Josna Rege

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630. The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

In Books, culture, Family, Immigration, India, memories, parenting, places, postcolonial, reading, Stories, storytelling, United States, women & gender, writing on November 10, 2025 at 4:09 am

[This appreciation of Kiran Desai’s new novel is not intended to be a spoiler, so you can read it safely unless you don’t want to know anything about it.]

If I don’t set down a few words now, quickly, I will risk taking notes for as long as the author took to write it! For Kiran Desai’s new novel (her first since 2006), is like the world, a never-ending, ever-extending, web of multifarious stories. The feelings it arouses in me are personal and political, feelings that make me nod in assent, want to write my own versions of them, feelings that tear me between three generations. For, like Desai, I am also a 1.5-generation immigrant, having come to the United States as a teenager, half a generation older than Sonia and half a generation younger than her mama, Seher. Like Sonia and Sunny, like so many members of the South Asian and the postcolonial diasporas, I too have shuttled back and forth on similar paths across the same continents—in their cases Delhi-Vermont-New York-Allahabad-Delhi-Landour-Goa-Mexico and back again, with an interlude in Italy in-between, and ghosts of Germany floating, lost, in the Himalayan mists. Like Desai’s protagonists, I too have been beset by the consciousness of unearned privilege, of being a “cheating outsider” (as the man with the longest fingernails in the world called Sunny), but also, of being, like Salman Rushdie’s protagonist Saleem Sinai in Midnight’s Children, “a container of worlds.”

There are so many different pieces all stitched into this patchwork of a novel, that nonetheless follows the fateful stories of Sonia and of Sunny as they crisscross continents both separately and together. There are almost-stand-alone set pieces, dreamy reveries and haunting nightmares, notes and sketches that might have been written in coffee shops over the years, post-colonial peregrinations, self-reflexive musings on how these ever-expanding drafts could possibly be made into something that would cohere. And just before a prosaic passage threatens to get a little tedious, Desai sweeps the reader into lyrical, utterly beautiful language that one wants to stretch out and bathe in.

She need not have worried—The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny (Loneliness) does cohere. It is a pleasure to read this third novel from a mature writer at the height of her powers and confident in her own style and voice. It employs magical realism without grandiosity. It luxuriates in language without tipping over into solipsism or farce. After a bit of a slow start, it grew on me—and grew, and grew, into 21 parts, 75 chapters, 670 pages. And when, all of a sudden, it was over, I was left wondering what had become, what would become of these people whose fates I had come to care about. And found myself starting over, in hopes of finding out.

Despite its length, the core of Loneliness, so viscerally real that it tied a knot in this reader’s stomach, plays out in the first quarter of the novel. It describes a relationship of coercive control that embeds itself deep and malignantly into one of our protagonists and haunts them both for the rest of the novel. What will it take to exorcise it?

Like her writer-mother, Kiran Desai brilliantly conveys a sense of place. Just the title of the section set in Vermont, “Winter Vast and Forlorn,” conjures up the desolation of the landscape, both inner and outer. At times, as in some scenes in Mexico and Goa, she risks overdoing the descriptions, and in those cases I found myself skating over the passage. But much more often I took great pleasure in them, letting them carry me away. For people whom history and politics have displaced, precious places must be conjured, claimed, and revisited in imagination, again and again.

But beware! In this novel, one must remain alert at all times, for the characters are at risk of being carried away for good. The sea that can rock you, lull you to sleep in its balmy waves, can also drag you down in a riptide that comes without warning. What will it take to get across? The sea is a living presence in Loneliness, putting me in mind of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, and of Woolf’s acute awareness that we are all waves, thinking of ourselves as separate until we become one with the sea.

The sea contains all our stories. One thinks of the Kathasaritsagara, the ocean of the streams of story (often invoked by Rushdie, notably in Haroun and the Sea of Stories). In The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Kiran Desai has woven a multiplicity of stories together into a web too large for any single person to contain, and has disappeared into them.

Part 1 is entitled, “Lonely? Lonely?” These words are spoken in utter bewilderment by Sonia’s grandparents when her father tells them that Sonia is lonely and depressed. For “they had no patience with loneliness. . . they had never slept in a house alone, never eaten a meal alone, never lived in a place where they were unknown.” But over the course of the novel and in different characters, we become intimate with loneliness as both a life sentence and a gift.

To carry us through and across these vast expanses of loneliness, we feel the need for a talisman. Pervading Loneliness is the figure of a particular talisman that must never be parted with, and that, if lost, must be recovered at all costs—although, as the novel so powerfully shows, the greatest loss of all is the loss of ourselves.

I can’t close without saying something about Kiran Desai’s mother Anita Desai, one of my very favorite writers. Anita is continually evoked in the distant, reclusive, beloved figure of Seher, Sonia’s mother (Anita’s German mother transformed into the Seher’s German father), but also in the mountain mists swirling around Cloud Cottage in Landour, Uttarakhand, so reminiscent of the setting of Anita Desai’s 1977 novel Fire on the Mountain. In her words of acceptance in 2006 upon being awarded the Man Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai said, “To my mother, I owe a debt so profound and so great that this book feels as much hers as it does mine.” In 2008 I wrote a paper for a conference on the strong similarities and the critical differences between the mother’s Fire on the Mountain and the daughter’s The Inheritance of Loss. Re-reading it yesterday, it still rang true. In Inheritance, the female protagonist Sai was an orphan. In Loneliness, both Sonia’s parents are very much present. Desai dedicated this new book to her late father, after whose death she asked herself, “why was I here? Without him there, why should I go back? Without that ache between us, what was I made of?” I recognize those feelings now, with the death in India last week of my Manda-atya, my father’s youngest sister and the last of his siblings. Without her there, why should I go back?

Thank you, Kiran Desai, for finishing this novel at last, and sending it out into the world. It was worth waiting for.

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627. A Visit to Highgate Cemetery

In Books, Britain, history, places, Stories, writing on August 17, 2025 at 8:32 pm
Highgate Cemetery, July 2025

On our last visit to England Andrew and I caught COVID-19 on the way over. This necessarily limited our contact with people, but since it was summer and we both had mild cases we were still able to get out and about. Once we had tested negative, we took a trip to Highgate Cemetery in North London, a place we had last visited as teenagers more than fifty years before, and then too, only in the dark. Paul had slipped us in over a wall or through a fence and there we were, among the vaults and tombs in the moonlight. That’s all I recall about that short escapade.

This time we entered the proper way, paying a fee and even getting a map. We decided to limit ourselves to the East side of the cemetery and I’m glad that we did, because we couldn’t possibly have taken in any more. Progressing in a loose circle, we started at the northern edge and slowly spiralled in. The graves of a few prominent people were marked on the map, but I had no idea of the pilgrimage we were about to undertake.

The first grave we came upon was that of the parents of Virginia Woolf—her mother Julia Princep Stephen (née Jackson), who died at 49 when Virginia was only 13, and her father (Sir) Leslie Stephen, as well as her beloved brother Thoby, who died of typhoid when he was only 26. So many associations came to mind as I looked upon the gravestone. The first was the photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, Virginia’s great-aunt, whose many photographs of her niece and namesake Julia (Virginia’s mother) I had seen in Victorian Photographs of Famous Men and Fair Women. I thought of how Julia’s death had precipitated her daughter’s first nervous breakdown, and the figure of her mother in To the Lighthouse. The absence of Thoby, as I remembered, was central to Virginia’s novel, The Waves, in the character of Percival, who died in India yet remained an integral part of the consciousness of the close-knit circle of friends he left behind.

