Oracle Bones, by Peter Hessler

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Although several years old now, Hessler’s book offers a good introduction to a country that is rapidly changing. Presented chronologically, the stories of people and places and artifacts span the years from 1999 to 2002, when Hessler worked in China as a teacher and journalist from. As in the best of today’s narrative nonfiction, these stories are vivid vignettes that immerse the reader in the experience.

We meet an 82-year-old, tennis-playing man who “carries himself like a soldier” and stubbornly refuses to leave his family home when the developers demand it. We camp in a tower on the Great Wall during a sandstorm, hang out in cafes at night with Uighur traders, and cruise along the banks of North Korea. We talk with peasants and movie stars, archeologists and black marketeers. We learn what a ghost chariot is.

The book’s subtitle, A Journey Between China’s Past and Present, points to the aspect of the book that—next to the stories—most appealed to me. Hessler gives the reader historical context for everything, but so subtly that we can absorb the information almost without noticing it. The trick is that he gives us a snippet of history at the moment we need it and immediately returns to the story.

Also, every two or three chapters we get a section that zooms in on a particular artifact, such as the Flying Horse, discovered in 1969 in the village of Wuwei. Since archeologists were not available in the middle of the Cultural Revolution, the peasants who blundered onto the third century tomb while digging under a temple did the excavation and kept the many bronzes in their own homes until they were finally collected. The background and symbolism of the horse are teased out in a series of interviews that keep the reader’s attention engaged.

Our attention is held, too, by certain people and stories that are carried through the book, such as former students with whom Hessler stays in touch and the mystery surrounding a suicide. Also, descriptions of places come alive with a handful of details, such as this one of the Ju’er neighborhood of Beijing:

Some residents kept makeshift pigeon coops on their roofs, and they tied whistles to the birds, so that the flock sounded when it passed overhead. In the old parts of Beijing, that low-pitched hum, rising and falling as the birds soared across the sky, was the mark of a beautiful clear day. In late afternoons, the trash man pushed his cart through the hutong, blowing a whistle. The sound faded as he made his way out of the neighborhood; usually he was gone just before sunset. Nights were silent.

What sent me to this book were the lovely quotations credited to it in Hélène, by Deborah Poe, such as the epigraph from Chuang-Tzu about the use and limitation of words. My favorite is this from Chen Mengjia, a poet and scholar: “I crushed my chest and pulled out a string of songs.”

I particularly liked Hessler’s evaluation near the end of the commonalities and differences between China and the U.S. We have more in common than you might think.

Change has only accelerated for China since 2002, but this book is a good place to start if you want to understand modern China amid the fragments of its long past.

What book have you read about modern China?

The People in the Trees, by Hanya Yanagihara

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A newly-graduated doctor sent in 1950 on an anthropological expedition to an island in the South Pacific to find a lost tribe: sounds like it might be an adventure story. However, by making the bulk of this novel Dr. Norton Perina’s memoir, Yanagihara turns it into an intense psychological portrait of a thoroughly unpleasant man.

In the memoir, which is introduced and edited by his obsequious assistant Dr. Ronald Kubodera, Perina describes his childhood, isolated on a farm with his fraternal twin. The two spend their time torturing insects and small animals as well as their mother; Perina despises both his parents for their uselessness and lack of ambition.

After medical school his brilliance is finally rewarded by his inclusion on the expedition. Ivu’ivu is thought to be uninhabited and cursed, but Paul Tallent, leader of the expedition, has reason to believe it harbors a lost tribe who live to an advanced age. The description, through Perina’s eyes, of his first encounter with the jungles and people of Ivu’ivu is brilliant, vividly evoking the sounds and smells of this new world and Perina’s wonder and anxiety.

Perina’s discovery on the island and his amoral behaviour around it lead to fame and fortune and the Nobel Prize. However, we learn from the first pages that he is in prison for sexually abusing one of the 43 children he adopted from the island.

When I finished the book, I felt strongly that the pedophilia plot detracted from the story. It was nowhere near as intensely written as Perina’s trips to the island and seemed to be included purely for gratuitous shock value and to provide a climax at the end.

