July 2015 Reading

Well, I was browsing some other blogs that did monthly book reviews or round-ups, and I thought I'd give it a try since I haven't posted in a while. Also, I suspected July would be an easy month to reflect on, since it seemed like I'd read less this month than I had during any other month of the year. (Also, I've been procrastinating on writing my midterm.) When I actually checked my Goodreads stats, I found that July is actually my 2015 month of second-fewest-books-read. I only read four books in June, but one of those was The Crimean War by Orlando Figes and I was pretty sick for at least a good part of that month, so I give myself a pass. Also, I read  two issues of Foreign Affairs cover-to-cover (I'm digging that subscription much more this year than last time I tried it.)

Anyway, July. I suspect Station Eleven would be the stand-out of the month, but I'm only two-thirds through and not at all sure I'll finish by tomorrow. So instead I'll give the top spot to Shrubs: An Old Fashioned Drink for Modern Times by Michael Dietsch. This is a cookbook! It was also a birthday gift from Noah. It's rare I read a cookbook from cover-to-cover, but this is one of those rarities; it opens with a discussion of the history of shrubs (whose name comes from the same origins as sherbet and syrup), which are essentially fruity simple syrups with a vinegar base. They can be mixed into cocktails or blended with soda water to create homemade soft drinks, and I am looking forward to mixing up a few, which will apparently keep for a year in a fridge. (Hold the jokes, please.) 

The book opens with some traditional, heavy-on-booze, light-on-vinegar recipes, including recipes used by Benjamin Franklin and Martha Washington. (The whole section, with its presentation of the original recipe wording and a modern adaptation reminds me of the VHS-sponsored historical cider tasting at Blue Bee.) Ben's is basically oranges marinated in rum and is definitely on my to-try list. There are some suggestions for modern white rums that still have some of the rum "funk" associated with darker or blackstrap varieties. (I haven't checked yet to see how well represented these are in the local ABCs.) The majority of the book is devoted to simple but enticing fruity concoctions -- like the strawberry balsamic, cherry mint, and blackberry-raspberry shrubs. Experimentation is encouraged, and there's a cucumber shrub I'm itching to add a jalapeno twist to. The final section of the book is devoted to cocktails, ending with the "ultramodern" twist on an old fashioned: bourbon, Scotch, cinnamon fig shrub, and a dash of bitters.

Roadside Picnic, a Russian sci-fi classic by brothers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, was another July standout. The novel has a bit of the PKD high concept, slapdash feel about it, with long talky moments interspersed with action sequences. We begin, after an introductory faux interview, in the point-of-view of Red, who works at an international research institute but makes his real living as a "stalker," venturing into the perplexing and dangerous areas affected by alien contact and stealing artifacts to sell on the black market. In Roadside Picnic, the cosmos may be indifferent to humanity, and most characters try to make do in an amoral world.

House of Rain is probably the main reason for my slow July. This moderately hefty nonfiction volume had caught my eye some time ago, and the subject was indeed fascinating: author Craig Childs tackles the question of why the Anasazi culture "disappeared" around 1300 A.D., resisting the idea of disappearance and instead looking at archaeological support for possible migration paths southward. He doles out his argument in snippets along with descriptions of ruins and other landmarks (generally very well written; Childs has a feel for the locale) and ancecdotes detailing his own thoughts, hikes, and journeys (often with chance-met travelers or his wife and infant son filling mostly non-speaking roles as add-ons to the scenery). Hey, he obviously walked the walk, but I could do with a little less walking and meditating and a little more of the archaeological data and hypothesizing. The attitude toward the general public that comes across is also kind of ambivalent and perverse. (Many of the sites are on national parkland, and Childs is often trespassing or wheedling his way into special-exception status in order to complete his research/experience. Childs seems to thoroughly believe that he deserves special-exception status while also seeming to think that maybe more of these sites should be more open to the public while also seeming to think that the public are mostly bores who can't appreciate what they're seeing, block the scenery, and get in the way of his mystical experiences). The book was published in 2007, and Childs appears to be ahead of a curve, with contemporary archaeologists seeming to spend more time looking at patterns of migrations and leaning toward a consensus that, yes, many of the Anasazi did move to other population centers. Not a professional achaeologist, Childs is free to make some larger guesses and generalizations and makes a pretty convincing argument for linking many of the Anasazi sites to sites to the south and to worship of Tlaloc, a Mexican/mesoamerican rain god.

Another reason for the relatively low July book count was my tackling of the massive volume The Best Science Fiction and Fantasy of the Year (Volume 9), edited by Jonathan Strahan. I enjoy short stories, but I often find reading a collection of short stories takes me longer than reading a novel ... with a novel, once I get into the rhythm, I can usually read a few pages while standing in line or eating lunch and be able to be fully immersed and remember what I've read. This is not as true for me with short stories, which I prefer to read in one sitting (though that can be hard to count on with some of the novella-length works). So, trying to find sustained reading time slows my pace, as does a preference for pausing for some processing time between stories. A great short story, even though short, is like a novel in that you want some time to think about it before diving into a new work.

Overall, although several of the stories veered more toward the slice-of-life approach than I'd prefer, this was a very strong volume. Holly Black's "Ten Rules for Being an Intergalactic Smuggler (The Successful Kind)" was a highlight, telling a somewhat familiar but happily complete story with a few interesting authorial tricks. K.J. Parker's "I Met a Man Who Wasn't There," about a sorcerer's student, is full of delightful black humour and about as far from Harry Potter as it gets. Joe Abercrombie tells a cursed-object in sorta-fantasy-Venice tale with switching points of view; Lauren Beukes deftly tackles biotechnology in "Slipping" while Greg Egan finds utilitarian and criminal uses for drones in "Shadow Flock"; Ian McDonald's "The Fifth Dragon" takes a hard SF approach to life on the moon that also speaks to sacrifice and relationships; Elizabeth Bear's artificially "right-minded" sociopath makes for a compelling narrator in "Covenant," a mini crime thriller that poses several ethical quandaries. Peter Watts detonates the ethics case study in "Collateral"; Kelly Link tells an atmospheric fairy tale; Rachel Swirsky write a well-crafted AI tearjerker; Usman T. Malik writes an ambitious tale that brings together science metaphors, superpowers, conflict in the Middle East, and family values. I'm not much of a horror fan in general, but I found the aestheticization of violence in Caitlyn Keirnan's short story particularly problematic. (That's not to mention the incest, er  twincest, which I'm not certain was a problem, but I'm not certain it wasn't, either.) On the other hand, the charming octogenarian narrator in Garth Nix's horror short "Shay Worsted" made for an entertaining if slight piece. There are 28 tales and 634 pages in all. 

Largely inspired by my viewing of Justified (and listening to a few of the commentary tracks) was a spurt of crime reading. I read The Friends of Eddie Coyle, which Elmore Leonard called the best crime novel ever written, published in 1970 and set in the Boston of cops and criminals. Its dense, fast-paced dialogue and way of coming at the main action sideways through different POVs was deft and enjoyable; however, even when it deliberately tries to give female characters some agency or autonomy, it fails miserably in its writing of women. (Thankfully? the book mostly focuses on men.) Swag has a similarly distinctly 70s vibe (also with a bit of a whiff of misogyny, although less so) and tells an entertaining story of odd-couple armed robbers. Leonard has a spare but humorous style that works well here and perhaps even better in his short story collection Fire in the Hole.   

Closing the Book on 2014, One Chapter Down in 2015

So, how did I do on the reading challenges I set myself in 2014? Goodreads data shows that, with 185 books read, including 139 works of science fiction and fantasy and 11 volumes of poetry, I met all but one. A few highlights below:

Since I had never read a science fiction or fantasy graphic novel before, I set a small goal of 5 books for the Science Fiction & Fantasy Graphic Novel Challenge, which I quickly upped to 10. After that, I stopped changing the goal but kept reading (torn between wanting to try a variety of approaches and a strong impulse toward series completism), winding up with 43 volumes read. At the top of the list stands Saga – fun, thoughtful space opera with incredible painterly illustrations. Another favorite was the entertaining The Sixth Gun, an action-filled Western with an engaging cast and wonderful, detailed illustrations (the Thunderbird remains a highlight). Also standing above the crowd were Y: The Last Man, particularly strong in its opening volumes describing the responses to a global catastrophe that seems to have killed all the world’s males and bringing our hero Yorick’s story to a satisfying conclusion in volume 10, and Fables, a less philosophical series that follows the lives of fairy tale characters living in modern-day New York, at its best when telling war stories or poignant morality tales.

This challenge also encouraged me to check out some of the much-vaunted classics of the speculative graphic novel. While I didn’t especially care for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman: Preludes and Nocturnes (perhaps I should have heeded Internet advice to start with a later volume), I enoyed Snowpiercer’s starkly drawn tale of postapocalyptic class struggle aboard an unstopping train despite its weaknesses in characterization. It was easy to see why Alan Moore’s work has been deemed classic, and I certainly thought V for Vendetta and Watchmen earned their status, although they didn’t necessarily become favorites (a bit of datedness/the fact that I’ve now seen many variations on these themes – many of them inspired by Moore’s work – comes into play, as well as the fact that despite a few attempts to portray well-rounded females, I found Moore’s characterization of women to be problematic overall). I probably give the edge to V for Vendetta; although I’m not sure I buy a key relationship, the politics is still interesting; interesting, too, is how important words are in the way this graphic story is told, from a full sermon to vaudeville-style lyrics. Reading Watchman’s reflections of what it might really mean to possess a superpower or to exist “beyond the law” was made even more interesting by comparing its 1980s outlook to the current outpouring of books, films (Man of Steel and Birdman to mention but two), and TV shows now tackling the same themes.  
 

Then there was the SFF Explorer Challenge to read authors whose work I hadn’t read before. I expected that this category would lead me to explore some of the older “classic” science fiction writers whose work I wasn’t familiar with and perhaps also more military sci fi, which is a genre I often find entertaining and frustrating at the same time. In fact, what this challenge mostly prompted me to do was prioritize some writers who’d been on my to-read list for a while (like N.K. Jemisin with the Dreamblood duology) and some newer writers (like Madeline Ashby, who explored the ethics of artificial intelligence, with a lot of action and roadtripping thrown into the mix, in vN and iD). Nalo Hopkinson was one of these writers, and Midnight Robber was one of my top books of 2014, a book in which a high tech space colony can also be a bastion of Carribean culture, propelled at the sentence level by vivid dialect, and exploring (among many other topics) female friendships and coming of age.

I started with a goal of 15 or 20 for the Explorer Challenge, eventually raised it to 30, and ended with 34 titles fitting the bill. Of course, completing other challenges had a spillover effect in the “new to me” category, as did the books and stories I read in order to take place in online discussions. “The Lady Who Plucked Red Flowers Beneath the Queen’s Window,” was one of my first reads in 2014 and Rachel Swirsky’s haunting short story collection How the World Became Quiet remains one of the most memorable. Many of Swirsky’s stories explore gender through a speculative lens, but How the World Became Quiet is by no means a one-note collection. It begins with “The Lady Who…” novella, in which a sorceress from a warrior caste finds her consciousness preserved and her beliefs challenged as she encounters generation after generation of descendents and others. While not every story reaches the same level, there are numerous highs, from a ghost story set in Japan’s “Sea of Trees” to “A Monkey Will Never Be Rid of Its Black Hands,” which takes a personal look at global violence, to a relationship story that asks how an artificial intelligence experiences “Eros, Philia, Agape.”  

Another short fiction standout was On a Red Station, Drifting, part of Aliette de Bodard’s Vietnamese-inflected Xiyun universe. In the novella, a refugee crisis and uncertain peace are the backdrop for a multigenerational power struggle on Prosper Station. de Bodard draws strong, not always likeable, female characters and gives depth to most of her cast (be they male, female, and/or computer).

I found a lot to enjoy in my 2014 reading -- the great fun of Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series and Michael J. Sullivan’s old-fashioned Riyria books; Jeff VanderMeer’s very weird Southern Reach trilogy; China Mieville’s marriage of science fiction and linguistics in Embassyville; Samuel R. Delany’s darkly playful The Einstein Intersection; Toby Barlow’s unique story of Parisian detectives, American spies, and Russian witches in Babayaga; K. J. Parker’s tactical and tough Fencer Trilogy; the Afro-Celtic scope of Kate Elliott’s Spiritwalker trilogy; The Lathe of Heaven (in which Ursula K. LeGuin seems to channel reality-bending Philip K. Dick); Jonathem Lethem’s Chandler-meets-Dick noir with a talking kangaroo Gun, With Occasional Music; and Dick’s own, suprisingly personal, paranoid yet exuberant A Scanner Darkly. 

I read a number of books from C.J. Cherryh’s celebrated Alliance/Union Universe (conceived in some ways as a mirror of the Cold War), in which I found the recurring themes I expect from Cherryh (attention paid to economics, politics, and the mechanics of ships and stations) as well as a few surprises (“damaged” male adolescents as protagonists or prominent characters). Downbelow Station makes a complicated conflict between planets, ships, and unions into a pageturner; Rimrunners’ tough vet narrator, Bet Yeager, is compelling in her struggles to leave behind staion life; Cyteen tells an expansive and insightful tale of cloning, politics, and parenting. 

My reading outside the realms of fantasy and science fiction included the enraging but important nonfiction Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press, multigenerational Vietnam memoir The Eaves of Heaven, and Monica Drake’s not-just-chick-lit The Stud Book.

A few books and authors merit special mention:

Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being was a January 2014 read that’s stuck with me. It meditates on Zen, time, and mortality while telling the stories of a West Coast novelist and a Japanese teenager facing brutal bullying. Ozeki’s stories tend to be emotional but not sentimental, to ask big questions, and to promote environmentalism. In 2014, I also enjoyed My Year of Meats, which begins with a quote from Shonagon’s Pillow Book and introduces two very different protagonists, a brash Japanese-American documentarian working on a television series funded by the Beef Export and Trade Syndicate and a subdued Japanese housewife whose husband is part of BEEF-EX.

I had long heard fantastic recommendations for Mary Doria Russell’s Jesuits-in-space novel, The Sparrow. Both it and its sequel Children of God live up to the hype in their exploration of spacefaring possibilities; real questions of values, faith, and reason; and how individuals can change over time or just when looked at from a different point of view.

Although I’ve heard very little about this book and its author, A Guide for the Perplexed by Dara Horn would be very close to the top of the list if I was attempting numerical rankings for my 2014 reading. The central story focuses on Josephine Ashkenazi, who has designed the program Genizah, which takes social media and other information to create incredibly detailed personal archives or living memories. Focused more on her work than her young daughter, Josie has been invited to do some high-profile consulting work with a library in Cairo. Not far into the book, you realize that you are reading a modern-day version of the Biblical Joseph story, but Horn ably walks the line of hewing to many of the details of the original while allowing enough differences to make the current tale seem plausible and its outcome uncertain. Into the layers of the novel, Horn pulls the story of Jewish scholar Maimonides (who like Josie faces political, religious, and sibling tensions) and the nineteenth-century Cambridge professor who helped uncover Maimonides' Guide for the Perplexed in the geniza (worn-out document storage) room of a Cairo synagogue. Horn paints a complex view of Josie, her family, and global conflict in a novel that muses on the importance of memory and tradition. At least one review characterized this, Horn’s fourth, as her “best novel yet,” which seems likely to be true. I read Horn’s second novel, The World to Come, which includes an art theft, Marc Chagall’s early job teaching in a Soviet orphanage, Yiddish parables, and American Jews in Vietnam and New Jersey. Although I enjoyed it, I found the multilayered story tended a bit more toward the vignette than in Guide for the Perplexed. I’ll read Horn’s other two novels as well, but I’ll also eagerly look forward to her future work.

The only challenge I didn’t meet was my “14 books of contemporary poetry for every year of the 21st Century challenge.” I got as far as 7 books (though some publication years were particularly alluring, so I actually read nearly a dozen volumes of poetry). I won’t be too hard on myself for coming short: the two main themes of poetry are love are death; you could say that the main theme of poetry is ephemerality, and that can sometimes get a little dark. I’m not always in the mood for that. (Of course there are other, sometimes overlapping themes, including self expression and promotion of social change. I’ll admit that sometimes a book like Stacey Waite’s Butch Geography can be more enjoyable just for the fact that it presents someone else’s struggles, strengths, and weaknesses.) A lot of the poetry I read last year struck me as “just OK,” perhaps partly due to the fact that, while reading a full collection allows for emergence of themes and interesting points of comparison, it may also have a bit of a dilution effect, with individual verses fading into an overall remembered blur. Some works stood out as collections: the overall project of Susan Slavierno’s Cyborgia was perhaps more impressive than any of the individual poems on their own. Outstanding in my 2014 poetry reading was Blowout by Denise Duhamel. The biggest fault of the collection is probably that it never quite surpasses the height achieved in its opening poem, “How It Will End” – with a believable conflict that turns and develops, everyday language that is rhythmic and propelling, humor, a point of view, and a real sense of stakes.

How best to address this missed goal? As the 21st Century remains young and full of appealing poetry titles, I think I’ll turn it into a two-year challenge. In 2015, I’ll aim to fill in the years missed plus something as-yet-unpublished. I was inspired by a collection of newspaper columns by poet Edward Hirsch (whose taste I’m not sure is very similar to mine but who seems to have pulled together quite a strong group of world poets) in which he writes about a poet at a time, giving some broad background on the writer but focusing on discussion of a single poem. My ambitious goal will be to review each volume of poetry I read this year in this way, focusing on a single poem (my favorite, or perhaps one I find most emblematic). I think this might be a fairer way to discuss and evaluate the poems I’ve read, a way of resisting the lyric blur.

What are other goals for 2015? I set a relatively modest goal of reading 100 books overall (I’ll probably read more, but reading is one thing for which I don’t need to find an incentive) and at least 20 science fiction or fantasy authors who are “new to me.” I also set a goal to participate in online discussions. I should probably set a goal for “number of books reviewed on this blog” … what would a good quantity be? Hmmm, I’ll think on it …

The Girl in the Road

The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne feels singular. What stands out is the bold, female, first person voice of Meena. (Mariama’s voice is not quite as vivid, though Byrne ably balances the child’s sometimes skewed perspective.) Some time 20 to 50 years in the future, two individuals embark on perilous journeys – young Mariama, born into slavery and separated from her mother, across the width of Africa in a truck caravan – and Meena, a college dropout from IIT-Bombay whose parents were murdered in Ethiopia and who sets out to cross (illegally) the Trans-Arabian Linear Generator, an energy-producing pontoon bridge that stretches from Mumbai to Djibouti. Both have been propelled on their journey by snake attacks that may not be all they seem; their back stories are filled in as the novel and their travels progress, and we learn more about how their stories might relate to one another.

         There are intriguing sci fi concepts here – it’s a world affected by climate change where today’s “developing world” is the center of global investment. Addis Ababa is the happening city of modern Africa. (One of the central conflicts of the book is the treatment of Ethiopian workers and the colonial-capitalist exploitation of Ethiopian resources by Indian businesses. I don’t know whether there is actually a history of migration between those two countries from which this future is extrapolated, but I can think of plenty contemporary parallels, for example, the treatment of Indian guest workers in the Middle East.) Alternative energy is crucial, from the solar Sun Traps of Sudan to, centrally, the TALG or Trail, with its pioneering wave energy and its controversial use of metallic hydrogen (a valuable but potentially unstable superconductor). Then there are the casual extrapolations of near-future tech, like “mitters” for wireless transfer of funds (far more common than cash) and the “glotti” translator.

         The novel describes a classic man vs. nature conflict – if we take man to mean woman and accept a future in which nature, even the deepest sea, is inherently compromised by the man-made. The TALG or Trail is an inhospitable as environments come, the path one of lunging peaks and troughs, intermittently submerging itself to allow the passage of ships. Food and potable water must be extracted from the surrounding sea or obtained through encounters with dangerous strangers; the sun and the solitude are brutal. Importantly, beyond the survival story itself, The Girl in the Road also asks what it means to be “a survivor.”

         But I’d say this is a book about sex. (I have a kneejerk tendency to lament: why does a book with an interesting, fresh female protagonist have to be about sex and relationships? But isn’t my assumption that a plot based in science is superior to one saturated in sex, with its suggestion that action-adventure is more worthwhile than romance, problematic in itself? Then, too, as I write, I think maybe I should reconsider my categorization: as central as human sexuality is to this novel, to the characters and themes, perhaps at its heart it’s a book about love.) It’s not clear whether Meena is bipolar or just impulsive, but her inner monologue thrusts the reader into her physicality as much or more than her strategizing, and her relationship with the hijra Mohini becomes just as compelling as the mysteries of who killed her parents and how Mariama’s African journey connects to her water-walk. While I’m not sure whether of the book’s elements are intriguing comments on the theme or problematic plot shortcuts (some of the hallucinations, for instance) The Girl in the Road is a fascinating pageturner that rips through the boundaries of more than one or two genres in its global travels.

Astride the Gun Zam-Zammah

I don’t know what I expected of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim. A militaristic novel that enthusiastically endorsed the British Raj. A nineteenth century tome (Kim was actually published in 1901) portraying Indians in a manner politically incorrect at best and with deeply offensive potential for a 21st century readership; a set-piece of orientalism. A Kipling novel, so one with lively action, vivid depictions, and memorable (male) characters. I didn’t expect a spy novel. I didn’t expect the “Great Game” among British, Russian, and other colonial powers with non-Western peoples and their lands as the tokens to be treated so openly. I didn’t expect a book that takes seriously Buddhist ideals that devalue the material world. (I didn’t expect the poetry – verse lead-ins to every chapter – although I should have.) I didn’t expect a portrait of India that aims to paint in the finests of shades, delineating different castes, countries of origins, and most especially religion, attempting nuances that it seemed to me are just beginning to be in English by the nonfiction of the past few decades (mostly written contextualize, warn of, or understand global conflict).

         So Kim is the spy story I didn’t expect, beginning when Kim’s picaresque adventures lead to him stumbling upon a message of urgent military import. One of the critics quoted in my editions annotated bibliography writes insightfully that the “India of Kim … is like a vast and well-equipped nursery full of benevolent mothers and fathers, who are all regarded as belonging to the gang.” Kim’s is a coming-of-age story that involves learning from many mentors, but mostly it’s of choosing between two – Col. Creighton and the opportunity to be a valuable but hidden cog in British espionage machine, or Teshoo Lama whose way offers few comforts but is devoted to gaining spiritual merit. Kim is described as very much of the world, and I never doubted that he would choose the life of a spy for the English – and yet, of the two paths, it’s not clear that the novel holds the spy’s to be superior. I’d argue that the lama (perhaps unintentionally) is portrayed as the better (more morally upright) man, and whenever the lama’s advice comes into conflict with, it usually the lama whose wisdom is proved.

         While Kim certainly endorses British colonial rule and practically redefines “loyalty” as “loyalty to the British empire,” being part of the patriotic effort is not the unambiguously cheerful adventure one might expect from Kim’s early chapters. Spoiler: Although one can expect that when an aged holy man enters a book in its first pages, his demise is likely to follow at some point, leaving his protegé with responsibilities and lessons learned, Kim complicates the narrative by making the lama’s death a direct result of Kim’s covert mission. The lama’s death can be seen as an eulogoy for native cultures lost or corrupted by colonial rule, but it can also be seen as the sacrifice of ideals on the altar of realpolitik. Kim’s breakdown/illness at the novel’s end is chalked up to exhaustion from tending to the weakened lama and the burden of holding significant intelligence with no clear means to pass it on, but its timing suggests it’s a guilty conscience that provokes his collapse. (The technique by which this collapse is introduced – with the initial focus on the return journey and the state of the lama’s health while the seriousness of Kim’s exhaustion only becomes fully clear from the reactions to his recovery – is interesting, and after reading the biographical notes, it’s hard not to see parallels to Kipling’s own nervous breakdowns.) Kim’s decisions and those of other characters have real stakes, and while specific to Raj setting, they also have wider implications – who is worth emulating, and how does one choose between competing loyalties? how does one reconcile religion with pleasure or with individual goals? is there a value to diplomacy even if one holds the upper hand?

         There are certainly problematic aspects to Kipling’s potrayals of native Indians (and Afghanis and Tibetans). The lama may be venerated by the text as well as by his title, but I can’t believe a white character would have been written as gullible-bordering-on-idiotic, most particularly in the final discovery of the River. (While the Protestant and Catholic army chaplains have their humorous flaws, they are not presented as fools, not even holy fools.) The most offensive charicature is Hurree Badu (whose desire to become a Fellow of the Royal Society, although ostensibly genially accepted in the book by Col. Creighton, is most often depicted as an attempt to literally ape his betters – are we meant to believe that this is the best Kim could have aspired to, despite his education, if he had actually been a Hindu orphan instead of Kimball O’Hara?). Muslim Mahbub Ali comes off as a more respectable figure. Much of the narrative serves to underscore how important both the contributions of native Indians and an understanding of native cultures, yet Kipling provides a protagonist with conveniently white shoulders as the symbol of cultural sensitivity.

         The female characters (few and far between in a book that highlights male bonds) deserve a word. At first, I thought Kipling would stick to true “The Vampire” form, seasoning in an occasional whore or nag for local flavor. But while not quite real people, Kipling does give his female characters their own histories and motivations but these are chosen from a narrow range of stereotypical options (a loquacious grandmother who nurtures with her cooking, a woman seduced and abandoned by an English soldier who neverthless provides lavish aid to Kim out of romantic sentimentalism). The Woman of Shamlegh was intriguing (is there a symbolism to her appearance at the end of the tale? was it only because she happed to be available, recycled from an earlier short story? does the fact that she lives in an area where polyandry is indeed practiced make the emphasis on her two husbands and sexual desires more or less palatable?). Despite the female characters’ limitations, it’s clear that Kipling means the reader to ultimately value their contributions to the novel and on Kim’s behalf.

         What do I take away from Kim? It is in many ways a relic of a historical worldview with continued global implications. It utilizes all the elements of a story and is able to weave in consideration of politics and religion, too. In its dense descriptions, its affectionate wealth of detail, its panorama of places and personalities, it’s a book that places understanding of others high amongst the values (not all so noble) that it champions.

Fortunes Wagered

A Small Fortune by Rosie Dastgir earns the “Austen-esque” description its sepia teacup cover seems to court, delivering a rare example of well-done third person omniscient POV. Harris, a Pakistani who’s spent more than half of his life in England, receives the title sum as a divorce settlement from his wealthy English wife and must decide where to bestow it – on his daughter Alia (who has dropped out of med school without telling him), the cousins he left behind in his impoverished home village, his alternately caretaking and scheming cousins in Northern England, or perhaps an investment in one of his friend Omar’s international business deals. Aside from a few moments in the storyline centered around Rashid (the Pakistani cousins’ eldest son, whose English education Harris has supported), A Small Fortune avoids melodrama, painting the flaws and foibles alongside the enthusiams and kindnesses of the entire cast, from Alia’s English boyfriend to Dr. Farrah, a widowed literature professor and potential romantic interest for Harris. In a comedy of manners it can sometime be easy to forget how deeply our manners reflect our values; with stakes both large and small, the dry but affectionate and totally believable A Small Fortune remembers.

***

In another novel that concerns itself with both money and national identity, English school Headmaster Percival Chen of Saigon (born Chen Pie Sou in Shantou province, China) clings to the belief that, with the proper bribes, his business can prosper under any political system – be it colonial French, colonial American, or even Vietnamese. Though his more politically savvy lieutenant and his Vietnam-born son challenge this belief, Chen stubbornly holds faith, blinding himself to the changes taking place around him while enjoying all the restaurants, clubs, gambling parlors, and high class escort services Saigon (and Cholon, its neighboring Chinatown) can offer. History will not, however, leave the headmaster untoched, and tensions build – and then break and splatter and settle a bit and rise almost reluctantly again – as we journey with him from 1966 to 1975. Though the novel includes some elements that would suit a Bond or Tarantino film (kidnapping! hookers! brutal imperialists! secret police! casinos! communists!), the close focus on Percival’s daily life (noodle dishes! loan payments! mah jong! bribe packets!) makes this a subtler, psychological story. In other hands (or with a truly omniscient POV instead of a distant but perceptive limited third), Percival might have emerged as the most unlikeable of protagonists, but Vincent Lam’s storytelling leads you (or, at least, me) to truly care for this often frustrating character. Ultimately, The Headmaster’s Wager is a tale of fathers and sons and what’s important in life – from the distant ancestor who found good luck and greener passages on Gold Mountain, to the father who left young Chen Pie Sou behind in order to establish himself in Vietnam’s rice trade, to the legacy Chen hopes to leave his sons as it becomes ever more uncertain where their futures will take them.

War and Theatre in Kabul

A Fort of Nine Towers: An Afghan Family Story by Qais Akbar Omar and Shakespeare in Kabul by Stephen Landrigan and Qais Akbar Omar are part memoir, part history. (Helpful hint: the author bio states that “Qais” is pronounced “Kice.”) In A Fort of Nine Towers, Omar tells the story of the years from the Russians departure and subsequent factional fighting through the rise and fall of the Taliban. Some of the strongest depictions are of life before the Soviets left; while Qais was only seven at the time, he vividly describes his grandfather’s house with its orchards, servants, warehouses filled with carpets, daily outdoor banquets as regular meals for an extended family of more than fifty, and ramparts suitable for kite-flying competitions. Equally memorable are some harrowing encountering during the early years of factional fighting; with the family scattered (eventually retreating to a wealthy friend’s property, Qala-e-Noborja, the titular fort), young Qais and his father must brave the city streets, encountering brutal soldiers who style themselves as mujahideen while they torture, dismember, rape, and wage a mercenary war for neighborhood turf.

        While the later stages of the family’s journey have fewer thrills and seem less likely to be representative of typical Afghani experience (even typical wealthy Pashtun experience), Omar’s story remains absorbing. Travelling now with just his parents, sisters, and infant brother, mostly in the sometimes unreliable family car, Qais’ adventures include raiding pomegranates from a walled garden at night, camping in the caves behind the historic Bamayan Buddhas, learning carpetmaking from an alluring deafmute, and traveling with a Kuchi nomad camel caravan.

        Throughout, Qais presents himself as clever but deep, resourceful, hard working, and (with undoubted truth) quick with languages. Qais paints himself as more in tune than his peers with the Afghan verse and traditions, but still surrounded by Afghan youth and adults who take their codes of honor, their poetry, and (perhaps more problematically) their religion seriously. He walks the line of presenting Afghan culture and history as appealingly exotic and as a serious, meaningful part of daily life. There’s a dash of hyperbole, an exuberant optimism through which sometimes shows profoundly observed darkness that reminds me of Twain. The story is more than a picaresque; Qais and family encounter real danger and tragedy. By the time the family finds itself back in Kabul (the book includes helpful maps of Kabul, Afghanistan, and its neighbors), Qais is college-aged and positioned to take on an adult’s decision-making burden. The book’s final section ranges from a Taliban prison to an entrepeneurial backroom carpet factory to streets full of joyful dancing as the Taliban is ousted and music once more allowed. In A Fort with Nine Towers, Qais Akbar Omar tells an important and compelling story with a poet’s power and sensitivity.

       

Shakespeare in Kabul is less personal; co-written by Qais Akbar Omar and English playwright Stephen Landrigan, it takes place during in 2005 and 2006, as the U.S./coalition forces are preparing to withdraw from Kabul but still investing heavily in. (Qais is too politic to spend much time covering this period in A Fort with Nine Towers; he expresses cautious optimism, briefly profiles the national characteristics of various foreigners, and relates a telling story of an Englishman who rents property in Kabul and promptly cuts down the trees Qais “had kept … alive during the worst years of drought by carrying water twice every day in buckets strappped to my bicycle from … a pump more than a mile away”.) After meeting French actress Corinne Jaber at a cultural festival in Afghanistan, Landrigan and Jaber hatch a plan to put on a Shakespeare play in Kabul. They will translate one of the plays into an Afghan (Dari, as it ultimately transpires) and recruit and train Afghani actors (including women, revolutionary in a country with no history of co-ed performances). The first section of the book, “Exposition,” written by Stephen Landrigan, describes Corinne’s first encounters with Afghan actors, who are enthusiastic but unevenly trained, as she is invited to give drama workshops. It covers the choice of a play (Love’s Labour’s Lost), the complicated process of script development and translation, and the search for funding.

        The most interesting section of the book is the middle, “Climax,” written by Qais, who served as translator and assistant director for the production. It describes the auditions, the histories and personalities of the actors, the conflicts between actors and between some actors and Corinne, the search for costumes and props, the challenges of balancing day jobs in a rebuilding city with demanding evening rehearsals, and the struggles to understand not just the archaisms of language but Shakespeare’s concept of inspirational romantic love. Qais has a gift for conveying the various players’ perspectives (including Corinne’s, though she is perhaps portrayed a little harshly despite a cumulatively positive depiction). Highlights include the casts’ teatime discussions and their reaction to the scene where the play’s .

        The third and final section, “Resolution,” is co-written by Landrigan and Omar and describes the performances, including in the Queen’s Palace of Kabul’s Bagh-e-Babur and later on-the-road performances in northern Afghan cities. It describes audience reactions and chronicles the logistics and cast changes necessitated by the later performances. There are ominous hints in the beginning of the book that the project may not have turned out as planned but, though less well received than in the capital, Love’s Labour’s Lost incites no riots in Mazar-e-Sharif or Herat. I won’t give too much away about audience reactions, though I will note the sometimes melancholy tone that seems due to a 2012 Afghanistan not living up to 2005 hopes (civic and political as much or more than cultural). Shakespeare in Kabul brushes on history, but is truly notable for how it engages deeply with the idea of theatre, a cultural conversation between east and west, and the details of how and whether a specific Shakespeare comedy remains relevant to a specific modern nation in conflict.