Mrs. Julia Stephen (photo: Julia Margaret Cameron)

It’s hard to describe how I felt as I looked upon the headstone, more neglected than I would have expected, given no particular pride of place. There they had been buried, some of the most important people in Virginia Woolf’s (née Stephen’s) life. Her mother Julia, who bore seven children over two marriages and whose presence pervaded so much of her work. Her important and self-important father, Editor of the Dictionary of Literary Biography, against whose concept of representing a human life Virginia formed her own. Her brother Thoby, just two years younger, whose absence may have may have continued to shape her consciousness for years after he was no longer with her in person.

Not far from the Stephens I found the grave of Andrea Levy (1956-2019), one of my favorite black British novelists, who had died of cancer at 62, just before the COVID-19 pandemic. Her most famous work is her wonderful fourth novel, Small Island (2004), a crossover success which captured the British imagination, but I had been reading her work throughout the 1990s and also loved her first novel, Every Light in the House Burnin’ (1994). The simple declarative sentence on the headstone, “This is life.”, gave me a little burst of joy, as did the stones lovingly placed atop it by other visitors, and the pile of cards announcing a scholarship for black British students established in her name by the University of Edinburgh.

Circling round and down, we found the grave of the great 19th-century novelist George Eliot, the pen name of Mary Ann Cross (née Evans, 1819-1880), author of The Mill on the Floss (1860), Middlemarch (1871-2), and five other novels. She, too, had died in her early 60s. But what a prodigious output in twenty short years! Next to her grave was that of Elma Stewart, née Fraser (1837-1903), “who for 8-1/2 blessed years George Eliot called by the sweet name of ‘daughter'”. I had known nothing of this loving relationship and have just read her letters to Stewart, preserved and later published by Stewart’s son Roland.

Next we came to the tomb of a near-contemporary of George Eliot and the person for whom Highgate Cemetery is most renowned: Karl Marx (1818-1883). A tall column was topped by a bronze bust of the great political philosopher, who spent the last three decades of his life in London. Apparently he was originally buried by a small group of friends in an unconsecrated part of Highgate Cemetery set apart for agnostics and atheists, but in 1956 the grave was moved to its current, central location and the new monument paid for by the Marx Memorial Fund. Carved into the stone column below the bust are the famous words: “Workers of all lands unite”, the closing call of The Communist Manifesto (1948, co-authored by Marx and his friend and collaborator, the revolutionary socialist Friedrich Engels) and, from his Theses on Feuerbach (written 1845, published 1888), “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

My cousin Jacky’s comment, after reading this inscription, was a reasonable one. She asked whether Marx was elevating action over ideas, and if so, why. I wondered the same, and not knowing the source or context of the quote, looked it up. Apparently, as a philosopher himself, Marx was taking issue with other philosophers, Ludwig Feuerbach in this case, who interpreted problems arising from dominant ideas and ideologies, but stopped short of suggesting what was to be done to resolve them. In “What did Marx mean by Thesis 11 (the statement inscribed on Marx’s tomb)?”, Mark Murphy writes that it was “a statement of Marx’s desire to situate philosophical thinking about social problems within history rather than outside it“. Theory was necessary, but theory divorced from constructive action in the material world was like a diagnosis without a proposed cure.

It was clear that many of the visitors to the cemetery were there to visit Marx’s tomb. People had brought flowers, and clusters stood before it or sat contemplatively on nearby benches. What moved me the most was the number of people whose life’s work had been inspired by Marx’s—some whose names were familiar, others completely unknown to me—who had chosen to be buried in the same vicinity. Among many others there was the great Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm (1917-2012); Yusuf Dadoo (1909-1983), statesman, longtime anti-apartheid activist, and Chairman of the South African Communist Party, whose inscription read, “He dedicated his life to the cause of national liberation, socialism and world peace”; and the Trinidad-born journalist and black activist Claudia Vera Jones (née Cumberbatch, 1915-1964), who has been credited with dreaming up the Notting Hill Carnival and whose inscription read, “Valiant fighter against racism and imperialism who dedicated her life to the progress of socialism and the liberation of her own black people.”

I was arrested by the words on so many more gravestones, so many tender words from loving family and friends. Beside writers and thinkers, artists and activists, there were herbalists and farmers, schoolteachers, architects, and engineers, spouses, parents, and children. There were old forgotten sites collapsing in on themselves and new ones, still being tended lovingly. On one stone, “How lucky I am to have something/that makes saying goodbye so hard”; on another, “Loving Husband, Father, Grandfather, Son, & Bibliophile.”

Toward the end, I came upon the grave of one of my favorite post-WWII British writers, Alan Sillitoe (1928-2010), author of Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1958), a novel I have taught several times, and perhaps most famously, of the short story, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner” (1959). At the foot of his headstone, “Alan Sillitoe/Author” visitors had simply left pens sunk into the ground in tribute. As an early working-class writer and a near-contemporary of my mother, I had a special fondness for him.

Grave of Leon Griffiths, Highgate Cemetery (photo: Josna Rege)

Andrew spotted the last grave of all as I was casting about for it: Leon, the late husband of Lily, my mother’s best friend from infancy, also now gone, along with their whole generation. His headstone, too, simply read, Leon Griffiths/Writer/1928-1992. I stood there for a short while as generations of the living and the dead swirled around me. Since Lily’s death I had lost touch with their children Paul and Suzy. How I wished I could leave something at their father’s grave to lead them back to me.

Just this Spring my Auntie Angy died, the last of my mother’s generation in our family. Her ashes are in nearby Golders Green crematorium, along with those of Uncle Len. Cousin Lesley tells me that our Sharp grandparents are also buried in a Highgate cemetery, but not the Highgate Cemetery, and in humble, unmarked graves. Perhaps my next pilgrimage will be to seek them out.

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624. Zeitoun

In blogs and blogging, Books, Media, Stories, United States, writing on April 30, 2025 at 11:29 pm

This month I will be participating, for the ninth time, in the annual A-to-Z Blogging Challenge. My theme is Books, my own very personal responses to and relationships with books I have read and re-read, loved, taught, and wrestled with over the years, so much so that they have become a part of me. These posts are not intended to be book reviews, or fodder for students looking to scoop up material for last-minute reports on books they haven’t read.

Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers (2009)

I first read Zeitoun in the fall of 2010 for my book group—in haste as usual, especially during a teaching semester when there was no time for “extraneous reading” (as my husband called it). It had been five years since Hurricane Katrina and the horrors of its impact and the spectacularly mismanaged federal government response had receded somewhat from the public eye, at least for those of us who had not been directly affected by the disaster. Nevertheless, this true-life account of one family’s experience during and in the aftermath of Katrina shocked readers all over again.

Zeitoun was highly acclaimed, winning the American Book Award, among other honors. It was written by the celebrated writer Dave Eggers, who was explicit that the Zeitoun family were victims both of the George W. Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina and of its War on Terror. Eggers was also awarded the “Courage in Media” Award by the Council on American-Islamic Relations for the book.