Perina’s story of his discovery and the consequences for Ivu’ivu and its people raise questions of power, colonialism and abuse of both nature and people. It also raises questions of how to evaluate a genius who is also a sociopath—a question much in the news of late as gifted and famous men are forced out amid revelations of abuse. That important and nuanced story did not need to be wrapped in a simple soap opera about pedophilia.

However, I later learned that, while the island and its tribe are fictional, Perina’s trajectory is based on the true story of a Dr. Carleton Gajdusek who won a Nobel Prize for his work among the Fore tribe in Papua New Guinea on kuru, a fatal disease. Gajdusek later went to prison for the same reason his fictional counterpart did. It may not always be the right thing to include every aspect of the story that inspired you.

This first novel shows some of the author’s strengths that made her second, A Little Life, a huge bestseller. She doles out information in such a way that for every question answered, new questions emerge, thus keeping the reader from getting too frustrated while maintaining the suspense. Her male characters—and all the primary characters are male—are deeply characterised, by which I mean that we have full confidence that she thoroughly understands all their formative experiences, their demons and angels, their subtlest shadings.

The weaknesses are here as well. The single female character is presented as an unpleasant stereotype, though this is only to be expected since we learn about her through Perina’s eyes. Perina is born into wealth and becomes much richer through his famous discovery. The fact that all four protagonists in A Little Life also became fabulously rich and famous was one of the factors that left me bored and unmoved by the story.

Worse, though, is that both narrators here are thoroughly unpleasant. I felt that way about the protagonists in her second book as well, though not everyone agrees with me.

Aside from their obvious pathologies, both Perina and his assistant are unreliable narrators. For example, Perina at one point claims that he went to Ivu’ivu solely for the adventure when it is obvious that he was desperate to be the center of attention. Equally he claims that his childhood torturing of insects, animals and even his mother is only what every small boy does.

What I did like about this book that I didn’t find in the second book is the attempt to grapple with serious problems. Because we are limited by Perina’s self-serving point of view, and notes by his loyal assistant, the issues of power, colonialism and abuse are sketched in broad strokes. In retrospect Perina is sorry for the changes he brought to the area, but unrepentant, saying any scientist would do the same, and he himself, knowing the result, would certainly do it all again.

The changes are so horrific, as are Perina’s crimes against the children, that we have no choice about what to conclude, both about these issues and the question of how to evaluate a genius who is also a sociopath. Still, obvious as our conclusions must be, it is good to be reminded of these horrors that continue to occur today.

We discussed the title in my new book group without coming to any conclusion. The tribe is not in the trees but in their village. Perhaps it is meant to remind us of the song Strange Fruit, though I think the comparison is strained; both peoples suffered tragically but differently.

We were also reminded of Euphoria, of course, the novelisation of a portion of Margaret Mead’s life. Though I disliked that book for its tampering with the facts of Mead’s life, it does approach the issues of colonialism and tampering with more depth and subtlety.

Still, this book is a good read if you can bear to spend so many pages with someone so awful. The writing keeps you turning page after page, and the psychological portrait of a narcissistic sociopath is brilliant.

Have you read a novel based on a real person? Did it change your view of the person?

Accounted For: Poems, by Jeannine Savard

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A chorus of voices fill this 2011 collection of poems from Red Hen Press. People crowd the pages, alone or in company, describing prayers and portents, dreams and deserts. Savard uses the things of this world—donkeys, gold silk, stars, wild thyme—to ground emotions and epiphanies. Like Virginia Woolf’s “moments of being”, each poem holds a cup of liquid light.

However, much as I reveled in individual phrases, sometimes the objects and images came too fast for me, piled on top of one another, without enough context for me to follow.

I first understood what appealed to me in poetry when I read Robert Bly’s Leaping Poetry. He says:

My idea, then, is that a great work of art often has at its center a long floating leap . . . The work can have many leaps, perhaps shorter. The real joy of poetry is to experience this leaping inside a poem.

