And, I personally don’t make any value judgements about the subject. What leads to my discomfort is the blatant sexism of the arrangements portrayed in this book – but, we are talking about 100 years ago, except I know that in parts of the world, including big city America, that 100 years ago is today.

Recommendation:  If one is a student of India, or Bollywood, yes. 

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Japanese 2013; English translation 2014) By Haruki Murakami

Wow. That one word could suffice as a description of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami, were I not so eager write more.

Mr. Murakami is a major force in literature in Japan and in English translations throughout the world. He’s also rather prolific, though this is the first work of his I’ve read. Now for a cliché: were it not for having to work, I would have read this book straight through, that’s how good it is. 

The main character is a young man named Tsukuru Tazaki who grew up in the suburbs of Nagoya, Japan. In high school he was part of a 3-guy, 2-girl clique of friends. Each of the other members of the clique have names that include a color; i.e. one of the guys is named Akamatsu, which means “red pine,” another is named Oumi, meaning “blue sea.” Tsukuru’s name means “builder.” He has no color to claim, hence the nickname of “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki.” Nicknames can define you, for life.  Colorless Tsukuru developed a self-image of boring, average, nondescript.

After high school Tsukuru goes away to engineering school in Tokyo. The others enroll in universities in Nagoya. For a while, they remain as close as always, with Tsukuru frequently coming home from college on weekends to see his friends. Then suddenly Tsukuru gets the feeling he’s being left out, no calls, no emails. He comes home to find out what’s going on. No one will see him. Finally, one of them returns his calls, informing him they’ve jointly decided to expel him from their group. No explanation, just a leave us alone.

Tsukuru returns to Tokyo devastated. 

For several months he just goes through the motions of living, and considers if even that is worth the effort. Eventually, he puts it all in the past and moves on. But the experience has left a permanent scar on him, an inability to become emotionally close to anyone. 

Sixteen years later, and still single, he begins a dating relationship with a woman named Sara. She calls him out on his intimacy issue, and he explains his life story to her. Her reaction is sympathetic, but she tells him she can’t continue with him as anything more than a casual friend until he confronts his four childhood friends and seeks an answer to why they ostracized him years ago.

The remainder of the book deals with Tsukuru’s efforts to find that answer. He eventually does, but in the process opens up several other mysteries which remain unsolved after the final page, not the least of which is the status of his relationship with Sara -- all the perfect set-up for a sequel. I suspect, after researching the author, that I won’t be disappointed on that front; his first published works after all, formed a trilogy titled The Rat.

Also, from reading over the Haruki Murakami website, and through Wikipedia, I’ve learned he has a reputation of dropping lots of musical themes into his writings. In Colorless he utilizes two: one a classical recording of Franz Listz' Years of Pilgrimage as performed by Lazar Berman; the other for contrast, Elvis Presley's Viva Las Vegas.

Reviewers have noted that Murakami’s writing is very “western.” While true, I think it’s because he writes about modern Japan, not the traditional one readers might be expecting, though at least in Colorless, he tips his hat to traditional writing, making a great cultural blend.

Recommendation:  You bet.

The Mathematician's Shiva (2014) By Stuart Rojstaczer

More fun than a barrel of monkeys! Imagine being surrounded by socially awkward geeks-on-a-mission for seven days, then sprinkle in a few serious sub-plots and themes, and voila, you have a novel titled The Mathematician’s Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer. Life (and death) is funny sometimes, and then life moves on.

The woman who dies is Rachela Karnokovitch. She was a world famous mathematician, a genius, whose colleagues worship her. Most of them, though an exceedingly bright and overly educated group of people, are not of her intellect.        

