A Strangeness In My Mind (Turkish 2015, English 2015) By Orhan Pamuk

As I sit down to write this I’m surprised to realize that A Strangeness in My Mind will be the first book by Orhan Pamuk that I’ve reviewed on my book blog (maybe I read them before I started the blog?). I’m surprised because Pamuk, who was honored with the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2006, is one of, if not arguably “the” best living writer in the world. 

It’s also strange because I’ve read eight other of his works that have been translated into English -- Istanbul, Memories and the City; The White Castle; Other Colors; The Museum of Innocence; The Black Book; The New Life; and two more that are already literary classics, Snow (set in eastern Turkey) and My Name Is Red (set in Constantinople) – and loved them all.

Pamuk as an author is synonymous with Istanbul, just as Dickens is with London. When one reads his books, particularly Memories and the City, one discovers not just the characters in the novel, but also the heart and soul of the city. The unusual role Istanbul plays in world history is the ever present background in all his works – intersected as it is by the Bosphorus, the city straddles Asia & Europe, Muslim & Christian; modern and old.

In A Strangeness in My Mind, a teenager named Mevlut leaves his country village to live in big city Istanbul where his father spends the winter selling boza as a roving street vendor. Mevlut will learn this trade from his father and use it as a primary or fallback occupation the rest of his life. Narrating as Mevlut walks the streets shouting out “boza” is how Pamuk overviews 40 years of Turkish history (the book ends in 2014).

Readers who pick up this book expecting to understand the Middle East in just 600 pages, will be sorely disappointed. Those who expect an action packed thriller will also be disappointed. Mevlut’s is an ordinary life. At times you will scorn him believing him to be just stumbling through. By the time you finish the book however you will understand him perhaps better than he understands himself. You will also like him immensely.

The plot of the book centers on love letters that he sent to a woman who he once saw at a wedding. Actually, all he could really see were her eyes, because she was veiled. He didn’t even know her name. His cousin Suleyman told him the name of the woman he saw was Rayiha, so that’s who he addressed his letters to. But in reality, Suleyman lied, Rayiha was the woman’s older sister. Tradition dictated that Samiha could not be wed until her older sister was married. Suleyman wanted Samiha for himself.  How this plays out through their lives structures the entire book. And no, I’m not giving any spoilers on that front.

There is much to like hidden away in this story.  For the most part these jewels relate to a series of jobs that Mevlut goes through in life:  electrical inspector (they could teach Chicagoans a thing or two about shake-downs); a restaurant manager; a community center manager, a parking lot attendant, and of course a street vendor. Also surfacing from time to time is the rich-cousin/poor cousin dynamic.

The book includes two generations of sisters marrying brothers as main characters, a fascinating subplot that offers Pamuk a chance to track the slowly changing role of women in Turkish society. And Suleyman will eventually marry a lounge singer (not unlike the story in the Palace of Desire, the second of the classic Cairo-trilogy written by Naguib Mahfouz) bringing another women’s subplot into the book. 

The popularity of boza, a traditional fermented drink which skirts the Islamic ban on alcohol is an underlying theme, subtly playing the Islamic-Secular political divide in the country.

The urban sprawl development of Istanbul as poor villagers moved to it swelling the population to 13 million is detailed throughout, and should be recognizable to anyone living in a big city. It’s told as an influx of people settle in neighborhoods based on the village they came from, develop their own community organizations, travel “home” to the village for special occasions, become politically active as a way to break into employment in the civil sector, and occupy property without proper deeds. The final chapters zero in on a gentrification story that is familiar to every city in the world (and the book even includes a discussion of “bachelor housing” that urban tradition known in the west as SRO hotels). 

I strongly recommend this book, though it is not my favorite Pamuk novel, that would be My Name is Red. My sole reservation about this book I think is the translator, not the author. There are multiple instances where a paragraph is written in a way to make it culturally recognizable to an American, forgetting that American culture is not what the book is about. Pamuk has never used this translator before, and one would hope that he does not do so again.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884 UK; 1885 US) By Mark Twain

Recently I read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. Yes, I’ve read it before, but that was some 50 years ago, I believe when I was in middle school. Huck is such a part of American culture that I remembered every chapter – and was bored by none. Some movies reach that level, ingrained in our minds in detail forever – The Wizard of Oz, or Casablanca -- but books don’t seem to do so … maybe Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

I rarely discard a book (though have loaned out many, never to see them again – hint, hint), yet I seldom re-read them. The ones I do revisit more than once seem to have a political-historical theme: The Mayor of Castro Street, Exodus, The Fire Next Time, and Silent Spring. Huck has that historical “place in time” context, but falls more so into the fiction category.