Graves maintains that the leap enables the reader to access the unconscious. He calls it “a leap from the conscious to the unconscious and back again.” While that may be true, I instead think of it as being given the space to bring my own experience, my own emotions into the poem.

I love when two images come up against each other, the liminal space between them resonating with sounds neither can summon on their own. Similarly, an artist can lay down two strips of color on canvas and where they meet, our eyes see a spectrum of colors faintly vibrating. For example, in one of my favorite poems, “In a Radiant Field”, Savard says:

Touching her own ribs
she overhears the years of a tree

before the lightning struck.

She gives us a moment to hold these two images, of ribs and rings, and let them echo before summoning the lightning strike.

However, too much obscurity, too much private meaning invested in the image leaves the reader stranded on one side of the gulf. As Bly says of Neruda: “The links are not private, but somehow bound into nature.”

In several of the poems in this collection, the gaps are sometimes too wide for me, rendering the poems impenetrable. Perhaps there were allusions that I didn’t recognise or my brain couldn’t move fast enough. Bly goes on to say:

Thought of in terms of language, then, leaping is the ability to associate fast. In a great ancient or modern poem, the considerable distance between the associations, the distance the spark has to leap, gives the lines their bottomless feeling, their space, and the speed of the association increases the excitement of the poetry.

Other poems, with time, yielded meaning. “Ekstasis”, for example, conjures in cascades of images the experience of different kinds of music, the sound of the words as important as the images themselves, such as “Acoustical honey” and “Nine parrots come pecking at the foot of the porch stairs.”

As writers we struggle with finding the line between saying too much and saying too little. Certainly, as readers we want to do some of the work, not be spoonfed, but finding that line can be difficult. Trusted readers can help. I rely on my critique group to let me know when I haven’t provided enough information or am being too obvious.

To make it even harder, individual readers bring their own preferences and experience to a poem. I’ve participated in a poetry discussion group for several decades, enjoying the opportunity to explore in depth the work of a different poet every month. A side benefit has been hearing how others react. Tastes vary wildly. People interpret words, phrases, images differently. Their disparity has nothing to do with right or wrong, good or bad.

I found many of the poems in this collection difficult. When the juxtaposition of images worked for me, I experienced the excitement Bly describes. Always, I appreciate the vividness of her descriptions and am happy to immerse myself in the music of her words. I love, too, the way she tests the barriers, trying to surmount what holds us apart. As she says in “Sky Treasure”, our history is the “cry of so many hungers, / no boundary in between.”

What excites you in a poem?

Selected Poems II, 1976-1986, by Margaret Atwood

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I came to Atwood through her fiction, but it is her poetry that has come to mean the most to me. For me, her poems from this period expressed my own complicated mix of sorrow, pity, praise, and controlled rage.

As in her fiction, Atwood sometimes uses a female protagonist to shed new light on social issues. Most poems about the myth of Orpheus focus on his divine music and tragedy of his trip to the underworld to bring his wife Eurydice back to the realm of the living. However, Atwood’s “Orpheus (1)” gives us the voice of Eurydice who says, “the return/to time was not my choice.” She speaks of his “old leash . . . love you might call it” and says:

Before your eyes you held steady
the image of what you wanted
me to become: living again.
It was this hope of yours that kept me following.

In these few lines, Atwood captures the frustration of women wanting to be seen for themselves, not something to be molded to their husband’s fantasy, along with the patient kindness, the desire to spare him hurt that keeps us silent.

Myths and fairy tales are subtexts in many of these poems. In “Variation On The Word Sleep”, she alludes to several fairy tales, including one of my favorites: The Twelve Dancing Princesses.

I would like to give you the silver
branch, the small white flower, the one
word that will protect you
from the grief at the center
of your dream, from the grief
at the center I would like to follow
you up the long stairway
again & become
the boat that would row you back
carefully, a flame
in two cupped hands . . .

