Out of Egypt (1994) By Andre Aciman

 

Odd that I find a memoir by an author to be his best work. But why not, after all who knows the subject matter better? Out of Egypt by Andre Aciman is a family history, as well as an autobiography of his childhood years. He is widely known as the author of Call Me By Your Name.

Aciman is part of a large Jewish family that had to emigrate frequently over the centuries from one country to the next. The remembered family history goes as far back as their expulsion from Spain, resultant of the Spanish Inquisition. Their next stops were in France, the Italian port city of Livorno (Leghorn), enroute to Solonika Greece, then Constantinople Turkey. Then, as the Ottoman Empire was crumbling at the beginning of the 1900s, it became apparent they would need to flee once again.

In 1905, Aciman’s grandparents and their extended families bypassed Palestine, settling in Alexandria, Egypt because one of his great uncles was a college classmate and good friend of the man destined to become Egypt’s next King. For fifty years they would live comfortably in Egypt.

Because of the family’s business connections with the monarchy – his father ran a textile mill -- they were able to survive the beginnings of Arab nationalism – this despite the fact that the Egyptian army was a partner in the attempt to drive the modern-day State of Israel into the sea (the First Arab Israeli War, 1948). By 1952 however, the monarchy had been overthrown and Arab nationalists led by Gamal Abdel Nasser were in control of Egypt. Near the end of 1956, Israel, Britain, and France unsuccessfully attempted to wrest control of the Suez Canal away from Nasser, marking the beginning of the end of tolerance for Jews and Europeans in the country.

Into this history, Andre Aciman was born in Alexandria in 1951. As a young boy who did not particularly understand world events, it seemed a normal, privileged childhood. They had servants, went to shopping districts, movie theaters, restaurants, parties at the various consulates, and even owned a summer house on the coastline. The family was well-educated and as fascinatingly multi-cultural as could be – first languages spoken included Spanish, Ladino, Italian, French, Turkish, Greek and most members had enough knowledge of Hebrew to follow religious ceremony. Some family members had a working understanding of Arabic, Andre learned it primarily by hanging out in the kitchen with the household servants. Shortly after he began formal schooling, the country mandated that all students learn Arabic – it was taught via rote memory by reading the Koran – Andre’s parents eventually hired a private tutor for him. They also pulled him out of the “elite” British School over its questionable (read: should be criminal) corporal punishment practices.

The final chapters of the book are gripping, as the boy who has lived all his life in Alexandria is discovering that he is not welcome – and although he was born in Alexandria, is not recognized as an Egyptian citizen.

In 1965 the Arab nationalists confiscated his father’s business and gave the family two weeks to leave the country, they were not allowed to take anything other than what they could carry, nor transfer funds out of the country. For Andre, living this is a coming-of-age event. His grandmother mourns it perfectly. “This was the ninth time she had seen the men in her life lose everything, first her grandfather, then her father, her husband, five brothers, and now her son.”

Andre spends his final night in Alexandria at the beach where he has spent so much of his childhood. “And suddenly I knew, as I touched the damp, grainy surface of the seawall, that I would always remember this night, that in years to come I would remember sitting here, swept with confused longing as I listened to the water lapping the giant boulders beneath the promenade and watched the children head toward the shore in a winding, lambent procession.  I want to come back tomorrow night, and the night after, and the one after that as well, sensing that what made leaving so fiercely painful was the knowledge that there would never be another night like this, that I would never eat soggy cake along the coast road in the evening, not this year or any other year, nor feel the baffling, sudden beauty of the moment when if only for an instant, I had caught myself longing for a city I never knew I loved."

The family would move to Italy, and later to other parts of the diaspora. Today, Andre and his family live in New York.

At Swim, Two Boys (2001) By Jamie O'Neill

 

Considered controversial on multiple fronts, Jamie O’Neill’s novel At Swim, Two Boys is one of the best written books I have ever read.

It is penned in the literary style of stream of conscious made famous by James Joyce, but unlike my reading of Ulysses, O’Neill’s book remains comprehensible throughout. Which is not to say it is an easy read, it is not. The languages/dialects used in the book alternate from the traditional Irish, to the formal Latin of the Catholic Mass, the formal English of the landed-British colonial aristocracy and its Anglican Church, and the common English spoken by the general population.

While Joyce influenced the writing style, it is another Irish writer, Oscar Wilde, who heavily influenced the storyline of the book. Wilde’s trial, conviction, and imprisonment took place in 1895, just 20 years before the timeline of O’Neill’s book.