So what made me re-read Huck? 

The decision relates directly to a book I reviewed about a year ago: The Republic of Imagination by Azar Nafisi. The author (of Reading Lolita in Tehran) is an Iranian immigrant to the U.S. who “learned” about America through its literature. She cited Huckleberry Finn as her biggest influence. While I heartily agree that Huck is an American classic, I was somewhat surprised, and concerned, that it shapes a world view of the United States – actually “alarmed” might be a better word. I thought it might be time to revisit the book.

Normally in a review this is the point where one would provide a synopsis of the book to the reader, but does anyone really need to have Huckleberry Finn spelled out for them? For an American this book is about as universal knowledge as one can get – and perhaps that is one of the points Nafisi is making.

Huck is one of Mark Twain’s four Mississippi river writings, the others being: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Life on the Mississippi, and Pudd’nhead Wilson. Though written post-Civil War, it tells of life along the fault line of America before the war. An underlying story in the book is an examination of that part of America where citizen loyalties were divided between pro-slavery advocates, and the growing abolitionist movement ... with both sides quoting the Bible. But significantly, it isn’t told as a political treatise (like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic Uncle Tom’s Cabin became); in Huckleberry Finn, slavery is set as a backdrop to Huck’s youthful trials (hence “The Adventures of” part of the title).

The adventures of Huck, and Jim – technically a run-away slave, set in river towns up and down the Mississippi, are what I believe caught Nafisi’ eye. Her book explores what she refers to as "the emotional basis of America as geography."  Mark Twain captured that perfectly.

Having enjoyed this re-read, maybe I’ll revisit some other classics from my youth: maybe Treasure Island or Swiss Family Robinson, who knows, maybe even the Hardy Boys.

The Way West (1949) By A. B. Guthrie, Jr.

In 1950, A B Guthrie won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel The Way West, the second of the sequential six-volume Big Sky series.  It marked the first critical recognition of the genre of the American western. The book is a historical fiction treatment of the Oregon Trail saga – the seemingly endless route taken by pioneers in wagon trains across the untamed plains and mountains. Their goal was personal, “free-land" and “a new start;” but it was also political, settling what is now the State of Oregon, claimed by England, making it a de-facto part of the United States.

Sequence is important to this fictionalized history. The Lewis & Clark Expedition (1804-1806) was what could be called the “Exploration” phase. The Big Sky, the first & title novel of this book series, which I read and reviewed last December, covered what could be called the “Mountain Men” phase, when settlement of the Indian Territory was still technically forbidden by law – the Mountain Men, few in number, were fur trappers and traders, but not permanent settlers. The Way West covers the “Pioneering” phase, when settlement of parts of the territory had been made legal – if not safe.

 

While I’ll not challenge the credentials of the Pulitzer committee, in my take The Big Sky is the better book. Its huge and unexpected commercial success is what led to The Way West.

In The Way West, a wagon train departs from Independence, Missouri in 1846 and heads out for Oregon, having hired the recently widowed Dick Summers to be their guide. Summers is a veteran mountain man and was a major character in the first book. He had returned to Missouri after deciding he was getting too old to live the mountain man lifestyle.

That date, 1846, should be instructive for history readers. It is the year that an author by the name of Francis Parkman traveled the Oregon Trail as a young man looking for adventure. In 1849, his book The Oregon Trail was published, it is the definitive text on the subject. I haven’t read the Parkman book, but I’m willing to bet that Guthrie did.

One cannot do The Way West justice without mentioning that it was also a (bad but) widely successfully Hollywood movie starring three giants of the western genre: Kirk Douglas, Robert Mitchum and Richard Widmark.  The movie also was a very young Sally Fields’ first major film role (watch the opening clips with her riding on the back of a wagon – it’s a hoot).  Reading the book, and comparing it to the movie, is also very interesting. One is aware that Hollywood often takes “liberties” with the original book, but in the case of The Way West, these “liberties” can only be characterized as out and out alterations.

Link to the full movie: The Way West

Recommendation:  Same as with The Big Sky, yes, if you are a history or western buff -- I'm the first, not particularly the second.  I'm not sure if I'll read the third novel in the series, but I have no regrets about reading the first two.  

The Seven Good Years, a Memoir (Hebrew 2006-2015; English 2015) and Dad Runs Away with the Circus (Hebrew 2000; English 2004) By Etgar Keret

I’ve often raved about a writer named Etgar Keret, and I’ve reviewed a half dozen or so of his books. There is a reason I’m a big fan: he’s completely entertaining. He writes short stories that are memorable, no small accomplishment when you are using only several pages to tell a story. The Seven Good Years: a Memoir is his latest work to be translated into English. It’s more of the same, and in this case, that’s a good thing.