Rescuers evacuate children after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast, August, 2005. (AP/John Bazemore)

Rereading Zeitoun now, nearly 20 years after Katrina, everything felt much darker and more ominous. It was unsurprising to me that, less than five years after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York City, a Syrian Muslim immigrant, married with four children who owned his home and a successful contracting business in New Orleans would be arrested by a group of U.S. Army National Guard and police officers on suspicion of being part of an “Al-Qaeda” cell; that he would be held without charges in Camp Greyhound, caged in an open-air prison, then moved twice to other prisons while his wife and family had no idea whether he was alive or dead; that rather than providing adequate disaster relief, thousands of armed police and national guard would be dispatched to New Orleans to enforce law and order. According to a 2010 review in the Guardian (UK):

Between 29 August and 10 September, the number of National Guard troops sent to manage the chaos in New Orleans went from 7,841 to 46,838. This doesn’t include the scores of privately hired Blackwater mercenaries, as well as an Israeli commando group called Instinctive Shooting International. It wasn’t a rescue operation the government was running; it was an invasion.

Louisiana Department of Corrections officer at “Camp Greyhound,” September 2005. (Queen’s University Belfast)

Katrina was the costliest hurricane on record, though there have been so many more since that it is hard to remember what an impact it made on the national psyche. There were so many people in New Orleans and along the Gulf coast who were killed or permanently displaced, the emergency response was badly mismanaged, and at times it seemed that the focus of the response had been more punitive than humanitarian. But somehow, reading the story of Zeitoun in 2025 hit me harder than it had in 2010. Why?

In the current administration, the life of a Muslim American immigrant family is more precarious than ever, even when, as was the case in the Zeitoun family, one member of the couple is American-born and the other a permanent resident green card holder. In the first few months of 2025, thousands of immigrants or foreign nationals with valid visas have been arrested with their visas revoked, and whisked off to distant prisons—sometimes overseas—without charges, legal support, or their family knowing their whereabouts. Even green card holders married to American citizens have been subject to this kind of treatment. The conditions and treatment in the ICE detention centers and maximum security facilities where these people are being held make the prisons in Louisiana where Mr. Zeitoun was held pale by comparison. Sadly, the Kafka-eque nightmare that both Mr. Zeitoun and his family suffered in trying to locate each other, establish communication, get legal assistance, and find out the reason for his arrest has become all too common today. 

A further tragedy is that after Zeitoun was published in 2009, civil war broke out in Mr. Zeitoun’s home country of Syria, displacing more than 14 million people, at least 6 million of them abroad. Even now that President Assad’s regime has been toppled, the situation in Syria remains violent and volatile, making it even more urgent for Syrian immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers in the United States to be protected.

The year 2024 was marked by hurricanes, floods, droughts, earthquakes, and wildfires, and the outlook for the future portends still more extreme and erratic climate-related disasters. The weak, poor, and people of color are unprotected and even further dispossessed, while prime real estate is gobbled up by wealthy speculators, driving housing prices still higher, as happened in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. It is almost too painful to imagine being a vulnerable immigrant in the United States today caught up in such disaster capitalism.

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623. Yuganta

In blogs and blogging, Books, Childhood, culture, history, India, reading, storytelling, women & gender, writing on April 30, 2025 at 6:20 am

This month I will be participating, for the ninth time, in the annual A-to-Z Blogging Challenge. My theme is Books, my own very personal responses to and relationships with books I have read and re-read, loved, taught, and wrestled with over the years, so much so that they have become a part of me. These posts are not intended to be book reviews, or fodder for students looking to scoop up material for last-minute reports on books they haven’t read.

In other posts this month I have written about the eminent Indian anthropologist Irawati Karve (1905-1970) and the Mahabharata. Here I want to discuss a book in which Irawati Karve writes on the Mahabharata.

Yuganta, by Irawati Karve (Marathi, 1967; English, 1969, 1974)

Yuganta means the end of an epoch. In this collection of essays on the Mahabharata and some of the main characters and relationships in it, India’s pioneering female anthropologist Irawati Karve draws out not only the differences of its time from those that followed it, but also the enduring similarities that allow her, as she puts it, “to read today a story . . . that was sung three thousand years ago, and discover myself in it.” What Karve loved about the Mahabharata was that it doesn’t present airbrushed pictures of godlike figures, but complex, flawed human beings.

As an anthropologist who studied kinship structures in Indian society, Irawati Karve read the Mahabharata as a secular text that offered insights into human behavior. Rather than reading the characters in the epic as role models or cautionary tales, she looked on them—and on the epic as a whole—as a historical record that shed light on its time and our own. All the characters struggle to resolve impossible dilemmas, sometimes causing harm to themselves and others in the process. Today, the Mahabharata is seen as a guide to dharma, the universal law that guides right action and upholds the social order.

In the simplest of terms, the Mahabharata tells “the story of a family quarrel ending in a fierce battle” (1) It started off as an oral epic but was written down and added to over time. The critical edition produced by the Bhandarkarkar Oriental Research Institute defined the original story and the later interpolations, some of which were included in the critical edition, others omitted. 

Starting with Bhishma, a character who was considered a model of selflessness, Irawati Karve scrutinizes his actions and choices, and suggests that in his unyielding idealism he in fact caused considerable harm to others, especially women. In her subsequent chapters she goes on to consider the female characters of Gandhari, Kunti, and Draupadi in the epic, and Vidura, Dharma (as Yudhishtira is called), Karna, and Krishna Vasudev among the men. What motivated them? How did they justifiy their actions? Did they have a choice? Irawati reminds us that the Mahabharata did not reflect the mores of all of society at the time, but was focused on the Kshatriyas, the warrior caste, and to a lesser degree on the Brahmans. Of the other main castes, the Vaishyas and Sudras hardly figured in it at all. Similarly, it described a male-dominated society in which the ideal of and expectations of women were very different.

If you look up Yuganta on the internet, you will find dozens of lively discussions and reviews, in English and different Indian languages, by college students, feminists, book groups, business people, people who may or may not not agree with Irawati’s interpretations. What is it that is is so vital and compelling of about Yuganta‘s treatment of these characters? From watching and reading a number of these discussions, I believe that they find it both refreshing not to have to simply accept the received, almost hallowed interpretations from their childhoods, imbibed through storytelling at home and at school, Amar Chitra Katha comics or watching Mahabharat, the wildly popular TV series on Doordarshan (the government television station), but to be able to consider for themselves what they think. It feels liberating to be able to think of these epic figures as human, struggling like the rest of us to determine the right course of action in difficult circumstances.

Gandhari
Let us consider the character of Gandhari, the princess from Gandhara who is married to Prince Dhritarashtra. Irawati Karve puts us in the position of the princess who learns, only after coming to the kingdom of her new husband, that he has been blind from birth. Irawati flashes forward to the aftermath of the great war, in which Gandhari has lost every one of her 100 sons, including her first-born, Duryodhana. As a woman, her heart has broken again and again for each of her children during their lifetimes. Now, she says,

Gandhari–In Search of Light (play)

no one’s success can make my heart blossom in happiness; no one’s defeat can wither it with sorrow. Now there is nobody for whom I can be anxious. My mind is now permanently at peace. There is nothing to hope for, nothing to fear. (33)

But no, she immediately realizes that “as long as her blind husband was alive she could not escape being subjected to happiness and grief” (34).

