FRIDAY: My Book World | Donna Jackson Nakazawa's Childhood Disrupted
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FRIDAY: My Book World | Donna Jackson Nakazawa's Childhood Disrupted
FRIDAY: My Book World | Donna Jackson Nakazawa's Childhood Disrupted
My Book World Forster, E. M. A Passage to India. New York: Houghton, 1984. Forster accomplishes so much in this novel first published in 1924. It is one of those books that, because of the author’s elegant but subtle insights, is timeless. Readers feel as if they are there in Chandrapore experiencing the British condescension towards Indians, experiencing the many geographical and topographical wonders, observing or participating in the various religious sects, which bubble up against one another yet are a bit tolerant of one another. It is against this rich backdrop that the novel’s tension unfolds. When a young Doctor Aziz first meets Mrs. Moore, a British visitor, it is in a mosque. Before thinking, he chastises her for not having removed her shoes, but quickly apologizes when she states that she already has done so. They strike up a friendship for she is anxious to befriend the Indians, to understand their beautiful land, and Doctor Aziz is only too pleased to oblige her. Forster also limns an Indian which is a stranger to us today, by way of Doctor Aziz. He is at by turns arrogant, defiant, then apologetic, childlike in his seeking of British approval, then ashamed, as a grown man that he has sunk so low. Since the British left India a long time ago, Indians have had time to regain or reframe their national profile while perhaps holding onto certain institutions the Brits left behind. In any case, cultures clash when Doctor Aziz, unconfident and really unwilling, is put in a position to take Mrs. Moore and her young female companion, Miss Quested, on a tour of Marabar Cave. It is a bitter irony that the expedition which he organizes explodes in his face, when something dark happens to Miss Quested in the cave, something for which Aziz is held directly responsible. The novel’s end provides an intriguing closure, when Aziz and his hard-won British friend (who’s moved back to England) returns to Chandrapore in the future for a visit. They have become quite fond of one another yet can never seem to consummate their friendship. The last paragraphs of the novel seems to sum up their 1924 dilemma: “‘Why can’t we be friends now?’ said the other, holding him affectionately. ‘It’s what I want. It’s what you want.’ NEXT WEEK: My Book World | TBD
TOMORROW: My Book World | E. M. Forster's A Passage to India
FRIDAY: My Book World | E. M. Forster's A Passage to India
FRIDAY: My Book World | E. M. Forster's A Passage to India
My Book World Tolentino, Jia. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion. New York: Random, 2019. Jia Tolentino may be one of the most eloquent spokespersons for members of the Millennial generation. These nine essays cover topics, among others, concerning her informed opinions about the Internet and social media. Another essay about her short stint in a Reality TV show is more confessional in nature, and brutally honest: “Reality TV enacts the various self-delusions of the emotionally immature: the dream that you are being closely watched, assessed, and categorized; the dream that your life itself is movie material, and that you deserve your own carefully soundtracked montage when you’re walking down the street” (44). My favorite essay may be “Pure Heroines,” one in which Tolentino takes a hard look at how girls and women are treated in literature. She goes deep on this topic, examining books that are from fifty to one hundred years old: writers like Maud Hart Lovelace (whom I read in elementary school), E. L. Konigsburg, Lucy Maud Montgomery. But this discussion is to lay the foundation for her look at more contemporary literature. Tolentino’s observation is that the girl-heroines, who are brave and outspoken in childhood, become hemmed in by the sexism and patriarchy in adulthood. “Traditionally, male literary characters are written and received as emblems of the human condition rather than the male one . . . [f]emale literary characters, in contrast, indicate the condition of being a woman. They are condemned to a universe that revolves around sex and family and domesticity” (118). Yet I also enjoyed “The Cult of the Difficult Woman,” and the final essay, “I Thee Dread,” in which Tolentino declares that in her young adulthood (born 1988), she and her partner (she plans never to marry) have attended forty-six weddings, expending over a period of nine years as much as $35,000 to gift their friends, arrange for transportation to the weddings, not to mention the “uniform” and finally hotel accommodations. But if one is spending an average of $30,000 for a wedding why not expect your guests to put out their share, as well, eh? Jia’s primary objection to marriage is the inequity that awaits a woman once she crosses the threshold into wedded unbliss. Here, Tolentino deftly references her title, providing a sort of recap of her entire book: “I wonder if women today would so readily accept the unequal diminishment of the independence without their sense of self-importance being overinflated first. It feels like a trick, a trick that has worked and is still working, that the bride remains the image of womanhood at its most broadly celebrated—and that planning a wedding is the only period in a woman’s life where she is universally and unconditionally encouraged to conduct everything on her terms” (289). After that, the bride’s life is over as she splits into two personalities: one who is “large and resplendent,” and one who “vanishes underneath the name change and the veil” (290). Tolentino nails not only this vision of marriage (the thesis is not original) but she does so for her generation of women who still seem to be falling into the trick mirror of self-delusion.
NEXT WEEK: My Book World | TBD
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18: My Book World | Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18: My Book World | Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror
FRIDAY, OCTOBER 18: My Book World | Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self Delusion
My Book World Porter, Regina. The Travelers. New York: Hogarth, 2019.