Actually, it’s not exactly more of the same. In this book, the short stories are related and autobiographical. Some of them are funny, some are not, though they are always told in a self-deprecating way that touches you personally. They are grouped in years.

Year 1 begins with the birth of Keret’s son, Lev. The delivery is referred to as “natural,” though Keret immediately questions “what’s natural about a midget with a cable hanging from his belly button popping out of your wife’s vagina?” The Kerets arrive at the hospital after a wild taxi ride, as all medical personnel are being paged to the emergency room in response to a terrorist rocket that has reached Tel Aviv, previously thought of as “safe” from rocket attacks. Lev, the-soon-to-be-born, is a fast study and patiently waits until the worst of the hospital crisis is over before deciding to make his first appearance. 

The next few years takes one through raising an infant child as a father who is a writer that does not keep 9 to 5 type hours, and a mother who does a 9 to 5 plus-hours job. Etgar brags that he spends a lot of time at the playground. “I don’t want to brag, but I’ve managed to earn myself a unique, somewhat mythic status among the parents who take their children to Ezekiel Park, my son’s favorite spot in Tel Aviv. I attribute that special achievement not to any overwhelming charisma I may possess, but rather to two common, lackluster qualities: I’m a man, and I’m hardly ever working.”

One of the more poignant of the chapters deals with a question he is confronted with by another parent while at the playground: “Tell me something” said the mother of a 3-year old, “will Lev go to the army when he grows up?” (Israel has compulsory military service). Seems this is a favorite topic of the playground-moms, almost from birth; while playground-dads don’t think about it at all, until confronted with it. It is politics at the personal level – not totally different from how the politics of the Vietnam War played out at the family level in the United States.  And as with all of Keret's books, please note the cover illustration, it relates directly to a chapter on the Angry Birds, that well known child phenomena that teaches kids how to be violent.

Interspersed with the tales of raising Lev are essays on other topics: including Etgar's frequent travels abroad to book fairs and at academic invitation. Most of these other stories are humorous (i.e. how he met his wife), but not always. One is about a trip he made to Poland where his parents were the only family members to escape the holocaust. The trip triggers multiple memories, not of his, but as told by his parents – comparing the old Poland of his grandparents’ generation, good and bad; and the revisionist version often told by current residents. [It isn’t a focus of this book, but the use of the “oral tradition” to save and continue family history when material possessions and documents were also lost to carnage, is an interesting academic aside.]

The end of the seventh of “The Seven Good Years” is the death of his father, though the actual death & shiva is not the main focus. The real story Etgar tells is his father’s attitude toward pending death. 

During the time period covered by this book, Keret wrote his one and only children’s book – influenced heavily by his experience as a playground parent. The book, complete with great illustrations by Rutu Modan, is titled Dad Runs Away with the Circus – it’s a rather fun read.

Recommendation: The Seven Good Years is his best book yet, and considering how I praised Suddenly A Knock on the Door, that is a strong recommendation.  One should pick up Dad Runs Away with the Circus for the kids in your family. But read it before you give it to them, you'll find it whimsical and fun.

Afloat On The Ohio (1897) By Reuben Gold Thwaites

For readers who slept through their high school American history classes, you probably missed a key detail we “citified” people raised in the northern counties of Ohio, Indiana and Illinois conveniently like to overlook: the undeniable fact that our three states were settled by immigrants from the bottom up, not from the top down.

Putting it in family terms, the Drakes and Coffeys (paternal grandparents) did not fly into Chicago’s O’Hare airport and take the Amtrak south to Logan County, Illinois; they likely floated down the Ohio, and up the Wabash in the early 1820’s (beating a later upstart named Abraham Lincoln to central Illinois by a full generation). On the maternal side, the Hendersons (grandmother) were a clear boat ride down the Ohio River to its convergence with the Mississippi River (a.k.a. the flood zone); while the Wards (grandfather) appear to have turned south down the Tennessee River before turning around and veering north again. This makes my family tree not much different than that of countless other “native” Midwesterners, particularly those with Scottish-Irish surnames.