After the devastating war in which, as predicted, there were no winners, Gandhari, along with her husband and two other elders, renounces everything and sets out for the Himalayas. Sitting in the shade, she feels a mountain breeze and lets out an involuntary sigh. Her husband Dhritarashtra takes offense, interpreting it as resentment for having being saddled with a blind man all her life. When she tells him that she meant nothing by the sigh, only that the mountain breeze reminded her of her girlhood home, he is filled with pity that her life was ruined by her marriage to him and that she must have missed her family terribly. But Gandhari will not accept his pity. She replies, stiffly: 

”Not at all. The day I married you I suppressed all thoughts of my parents’ home. Today I was recalling the country of Gandhara, not the people” (37). 

Dhritarashtra acknowledges how much he and his family have wronged Gandhari, and pleads with her to forgive and forget. He tells her how much she has punished him over the years by insisting on blindfolding herself, and acknowledges that he has punished her in return. When her children were born he thought that she would surely remove the blindfold to be able to see them, but by then his own heart had hardened, and he did not ask her to do it. He admits: “

I had a kind of revengeful pleasure in knowing that you could never see the face of your son. Going around with your eyes bound, you were playing the part of a devoted wife. You were chained by the results of your own actions”(38). 

Dhritarashtra admits he knew that if he had ordered her to remove her blindfold she would have obeyed him, but he had refused to give her that order. Now he begs her to remove it:

I’m pleading with you not only to ask your forgivenesss but to persuade you to give up your fight against life. Give up your anger, not only against me, but against life itself. . . At least now take off that blindfold. Learn to look at the world, at human beings, and at your own past life objectively. Our life is nearly over. At least do not die with your eyes bound. 

(39-40)

In Irawati Karve’s account, Gandhari does take off her blindfold at last. and over the next two days learns how to use her eyes again. But her husband smells a forest fire coming. He is fully reconciled to ending his life, but urges her to escape. Gandhari refuses:

 “Your Majesty, now I am not going to leave you. Come, instead of waiting for the fire, let us walk towards it” (41).


Wow. What a disturbing, deeply moving ending. I went back to my childhood edition of the Mahabharata by C. Rajagopalachari to see how he covered that episode. In his account, Gandhari gave herself up to the flames with her blindfold still on.

Irawati Karve’s interpretation puts Gandhari’s actions in the context of the code of conduct within which she had been raised. It also refuses to sentimentalize. In the Amar Chitra Katha children’s comic, Gandhari blindfolded herself before her marriage “to prove her love and respect for her future husband.” But in Irawati’s account, it is an act of defiance and resistance in the only way she knows how. It maintains the letter of dharma, the law of right conduct, but not the spirit of it. She burns with rage until nearly the very end of her life, when she has lost everything; and it is only when husband apologizes and begs her to remove it at last, that she does. But still she insists on embracing death with him, again, according to the Kshatriya code of conduct.

Suman Keshari’s Gandhari

Irawati notes the limited options for women in the time of the Mahabharata. She devotes an entire chapter to exploring what it might have been like to be Gandhari and what might have motivated her to act as she did in the society in which she found herself. Nevertheless, it will be seen that Irawati does not necessarily take a feminist position. Her reading is only feminist in the sense that she gives the same attention to the female characters as she does the male characters. She gives the women inner lives, complex characters—and flawed greatness—just as the Mahabharata gives the men. And through her intervention, she opened up space for more interpretations of the epic, which have followed in the 50 years since Yuganta was published. Just one among many is Suman Keshari’s 2022 Hindi play, Gandhari, reviewed here.

Irawati Karve ended her preface with some sadness that few young people are reading the Mahabharata nowadays, recalling a young Indian friend she had recently spoken with who had no idea who Gandhari was: “I shall consider it a victory if they think that my interpretation is wrong and read the Mahabharata merely to prove it wrong” (i)

I think that she has been richly rewarded. 



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621. Wise Children

In blogs and blogging, Books, Britain, culture, Media, Music, reading, Stories, women & gender, writing on April 28, 2025 at 7:21 am

This month I will be participating, for the ninth time, in the annual A-to-Z Blogging Challenge. My theme is Books, my own very personal responses to and relationships with books I have read and re-read, loved, taught, and wrestled with over the years, so much so that they have become a part of me. These posts are not intended to be book reviews, or fodder for students looking to scoop up material for last-minute reports on books they haven’t read.

Wise Children, by Angela Carter (1991)

What a joy it is to dance and sing!

I love this novel so much. How on earth has it been a quarter century since I last read it? Every time I taught contemporary British fiction I would include Angela Carter but it was always Nights at the Circus, because I deemed it more accessible to an American audience than my own personal favorite, Wise Children.

Dora and Nora Chance are identical twins who live on Bard Road in Brixton, South London with their cats and Wheelchair, one of their father’s ex-wives, now old and decrepit. Their mother died after giving birth to them and they were raised by Grandma (not their biological grandmother), with loving but erratic help from their Uncle Peregrine. Their father, the acclaimed Shakespearean actor Melchior Hazard, has not recognized them because they were born out of wedlock. Dora, the novel’s narrator, upends the norm in her explanation: “We are his natural daughters, as they say, as if only unmarried couples do it the way that nature intended” (5).

The novel takes place all in one day, with some digressions into the past, opening on the morning of Dora and Nora’s 75th birthday, which also happens to be their father’s 100th birthday. And for the first time ever, they have received an invitation to his party. Dora wakens with a feeling that something is going to happen that day, and it sure does.

Wise Children was Angela Carter’s ninth novel, and as it turned out, her last, although she didn’t know that while she was writing it. It is quintessentially Angela Carter in its celebration of popular culture, erasing the boundaries between high and low cultural forms, combining bawdy humor with heart, material-girl realism with liberating fantasy. While in no way downplaying the heartbreaks of life, it insists on happy endings. Its feminist critique of patriarchal power and sexism offers an affirmation of life and the redeeming power of love.

Oh, the exuberance, the topsy-turviness, of this novel! You can listen to its opening here. It is a celebration of the London on the “wrong side of the tracks;” of the music and culture of the music hall era; and of language itself—the language of ordinary people, every bit as rich and inventive as the language of Shakespeare.

Music Halls
Dora: . . . not only are Nora and I, as I have already told you, by-blows, but our father was a pillar of the legit theatre and we girls are illegitimate in every way—not only born out of wedlock, but we went on the halls, didn’t we? (11)

Music halls offered a very popular form of entertainment in Britain from the mid-19th century through the First World War, when they went into decline although they did continue into the 1930s. They were comparable to vaudeville in the United States, with their song-and-dance and comedy acts. The songs and the comedy were often suggestive and downright bawdy, included audience singalongs, and generally involved quite a bit of audience participation. Food was available in the auditoriums, and so was alcohol until 1914, when alcohol was required to be sold only in a separate bar; in 1923 even the separate bars were abolished. But by then the music halls were already in decline for other reasons, including the rise of cinema, the advent of the radio and gramophone records, and other opportunities to listen and dance to jazz, swing, and big-band music.

In my mother’s family, my mother, born in 1927, knew some of the music-hall songs, but came of age with the movies and dancing to American singers from Frank Sinatra to Bill Haley and the Comets. Her eldest sister, though, born in 1919, was steeped in the late music-hall culture of the 1920s and 1930s and had a whole different repertoire of songs and sayings from Mum’s. 