Atwood’s Canadian identity has informed much of her critical work, including her landmark book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. Published in 1972, it makes a case that Canadian literature reflects a unique national identity, one derived from the harsh conditions in the frozen north and the clear-eyed accounts by early pioneers trying to survive in the wilderness. This somber theme works its way through many of the poems in this collection, sometimes emerging in strong, unpretty images. In “Flying Inside Your Own Body”, for example, she describes

Waking, your heart is a shaken fist,
a fine dust clogs the air you breathe in;
the sun’s a hot copper weight pressing straight
down on the thick pink rind of your skull.

That sense of the landscape as something hostile is tempered by her ecological awareness and sometimes difficult love for the things of this world. In “Marsh, Hawk” she describes a swamp and “a mass grave” of detritus—rotten trees, old tires, bottles and cans—that “spreads on the / land like a bruise.” But the poem takes a left turn in the middle, as so many of Atwood’s poems do, as the speaker wants the marsh rushes / to bend aside, the water / to accept us”, to become one with the complicated beauty of the physical world.

In much of her writing, Atwood draws inspiration from historical figures, particularly Canadian ones, such as Susanna Moody. Some of the poems in this collection seem to draw on this awareness. Sometimes she seems to be speaking for those who came before us.

In Negotiating with the Dead, a collection of her Empson lectures, she says, “Not just some, but all writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and fascination with mortality – by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead.”

What themes or preoccupations do you see in one of your favorite writers?

Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things, by Amy Dickinson

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There are many reasons to write a memoir: to work through a personal trauma, to leave a record for your family, to try to understand how you’ve gotten to this place in your life, to name just a few. Not all such memoirs are appropriate for publication, or in fact written with publication in mind.

While it’s true that for a few years there were quite a few illness and grief memoirs published that were thought to be useful to others suffering similar calamities, that time has passed. With such a glut of what my friend calls “woe-is-me” memoirs, publishers and the reading public look for something more than a sad story.

To be commercially published today, memoirs must be well-written—always a priority!—and addressing some larger social issue, something that the general public will find interesting. Take, for example, Hillbilly Elegy which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago. True, it had a bit too much woe-is-me for my taste, but it hit the mark commercially by telling the inside story of what it’s like to grow up in the white working class in an environment where there’s not much work anymore.

You’re probably already raising your hand and saying, “But what about . . .?” Yes, the exception to this rule is a memoir by a celebrity. Fame is a peculiar sort of intimacy, where we feel we know someone from their shows or books, but at the same time know that we don’t know them at all. I recently devoured The Memory of All That, a memoir by Betsy Blair’s memoir of her marriage to Gene Kelly. As a huge fan, I was relieved to find him portrayed as the truly decent man I’d thought him.

Dickinson’s memoir wins on all three counts. Roughly chronological, the story flows well, written in forthright prose sweetened by a generous dose of humor. While pulling no punches in telling her own story, Dickinson invites us to look at families and small-town life, how we are different and how we are the same. And as the author of the syndicated “Ask Amy” column and a regular on Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me . . . !, she has a legion of fans already.

And did I say it was funny? I actually laughed aloud, startling the cat into bolting from the room. Most of the humor is directed at herself and her own foibles, but she doesn’t hesitate to bring out the quirks in those around her. She says of her mother:

One of Jane’s primary modes of home decorating was to saw the legs off of things. You’d go upstairs to bed at night, and in the morning when you came back downstairs, the kitchen table had become a coffee table. Growing up, we got used to it.

People in my memoir classes often ask how to handle criticising family or friends. They want to tell their story honestly but avoid hurting or offending other people. I believe the key is to respect their privacy as much as possible and, when you have to show them in a bad light, do it with love. Try to understand why they behaved as they did. One factor in The Glass Castle’s success was the way Jeannette Walls told us all the horrible things her parents did, yet she always spoke of them with love and explained their reasoning.

In this book, Dickinson is generous and truly writes from love, even about her ne’er-do-well father who not only abandoned the family but sold off all their assets and absconded with the money.

When you need a laugh or reassurance that life can be crazy and good at the same time, pick up this book. It is an excellent read: honest, plain-spoken, and full of the humor found in daily life.

Can you recommend a warm and humorous book? Or share a joke?