At Swim, Two Boys takes place in 1915-1916, and is set in Ireland, at the time a British colony. With limited employment opportunities at home, Irish men often served in the Empire’s military, including India and South Africa – two other British colonies. During the course of the story, Irish men are again being actively recruited, this time to fight in the first World War.

Two of the characters in the book, Mr. Mack and Mr. Doyle, are proud veterans of the Boer War in South Africa and the British occupation of India, having served together in the Second Battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusiliers. Their sons are two of the three main characters of the book.

Mr. Mack’s son Jim is a teen who is just finishing school and is bound for college on scholarship. The Macks are not rich, but they are relatively well-off and run a general store. His older brother Gordie will enlist in the army early in the book.

Mr. Doyle’s son, known as Doyler, is the same age as Jim. The Doyle’s are dirt poor with little prospects at a better life. Doyler has attended school only sporadically due to the need to hold down a job to help support the family.

The third main character is Anthony MacMurrough. He is living the nightmare of Oscar Wilde, having been just released from a two-year imprisonment for an affair he had while in college in England. He watched his partner die while they were imprisoned. Although he was born in England, he spent his childhood summers at his Aunt’s estate in Ireland. With his reputation destroyed by the trial he has now returned to the Estate as a virtual refugee to figure out what to do with the rest of his life. And while his Aunt Eveline is not one of the main characters in the book, she is clearly one of the most interesting.

The controversies in this book are many – the Catholic Church and the politics of the Mass; the diocese structure vs. the religious orders; the Anglican Church as the protestant denomination of the English overlords, the colonial administration’s attempts to outlaw the Irish language, both Church’s policies of outcasting “fallen” parishioners (gay men, pregnant unmarried women, etc); Nationalists, Loyalists, and budding Socialists; the police and their allegiance to the Crown and church leaders; the rich vs the poor; rural vs. urban, and family generational divides. O’Neill’s book helps readers understand all of this history, because it never lets you forget we are talking about real people.

The book concludes with the Easter Rising.

Recommendation:  Yes, absolutely.

No Longer at Ease (1960) By Chinua Achebe

 

No Longer at Ease is the third book of what is known as The African Trilogy, independently written books by Chinua Achebe, recipient of the Man Booker International Prize for Lifetime Achievement. The trilogy collectively creates a timeline of colonial history in Nigeria.

The three books could be viewed as a “how to” manual of establishing British colonial rule, or more accurately, “how it was done.” First were the Christian missionaries, then the strong-arm military take-over, and finally the establishment of what is effectively a puppet “independent” government.

At the end of Arrow of God, the second book, the Igbo village chief realizes they will not be able to further oppose colonization, and makes the fateful decision to send his son Obi to missionary school.  In No Longer at Ease, the final book, the village elders decide to underwrite Obi's university training in London. By so doing, they believe Obi will be able to protect/promote the village’s interests in the new colonial government.

Years later when Obi returns to Nigeria, he is given a civil service position in the government. He stands ready and proud to help build a new Nigeria. At this point however reality intercepts idealism, eventually trapping him in a corrupt system of payoffs.

An interesting aspect of his downfall relates to the need to repay the money his village invested in his education (aka: a student loan), while at the same time establishing himself financially as he advances in his career. The villagers not only expect him to repay the loan, but also want immediate return on invest vis-a-vis the reason they made the loan to begin with: helping the villagers.

Book One: Things Fall Apart

Book Two: Arrow of God

No Longer at Ease, and in fact the entire trilogy, puts a personal face on the challenges faced by, and facing, the independent countries of Africa as they exit colonialism.

Recommendation:  Yes, particularly for history buffs.

And Call Me Conrad / The Immortal (1966) By Roger Zelazny

 

To deal with being a winter shut-in last week, I decided to pick up a science-fiction book, RogerZelazny’s book And Call Me Conrad (also titled This Immortal).

In the book, the people of Planet Earth have -- predictably -- trashed the place and fought a nuclear war. The war is known as the “Three Days,” which though never stated, represents the amount of time between the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In the war’s aftermath, much of the Earth’s population has fled to the Planet Titan, where they are welcome, but given the treatment received by immigrants universally. Of the life-forms who remain on Earth, four million are mortals, and a whole lot are nuclear mutants. It is thought that once Earth restores itself, the humans on Titan will return to Earth.