If one is into history, and I am, this settlement of the heartland saga is covered in detail in a travel log written long ago titled Afloat on the Ohio by Reuben GoldThwaites. In the 1800s, the Ohio River was the superhighway of American expansion. Thwaites (1853 – 1913) was a journalist and librarian who was the editor of the Wisconsin State Journal. His more famous work as an editor was on the Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Afloat on the Ohio is not technically a history book, it’s the log from a "vacation" trip Thwaite, his wife, their ten year old son, and a friend dubbed “the Doctor” took in 1894.  Like the pioneers before them, they launched their journey at Redstone (now known as Brownsville, Pennsylvania) on the Monongahela River, which winds its way north a little ways to Pittsburgh where it merges with the Allegheny to form the Ohio River. Six weeks later they disembarked from their boat in Cairo, Illinois (pronounced Kay-row) where the Ohio River meets the Mississippi River. Between were cities/towns like: Wheeling, Ashland, Cincinnati, Covington, Louisville, New Albany, Owensboro, Evansville, Elizabethtown, Paducah and Metropolis (Fort Massac). Get out the atlas, you will need it.

The significance of this waterway to American history cannot be overstated, as one rapidly learns as the party pulls ashore each night to camp. There was not a single stop that Thwaites was not able to relate to an event in American history. In the early decades of the new nation the river was the divide between the acknowledged Indian country on the north side of the river, and the storied Davey Crockett – Daniel Boone settlement era on the south side of the river. The Ohio would later mark the primary dividing line between the South and the North during the Civil War.

While reflecting on American history in his journals, Thwaites also proves to be a keen observer of the present (the “present” being 1894) – a mere 29 years after the Civil War, with poor and displaced “crackers” and “negroes” populating the river towns, left out of the post-war economy, an economy that was quickly passing them by completely as it crossed the Mississippi into the plains. Thwaites, an educated man, and also a northerner, often uses language then common that makes one cringe today, not the least of which was the consistent slander of the period’s latest wave of immigrants: eastern Europeans.

An interesting sub topic in the book is the varieties of river boats. The Thwaites entourage traveled in a home-made cross between the legendary flat boat, and what we would today call a houseboat; while the bulk of river traffic was still carried on steam boats.  In the years just ahead of the trip, the Baltimore & Ohio RR connected with river traffic at Parkersburg, WV. When it “jumped” the Ohio River however, the B&O and other railroads, rapidly came to dominate all shipping, and contributed to the decline of these river towns, because freight and passenger traffic no longer had to follow the waterways.

One has to be a history buff to read this book today, and even with that qualification the phrase “if you’ve seen one river town you’ve seen them all” passed through my mind several times; this despite the fact that Henry David Thoreau was clearly Thwaites’ literary role model. Afloat on the Ohio contains countless descriptions of the river basin’s natural habitat that are detailed, yet poetic.  His descriptions of the “river folk” while not up to Mark Twain’s caliber, are astute none-the-less.

Recommendation:  For history buffs only.

The Hilltop (Hebrew 2013; English 2014) By Assaf Gavron

A common retort from those of us with brothers, while somewhat overstated, is “were it not for our last names, we’d have nothing in common at all.”  Brothers Gabi and Roni Kupper no longer share even that characteristic; Gabi having selected a new, Hebrew name when he moved to the “illegal” settlement of Ma’aleh Hermesh C. What they do share however is the experience of growing up in Israel, post-independence. They are the lead characters in Assaf Gavron's magnificent novel The Hilltop which I dare say will be a classic of Israeli literature.

It’s dangerous for an American gentile like me to posit vast generalities on the State of Israel, or on the Jewish people, so I will try not to do so. But it is important to clarify upfront for readers of this review that Israel is as diverse of a place as one will find on planet Earth. 

We know, or we think we know about the divides -- Likud, Labor, religious, secular, Hasidic, Tel Aviv vs everywhere else, the west bank, the Old City, the Mediterranean, Haifa, the desert, the kibbutz’s and the settlements -- but, we don’t. The genius of Gavron’s book is that he has taken “all of the above” and turned them into people, not factions, and by doing so has shown us their common denominator.

Gavron is not the first author to use brothers to provide different viewpoints on life, but he’s truly mastered the genre with this book. 

Roni and his younger brother Gabi grew up on a Kibbutz near the Golan Heights, raised by an Uncle after the death of their parents in a car accident. Though close as kids, they lead decidedly different parallel lives as adults. Gabi eventually retreats into his religion, and helps found a settlement; while Roni escapes to Tel Aviv, then New York. The book traces their separate lives, and their reunion at Ma’aleh Hermesh C.