Nora and Dora, hard-working song-and-dance girls, started off as children performing in pantomimes, and then graduated to musical revues and shows on the music hall circuit. As Dora suggested, these cultural forms were increasingly considered disreputable, and were certainly never elevated to the same plane as were the plays by the icons of high culture such as William Shakespeare. But as well as celebrating their own music-hall culture, the Chance sisters also claim Shakespeare as their own, and not just because of their biological father. Of course Shakespeare, too, is full of gender-bending, bawdy humor, and popular song. Carter’s many quotes and literary allusions include high-culture allusions from Shakespeare and many others, as well as references to music hall culture and popular songs of the time, songs like I Can’t Give You Anything But Love, Baby.

When Nora describes the twins going to see Fred and Adele dance in Lady Be Good, I wondered who Adele was. Wasn’t the famous dancing pair Fred and Ginger, Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers? I hadn’t known that Fred and Adele were a brother and sister dance duo, but that Adele married an English lord and retired from performing, leaving her younger brother bereft for a time, until Ginger.

Here are a few popular music hall songs:
Top Ten Music Hall Hits
Waiting at the Church (Lily Morris)
Pack Up Your Troubles and It’s a Long Way to Tipperary (Florrie Forde)

Music hall culture vanished as live performances gave way to recordings. A long section in the middle of the novel takes place during a star-crossed film production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in Hollywood. I leave it to you to consider how this section is shaped by Angela Carter’s view of how the entertainment industry and society itself were changing. As far as I know, Wise Children has not been adapted for film. However, it has seen at least one stage production, and here is a taste of it.

Language
Wise Children is so fully alive that it wakens the reader to its living language, its song and dance, and its large cast of characters, both biological and otherwise, who become family for each other—or at least, some of them do. As Grandma would say, handsome is as handsome does.

I grew up reveling in the language my maternal family used and I still use, although increasingly I have to translate myself. In Wise Children not a page goes by without my oohing and aahing over a turn of phrase, a saying, an idiom from my mother’s day, or even my grandmother’s. Here are just a few, randomly chosen:

Some superannuated hoofers put on the avoirdupois like nobody’s business.
She wobbled something chronic on those purple shoes.
Once she’d got her foot under the table. . .
Our little hearts went pit-a-pat
on the QT
The first time we spent a penny

Can’t say fairer than that
done up to the nines
Have a heart
hell for leather
a cut above
darling buds of May
smiling like the cat that got the cream

Quoting Jane Austen, “Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery,” Dora skips over the horrors of the Second World War. “I don’t wish to talk about the war. Suffice it to say it was no carnival, not the hostilities. No carnival” (163). Although Dora notes that tragedy is always elevated above comedy, she herself chooses comedy every time.

. . . there they were, side by side, the comic masks, the tragic mask, one mouth turned up at the ends, the other down, the presiding geniuses—just like life. The commedia—that’s life, isn’t it? (58)

Angela Carter’s personal story ended in 1992, the year after the novel’s publication, when she was only 51 years old. And yet, as WB Gooderham notes in a Guardian review, “such is the strength of the writing that Wise Children transcends this sad fact, and the comedy is never overshadowed by the tragedy. It is a masterpiece.”

One of the novel’s epigraphs is the old saying that gives rise to its title, “It’s a wise child that knows its own father.” Another epigraph is an observation by the English Shakespearean actress Eileen Terry: “How many times Shakespeare draws fathers and daughters, never mothers and daughters.” Dora reflects on the sisters’ need to imagine Melchior as an active father, when in fact Grandma has given them all the love they need. She wonders:

if he isn’t just a collection of our hopes and dreams and wishful thinking. . .Something to set our lives by, like the old clock in the hall, which is real enough, in itself, but which we’ve got to wind up to make it go.
 (230)

In the end, the cycle of life continues, More twins are born into this blended, extended, non-biological family, more absent fathers, more unmarried mothers. But they are going to be loved.

There was singing and dancing all along Bard road that day and we’ll go on singing and dancing until we drop dead in our tracks, won’t we kids. 

What a joy it is to dance and sing! 



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617. The Summer Book and Shikasta

In blogs and blogging, Books, Inter/Transnational, Nature, Stories, writing on April 23, 2025 at 3:05 am

This month I will be participating, for the ninth time, in the annual A-to-Z Blogging Challenge. My theme is Books, my own very personal responses to and relationships with books I have read and re-read, loved, taught, and wrestled with over the years, so much so that they have become a part of me. These posts are not intended to be book reviews, or fodder for students looking to scoop up material for last-minute reports on books they haven’t read.

The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson (1972)

I grew up with Tove Jansson’s Moomin books: Finn Family Moomintroll, Comet in Moominland, Moominsummer Madness. Her text and illustrations are all of a piece, immersing the reader in the world of the Moonminvalley. Its prevailing spirit of acceptance toward the different creatures who live there allows them all to be their decidedly quirky selves, even when they become disruptive and downright weird. Despite the benign nature of Moonminvalley, there is always an undercurrent of sadness, even of darkness. Moomintroll misses Snuffkin when he is away, and he is almost always away. Most Hemulens seem to be depressive. And the Groke is simply terrifying. I was middle-aged before I read any of Tove Jansson’s writing for adults; its darkness was recognizable, but it was without the whimsy of the Moomin world to lighten it.

In The Summer Book, though, even its darkness is light. An old woman and a young girl sojourn together on a tiny island, communing with it and each other without a hint of sentimentality. Both are naughty, sharp, even prickly, but also, oh, so fragile. They engage in play, but play that is the essence of life. Guardians of each other and the natural world, they are careless of themselves. And yet, stubbornly quirky, they are always themselves.

I can’t recommend this slim, beautiful book enough.

Re: Colonised Planet 5, Shikasta, by Doris Lessing (1979)

photo: Louis Monier/Getty

Full disclosure: I am a complete and utter fan of Doris Lessing, and I am telling you that Shikasta is her masterpiece. Not The Golden Notebook, no matter what others may say. Shikasta can stand on its own, or be read as the first of Canopus in Argos: Archives, a quintet of novels that Doris Lessing wrote, in a rush of inspiration, between 1979 and 1983. In both cases, it is epic in scope and utterly mind-blowing. 

My advice: accept the world it presents to you and allow yourself to be carried along.

Shikasta consists of documents and dispatches from the archives of the advanced planet Canopus, tracking the development—and sadly, the devolution—of the broken planet Shikasta, once the bountiful Rohanda. Canopus always acts in Shikasta’s interest, and over the millennia has sent a series of agents and emissaries there. Johor (or George) is one of these emissaries, who despite his professional detachment loves this beautiful, broken planet dearly, and is deeply pained to have to witness its decline. 

In opening remarks, Doris Lessing suggests that the Old Testament—including the Torah—the New Testament, and the Qu’ran could be seen as one book, and that we could read them as such. She goes further: “The sacred literatures of all races and nations have many things in common. Almost as if they can be regarded as the products of a single mind” (Shikasta x). In part, Shikasta can be seen as her fictional interpretation of their collective wisdom. It offers us a diagnosis of our planet’s malaise, and a path to healing. Follow it up with the second book in Canopus in Argos series, The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five.

There are so many S titles, each one deserving of your consideration, but I will simply list them below, and leave you in care of Tove Jansson and Doris Lessing.