The species who are native to Planet Titan are the Vegan, blue human-like creatures derogatorily referred to as “Veggies.”  They have no interest in colonizing Earth. However, as a people who have never experienced nuclear warfare, they are scientifically interested in Earth as a case study. The Veggies have purchased the majority of the habitable parts of Earth from the people who fled to Titan – at bargain basement prices. They use their land buys as tourist resorts, and for archaeological expeditions.

The Vegans also have no particular interest in the day-to-day administration of post-apocalypse Earth, so they created a quasi-government of the humans who stayed on Earth to run the place. The government is called Radpol. It is headquartered in Port-au-Prince, Haiti a city unaffected by the nuclear war.

The politics of the Radpol forms the action theater in the book. One faction wants a peaceful co-existence with the Vegans, the other faction wants to expel them. The two sides are represented by two demigods who have been summoned to Port-au-Prince, one is charged with protecting a prominent visiting Vegan official, the other has been hired to assassinate him. Having a basic understanding of Greek mythology is not required to enjoy this book, though it certainly helps.

Recommendation: Okay, quite clever in spots, though not the best sci-fi book I have ever read.

The Voice At The Back Door (1956) By Elizabeth Spencer

 

Judges for the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1956 unanimously selected The Voice at the Back Door by Elizabeth Spencer for the award. The Pulitzer Board of Directors however chose to ignore the vote and announced they would not be making an award that year. They believed Spencer’s book was too explosively controversial, it deals with racial injustice in small town Mississippi.

Anyone who does not understand how racial injustice could be considered too “controversial” a subject matter in 1956, need only tune in to any news source today. America has yet to successfully drive a stake through the remnants of confederacy, or its proud child Jim Crow.

The time period when the book was written and published was indeed tumultuous. Near the end of WWII, President Truman ordered an end to segregation in the military; and would be politically vilified for doing so. In 1954, the Supreme Court would issue a unanimous ruling in the Brown v. the Board of Education proclaiming that the mantra of “separate but equal” was a fallacy, declaring “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." In 1955, a 14-year-old African American boy, Emmett Till, was accused of “flirting” with a white woman in a grocery store. He was kidnapped from his aunt & uncle’s home at night, physically mutilated and murdered with his body dumped in a nearby river.

These real-life events, and countless others like them, set the background for Spencer’s book about the post-civil war Jim Crow era, when white southerners had to relinquish ownership of African American slaves, but replaced it with a system of state and local laws enshrining white supremacy, as their God-given "southern way of life.”  Spencer’s book is a textbook on how that “way of life” operated. Her vantage point as author is that of a Southerner, she was born and raised in Carrolton, Mississippi.

Like Harper Lee’s classic To Kill a Mockingbird (which did win a Pulitzer Price five years later), the book begins with a Black man being accused of a crime. It flashes back to the cold-blooded execution of “12 Negroes” that took place in the courthouse before a trial had even convened.

While one should read The Voice at the Back Door as a civil rights history, let me tell you it also reads like a page-turning murder mystery played out alongside a complex love “quadrangle,” with a thriller primary election campaign for County Sheriff setting the timeline – and a Prohibition subplot for a little added spice.

The novel has three main characters. One is Duncan Hunter, a "townee," whose family has owned the grocery store for generations.  Dubbed “Happy Hunter” he was a college football star and is now a reluctant candidate for Sheriff. The second main character is Jimmy Tallant. He is a country boy, grown up to be bootlegger. Tallant and Hunter went to grade school and high school together. Their personal rifts over girlfriends and perceived rights and wrongs, and family histories, are the fodder of generations of small-town gossip.  The third main character is Beck Dozier, an educated Black man, his father was one of the 12 Negroes gunned down in the courtroom, his nephew is a kid called W.B. who works as a delivery boy for Hunter's grocery store.  

Recommendation: Absolutely. The Pulitzer judges were right, the Pulitzer Board was cowardly.

The Road Through the Wall (1948) By Shirley Jackson

 

Shirley Jackson’s first novel, The Road Through the Wall, is semi-biographical. It is about a young girl named Harriet growing up in post-WWII suburban America, a unifying theme in Jackson’s early novels and short stories. Later in her career Jackson would turn to horror topics including her best-known work The Haunting of Hill House, which has been adapted numerous times for movies and television shows.

