So Far in 2017

So Far in 2017

So this blog is really challenging to keep up with.  I'm not exactly sure why.  Perhaps I am over-thinking it, trying to make it into something it doesn't need to be or something I don't even want it to be.  It's just a little journal of my reading, that's all.  And it's only some of my reading, not all of it.  And there's no contest, no judging, no grade, no right or wrong answer.  Right?  So here I am again, thinking I'll try to get back at it and try to keep up better.  Because like I said before, just because I'm not writing doesn't mean I'm not reading. 

Since I last wrote, I have visited Germany, Burma, Nigeria, Cuba, Hong Kong, Papua New Guinea, Italy, and France!  Plus several in the USA, of course, but I don't write about those.  That's a lot of countries and books to cover ... might not get them all in this one post.  Here we go ...

GERMANY

In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin

by Erik Larson

I really wanted to enjoy this nonfiction work about U.S. Ambassador William Dodd's time in Germany during Hitler's rise to power.  Having served the U.S. government overseas in two U.S. embassies abroad and also in Washington DC, I understand the diplomatic world and was intrigued by what it must have been like to represent the United States in Germany during that period of history.  Regrettably, this book was enormously disappointing.  I wanted insight about how ... and why ... the United States stood by and watched it all happen without intervening ... or how they missed even seeing the opportunity to intervene ... or why they believed they were not in a position to have taken action of some kind during that critical and horrific period in our world's history.  What Larson delivered, in my opinion, was primarily a dull and uninspiring litany of boring details about the Ambassador's personal life and his daughter, Martha's promiscuous and entitled behavior.  I am aware that many, many people enjoyed this book and found value in it.  I'd love to be persuaded that my impression is biased, skewed, narrow, or just flat out wrong.  Anyone?

BURMA

The Piano Tuner

by Daniel Mason

Author Daniel Mason is a magician with the English language.  His poetic and mesmerizing narrative weaves characters that jump off the page as if they are real people, sitting in your living room, telling you their stories.  This lovely novel is about a quiet and unobtrusive piano tuner, Edgar Drake, who is commissioned by the British War Office to travel to far-away Burma where he will repair a rare and costly piano.  Confused about why such a valuable musical instrument has been transported to the middle of the uncivilized jungle where heat and humidity risk damaging it beyond repair, Edgar's long, slow, and arduous journey affords him plenty of time to learn the history not only of the piano, but also of the army doctor who has won over the Burmese natives through art, poetry, and especially music.  Edgar  hears the story multiple times, told by different narrators in varying styles and with varying levels of truth.  Nothing can prepare him though for what he experiences when he arrives and finds himself feeling more alive than ever before.  The first half of the novel is stronger than the second half, and I slogged my way through a bit towards the end.  But the imagery and poetic crafting of the words make it more than worthwhile.

If you'd like to read a book set in Burma, I would strongly recommend The Art of Hearing Heartbeats, by San-Philipp Sendker, which is one of my all-time favorite novels.  I read this book in January 2013, just a little over a year after my father died.  It was the perfect book for me at that particular moment in my life.  It reads like a fairy tale that is real enough you don't have to completely suspend disbelief, but magical enough to draw you into all the beautiful hidden messages that hover just below the surface of the story.  In the novel, as in true life, all is not as it may seem.  The main character, Julia, who has also lost her father, has to come to terms with the realization that she really knew very little of who her father was.  But as she becomes caught up in the story within her story, she not only makes her peace with this reality, but also comes to understand that this is perhaps the way it's meant to be.  If you're like me, you'll find yourself thinking about love, loyalty, imagination, the meaning of life, the contract of cultures, and the importance of making the most of every second of your life.  There is definitely a spiritual feel to the book, so wait until you're in the right mood to read it ... but definitely read it.  I was enchanted. 

NIGERIA

Americanah

by Chimananda Ngozi Adichie

Okay, nothing I say here is going to adequately convey how powerful this novel is.  Another highly relevant fictional look at critical issues of our time, Americanah tackles the concept of race in the United States and contrasts the protagonist's experience of being black both here and in Nigeria, where nearly everyone is black and race is not emphasized.  The story begins in Nigeria when Ifemelu and Obinze are teenagers, falling in love just as their country comes under military rule.  They both leave ... Ifemelu to join a family member in the United States, and Obinze to London.  She goes legally, with all the necessary documents, and finds that life in America is not all what her aunt had represented.  She is poor, lonely, and forced to make unthinkable decisions in order to survive.  Meanwhile, Obinze gives up on being able to follow her to America, so he sets out for the United Kingdom.  He is without legal documentation and finds himself immersed in a world that is fraught with secrets, compromises, worry, and isolation.  Years later, Ifemelu makes her way back to Nigeria, where she once again meets Obinze, who returned long before.  Their respective experiences have changed them, shaping their understanding of the world, themselves, and each other in ways they could not have predicted.  This is an incredible, thought-provoking novel that won the 2013 National Book Critics Circle Fiction award, is a bestseller, and should be required reading for anyone who wants to dig deeper into the social construct of race.

CUBA

The German Girl

by  Armando Lucas Correa

I don't know if I want to get into anything too political here, but let's just say that this book was amazingly relevant considering the times in which we are currently living and the ongoing public debate about immigrants, particularly refugees, and whether they should be allowed to enter the United States to find safety.  It would be dishonest if I did not, however, make it clear that I am unequivocally pro-refugee and pro-immigrant, that I believe all human being are deserving of and entitled to safety and security, and that failure to respond with open arms to those seeking refuge would be the ultimate failure of our humanity.  Yeah, so maybe I do want to be a little political, although one might argue that this isn't really about politics ... it's just about being decent.