There are numerous subplots to this book that are easily stand-alone novels. At one time each of the brothers lived in the U.S. – Gabi working for an Israel fundraising organization, and Roni as an active participant in the “Hummus Forum” (a social networking group of Israelis working on Wall Street). It is Roni’s riches to rags story during the 2008 financial meltdown that lands him on Gabi’s couch in a trailer at the settlement. There they rehash their lives, their relationships, while living through the current political drama of the settlements issue. 

The early chapter on the “status” of the settlement of Ma’aleh Hermesh C is one of the most instructive -- and sadly hysterically funny -- episodes in the book, written as a commentary on the country’s legendary and insane bureaucracy.

The brothers’ lives intersect with dozens of others to provide a panoramic insight to all things Israel. The only position the author takes is that all of them have a belief system that is both situational and personal. To quote a biblical passage used frequently in the book:“though I walk through the valley of the shadow of the death, I will fear no evil for Thou art always with me.” We are all walking through that valley; no one’s journey is the same, no one's journey is superior to any other.

I cannot complement Gavron’s writing enough, his wording, and the structure of the book are near perfect. He seamlessly mixes the philosophy of Rabbi Reb Nachman of Breslov, the rigors of child rearing, running a tavern in Tel Aviv called “Bar BaraBush” named after American First Lady Barbara Bush, the shenanigans of Wall Street, and an online world of avators called Revival: The Second Life (that is engaged in religious warfare, some petty, some catastrophic).

An example of Gavron’s prose:

They reached the entrance to the cave, one of several large caves in the side of the mountain that had served as hideouts for the Maccabees and Romans, for monks and bandits, for shepherds and commando unit fighters and Crusaders; also for foxes, and for porcupines, and for leopards and snakes – for any living creature that passed through that desert at some point in time.

Earlier this year I read an Assaf Gavron short story in a collection titled Tel Aviv Noir.  Loved it, and decided to take on The Hilltop.  I am glad I did, and highly recommend it to others.

The Mayor of Castro Street: The Life and Times of Harvey Milk (1982) By Randy Shilts

I have re-read The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts each June since it was it published in 1982, but I have never written a review of it. It is a very personal book for me. I call it my bible.

For gay activists, even ones like me who call ourselves “retired from the frontlines” The Mayor is our collective autobiography. Its subtitle … “The Life and Times …” is us, and though we may not march at the head of the parade any longer, it’s OUR parade. This weekend’s Pride Parade will mark my 41^st. And in reality, gay activists may move to the sidewalks, but we never really retire because just living our lives honestly is a political act.

Several years ago, no, more than that I’m afraid, the late and wonderful Paul Varnell, a nationally syndicated gay newspaper columnist in Chicago and close friend, and I, had the delight of jointly interviewing journalist/author RandyShilts over dinner when he was doing a book tour for his epic And the Band Played On.  During the interview I mentioned to Randy (hard to call him Shilts, he was way too cuddly) the importance of The Mayor to me. He said he wrote The Mayor because “the story” needed to be told, however he had never expected it to have the impact on gay readers that it does. 

Randy Shilts

The story details some of the key chapters in the modern day gay rights movement – a historic sea change that has occurred in our lifetimes. While there are skirmishes yet to be fought, and probably re-fought, the war was effectively won this week with the Supreme Court’s ruling on marriage equality. The promise of "equality under the law" has one meaning, you either have it, or you do not; to me it’s never been a difficult concept to grasp.

How far the gay movement has come, and how difficult the road has been, is what will always remain important about The Mayor.  When Harvey Milk and the rest of us were growing up, being gay wasn’t just considered a “perversion” it was an actual criminal offense. At the time, the idea of gay marriage didn’t even rise to the level of science fiction.

People lost their jobs, and were barred from many occupations. They automatically lost the custody of their children, and were usually even denied visitation. Establishments that served gays were routinely extorted by the police for payoffs, and then raided anyway, with the names of those arrested published in newspapers. So-called “professionals” considered barbaric electric shock therapy a “cure.” Gay kids were routinely thrown out by their parents, ostracized and bullied and beaten by their peers. Religious figures made profitable careers out of preaching hatred, and (ironically) called gay men pedophiles. Our relationships were not considered “real” relationships, no matter how many years they had existed. And our government knowingly ignored AIDS until it became an uncontrollable epidemic that began impacting others. And throughout all of this, most -- but not all -- of straight America stood by silently, not wanting to acknowledge what was happening all around them.  

As we celebrate its demise, it is important that we never lose this history. 

The Mayor is the book I always recommend to non-gay people because it, better than any other, describes chapters of American history that they are probably unaware of, even though they lived through it. And its story, our story, my story -- is what I want every young gay person to know, to be proud of, and to never forget.