While Harriet is the main character in The Road Through the Wall, there is a large contingent of “others” in the book, her neighborhood friends, classmates, siblings galore, and their nemeses the parents. I think the word “generic” applies to the kids, and to the personal goals set for them by their parents. Just pages into the book I already had the folk song Little Boxes playing in the back of my head, written & composed by Malvina Reynolds in 1962 and made famous by Pete Seeger, and used more recently as the theme song of Showtime’s serial Weeds.

Little Boxes sung by Pete Seeger

The novel includes several interesting little side stories amongst the ordinary days, mixed in with the never-ending dynamics of who is part of the “in crowd” and who is not, and why, told at the level of the children, and also at the level of the parents. At the top end of this us and them scale, and uncontested, was the distinction between homeowners and renters.

One of the side stories is of Harriet being persuaded into visiting a Chinese man her friend Virginia met while shopping in town. Harriet knew her parents would not approve of visiting an adult man, rather on a Chinese one. Yet, they went anyway, though they nearly canceled at the last moment out of fear of the unknown. The meeting, with tea and cookies, turned out to be eye opening, multi-cultural, interesting, and without incident. Among other things, the girls discover the man lives in the house as a servant, not as the proprietor – a class distinction handed down to them from their parents.  The girls do not visit a second time.

Another interesting side story is the decision by the adults in the neighborhood to start a Shakespeare reading program for the kids. Without objection (or even the notion of an objection), the program organizer announced his decision to not invite Harriet’s friend Marilyn to participate in the program. Marilyn is Jewish and lives in a rental. He explains this exclusion by stating he did not want to offend Marilyn by subjecting her to a reading of The Merchant of Venice.

Throughout the storylines, everyone is in high dudgeon because a subdivision is being built next to theirs, and they will have no say in what “class” of people will be moving in, possibly harming the desirability of the neighborhood. Currently, a wall exists between the new and the established, though the developer had indicated the wall is coming down, streets and sidewalks will be connected with theirs, new kids will be in the school system.

The novel concludes when a 3-year-old girl dies near a hole in that wall. No one knows if it was an accident, a murder, or what.

Recommendation:  Yes, though I have read this theme before.

Dear Alben: Mr. Barkley of Kentucky (1979) By James K. Libbey

 

This summer I picked up several books – a $5 bag to be precise – at the McCracken County Library’s book fair. McCracken County includes Paducah, Kentucky, across the Ohio River and down a few miles from where I live. One of the books I selected while browsing was a biography of Alben Barkley, a name I recognized but actually knew little about. Lake Barkley in the Land-Between-the Lakes is named after Barkley, as is the regional airport in Paducah. I knew he was a longtime Congressman, and I was vaguely aware he was Vice-President under President Harry Truman.

The book is an interesting read.  Barkley grew up in western Kentucky, near Fancy Farm – home of a legendary annual political fair and picnic. He made his early career in Paducah – as County Judge Executive (in Kentucky this is the title given to the county administrator). Barkley won his first term in Congress during Woodrow Wilson’s presidency. Politically speaking it was a different era, Kentucky was reliably Democratic and patronage, not policy, was the name of the game. Barkley was a master of the patronage and spoils system. He also successfully secured federal funding for a bridge across the Ohio River from Paducah, KY to Brookport, IL -- a big boost for the local economy.

Eventually, Barkley moved up to become a U.S. Senator – and this is the part of his history that I knew nothing about. In due time he was selected as the Senate Majority Leader – as such, he served as the point man on legislation proposed by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to lift the country out of the Great Depression – putting him at the heart of the New Deal -- and making him perhaps the most popular Democrat after FDR – and one of the few who could bridge the schism between northern progressives and southern conservatives in the party.  Many of his colleagues were ready to support Barkley as a presidential candidate in the 1948 election. However, FDR’s death had elevated Vice-President Harry Truman to the White House, and Barkley was unwilling to challenge an incumbent Democrat.

An aside:  Barkley’s maternal grandmother was a cousin to the first Adlai Stevenson, making Barkley a distant relative and contemporary of Illinois Governor Adlai Stevenson II, who managed to win the 1952 Democrat Presidential nomination that many say was meant for Barkley.  Stevenson then went on to predictable defeat running against war hero General Dwight Eisenhower.  The first Stevenson by-the-way was Vice President under Grover Cleveland's second presidential term.

Recommendation:  Like many biographers, Libbey’s treatment of Barkley borders on idolatry – that said, it is a great read for political junkies, and those familiar with west Kentucky geography.