As a child, Rachela and her parents fled their native Poland in advance of the German invasion (1939) taking the only route available to them, Russia. They were sent to a refugee camp on the Barents Sea, where her mother did not survive. After the war, Rachela and her father made their way back to their village which had been annexed into the Soviet Union. School officials soon recognized her intelligence, sending her to the University of Moscow as a child prodigy. She distinguished herself academically and became a professor by age 22. She married and had a son. As time went on, she realized that no matter how intelligent she was, her academic career would be severely limited because she was a Pole, a Jew, and a woman. Eventually she defected while at a seminar in Berlin, knowing her husband and their son would figure out a way to follow – two years later they did, heading to the border on the day Joseph Stalin died, knowing the Soviet guards, along with the rest of the country, would be distracted with their mass grief.  

The family eventually re-united and ended up at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. There, Rachela joined the faculty and re-established her academic and intellectual credentials, though still battled with institutionalized sexism. 

Her Russian-born, American-raised son Sasha narrates the book.

At the time of her death, there was a rumor spreading rapidly in academic circles that Rachela had solved a century old problem, the famed Navier-Stokes equation – a proof she apparently decided to take to the grave with her. While mathematicians from around the globe descended on Madison to celebrate her life, they also came to hopefully uncover the Navier-Stokes proof among her papers. During the shiva they searched her home, ripping up floor boards, looking behind pictures, ransacking the attic, and even at one point attempted to interrogate Pascha, her Polish-speaking parrot. Shasha put a halt to their insistence on an open casket.

Eulogizing Rachela with this book also gives the author ample opportunity to provide insight into her family as a whole. From Sasha we learn of the challenges of being an immigrant in the U.S., the difficulties of being the son of a genius, and are offered an interesting subplot when his child from his short-term marriage, who he is aware of but has never met, attends the funeral. Another character who plays an outsized role in the story is Shlomo, Rachela's brother.

While the field of mathematics may have its equations, so too the field of literature has many classic formulas – one of which is using a funeral as the setting for a story. Rachela Kornokovitch mastered the mathematic equation.  Using the voice of Sasha, Stuart Rojstaczer has expertly mastered the shiva.

American Visa (Spanish 1994, English 2007) By Juan de Recacoechea

A few days ago I finished an interesting little novel titled American Visa by Juan de Recacoechea. It was a winner of Bolivia’s National Book Prize. It’s been made into a Spanish-language movie, with English subtitles. While I haven’t seen the movie, I did watch the trailer for it on YouTube. From it I get the impression the screen adaptation took a great many liberties with the script – way too many.

The book is a mystery, and a sad comedy. The main character is Mario Alvarez, a high school teacher often called “the Professor.” He’s originally from Uyuni in the south of Bolivia, but has lived his adult life in Oruro, just south of the capital of La Paz. The book includes a map of Bolivia for those of us new to the geography.

Before the book begins, Mario’s wife has abandoned him and their son, running off to Argentina to “find herself.” The son has also moved on, immigrating to the U.S. back when immigration policies toward South Americans weren’t quite as absurd as they are today. The story begins when Mario receives a letter from his son asking him to join him in Miami. Obtaining the American visa needed to go “visit” his son becomes the crux of the story. 

Mario gathers all of the documentation he will need, says goodbye to a lifetime of friends, and heads to the American Consulate in La Paz to apply for the visa. Only at the last moment does he realize the Americans will actually seek to verify the authenticity of his forged documents (one must prove, among other things, net assets of over $50,000) – he leaves before the interview begins. The rest of the novel details how he attempts to gain the visa through bribery.

While the book is a mystery (his favorite author is Raymond Chandler), it also serves as a significant commentary on Bolivian politics, the drug trade, and their intersection; military and patronage politics; and crippling poverty & unemployment … not to mention immigration policy. 

There are, of course, multiple subplots revolving around his fellow guests at The Hotel California (I kid you not) in La Paz, and his developing relationship with a prostitute named Blanca - all of which are interesting, yet definitely not the tales that would be approved by the Bolivia’s Tourism Bureau.

Recommendation: Not a world classic, but an interesting read for those of us who know little to nothing about Bolivia.