Book Review: Call Me Cassandra

 

• Author: Marcial Gala 

• Translator: Anna Kushner

• Where I bought this book: The Strand, New York City

• Why I bought this book: The author's character says he is literally Cassandra

*******

      Mixing ancient Greek myths with recent Cuban history, this slim volume (just 211 pages) packs in history, culture, and literature.

1. It features Cassandra, one of the best known mythological characters.
2. It's historical fiction from the mid 1970s, an era rarely covered.
3. It was originally written in a foreign language and has an international theme.
4. The story's plot includes several Greek gods and goddesses, including Athena, Aphrodite, and Zeus, whom the main character refers to as "father Zeus" and "Zeus who reigns on Olympus," among other epithets.
5. It's a literary masterpiece, entwinning visions of Greek mythology with escapism and anti-war fervor, and transgenderism with patriotism and finding oneself. It blends death and re-birth by metaphor, allusion, and complexity.

    But that complexity, and a writing style that rambles in and out of the past, present, and future, from dreams to reality to apparitions, make it a difficult read. Parts of the book also include disturbing descriptions of abuse, including sexual abuse. 

    Raúl Iriarte is a young man growing up in revolutionary Cuba, in the small town of Cienfuegos, with an abusive father, a depressed mother, and a dead aunt. He's small, thin, light-skinned, and blond,  likes to read, and is regularly bullied at school. He likes to dress as a woman, which his mother encourages because he resembles her dead sister. He knows he is the reincarnation of Cassandra, and has the same gift of prophecy as she did. But he tell no one the latter, because, well, he's Cassandra.

    As he turns 18, he's sent off with the Cuban forces to intervene in the civil war in Angola. There, he is maligned and abused because of his looks, his effeminate natures, and his perceived homosexuality. 

    A key scene in the book is a Cassandra narration about the troops cleaning their weapons and singing a corrido, a Mexican ballet that commemorates a tragic event.

Then they move on to I'm leaving your county, and they finish with the part that goes goodbye, lady, / goodbye forever, goodbye. I'm listening to them from here, Zeus, from the earth where I lie, dust among the dust. That corrido has been with me since we were getting ready to disembark in Angola. It was our true national anthem. We sang it when we were able to score some rum, or high-proof alcohol, and if we couldn't score, we sang it, and now, under the African sun, where we are already aware of what it means to be at war, what it is to shiver feverishly with a thirst that won't go away, what it is to carry fear the size of an enormous house, we sing it now too.

     It sums up the tangled relationship of emotions, fears and contradictions of the characters. Emotions about family. Fears about the future and one's place in society. Contradictions about country and patriotism. 

    From the Achaeans invading Ilios because of a perceived slight from a member of its ruling family, to the Cubans meddling in the internal affairs of Angola, Raúl/Cassandra melds past and present, self and society, and existence and displacement into one provocative book.

Book Review: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

  By Shehan Karunatilake

• Pub Date: 2022

• Where I bought this book: Roebling Point Books, Newport, Ky. 

• Why I bought this book: The title, and it won the 2022 Booker Prize, which is always a good sign

******

    

 

   Even the dead in Sri Lanka continue to fight its wars, but only the ghosts see the irony in having the same enemies as the living. 

    This is one ghost's story of his country, which he loves, hates, and everything in between. As part of the living, he thought he was trying to change the wrongs, but his involvement failed to make anything better. He's not ever sure what better would have been -- because he sees the factions, parties, and terrorists as equal opportunity killers -- in life and after. 

    Maali is in the afterlife as the story opens, but remembers little about how he died -- or was killed, which he also suspects. He has seven moons to find out, and he spends the time reviewing and justifying his life, and the country's violent ways. 

    It's hard to determine his many roles in the violence, which surrounds him in death as it did in life. Because he is the narrator of this tale -- in both his ghostly self and as the main actors in his flashbacks -- he has a bias to make himself look good and the various sects who are the warmakers look bad.

    He's a photographer and a gambler, a journalist and a "fixer," who brings together outside reporters and members of the various militias, the military, the police, and the government men. 

    He's a gay man in a homophobic country, dating the son of one of its top officials. So his voice is sometimes self-suppressed -- and sometimes loudly outspoken and self-conscious.

    He's also wryly cynical and morbidly funny. He refers to the dead wandering the streets as a combination of the various gods and goddesses from the Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, and Christian religions that are part of Sri Lanka. He calls others the Cannibal Uncle, the Atheist Ghoul, the Dead Child Soldier, and the suicides -- and wonders if they could collectively be known as "an overdose of suicides."