Swallows and Amazons, by Arthur Ransome (1930)
Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison (1977)
The Songlines, by Bruce Chatwin (1987)
The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie (1989)
Small Island, by Andrea Levy (2004)
Salvage the Bones, by Jesmyn Ward (2011)
Sing, Unburied, Sing, by Jesmyn Ward (2017)

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615. The Quiet American

In blogs and blogging, Books, history, Media, postcolonial, Stories, United States, writing on April 21, 2025 at 2:30 am

This month I will be participating, for the ninth time, in the annual A-to-Z Blogging Challenge. My theme is Books, my own very personal responses to and relationships with books I have read and re-read, loved, taught, and wrestled with over the years, so much so that they have become a part of me. These posts are not intended to be book reviews, or fodder for students looking to scoop up material for last-minute reports on books they haven’t read.

The Quiet American, by Graham Greene (1955)

Why had I chosen this particular book for the letter Q—aside from the fact that its title began with Q, that is? I hadn’t given it a second thought since I taught it, just once, more than twenty years ago. Why, then? I couldn’t for the life of me remember. So I decided to re-read the novel, look up a few articles about it and the history surrounding it, and watch the (very enjoyable and well acted) 2002 movie adaptation, starring Michael Caine as the older British journalist Thomas Fowler, Brendan Fraser as the young American Alden Pyle, and Do Thi Hai Yen as Phuong, the Vietnamese woman they both desire. 



The Quiet American is certainly an interesting novel, taking on as it does the role of Britain, France, and the United States as colonial/imperial powers in an Asian country fighting for its independence from colonial rule. The setting is Vietnam, 1952. The narrator is the Englishman Fowler—deeply flawed, mind you, Graham Greene-style. He is a washed-up middle-aged man, addicted to opium, carrying on an affair with a much younger Vietnamese woman while married to a devout Catholic woman back in England who refuses to divorce him. He is also a reporter who prides himself on telling the truth and remaining personally detached from the political turmoil all around him. Enter Pyle. 



Alden Pyle is the “quiet American” in the title—young, Harvard-educated, book-read, ideologically driven, but lacking any experience on the ground. “Quiet” as in the opposite of the stereotypically loud American abroad? Is that a good or a bad thing? Or “Quiet” as in undercover? What strikes Fowler about Pyle from the moment he meets him is his “innocence.” What does he mean by his American innocence and why do we get the distinct feeling that he is being ironic?

Fowler himself is far from innocent. In fact, like many of Greene’s characters, he is racked by guilt and self-doubt. At times we find ourselves admiring his honesty and detachment, but at other times we see that is it not his commitment to truth but his personal feelings that are motivating him. Who is Fowler/Greene to condemn imperialist ambition in the upstart American? Is he motivated by envy of the young nation in global ascendance when his own country, a former imperial powerhouse, is rapidly losing that power across the globe? Or to put it another way, does he just want to destroy the young rival who has stolen his woman?

Criticism of The Quiet American has run the gamut since the time of its original publication 70 years ago. At the time, American critics hated it, while British and European critics generally approved. Published in 1955, just as the United States was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, some hailed Greene as prophetic, since what he predicts in the novel did in fact come to pass. Others were threatened by his seeming criticism of the U.S. mission to counter the spread of communism. But Greene himself was no communist; in fact, as Michael Gorra observes in his introduction to the Penguin Classics edition in Greene’s centennial year, Greene was formed by a colonial mindset and never relinquished a sense of his own superiority. It is as easy for readers to question the author’s motives as we find ourselves questioning Fowler’s.

Screenshot from trailer of The Quiet American (1958).

In the 1950s, U.S. covert operations were on the rise. According to a 2018 article in the journal Foreign Policy, CIA officer Edward Lansdale conducted a covert operation to subvert Greene’s intent, turning his anti-American novel into a pro-American movie. Here is a 2024 article on the differences between the novel and the film. The first film adaptation of the novel was issued in 1958, just three years after the release of the novel. Apparently Greene himself disavowed it as a propaganda film for America. Check out the trailer here.

With the disaster that was to unfold in Vietnam over the next two decades, Greene’s novel remained relevant. More and more people in the U.S. and around the world publicly opposed American involvement in the war, taking a side as Fowler eventually did. Two decades passed, ushering in a new era in which the United States emerged as the sole superpower. In 2002, after the attacks on the World Trade Center and during the U.S. bombing campaign in Afghanistan, a new movie adaptation of The Quiet American was produced, one that was more faithful to Greene’s novel and that worked to represent the geopolitics of the time and the region more accurately. Here is the film’s trailer, and here is a podcast about the film and its relationship to historical reality.

I can’t close without mentioning gender politics in the novel—and in both movies, for that matter. Two white men who could be friends but for the fact that they both desire the same submissive, inscrutable Asian woman. Aargh! As usual in gendered colonial discourse, the woman stands for the colonized country. What’s love got to do with it? Try to convince me that it’s more complicated than that.



I’m glad I re-visited The Quiet American. If you haven’t read it, I hope I’ve piqued your interest. You might also be interested in watching the 2002 movie, in which Michael Caine feels he has given his very best performance.

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614. Perelandra, Poetic Justice, Praisesong for the Widow

In blogs and blogging, culture, Immigration, Inter/Transnational, reading, Stories, Teaching, United States, writing on April 20, 2025 at 4:52 am

This month I will be participating, for the ninth time, in the annual A-to-Z Blogging Challenge. My theme is Books, my own very personal responses to and relationships with books I have read and re-read, loved, taught, and wrestled with over the years, so much so that they have become a part of me. These posts are not intended to be book reviews, or fodder for students looking to scoop up material for last-minute reports on books they haven’t read.

Each of the three books I have for the letter P is in a completely different genre and I will make no attempt to connect them in any way. Here goes (in chronological order):

Perelandra, by C.S. Lewis (1944)

Many, many years ago I did read all three novels in The Space Trilogy by C.S. Lewis (1898-1963) but Perelandra stood out like a shining star. The only thing I remember about it is the unfallen Eden that the reader experiences through the character Ransom. Of that place the only thing I remember is the wonderful give of the ground underfoot—if it can be called ground, for it is a floating island.
I borrowed a copy of Perelandra from the library and searched for a passage that described what I remembered:



His first discovery was that he lay on a dry surface, which on examination turned out to consist of something very like heather, except for the colour which was coppery. Burrowing idly with his fingers he found something friable like dry soil, but very little of it, for almost at once he came upon a base of tough interlocked fibres. Then he rolled round on his back, and in doing so discovered the extreme resilience of the surface on which he lay. It was something much more than the pliancy of the heatherlike vegetation, and felt more as if the whole floating island beneath the vegetation were a kind of mattress. (35)

Ransom has to learn to walk on this dense floating mattress-like ground, and it is an unalloyed pleasure. Even falling is a joy.

That’s all. I know that the fall—as in the Fall of Man—will soon come, but I’m not interested in reading further.

Poetic Justice, by Amanda Cross (1970)

I’m not a fan of murder mysteries in general. However, there are two series that I have enjoyed, and in each case I have pretty much the whole set. One is the series of Inspector Wexford mysteries by the late Ruth Rendell, whom I have paid tribute to here. The other is the series of 14 Kate Fansler mysteries by Amanda Cross, the pen name of Carolyn Heilbrun (1926-2003), who was an English professor at Columbia University in New York City. She kept her detective novels a secret to protect her professional career, but was eventually outed by a fan.