This barely three-hundred-page novel contains a cast of thirty-five characters and spans nearly fifty years of American life from the 1970s until President Obama’s first term in office. At times, one must check back at the beginning to see who is whom. But for the most part, Porter does a remarkable job of refreshing the reader’s memory when the time comes. Even more remarkable, she paints a picture of our country as it really is: a world inhabited by white and black people who intermarry, have children, some of whom belong to the LGBTQ community. Is it all love and roses as our hippy friends of the seventies (including me) had hoped our future would be? Not by a long shot. The life she unearths is as messy as an all-white or an all-black one, but it is a life that is also marked with joys and trials of raising children, finding one’s own place in the world. This is a novel of high and low culture, one in which Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, becomes a major motif throughout the book, but a work in which current argot makes a place for itself without being annoying. It is a novel that requires the reader to put the nonlinear pieces together, a novel for now and always. NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-50 Oregon
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Regina Porter's novel, The Travelers
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the fiftieth post of fifty. Oregon (2015)Not only do I get to conclude my fifty-part series with the thoughts of one of my favorite childhood authors, Beverly Cleary, who lives at age 103, but with one of my favorite states. Ken and I arrived at our destination, Oceanside, in the middle of June, 2015. Our friends whom we met at Oceanside, had cautioned us about a sort of mix master coming through Portland, and we had studied digital maps galore, but we still managed to lose a lane and wind up for a few panicked seconds wondering where our car would go. It all worked out. The four of us shared a lovely three-bedroom house on a steep hill. Luckily, it was sunny the entire time, yet the temps never rose above the mid-fifties. We were privileged to witness a double low-tide, in which more beach than usual was exposed, leaving a great deal of sea life visible until the tide returned. I captured a bit of that beauty in the photos above, also a few other sights we managed to take in along the coast. Oregon was the 33rd state to join the union in 1859 and celebrated its sesquicentennial in 2009. Historical Postcards and Trunk DecalsIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World | Regina Porter's Novel The Travelers
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-50 Oregon
My Book World Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. With illustrations by Charles W. Schwartz. London: Oxford, 1949. I came across this tome while letting a house in the hill country of Texas, a place where the landowners raise native grass and wildflower seeds for wide distribution and sales, also a place where owners protect the environment and earnestly promote its care. The author, born in the late 1880s, is around sixty when he writes this book about ecology. At that time he already sees the Earth’s demise headed our way, now seventy years ago. And people wonder why we should be on fire about the current state of world environment? Since the age of early industrialization, humankind has been killing off the world, one species of botany and zoology at a time. And we’re still at it: cars and jets, fracking, coal. Land, sea, and air ruined daily one molecule at a time, even if the sun is shining, even if, in the middle of an ocean, you see nothing but blue (you haven’t yet spotted the great vortex of plastic bottles). The decay, the earth’s demise is there, rolling in slow motion. And Leopold sees this. Seventy years ago! Leopold expresses his deep love for Nature with a lengthy history of a good oak taking seed in 1865. Metaphorically, he cuts it down, and, by surveying its eighty rings, can tell the reader what traumas the local ecology has experienced: “Now we cut 1910, when a great university president published a book on conservation, a great sawfly epidemic killed millions of tamaracks, a great drouth burned the pineries, and a great dredge drained Horicon Marsh. I cannot go on, but the author continues, year by year, until the fallen oak has revealed all that the land has enjoyed or endured, usually at the hand of human beings, politicians who have little understanding nor care for the environment: “The congressmen who voted money to clear the ranges of bears were the sons of pioneers. They acclaimed the superior virtues of the frontiersman, but they strove with might and main to make an end of the frontier” (137). Leopold reveals bitter irony after irony, desecration after desecration of our native earth, and, again I say, seventy years ago! And still, we (as a species) do not listen.
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-50 Oregon
NEXT TIME: My Book World | Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac
MY JOURNEY OF STATES is a series in which I relate my sixty-year quest to visit all fifty states in the U.S. In each post I tell of my relationship to that state, whether brief or long, highlighting personal events. I include the year of each state's entry into the union and related celebrations. I hope you enjoy my journey as much as I have. This is the forty-ninth post of fifty. WYOMING (2014)Perhaps my best memory of Wyoming is a visit to Devil’s Tower, the unusual geological structure that Steven Spielberg features in his 1977 film, Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Ken and I arrived at the nearest town, Hulett, in May 2014, and stayed in the Best Western there. At breakfast our first morning, after a snow had taken state residents by surprise (though not really, if you’ve lived there long enough), the proprietor of the motel was lamenting that their winter had begun early in the previous October, when a great snow had fallen before the leaves had even dropped from the trees—making for a long and bitter season. Devil’s Tower is a breathtaking sight. A narrow asphalt walk surrounds the entire circumference, making a hike around the butte a delightful experience. Your camera cannot take too many photographs. Wyoming was the forty-forth state to enter the Union in 1890. HISTORICAL POSTCARDS AND TRUNK DECALSIf you missed earlier My Journey of States posts, please click on a link: NEXT TIME: My Book World | Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac
NEXT TIME: My Journey of States-49 Wyoming
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AUTHOR
Richard Jespers is a writer living in Lubbock, Texas, USA. See my profile at Author Central:
http://amazon.com/author/rjespers Archives
May 2025
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