Outside in the waiting room, there is wailing. (A police officer) walks outside to console the weeping woman. He does so by pulling out his baton and asking a constable to remove her.

     The switching from Maali's past as a living being, to his current state as a ghostly presence, can sometimes be confusing. And the story also questions whether we are the same person, the same soul, as we move from life to death -- and perhaps, back to life again.

Book Review

 New York, My Village, by Uwem Akpan

• Where I bought this book: The Book Loft, Columbus, Ohio
• Why I bought this book: It has a map

****

    My indelable memory of the Biafran War is the Catholic Charities "relief campaign" that used pictures of starving African children with bloated stomachs to raise money.

 

   That's it. I knew nothing about the reasons for the war, or even where in Africa Biafra was.

    So I was hoping this book would help me learn just a little bit about the war, and just as important, what happened and what is happening now. 

    It kinda did. But it also taught me the war has a long background, involves colonization and other crimes committed on the African peoples, and pretty much boils down to why any war is fought -- hatred, discrimination, jealously, and control.

    Briefly, and I hope I get this right: Biafra is a small province in the south of Nigeria. Northern Nigerian tribes, particularly the Hausa-Fulani, dominated. In 1967, representatives of the Igbo tribe in southern Nigeria, based in Biafra, claimed they controlled the south and proclaimed their independence.

    It did not go well. There's a reason you don't hear of Biafra anymore. It's no longer a country, and hasn't been since 1970.

    In this fictionalized account, Ekong Udousoro is a book editor, and he receives a fellowship to intern at a small publishing company in New York City. He is part of the Annang, who also lives in southern Nigeria, but have had little control to the dominant Igbo. Or as Ekong puts it, his group is a minority within a minoiry. 

    This book is an account of his months learning the book publishing industry, coupled with memories of the war -- which actually happened before he was born, but which has shaped his family, his village, and himself.

    But it's also about his family relationships -- which are confusing; his troubles and joys adapting to living in Hell's Kitchen -- ugh! far too much information on bedbugs and his problems with them; his relationships with his landlord, the man he is subletting his apartment from; the racism he confronts on the job and in book publishing; his difficulties getting along with his new neighbors, and much, much more.

    It's really too much. He covers too many issues, confusing us on many occassions, and spends far too much time on the damn bedbugs. (And even when you think he is done with that, they come back! I was ready to toss the book across the room at this point.)

    Still, at its heart, the book's theme is about how we complicate our lives by dividing ourselves in too many groups -- by color, ethnicity, religion, jobs, community, and so much more. In short, perhaps we are all minorities of a minority.    

Book Review: Days Without End

 Days Without End, by Sebastian Barry

    At one point in reading this painful novel, I was thinking of putting it aside forever. But I ploughed through, and eventually, it was worth it. But beware this is a depressing, violent, and traumatic book. 

    The plot, such as it is, is secondary to the descriptions of the scenes and the settings. And while the writing is evocative, it can be incessant at times. And some of those vivid descriptions deal with long passages about slogging through rain, snow and mud, or with hatred, fear, and slaughter. 

    The voice telling us all this comes from the main character and protagonist, one Thomas McNulty. He is a remarkable person to tell this story of the wild west, the Civil War, and the attempted genocide of the Native population. He is an Irish immigrant whose family died in the Great Hunger, a soldier, and a gay man who is gender fluid. He enjoys dressing as a woman, for a job, in the theater, and in his personal life. His loving relationship with John Cole, another male character, is a constant throughout the book.

    Barry gives McNulty a voice in the style of an uneducated person of the mid-19th Century. He uses language, terms, and expresses ideas that likely were common for the time, although considered offensive, if not derogatory and unacceptable, today. Yet, the gay love and transgender issues are treated in a matter-of-fact manner. While the two men often hide their love from others, they are sometimes accepted as a couple. In a passage late in the book, McNulty describes how he is comfortable with being gender fluid.

I am easy as a woman, taut as a man. All my limbs is broke as a man, and fixed good as a woman. I lie down with the soul of a woman and wake with the same. I don't foresee no time where this ain't true no more. Maybe I was born a man and growing into a woman.

    The story follows Thomas, or Thomasina, from about the time he is 12 when he and his partner, often called Handsome John Cole, run away from their orphanage and set out to explore the country. They get jobs as female dancers in a mining town, which is otherwise without women. It's not a sexual thing, but about companionship, and it is an enjoyable experience for Thomasina.

