Shikibu, Murasaki. The Tale of the Genji. Translated by Edward Seidensticker. New York: Knopf, 1992. 

I read this tome of 1,184 pages aloud to my partner for numerous evenings over three months. I believe there were several advantages to digesting the work in this manner. One, even though it is a translation, one does sense the delicacy of the Japanese royal court depicted in the early 11th century, the apparent highly educated level of its men and women. I selected this book because author Jane Smiley includes it as number one in her list of 100 books found in Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Novel, and I was curious. Reading aloud also prevents the reader from falling asleep from the apparently repetitive or rhythmic nature (heavily tied to the seasons) of the narrative. Many rituals also are linked to certain days of certain months. Finally, I believe, there is a narrative tone that I, as the reader, am finally able to master to some degree, reading exposition one way, dialogue (according to each character) in another, the poetic passages in yet another. At least I believe so.
 
Most scholars, including Smiley, consider this book the first novel. In large part that may be true. The complex narrative does sustain itself over a long period, more than fifty years, exploring the lives of two primary characters (Genji and his son) and their cohorts. However, there exist some differences. Many times Genji feels like a long narrative that drifts from story to story, as one wanders from room to room of the sprawling architecture of the court’s many palaces. Genji may be the first novel but only in the same way that a Model-T Ford is one of the earliest mass-produced cars. It’s a bit primitive, a suggestion of what is to come.
 
Shikibu does make great use of figurative language, particularly as it relates to nature, as well as the supernatural. She employs trees, flowers, bramble, snow, rain, wind to make comparisons. At the same time, she speaks, on behalf of characters who must believe in this heavily Buddhist period, of former lives now paying for past sins. They follow the Blessed One, are bothered by evil or devilish spirits who, among other things, cause characters to become ill or die. Spirits seem to be a continuation of life on Earth. They can’t accept the peace of death. Furthermore, Shikibu uses foreshadowing to great effect. The savvy reader catches these and appreciates her arrow-pointing. At the same time, Shikibu has some practices that seem underdeveloped. Often, in dialogue, she does not remind the reader who is speaking. And though the omniscient narrator has for a long time been a literary convention, Shikibu herself shifts to the first person numerous times through sly, wink-and-a-nod sort of asides—most often to excuse herself for not adding more detail to a certain scene: “There were many others [poems], but I neglected to set them down” (727). These instances seem clumsy compared to how that POV has been handled since the nineteenth century. She also demonstrates an odd sense of narrative pace, often extending a single scene over pages but passing over a longer era by way of a single sentence. A stylistic quirk, or lack of development?
 
Though Genji is presented as one tome, it is in reality two separate books. The eponymous character, Genji, dies at the end of chapter forty-one. The second part of the narrative is about his heirs. It seems that the first part is more complex, more alive, whereas the complexity of the second part diminishes to no more than a romance novel. But even this characteristic may be the result of serious intent on the part of Shikibu. Perhaps she wishes to portray a certain vapidity among the royals, whose voluptuous but empty lives are repeated again and again throughout the centuries by way of their own progeny. She may also be portraying a social transition. This work is more or less the view of the court, for even the royal servants have status that ordinary Japanese outside of its realm do not have. There is no mention of Samurai warriors or a military or any kind. No battles. No skirmishes that are found in the writing of male novelists, giving the book a uniquely feminine flair. One final thought: Shikibu does not seem to capture at a sophisticated level the characters’ emotions. The only exception may be the emotion of sadness, during which times she refers to their copious tears or their weeping or crying. There seems to be little joy or the portrayal of even ordinary emotions. Perhaps she is only portraying the culture as it appears to her, one where most royals hide their emotions from each other.
 
It seems that this book is much more complex and sophisticated than anything that was happening in Europe at the same time (one may disagree). The use of indirection alone is something that Jane Austen or Alcott would employ much later in time. During any other era I might not have taken the time to read this book, but given the need to do something constructive during the evenings of Covid, I think it a great gift to have done so now.

FRIDAY, 12/4/20: My Book World | Oscar Lewis's Five Families 

​Greenwell, Garth. What Belongs to You. New York: Farrar, 2016.
            
I read Greenwell’s more recent novel, Cleanness, first, a few months earlier. It almost seems that that novel about a young American teacher of high school literature in Sofia, Bulgaria, could be a sequel to this one, Greenwell’s first. If “R” is the same “R” in both novels, then the narrator meets “R” in this the first novel, but he is not in the picture much.
 
