Home To India, by Santha Rama Rau. 35.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

A memoir of the author’s teenage years in India during WWII. Rau and her older sister grew up in London, but returned to Bombay with their mother when their diplomat father was stationed in South Africa. (They tried living in South Africa, but her mother packed them up when she went to a movie theatre and found a sign reading “Indians, natives, and dogs are not allowed.”)

It’s hard to review this in a way that differentiates it from the many other books about people grappling with cultural identity and loyalty during a return to their homeland after a long separation. I did particularly like this one, though. It’s not primarily a comedy, but there are many funny bits, often involving her deadpan sister and a grandfather who reinvents Descartes via musings on the existence or nonexistence of the Indian sweet on his plate. Rau’s ear for dialogue is as sharp as her observation of a country and cultures she’s more or less encountering as a newcomer, as she had left India when she was six.

Unsurprisingly, she gets involved in the political scene. Her mother is a friend of the politician and poet Sarojini Naidu, who comes across particularly vividly, reigning over a dinner party in a blouse printed with the cover of her favorite book! She also meets Nehru a couple of times. Rau captures the excitement of the political scene, as friends often call up to apologize in advance for missing dinner parties, as they’ve decided to get arrested for civil disobedience instead.

The book was published in 1944, when Rau was about 21. It feels very immediate, with little mediation by hindsight. Her thoughts on politics and identity are honest and serious: you can see her growing up intellectually as the book progresses.

But though the content is weighty, the touch is light. It’s a quick, easy, enjoyable read. I was not surprised to learn that Rau became quite a successful writer, author of a number of books and the film version of A Passage To India.

View on Amazon: Home to India (Perennial library)

The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley

[seekingferret.livejournal.com]

15) The Chaneysville Incident by David Bradley

I discovered David Bradley and learned of his The Chaneysville Incident from his introduction to William Kelley's A Different Drummer, which I thought was tremendously insightful.

It's illuminating to view Bradley as influenced by Kelley (and of course, the other authors Bradley cites both in that introduction and throughout The Chaneysville Incident, like Ellison and DuBois). But Kelley and Bradley have both figured out ways to communicate complicated ideas about race and identity through new techniques and, more importantly, new spins on old techniques. In short, I am starting to see what African-American post-modernism is supposed to look like.

I mean, I've never pretended to understand white American post-modernism, or white European post-modernism. I just know that I can identify when it works for me and when it doesn't. Bradley's novel is achingly similar to other books I've read (Richard Powers keeps coming to mind, if that means something to anyone), and yet it is unlike any other I've come across. It has understandings of storytelling and its significance that will continue to lend power to my reading as I move on past into other literary worlds. That, I think, is one of the main purposes of literary post-modernism. By exposing the plumbing of the world of language, the post-modernists show readers and fellow writers how we go about the process of interacting with text. Inherent in the conception is confronting the born and bred prejudices of the reader.

Confronting the prejudices of the reader is something Bradley does far more literally than other post-modernists. Consider one early chapter, where the African-American narrator confesses to his white girlfriend that he once raped a white girl. The dynamics of the situation, the moral confusion, the transparent feelings of guilt and shame and pride and fear and love that swirl around and constantly imbalance each other... it is employed with a subtlety that confronts the reader with his assumptions about race. But this confession is a rapid flash back in time, juxtaposed against a present moment whose tense confrontation between two black men both illuminates and is illuminated by the old confession. Bradley is confronting both the reader's literary expectations and his social prejudices simultaneously. Bradley follows it up in the next chapter with a Br'er Rabbit-type retelling of the story of an attempted lynching. The serious matched with the tragicomic to devastating result.

Bradley's main character is a cleverly-drawn academic historian, a typical main character for a post-modern novel. The character's obsession with the little details of history enable Bradley to set up his own small, personal story against the vaster, more complicated stories of American history. Tidbits about Henry Ford and Robert E. Lee serve multiple purposes- they contextualize, grounding the story in a larger drama. They suggest that that larger drama is constantly interacting with millions of smaller dramas in ways that are too complicated to easily understand. They provide a break from the narrative, making it less relentlessly linear, more natural. They develop thematic ideas about the American concept of 'progress' and the nonlinearity that really inhabits that concept. They contrast to the folk stories of the main character's mentor Uncle Jack. And they develop an understanding of the main character and what his interests are, what grabs his attention and why.