    The pair then join the cavalry. This is where the book bogs down. Pages and entire chapters are dedicated to their travels and travails though the mountainous west, the intricacies and politics of army life, and the murder and dehumanization that occurs during the Indian Wars.

    Then we read similar tedious descriptions about the battles of the Civil War.

    Eventually, John Cole, Thomas, sometimes as Thomasina, and a Native child they have adopted settle in Tennessee with an old Army buddy and a few others. But even that life does not go smoothly, and there are more long-winded tales of unpleasantness.

    But for the most part, it is a satisfying ending worth getting to.

Book Review: Little Red Chairs

The Little Red Chairs, by Edna O'Brien

A foreigner, handsome and debonair, moves to small-town Ireland.

Now, Dr. Vlad is a bit strange, who portrays himself as a philosopher, a poet, and a sage. He seems eager to open the natives up to a new world. Soon -- to at least one lonely woman -- he becomes a companion and, eventually, a lover.

But then he is outed as a monster. For Dr. Vlad is not the refugee from Eastern Europe that he claims. He is not a victim but a war criminal, who led the torture and slaughter of thousands of his people.

None of the preceeding is a spoiler -- it's all there in the blurbs for the book. Indeed, the title relates to a piece of performance art that lined up 11,541 little red chairs to symbolize the 11,541 people who were killed in the Seige of Sarajevo in 1992. (Indeed, Dr. Vlad closely resembles Radovan Karadzic -- the Serbian president during the Bosnian war, who was convicted of war crimes.)

During his own war-crimes trial, there is this passage about Dr. Vlad and his delusions:

Sarajevo was his adopted city, the city he loved, and every shell that fell there hurt him personally, As he looked out towards his muted audience, he was like a man on the brink of his own creation.

This is quite a confounding book. On the one hand, it is lovely -- exquisitely written, capturing the voices of the meglomaniac and his enablers, along with the fears and dreams of the Irish villagers. O'Brien shows how hatred and division can be both universal and invisible. Despair and hope co-exist. Compassion, madness, and evil make their appearances.

But some parts literally make you cringe. She describes some brutally gruesome scenes of horror from both the past -- and the present -- as the result of Dr. Vlad's followers and henchmen. These descriptions are so explicit that I cannot imagine how she wrote them.

I do not think they are needed to provide one with the horror of the war and its atrocities, and including them make the book almost unreadable. Indeed, in two places, I saw what was coming and managed to skip over them.

Book Review: Girl in the Picture

The Girl in the Picture, by Denise Chong

For many of us of a certain age, it is the defining picture of the Vietnam War: several children, followed by soldiers, fleeing down a road. In the middle, a young girl, naked, her arms held out from her body, crying, with a look of absolute fear and pain on her face, running with them.

Her name was Kim Phuc, and we now know that she and her family were running from a napalm attack on her village in South Vietnam. Soldiers from South Vietnam, at the behest of the United States, had dropped napalm during an attack meant to clear out Viet Cong guerrillas. But the napalm missed its target in the nearby woods, and instead landed directly on the village full of women and children.

This is the story of the aftermath: How the war affected people in Kim's village, and in greater Vietnam. How the war -- and specifically the attack on Kim's body -- affected her life.

Kim and her family suffered. She suffered from the injuries of the burning, from the literal and metaphorical scars it left. (As described in the book, napalm is a horrible tool of war. It's a burning gel that sticks to the body, and attempts to pull it off just spread it around.) Meanwhile, her family's successful eating establishment was destroyed by taxes and fees the new communist regime in Hanoi enacted, and by the incompetence and greed of corrupt local officials who demand more and more.

Meanwhile, the government began to use Kim's story as propaganda. It forced her to interrupt her studies -- she at one point dreamed of becoming a doctor to help people -- and otherwise exerted control over her life and her decisions. And while the government sent Kim abroad -- to Russia, to East Germany, to Cuba -- it always kept a close eye on her.

Written 10 years ago, this remains is a wonderful, insightful book. It introduces us to another culture, and explains the differences between people from the north and those from the south. It's a great help to Americans, who, says author Chong, all-too-often see Vietnam not as a country, but as a war.

This Week in Books, 3rd Ed.

TBR had a relatively easy week.

After driving back from St. Louis, where TBR attended a lecture and signing by the great Welsh writer, Jasper Fforde, it was time to actually start reading his latest book, Early Riser. So far, it's a good one, dealing with a world in which humans hibernate during the winter months (well, most of them; this is about those who don't).

