#14: When the Emperor Was Divine by Julie Otsuka

[meganbmoore.livejournal.com]

When the Emperor Was Divine begins in 1942 with a Japanese woman seeing a sign in the post office window. Without pause, she begins to matter-of-factly prepare for her and her two children-her husband was recently arrested in the middle of the night under suspicion of being an enemy-to be relocated to an internment camp in Utah.

The story is told in five chapters and five distinct voices. None of the family is named. They are simply the mother, the boy, the girl, and the family, each almost completely lacking an individual identity. I usually don’t do well with the “Everyman” approach to characters, as I tend to prefer individuals to group representations, but this is an exception. Otsuka isn’t telling the story of this Japanese-American family, but of all Japanese-American families who were relocated.

Otsuka doesn’t focus on the physical conditions-whether or not the people were treated well, if they had enough to eat or wear, if the living conditions were good, etc.- though those are there. Instead, her focus is on the emotional toll of the experience, and what it did to their sense of identity and self. When the family returns home three years later, they are as unrecognizable as the world they are returning to is to them.

There is, however, on thing I should warn about.
( spoiler )

5-6: Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri and Londonstani by Gautam Malkani

[puritybrown.livejournal.com]

5: Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
6: Londonstani by Gautam Malkani

So, okay, I like Jhumpa Lahiri. I really do. And I do plan to read her novel The Namesake (I loved the film version). But at some point while I was reading the stories in Unaccustomed Earth, I started to get impatient. I mean to say, there are only so many beautifully-crafted short stories about upper-middle-class high-caste Hindu Bengali heterosexual academics having wistful epiphanies about life as a second-generation Indian living in a city on the East Coast of the USA that I can read before I start wondering whether she can do anything else. I'd like to say I'm exaggerating, but, seriously, that's all she ever writes about! She does it beautifully, but halfway through Unaccustomed Earth I found myself longing for a story about a gay upper-middle-class high-caste Hindu Bengali academic having a wistful epiphany about life as a second-generation Indian living in a city on the East Coast of the USA. Or a lower-middle-class high-caste Hindu Bengali heterosexual having a wistful epiphany und so weiter. I mean, I kind of get the feeling that I could recreate a fairly accurate account of Lahiri's childhood and her parents' experiences moving to the US just on the basis of her stories, and while it never gets self-indulgent the way a lot of disguised autobiography does, it does get repetitive. I still like her writing, but if she doesn't start trying something different, she's in danger of growing stale.

So, anyway, after Unaccustomed Earth I felt the need for something that showed a different side of the Indian-diaspora experience, so I picked up Londonstani by Gautam Malkani. This was a good choice for two reasons:
a) it could not be more different than Jhumpa Lahiri's stories; and
b) it's really really really good.

Londonstani is a roller-coaster of a ride through saaarf London rudeboy gangsta territory: our main man is Jas, who used to be, in his own words, "a gimpy fuck", but now he hangs out with Hardjit (used to be Harjit but now it's got a D in 'cos he's well hard, innit?) and Ravi and Amit, ridin around in Ravi's mum's Beemer an checkin out all da fit ladies.

Erm, sorry. As you can tell, it's written (mostly) in phonetic dialect, which is incredibly hard to pull off, and Malkani does it beautifully, so much so that 20 pages in I was saying "innit?" at the end of every other sentence (at least in my head). It's funny and real and vivid and rattles along at a breathtaking pace; I laughed a lot reading this book, and towards the end I cried. The final twist is one of those did-not-see-it-coming things that makes all the little gaps in the narrative make sense. This book is brilliant.

A Thousand Splendid Suns

[lady-jem.livejournal.com]

I'm new to this community, and was really surprised to see that no one yet had reviewed this book...(at least, it's not tagged under the author, which I admit is where I looked...)

So: 1. A Thousand Splendid Suns, by Khaled Hosseini. His second novel, after The Kite Runners, which I have not read yet but which a few others on this community have read and reviewed.

The novel is set in Afghanistan (Herat for the first part, and mostly Kabul thereafter) and follows the lives of two women set against Afghanistan from the seventies through the early 21st century--the book moves through the Soviet occupation, the Mujahadin, the Taliban, and eventually their defeat and the rebuilding of the city, but it tells of it all from the perspective of women living in Kabul trying to survive and raise their families...I will also say that it was one of the first books I've cried over in probably a decade. 

One other reviewer gently criticized Hosseini's first book for presenting a somewhat skewed, Westernized (or propagandized) view of Afghanistan and the happenings there; I freely admit that my knowledge of the politics and the time is weak, but I thought this was a lovely book and it rang very true and believable to me.  The "voice" of the story reminded me somehow of The Red Tent, though I'm not exactly sure why and the two books really don't have much in common. But I personally found this male author's representation of women's character and heart to be very convincing. (To my surprise, actually!)  And I will definitely read this one again.

(Next up: Saving Fish from Drowning by Amy Tan) (edit: which, if the dead socialite doesn't stop rambling about her own funeral and other stuff so we can get to the story, I won't get far on...this is SLOW going. And I'm sorry, but when an author tells you right up front what the story is going to be about, she's sort of made a contract with you wherein there are only so many pages you're going to read before you expect to go somewhere with the actual story she promised you...)