Why do I enjoy the Amanda Cross books? Well, for some obvious reasons: they’re full of literary allusions, which is always fun for an English prof., and they skewer the sexism in higher education. Heilbrun knew something about this, as the first woman ever to receive tenure in Columbia’s English Department. They’re light and funny, and the author is clearly enjoying her clandestine pursuit enormously. Her detective, Kate Fansler, is also an English professor at a college in New York City that is pretty clearly Columbia. And Kate is tall, svelte, and fashionable, with an adoring partner (not husband, not in academia) who is not only devastatingly handsome but also gives her all the space she needs in the relationship, as she does him. What’s not to like?

Interestingly enough, Poetic Justice, the third mystery in the series, begins as the students have just occupied the administration building, most likely referring to the student strike of 1968 protesting Columbia’s ties to military research and plans to build a new gymnasium in a public park in Harlem, with the occupation of five buildings, the arrests of more than 700 students, and the subsequent resignation of the university’s president. Kate Fansler does not seem to be particularly interested in the occupation, only expressing mild irritation at the students “trampling thoughtlessly across the new grass” (11). Nevertheless, central to the mystery is her recruitment into a struggle against the administration’s plan to do away with University College, formerly the extension school. Issues of race and class are central to their motives in doing so.



I can’t remember much about Poetic Justice, which does quote the poem W.H. Auden an awful lot, since he is a particular favorite of Kate Fansler’s. I’m not a fan of blood and gore, and thankfully the murder itself is secondary to all the other fun, which is probably why I like this series so much. 

Sadly, the death that haunts admirers of Amanda Cross/Carolyn Heilbrun the most was Heilbrun’s own, by her own hand. Although Heilbrun herself had always maintained that people had the right to end their own lives, feminist scholars who had seen her as a role model were particularly let down by it.

Praisesong for the Widow, by Paule Marshall (1983)

I love this novel, and its author. Let me try to think back to moments in the novel that have stayed with me. I’ll try to avoid spoilers, since I hope you will read it if you haven’t had the pleasure already.

At the outset, Avey Johnson, our eponymous and well-heeled widow with a house in North White Plains, is taking a Caribbean cruise with two other black friends on the Bianca Pride, complete with formal dinners in the Versailles Room and parfait for dessert. But the parfait does not go down well.

Too much! (This phrase is repeated again and again.)

Avey finds herself dreaming of being in a knock-down drag-out fight with her Aunt Cuney, long gone, with whom she used to spend the summers as a girl down in Tatem Island, South Carolina. When Aunt Cuney was young, she was thrown out of the circle and the church for having crossed her feet in a Ring Shout. When he learned I was preparing to teach Praisesong for the Widow, my department chair Bill Cook told me all about the tradition of the Ring Shout and personally demonstrated how it was supposed to be performed.

Later, Avey Johnson finds herself on a ferry boat to Carriacou, a tiny island off Granada. That scene has the most spectacular description of sea-sickness and the following scene the most beautiful description of a cleansing ritual. Thanks to another tip from Bill Cook, I was able to share with my students a recording of The Big Drum Dance of Carriacou, which plays an important role in the novel’s resolution.

Paule Marshall (1929-2019) was a Brooklyn-born Afro-Caribbean American writer whose parents had immigrated to New York from Barbados. She started out as a journalist, but went on to write five novels, five novellas, a collection of short stories, and a memoir, Triangular Road (2009). As Marshall explains in this interview, the three points of that triangle were the United States, Barbados, and Africa.

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613. The Overstory

In blogs and blogging, Books, Nature, Stories, United States, writing on April 19, 2025 at 1:12 am

This month I will be participating, for the ninth time, in the annual A-to-Z Blogging Challenge. My theme is Books, my own very personal responses to and relationships with books I have read and re-read, loved, taught, and wrestled with over the years, so much so that they have become a part of me. These posts are not intended to be book reviews, or fodder for students looking to scoop up material for last-minute reports on books they haven’t read.

The Overstory, by Richard Powers (2018)

I have only a shaky grasp on this book as yet, because I read half of it soon after it first came out, and the rest all in a rush a couple of weeks ago; but I’ve enjoyed it immensely, enough to want to raise it for consideration here. Its prolific author, Richard Powers, is new to me as well, although The Overstory was his twelfth novel, and he has published two more since.

I first ordered The Overstory for my book group back in 2019, before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, by the time we were scheduled to discuss it I had barely gotten halfway through and so didn’t attend the meeting. Once dropped, it fell by the wayside, and remained unfinished for five years, gathering dust on the shelf under my bedside table. But a few weeks ago Andrew and I received a very welcome email letter from our dear friend Michael in New Mexico, who is slowly cutting back his hours in preparation for retirement (though I’ll believe that when we see it). He wrote: 

”Time for more reading which is nice. Last book was Overstory by Richard Powers. Interesting tale of trees and a monkey wrench experience.”

1st edition cover (wikipedia)

Those of you who have read the novel will probably understand the reference to Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang. Abbey was beloved in the American Southwest, something of a cult hero in fact, since his characters are dedicated to saving it from corporate mega-projects that would despoil its natural environment. But back to The Overstory: Michael’s letter reminded me to return to the novel.

The first half was a bit of a struggle. The novel is divided into in four parts: Roots, Trunk, Crown, and Seeds. In Roots, the reader is introduced to a number of different characters—eight, to be precise— gets a bit of their family story, and learns that there is a tree or trees associated with them in some way. At that point I wasn’t sure whether or not there was a link between these disparate characters. One of them, Neelay Mehta, is a disabled Indian American tech genius from Silicon Valley, who has developed a wildly successful video game. What does he have to do with trees? The best I could come up with in Roots was that the novel was narrating the history of the United States through trees.

Trunk is still the most confusing to me, probably because I stopped reading somewhere in that section nearly five years ago and lost the thread. It followed the trajectory of some of the characters, showing how their lives began to be dedicated to studying and/or saving trees. My most powerful memory of this section is the character of Patricia Westerford, a professor whose research was unpopular in her department and who became a forest-dwelling recluse.

http://www.cloudlakeliterary.ca (review, Shantell Powell)

It was in the period after I had dropped the novel, somewhere in the depths of the COVID-19 pandemic, that I came across a long article in the New York Times Sunday Magazine entitled “The Social Life of Forests”, written by Ferris Jabr. Its tagline: “Trees appear to communicate and cooperate through subterranean networks of fungi. What are they sharing with one another?” As I read about this cutting-edge researcher in forest ecology, Suzanne Simard, she began to sound more and more familiar, until I realized that she must have been Richard Powers’ model for his character Patricia Westerford. Ferris Jabr writes: “Although Simard’s peers were skeptical and sometimes even disparaging of her early work, they now generally regard her as one of the most rigorous and innovative scientists studying plant communication and behavior.” Simard gave a TED Talk in 2015, entitled, How trees talk to each other. Jabr also cites Peter Wohlleben’s book, The Hidden Life of Trees, which I had given to my forest-loving nephew for his birthday in 2016. Describing a foraging expedition in the forest with Professor Simard, Jabr writes, “Like a seed waiting for the right conditions, a passage from The Overstory suddenly sprouted in my consciousness: ‘There are no individuals. There aren’t even separate species. Everything in the forest is the forest.'”

http://www.savetheredwoods.org

I pick up the novel again. Impossibly high in the forest canopy, acitivists blocking the clear-cutting of critically endangered old-growth forests are taking shifts to climb up a rope ladder and sit in. Up there, it’s another world, inhabited by creatures who live their whole lives without ever coming down to the ground. Unlikely human characters are stranded up there in the clouds together, somehow managing to eat, sleep, and perform bodily functions, waiting for relief that never seems to come, waiting for the inevitable arrival of the loggers. As one character, Nick, looks out upon ridge after ridge of giant trees, “each one a biome to creatures still to be discovered,” he thinks, “Every tree he looks on belongs to a Texas financier who has never seen a redwood but means to gut them all to pay off the debt he took on to acquire them” (265). Inevitably, the loggers move in and the protestors grow ever more desperate.