No, this is indeed a different novel. In Part I, “Mitko,” the narrator meets the eponymous hustler, in a public rest room and gets entangled in his life of drugs, though not as a user himself. The narrator is charmed by the sparely built, handsome young man, so much so that he gives him money for various enterprises until he realizes he is only enabling Mitko. Mitko is sent on his way though he will make more appearances.
 
In Part II, “Grave,” the narrator is informed of his father’s death and returns to the States. In a long passage, that is both expansive and yet compressed, readers learn how the almost idyllic relationship he has with his father as a boy comes to an end when he confesses to his father that he is gay. Almost every gay man in the world can identify with the sense of rejection and betrayal the narrator feels.
 
In “Pox,” Part III, Mitko returns to inform the narrator that he has not only contracted syphilis but that the narrator and his lover, “R,” both need to get tested. The disease seems to be an apt metaphor for the poison that the three of them share at this point. Mitko is surprised when the narrator indicates it’s all right. It’s a disease; it’s treatable. “R” is much the same way when he is informed. No harm, no foul. Yet, like a bad penny, Mitko continues to return, wanting to start something up with the narrator again, but he realizes he cannot. One last time he sends Mitko on his way with enough money to buy a meal for his emaciated body and entrain his way back to his home town. In a moving final scene, the narrator entertains his mother who has never traveled outside the U.S. before. On a train trip, in a roomy but unairconditioned first class compartment with several others, the narrator is charmed by a young boy, who, he ultimately realizes, reminds him of Mitko: the same intelligence, the same robust fight with the world to be his own person. The powerful novel ends with the narrator at the clinic being told that they do not have the shots to treat his disease. He will have to go elsewhere for salvation.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Shikibu's Tale of Genji

Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness with a new preface by the author. New York: New Press, 2020 (2010).

This book should appear at some point on the syllabus of a required course in every college or university in America. Portions of it could be taught in our high schools. Adult reading groups of all stripes should read it. The book is that important. It is that good. “In 1972, fewer than 350,000 people were being held in prisons and jails nationwide, compared with more than 2 million people today” (10), states Alexander.
 
The New Jim Crow, however, is not only about numbers. It is about an entire philosophy in which White people can no longer discriminate outwardly (at the end of the old Jim Crow era) so in an era of colorblindness (“I don’t mind if she’s Black.”), they resort to setting up a new form of discrimination through mass incarceration. How does it work? It begins with the War on Drugs, in 1980, with the Reagan administration. It gains momentum with Bush Senior and gains real traction with Bill Clinton and Bush Junior. Alexander claims that even some of Obama’s policies contribute harm (though he does speak out against mass incarceration). With this new policy young Black and Brown men are given long sentences for minor drug infractions. Then when they finally return to their homes (uneducated and no longer young), they are marked as felons, so for the rest of their lives they cannot vote, cannot get jobs, and wind up in a constant loop of being prisoner or permanent criminal—all for a minor drug offense. And how do White men who commit the same offenses fare? Much better, because, one learns, all these cases are adjudicated by the police, who ignore White drug crime but not Black or Brown.
 
An excellent writer, Michelle Alexander makes her case in not only a lawyerly manner (perfect syllogisms) with logic and facts but also with heavy but artful doses of thinking from the greatest African-American scholars: Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. DuBois, and Martin Luther King, Junior. She is rough on every one of us but in the best Tough Love tradition. There is enough blame for us all but also enough room to turn this around. It won’t be easy, she declares, but by looking at the concept of Race squarely in the eye, we can do it. And I believe her.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Garth Greenwell's What Belongs to You

Edwards, George C. with a foreword by Neal R. Peirce. Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America. New Haven, Yale UP, 2004. 
 
For years the electoral college mystified me, but it seemed like a concept that worked because more or less the right candidate always won both the popular vote and the electoral college vote. Then came the 2000 election, a bizarre turn of events by which five people on the Supreme Court would, through their action/inaction allow the candidate with fewer popular votes to win. And one of those justices would tell the rest of us to get over it—instead of taking the time, like a reasoned person, to explain to us why we should get over it, why their decision was such a wise one. Another justice, years later, before her death, would confess that she regretted her vote. Nice. I hope it made her feel better. The electoral college is a roulette wheel that is loaded. Rigged. Like any roulette wheel, we don’t really know until the last second which way the falseness is going to lie.
 