First though, TBR had to finish up All the Light We Cannot See, which took a while -- not because it isn't good (spoiler alert: it is) -- but because of its subject matter. It's a tough book to read.

As for next on the list,TBR is looking forward to reading  The Bees, about a resistance movement in a beehive. Seriously. Listen to this blurb:

 "Then (Flora) finds her way into the Queen's inner sanctum, where she discovers secrets both sublime and ominous. Enemies roam everywhere, from the fearsome fertility police to the high priestesses who jealously guard the Hive Mind. But Flora cannot help but break the most sacred law of all, and her instinct to serve is overshadowed by a desire, as overwhelming as it is forbidden."

Sounds delightfully weird, doesn't it?

TBR stayed out of bookstores this week, so did not buy any more books. But the need-to-buy list is getting lengthy, and TBR is feeling a bit antsy and a growing desire to add to the stack. Must resist. The Stack needs to shrink, not grow.

Book Review: All the Light We Cannot See

All the Light We Cannot  See, by Anthony Doerr

This is a book about war.

It's about the worst of war: The bigotry, the poison, the death. It's about the dirty business of war: The propaganda of hatred. The killing of one's humanity. The destruction of  innocence.

But it's also a book about redemption, about saving one's humanity, about overcoming fear and ignorance, and about accepting grace from your better angels.

In this book, we meet two players from World War II: Werner Pfennig, a German teenage boy living in an orphanage, who has a flair for electronics and mathematics, and the slightly younger Marie-Laure LeBlanc, 12 in 1940, a blind girl living in Paris with her father. Each has a cast of characters coming in and out of their lives. For Werner, it includes his sister Jutta, as smart and enterprising as he is, who simply cannot accept Werner's gradual assimilation into the Nazi regime, and his roommate Frederick, a sensitive boy and bird watcher who is considered too weak for the Third Reich. For Marie-Laure, a reluctant member of the resistance in Saint-Malo, France, where she is forced to flee, it includes her father, Daniel LeBlanc, who has dedicated his life to teaching her to survive in a sighted world, and her Uncle Etienne, a WWI veteran with lingering mental problems from that service, who strives to overcome his fears to protect Marie-Laure.

It also features a strange blue diamond, the Sea of Flames, said to be blessed and cursed, that becomes the focus of the lives of several characters in the book.

The story is told, in alternating chapters, from the perspectives of Werner and Marie-Laure. Their lives and experiences eventually intersect and intertwine, coming to several emotional encounters as the book reaches its climax.

Doerr won a Pulitzer prize for this novel, and it is easy to see why. It is sometimes a hard book to read, but ultimately, is worth the time and effort.

Book Review: Wine in the Sand

Wine in the Sand, by Jim White

I am generally not a fan of stories of wars or memoirs of soldiers. I never served in the military -- too young for Vietnam, too old for anything else -- and quite frankly didn't miss it. I'm not sure I could have survived. I tend to avoid violence and consider myself mostly a pacifist.

So I looked at this book -- a tale of White's time in the Air Force during Desert Storm -- as a kind of adventure, feeling I could read it with an open mind because I know the guy who wrote it.

And you know what? I liked it.

White is kind yet cocky, laid-back but intense (he once finished an unofficial triple Ironman, with the support of many friends, because he wanted to), friendly, generous, and witty. So is his book.

What I expected from a memoir of war was lots of heroics, ramped-up violence, gung-ho feats of daring-do, cynicism of the highest order. It's none of those -- OK, there is just the teensiest bit of sarcasm -- but instead it's chock full of tales of guys just trying to survive the best way they know how, trying to do an impossible job, and looking for the best in themselves and others.

It's a weird little book: Short chapters (I like; it makes for quick reading), no page numbers (didn't like), strong, explosive writing, and black-and-white Polaroid pictures.

See? I do know the guy.
 And Karen Minzner,
who took the cover photo,
is a great photographer.

White writes of his involvement in the lead up to Desert Storm -- his unit of fire fighters was one of the first sent to Saudi Arabia after Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. He writes of their survival and new experiences in a strange land. He writes of skirting the edges of military rules and regulations, and of driving hours through the desert to find his true love. The book is mostly one of good times. Even when he gets serious about three-quarters of the way through, he finds the positive.

The absolute fear of dying violently during a SCUD missile attack? Hey, it's just an extended version of the Fourth of July fireworks, with a little homemade wine on the side.

So, about the title. Is it a play on "line in the sand," which President Bush used to defend the initiation of the Gulf War? Or was it used because Wine on the Desert was already taken?

I need to know.