In Crown, things have reached a crisis but there is no resolution, no end in sight but extinction. The characters from Roots return, in various configurations. What kind of story is being woven here, and where is it leading? Patricia Westerford is desperately working against the clock to collect specimens for her tree archives before the world loses them for good. The monkey-wrenchers, now underground or on the run, face an uncertain future themselves. Neelay the tech wizard has transformed his game as his own ecological consciousness has transformed, and all this is making me dizzy. I can’t stop reading, but we are reaching the limits of what words can say. Now we’re in tree-consciousness.

Seeds is the very short final part of the novel, which gestures toward the future so cryptically that I see I will need to start over. Watching a video of Richard Powers’ talk at Shakespeare and Company in Paris, I realize that I have missed a number of critical clues that link individual characters to particular trees, loose threads that I will have to go back and pick up.

The Walden Woods Project (B. Burne)

Responding to a question about the novel’s eco-warriors, Richard Powers reminded readers of America’s homegrown tradition of non-violent civil disobedience advocated by Henry David Thoreau of Concord, Massachusetts. Yet Walden Pond, the site of Thoreau’s noble experiment in simple living, is now itself endangered.

I write this in the small hours of April 19th, when, along with its neighboring Lexington, the town of Concord, Massachusetts is preparing to mark the 250th anniversary of the start of the American Revolution, “a new nation dedicated to the ideals of liberty, equality, natural and civil rights and responsible citizenship.” Concord 250 invites us all to honor these founding principles.

One of them, surely, must be the protection of this beautiful planet and what is left of its old-growth forests. Bathe in this one for a few minutes.

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612. No-No Boy

In blogs and blogging, Books, Education, Family, Immigration, Stories, Teaching, United States, writing on April 17, 2025 at 3:15 am

This month I will be participating, for the ninth time, in the annual A-to-Z Blogging Challenge. My theme is Books, my own very personal responses to and relationships with books I have read and re-read, loved, taught, and wrestled with over the years, so much so that they have become a part of me. These posts are not intended to be book reviews, or fodder for students looking to scoop up material for last-minute reports on books they haven’t read.

No-No Boy, by John Okada (1957)

2014 Edition, U Washington P., with new Foreword by Ruth Ozeki, Introduction by Lawson Fusao Inada, Afterword by Frank Chin

No-No Boy is now rightly honored as a classic of Asian American literature, but it had been out of print and lost in obscurity for 15 years before it was “discovered” in 1970 by Jeff Chan, one of a group of young Asian American writers desperately seeking literary ancestors in the United States. Delighted, they sought out the author, but they were too late; John Okada had just died of a heart attack, age 47. Frank Chin and Lawson Inada drove to Los Angeles to meet Dorothy, Okada’s widow. She said that after it had been published, John’s book had sunk like a stone. No one had said a kind word about it. When he died, Dorothy had offered the Japanese American Research Project in Los Angeles his notes, papers, and the unpublished manuscript of a second novel, but they weren’t interested. So she had burned them. John Okada was the first, and at that time the only Japanese American novelist. In 1976 a new paperback edition of No-No Boy was published, and it has been continuously in print ever since.

The 1940s and 1950s were not a good time to be a Japanese American. After the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1942, then-President Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, enabling the U.S. government to round up 120,000 Japanese and Japanese Americans, freeze their assets, and incarcerate them in concentration camps. Fully two-thirds of them were American citizens, born in the U.S.A. (Sound familiar?). Every adult in the camps had to fill out a loyalty questionnaire, with two notorious questions in particular that gave many of them pause.

Not In Our Town: https://www.niot.org/blog/and-then-they-came-us

Whatever personal reservations they might have had, most people answered Yes to both questions. Many Japanese American men joined the U.S. military and volunteered for the most dangerous missions to prove their patriotism. (When they returned from the war, though, it was not always as heroes; they were still “Japs.”) But those who answered No to both questions, they were the so-called “No-No Boys,” like John Okada’s tortured protagonist Ichiro Yamada, and they had it the worst.

No-No Boy opens with a young man getting off a bus in his hometown, Seattle. He has spent the past four years locked up by his own government: two in a concentration camp, and two in prison. We have access to his thoughts and emotions as he meets his parents and younger brother again, sees old friends and neighbors, and tries to work out who he is, where he belongs, and whether he has a future in the country of his birth, the only country he feels that he belongs in.

No-No Boy is written from the perspective of a nisei, the second generation of Japanese in America. Ichiro’s parents were issei, the immigrant generation. (The third generation would be the sansei–my age group. But in the 1940s, they were only just being born.) In most immigrant families there are tensions between the immigrant generation and their children, born and raised in the new country. But this relationship was all the more fraught in the case of the Japanese in the camps. Many of the nisei felt that in order to thrive in the U.S. after the war, they would have to keep their heads down and assimilate to the majority culture. This position was taken by the Japanese American Citizens League, or JACL. Some Japanese Americans felt they had to demonize their fellow Japanese, especially the No-No Boys, in order not to be scapegoated themselves. No-No Boy explores the full gamut of responses to the nation’s treatment of Japanese Americans, including the spectrum of responses by white Americans—from extreme racism to empathy.

It is important to remember that in the early decades after WWII it was not possible to be both Japanese and American; you had to choose one or the other. In fact, although I have been using the term “Asian American”, there was no such term in use during Okada’s time. Asians were often seen as “unassimilable aliens“, so that those who worked to fit in were frequently put in a double bind. Every time I re-read No-No Boy I feel grateful that my family came to the United States after the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, when larger numbers of Asians and other people of color were able to enter the country, and when a new policy of multiculturalism permitted immigrants and their families to be both/and, not merely either/or.

I love the novel, its stream-of-consciousness, Beat generation style. I love Ichiro’s searing honesty and his idealism, despite everything, but weep at his inability to forgive himself. And as a 1.5-generation American—someone who, having immigrated as a teenager, is part of both the immigrant generation and their American-born children—I cringe at Ichiro’s harsh treatment of his issei parents, even as I understand his frustration with them.

Read No-No Boy, a classic of Asian American literature.

Three important works with helpful discussions of No-No Boy

Another useful source:
Japanese National Museum [Video: 1:20:48]. John Okada: The Life and Rediscovered Work of the Author of No-No Boy. April 19, 2019. 
 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VUcvuj9Kag&gt;
Frank Abe, a journalist and producer of the PBS documentary Conscience and the Constitution; Greg Robinson, professor of history at Université du Québec a Montréal; and Brian Niiya, Content Director of Densho.org, discussed Okada’s development as a writer and how misplaced blame can harm generations and breed deep divisions.

Tell Me Another (Contents to Date)

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