#47-50: Jen Lin-Liu, Hannah Crafts (and Henry Louis Gates Jr.), Attia Hosain

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

#47: Jen Lin-Liu, Serve the People: A Stir-Fried Journey Through China: After graduating from journalism school in the U.S., Lin-Liu moved to China to freelance for American newspapers and magazines. She became obsessed (her word) with Chinese food and decided to sign up for Chinese cooking school...and that's only the beginning of her journey, which takes her through cooking school, one-on-one lessons, apprenticeships in noodle stalls and dumpling houses, and finally an internship in a gourmet Shanghai restaurant.

The book is mostly (and deliciously) about food, but Lin-Liu also talks about the people she meets along her journey, providing a fascinating slice of contemporary Chinese life and of China's recent history. She writes humorously and honestly, and oh, the food descriptions just made me drool! And she even includes recipes -- I may not try many (though I marked a few), but I loved reading them.


#48: Hannah Crafts, edited by Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Bondwoman's Narrative: In 2001, scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. bought a previously unpublished manuscript from the 1850s, which he believed and it appears now is the first novel written by a fugitive slave. Gates provides a long and detailed introduction explaining the research he did into the manuscript's history, trying to find its author, and the introduction and notes are every bit as interesting as the novel itself.

The novel is told, in the first person, by a young slave who flees with her mistress when her mistress's terrible secret is discovered and who experiences a whole host of terrors before reaching safety in the North. Considered purely as a novel, it does leave something to be desired; it's structurally disorganized, and the plot is contrived and, like many Gothic novels, overly dependent on coincidence. Crafts borrows freely from a wide variety of sources, most notably Dickens' Bleak House, and it's interesting to see (using the extensive and useful notes) how she changes her borrowings in order to fit them in to her narrative. The Gothic bits (especially the cursed tree) are often very effective, and more than that, the viewpoint and opinions are fascinating. I found the book as a whole reasonably enjoyable on a narrative level and very interesting indeed as a historical document.


#49 & 50: Attia Hosain, Sunlight on a Broken Column, Phoenix Fled: Sunlight on a Broken Column tells the story of Laila, an orphaned girl growing up first in the orthodox home of her grandfather and her aunts, who keep purdah, and then in the less traditional home of her uncle and aunt. As her friends and cousins fight for their country's independence, Laila struggles for her own, especially when she falls in love with a man not approved by her family. Phoenix Fled is a collection of stories, each a short but vivid and rich bit of writing, with striking images and characters.

These are beautifully written, sensitive looks at Muslim life in India before and just after the 1947 partition of the country into Pakistan and India. Both books are deeply understanding of the conflict between Muslims and Hindus and between the old and new ways of life in India, and they made me wish Hosain had written more: as far as I can discover, these were her only two books.