Ultimately, the narrator's blend of microhistory and macrohistory leads him to the novel's central quest, the attempt to understand the life of the narrator's father and the way all of the novel's characters navigate history's nightmares (Joyce's Stephen says "History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake," and it cannot be a coincidence that the narrator suffers literally from nightmares that he cannot wake up from). It is a quest he cannot succeed in, because History simply doesn't work in a way that allows the kind of answer he needs. So instead he turns, as Bradley himself does, to storytelling. The novel's final story is powerful and filled with constant surprises. It is a worthy conclusion to a powerful novel.

Kip Fulbeck

[sanguinity]

58. Kip Fulbeck, Paper Bullets: a fictional autobiography.

I loved this a lot. Kip Fulbeck's background as a spoken-word artist is very prominent in Paper Bullets: this is a man who knows how to tell a story, how to pace it, how to deliver it, how to catch up his audience and seduce them. And these are good stories, too. I enjoy a lot of what I read, but I don't savor that many books; Paper Bullets is one I savored.

59. Kip Fulbeck, part asian, 100% hapa.

What are you?

100-some individuals, each photographed very simply against a white background; each photograph is faced with the subject's hand-written, free-form answer to the question "What are you?" Some people write several paragraphs, others come back with a one-liner ("Shouldn't you be asking my name, first?"); school-age kids draw pictures; toddlers scribble. The so-called "official" answer to said question, the list of each individual's ethnic heritages, is typewritten up in the corner, but the "official" answer is always dwarfed by the handwriting and the direct gazes. If you're kinda starved for representations of mixed people (which I am), this is all kinds of awesome.

Cons: White-Asian mixes predominate, even though some individuals are Asian-Asian, Asian-Black, or other mixes. Additionally, fully a third of Paul Spickard's afterword is a defense of the Asian-American appropriation of "hapa". (And not a very good defense, in my mind: language changes, we're using the word respectfully.)

Samples from the book (different layout than in the book, but same images/info) are available on the website.

#1 & 2: Black Betty, Walter Mosley; Dawn, Octavia Butler

[serenejournal.livejournal.com]

#1: Black Betty, Walter Mosley

I started off with something that matches my standard reading pattern: Basic detective fiction. I read a lot of murder mysteries -- they're my fluff reading -- so I was grateful when a pile of books that wild_irises lent me included this book. I'd read Devil in a Blue Dress long ago, and I can only surmise that I haven't read more of Mosley's stuff because I'm a half-unconscious sheep, and I have been too intellectually lazy to seek out POC mystery authors.

(The publishers certainly aren't going out of their way to point them out to me -- just now, I checked a top-ten-bestselling-mysteries list, and as far as I can see, they're all white.)

Anyway, I liked the story, and I liked the way that Easy doesn't fit the stereotypical detective mold. He's not always the good guy. He doesn't always protect people. He lets bad things happen -- it will be a while before I get the images of all his dead friends out of my head. He is afraid of people who can harm him. He is very human and not at all invulnerable. I'll be checking out more of Mosley's stories.

#2: Dawn, Octavia Butler

I don't read much science fiction, and I'm not really sure why, because I do usually like it when I read it. Dawn is no exception. I did think at one point "This will never become a movie, because it's written in the slow style of days long gone", but then again, so was "Enemy Mine", and that was made into a movie. Anyway, the pace was a plus for me -- no car chases or anything, but it was a quick, pleasant read even though it dealt with some really serious issues. I am not entirely comfortable with where it left off, and I don't think that's a bad thing. I will certainly get the next books in the series, because while I don't doubt at all that Butler will continue poking at issues of slavery, xenophobia, and torture, I just have to know how it turns out, and I really want for the ending to the series to be more satisfying than the ending to Dawn.