As I've watched this public debate evolve, with one side saying "let them in" and the other saying "keep them out," I have thought many times about the ship of Jewish refugees that left Germany and arrived at a port in the United States, only to be turned away without allowing a single human to disembark.  Imagine the terror those passengers must have felt upon learning that they would not be welcomed.  It is a dark spot on our history and one that should not ever be repeated.  Yet here we are, several decades later, having the Exact Same Conversation!  I am astonished and ashamed that we continue to speak from a place of fear and privilege in this manner (so many places of privilege that I won't delve into right now ... for now, just this one particular moment of incredible ugliness and arrogance that mars our history and threatens, unbelievably, to mar us again.)  

With this in the backdrop, I picked up The German Girl because of its setting in Cuba, not realizing until I was partway into the story that it is about that very ship of souls, those 937 passengers who had left Germany in 1939 to escape the Third Reich and were turned away, first from Cuba and then from the United States.  In the novel, young Hannah is aboard the St. Louis with her parents, her best friend Leo, and Leo's father.  She is confused and does not understand what is really happening, but she tries to piece it together based on bits of overheard conversations and what she can see with her own eyes.  When the ship arrives in Havana, Cuba, only a few passengers are allowed to get off and remain.  Hannah and her mother are among them ... all the rest, including her beloved father and young Leo, sail away, looking for another safe place to land.  Hannah never sees them again, and this of course, shapes and defines who she becomes.  Many years later, her great-niece Anna comes from New York to visit and to help her piece together an understanding and acceptance of what happened to her and those she loved.  Much of the novel is set in Cuba and offers a fascinating glimpse through the eyes of a young refugee of that country's transition to the totalitarian communist state that is currently is.

I wonder ... how long before someone writes a novel about those refugees left in dangerous places as a result of what is happening now?

HONG KONG

 Girl in Translation

by Jean Kwok

and

The Expatriates and The Piano Teacher

by Janice Y.K. Lee

I did not intend to read three books set in Hong Kong all in a row.  In fact, typically I would resist reading even two in a row that are set in the same place or have too much else in common.  I like to mix things up when I read, and this is probably why I don't usually enjoy series.  Even when I love the characters, I just find myself thinking that there are so many books out there, and so little time to read them, I'd rather not spend too much time in one particular world.  The first two Hong Kong books were completely accidental ... I pulled Girl in Translation off my shelf after it had been there for quite a while, then The Expatriates appeared under my Christmas tree and I wanted to dive in right away.  I enjoyed The Expatriates so much that when I remembered I had The Piano Teacher, by the same author, sitting right there on the bookshelf, I went ahead and read it right away.

Girl in Translation actually takes place primarily in New York.  Kimberly Chang and her mother have immigrated from Hong Kong to the United States with the help of an aunt, who then feels no shame about housing them in deplorable conditions and putting them to work in her husband's Chinatown sweatshop so they can work off their passage to America.  The novel offers a disconcerting look into the world of the sweatshop, right here in our country, and into the heart and mind of a bright young girl who is determined to make a better life for herself and her mother.  Kimberly makes all of her choices based on what will be best for her mother, what will help them to progress in their new lives, and what may enable them to break away from her cruel aunt.  The weight of these responsibilities impacts every facet of her life, from how hard she studies to whom she chooses for friends to whether she allows herself to fall in love.

The Expatriates follows the stories of several women who have each arrived in Hong Kong through different avenues and whose lives intersect as they try to find their footing in a strange place.  Hilary, grappling with her inability to have a child, has become attached to a little boy in a local orphanage but can't quite bring herself to move forward to adopt him.  She is immobilized by her husband's ambivalence and her own uncertainty about how strong she is and whether she could be a mother on her own.  Margaret has followed her husband to Hong Kong, where she finds unspeakable tragedy and struggles to keep going for the sake of her children.  And Mercy, a confused, young, Korean-American woman, is running away from her loneliness, finds herself in Hong Kong, where she unwittingly plays a part in Margaret's loss.  Her desperation to be forgiven is tangible and poignant.

Finally, in The Piano Teacher, we go back in time to Hong Kong during World War II.  This is the story of a British expatriate, Will Truesdale, and his love affairs with two women, ten years apart from each other in time.  Trudy, half Portuguese and half Chinese, is the great love of his life ... a beautiful and wild young woman of privilege, the one he would have married if not for the Japanese occupation of Hong Kong during the war.  As a foreigner, Will is imprisoned in a camp along with other expatriates from countries that were enemies of Japan.  On the outside of the camp, Trudy is struggling to make the best of the horror that life in Hong Kong has become.  She makes some brutally difficult choices, not necessarily good or even justifiable, but she does what she must in order to survive.

Ten years later, Claire arrives in Hong Kong with her new husband, and encounters Will, who is a completely different person after the war.  They fall into a passionate, but not romantic, relationship, and Claire unwittingly unravels a dark piece of history that involves Will and the wealthy, influential Chen family, whose daughter is her piano student.  The characters in this book are actually extremely unlikeable.  I found Trudy to be careless and spoiled; Claire, vapid and naïve; and Will, weak and malleable.  However, the historical component of this novel kept me turning the pages.  The Japanese invasion of Hong Kong is a little-mentioned episode in world history, and I found it fascinating to read about the political and military setting as well as the impact the Japanese presence had on Hong Kong's society.  There was a compelling subplot that added a little bit of mystery and psychological intrigue.  I would recommend this book to others, just don't expect too much of the characters.

Stay tuned for more...