Author Edwards logically and factually proves his thesis as to why the electoral college ought to be drummed out of existence. Interestingly, instead of beginning with the historical context of its origins, he begins with how the electoral college works, how it among other things, cheats the voters in a particular state who vote for the “losing” candidate who may actually have more popular votes. Most important in his discussions may be the idea of political equality or more important the political inequity that the electoral college tends to foster. The biggest takeaway from Edwards’s chapter on history is the recorded fact that the electoral college was not a well-thought-out concept that received rigorous attention from its founders. No, Philadelphia was hot that summer, and men [and I mean only men] formed the electoral college in a hurry, so that they could find cooler places in which to spend the rest of their summer vacations. At every turn, Edwards has an answer for those who would retain the electoral college, especially by noting when the proponents begin with false premises. The e.c. does not protect the smaller states, as some claim. It does not maintain cohesion and harmony among citizens. Candidates are not more attentive to small states with a low number of electors nor to large states that are entrenched in one party or another.
 
In the book’s foreword, scholar Neal R. Peirce sums up what is most flawed about the electoral college: “The electoral college process, Edwards reminds us, doesn’t simply aggregate or reflect popular votes; it consistently distorts and often directly misrepresents the votes citizens have cast. Indeed, the unit vote actually takes votes of the minority in individual states and awards those votes, in the national count, to the candidate they opposed” (x).
 
Don’t worry that Edwards’s tome was published in 2004; nothing much has changed concerning the institution. Author Edwards’s study is prescient in that he states emphatically that what happened in 2000 with Bush v. Gore will happen again. Voilà, 2016! The United States must abolish the electoral college when it comes to voting for the office of the president. The time to do so has past.
 
[This book published by Yale University Press has, by my count, five typographical errors derived mainly from a lack of close reading by copy editors—rather egregious for an Ivy League press, eh?]

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | Oscar Lewis's Five Families: Mexican Case Studies in the Culture of Poverty

​Hill, Fiona and Clifford G. Gaddy. Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin. New and 
Expanded. Washington: Brookings, 2015.
​
When I tuned in to President Trump’s impeachment trial at the end of 2019, I was impressed with the testimony of Fiona Hill, at that time former Deputy Assistant to the President and Senior Director for European and Russian Affairs on Trump’s National Security Council. Her credentials seemed impeccable, and I told myself I would read the book she co-authors with Mr. Gaddy.
 
The Hill/Gaddy team paint a portrait of Russian President Vladimir Putin that is not personal. They do not delve much into his upbringing or family life, only as those elements may apply to his long political life. They formulate what they refer to as Putin’s six identities, by which the book is structured: “the Statist, the History Man, the Survivalist, the Outsider, the Free Marketeer, and the (KGB) Case Officer (18).” The man manipulates or exploits each one of these identities in order to further his own career, his own strategies, and each study is an eye-opening view into the life of the real Mr. Putin.
 
Mr. Putin declares himself to be a gosudarstvennik, “a builder of the state, a servant of the state . . . a person who believes that Russia must be and must have a strong state” (40). The State is of ultimate importance, not the individual. Hill/Gaddy claim that “Putin continued with an analysis that echoed the language of the tsarist statist school, noting that Russia will ‘muscle up’ by ‘being open to change’ through state-sanctioned procedures and rules’” (55). The authors reinforce what President Obama once said of Putin, that Putin still maintains a nineteenth-century view of the world. He may utilize some of the tactics he learns while serving in the KGB, but his worldview is rooted in a glorified, pre-Soviet past: he aspires to be a tsar.
 
To summarize most of the other five areas, Putin manipulates history to strengthen his power. He is a survivalist who will do anything to get what he wants. Ultimately, his sense of strategy (over tactics, which only serve to fulfill his overarching set of goals) is one of his greatest strengths, one that Hill/Gaddy claim the West underestimates at its own peril. A man who creates a long-term strategy for the success of his State and is willing to do anything to see that it succeeds is to be to watched very carefully, something that the authors indicate the West has failed to do thus far. The West must see clearly how the man views himself, and the West, while not forfeiting its own values, must develop strategies for dealing with him, ones that realistically exploit his perceived strengths and weaknesses. Until the man is taken seriously, the rest of the world cannot deal with him in a realistic manner, and such a stance is not good for that world.

NEXT FRIDAY: My Book World | George C. Edwards's Why the Electoral College Is Bad for America.

Waldman, Michael. The Fight to Vote. New York: Simon, 2016. 

​I wish I had read this book when it came out during the run-up to the 2016 election—when I bought it. Even though the last chapters seem dated now, considering what the country has been through, the early chapters give an excellent historical account of how this country has ALWAYS been divided into two camps: those who would like to allow everyone to vote and those who would only have so-called elites vote. White (heterosexual, one assumes) male landowners comprised that group in colonial times: