Elizabeth Costello

Elizabeth Costello
J.M. Coetzee
Penguin Books, 2003
ISBN 0-14-200481-2
Amazon Link


I love this book, but I don't think it's for just anyone. It's a book only an English major could love. More literary theory than novel, I actually read it with a pen in my hand to make notations in the margins. I fell out of that habit not long after I finished graduate school, but this is a book to make you feel like you are back in school. Still, as literary theory, it was a brilliant stroke to put it in the form of a novel and really personalize, and by so doing complicate, the thoughts expressed.

Elizabeth Costello is a novelist, and the book is structured around a series of public lectures in which she usually manages to say anything but what her hosts are hoping to hear. Mostly her talks center around belief, loss of belief, ambiguity of belief, complications of belief, ethics of belief and so forth. In a talk on realism, she says, "There used to be a time, we believe, when we could say who we were. Now we are just performers speaking our parts. The bottom has dropped out. We could think this a tragic turn of events, were it not that it is hard to have respect for whatever was the bottom that dropped out--it looks like illusion to us now."

These concepts of truth and illusion as well as questions of good and evil run throughout the book, no matter what the subject. Elizabeth Costello is a woman of staunch opinions but no real belief. At least she believes she has no belief, and everything she does believe falls apart upon examination, though this does little to change her opinions.

All of this ambiguity of belief as related to opinion, action, good, evil, family, eating habits and literature culminates in a very Kafkaesque chapter that, quite frankly, I'm not sure what to make of. Sure, the English major allegorical readings are easy enough, but as a reader just reading this book for pleasure, the whole thing leaves me thinking "Hmph. What was that about?" And I'd be disappointed if it were any other way.

I hope someone I know reads this book soon so we can talk about the frogs. If you are a true a bibliophile (and only if), you really have to read this. There's just no choice.

Memories of a Pure Spring

Memories of a Pure Spring
Duong Thu Huong
Translated by Nina McPherson and Phan Huy Duong
Penguin Books
ISBN 0-14-029843-6
Amazon Link


This is a wonderful book, a contemporary tragedy. It had to grow on me a little, but I think that was because I didn't have time to sit down and read it all at once. However, by the time I reached the end I was convinced it was a very powerful story.

Memories of a Pure Spring is the story of a Vietnamese marriage in the aftermath of "The American War." It is also the story of shifting power structures and the impact of those shifts on those who had served the war effort, particularly the artists. Full of disillusionment and disappointment, it traces the downfall of someone who was at least at one time a hero to himself. Yet it is also lushly lyrical in a reflection of the beauty of the Vietnamese countryside and Vietnamese people.

Hung is a composer who is leader of the artistic troupe during the war, but is pushed out of the position after the war despite his loyalty to the Communist Party. He is simply a victim of old tribal power systems reemerging.

His wife, Suong, is a singer he discovers in a remote mountain village. He takes her with him as his child prodigy who later becomes his child bride. Suong's position as "the most famous singer in Central Vietnam" is not threatened after the war. She becomes the major bread-winner for the family as the roles are reversed and Suong "sings her lungs out" to provide for her children while Hung's life continues to fall apart, sometimes through his own doing by drowning himself in drugs or alcohol, and sometimes by merely being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Through a good portion of the book I kept thinking it was just a story about an irresponsible man who is so indulgent in his own self-pity that he refuses to get it together even to save his family. His pride has taken a major blow, and he has lost all of his former power. Yet even when he could do things to help out and make life easier on his wife, he just creates more problems.

Still, the book is so much more than that. Hung does show sensitivity and wisdom and awareness of his own wrongdoings. He remains entrapped by his own sense of powerlessness to do anything about these things until perhaps the very end, however.

Suong is loyal, though she has her breaking points. And the book is as much about her survival of her own breaking points and her perseverance as it is about Hung's undoing. She is perhaps saved by the fact that she neither has any real power nor desires any. Men profit from her talents, and they are the ones who gain the power because of it. She is not a threat to either the old power structure or the new, and this allows her to continue. She shows up and does her job, and not only do people love her for it, but the men who put her there gain fame and glory because of it.

The book is a very compelling story of the politics of art in Vietnam. It is even more compelling in that the author is a Vietnamese woman who spent time in prison for her writing. Her books are banned in Vietnam, though they are very popular in Europe and America.

To learn more about Duong Thu Huong and her writing, visit these links:

RFA Interview

Nina McPherson Posting at VSG

Also by Duong Thu Huong:

Paradise of the Blind

Novel Without a Name

Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

Reading Lolita in Tehran, A Memoir in Books
Azar Nafisi
Random House Trade Paperback Edition, 2004
ISBN 0-8129-7106-X
Amazon Link


This book inspired me to create a place to write about books, so I must start with it. Part autobiography, part fiction, part literary criticism, part political commentary, Nafisi has truly created must read. Her Memoir in Books, as she calls it, gives us a compelling view of life in Iran, for women, families, students, and literature, from the days of the Shah on through to the aftermath of the war with Iraq.

After leaving one university job for refusal to wear the veil in the classroom, and growing disenchanted with another when she decides to compromise and go back to teaching, Nafisi breaks her ties with public teaching and begins a private class in her own home.

There a group of young women gathers once a week to discuss Western novels and to learn a little about themselves. Nafisi writes: I could not get over the shock of seeing them shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color. When my students came into that room, they took off more than their scarves and robes. Gradually, each one gained an outline and a shape, becoming her own inimitable self.

Indeed, I could not get over the shock of the pink lipstick, the gold earrings, the red nail polish, and the mingled desires and frustrations emerging from beneath the black robes and scarves each time Nafisi's girls arrived for the next lesson.

One of the main themes running throughout the book deals with the struggle for self-identity beneath the veil. The young women respond especially well to Nabokov's Lolita because they understand only too well what it is to be a young girl whose life has been confiscated by another. Nafisi repeatedly asks them to write about how they see themselves, and too often the answer is "I'm not ready for that yet." In a land where a stray piece of hair flying out of a veil can lead to arrest, beatings by morality police, rape, or execution, women are left to the task of erasing all public identity with the donning of robes, gloves and veils. Yet underneath those veils there is pink lipstick, however illegal. There is fear and hope and the knowledge that these women do not have the same freedoms their mothers had. There are sharp minds that understand well the bravery in characters like Henry James' shy Catherine Sloper. They love and understand books, and through the books, they come to reveal a little more and a little more of themselves to themselves. They come to a point where they are ready to discuss their quite painful experiences with and relationships to the regime that is their captor.

There are many more things to say about Reading Lolita in Tehran, but for now I will leave it with this is an inspiring, well-written book. Anyone who loves literature should read it. Anyone who loves teaching should read it. Anyone who wants to know what lives beneath the veil in a land called Iran should read it.

Welcome

Welcome to Callie Cat Review, where I plan to lavish praise on books my cat and I have read and enjoyed.