"The great Indian rooster coop"

Continuing the theme of narrators who feel trapped by the society in which they live, Balram Halwai, a young Indian man, recounts his life history in The White Tiger. This is an epistolary novel and Balram is writing to Wen Jiabao. Hearing on the radio that Wen Jiabao wants to meet Indian entrepreneurs Balram volunteers to recount how he became an entrepreneur. Over the course of seven nights he tells his story.

As a boy Balram was successful in school and aspired to leave his village for the city. Learning how to drive he succeeds in becoming a driver, a prestigious occupation for someone of his background. Unfortunately, as he outlines philosophically, he (and all Indians) are constrained by "the great Indian rooster coop" which prevents any one individual from escaping their prison of indebtedness and familial obligations to become really free. As soon as someone tries to escape they are dragged back down with the rest of the chickens. Balram, however, has found a way out of the coop as only a white tiger can.

I did not find Balram to be an admirable or likable character. His lack of familial responsibility or affection is aberrant by any cultural standard.

Stuck

A Complicated Kindness by Miriam Toews, amusingly was translated as "Ein komplizierter Akt der Liebe." This is a direct translation, but has a very different connotation. "Akt" can mean a pornographic picture, so the German title leads one to believe that perhaps a complicated sexual act of love is the topic of this book. This is quite misleading though, as the novel is a bildungsroman about a teenage girl living in a Mennonite community in Canada.

Nomi, the narrator, lives with her father, as her mother and older sister have both left home. Their disappearance focuses the story as Nomi tries to work out where and why they left. Normal life unravels for Nomi as her father gradually sells all the household furniture. Speaking to the guidance counsellor about future aspirations Nomi says she wants to become a city planner. To explain why she says: "That our main street has two dirt fields on either end of it is weird to me. Shouldn't it lead somewhere?" The guidance counsellor suggests that she needs both math and engineering skills rather than responding to the problem which Nomi has pointed out - that their is no way out of the town, figuratively. There is nothing to which the school or work within the town can lead to. Unsurprisingly, Nomi gradually stops going to school.

This book is quite interesting as it deals with reality in ways that books about teenagers don't generally. It won the Governer General's Literary award and Canada Reads 2006.

Book club choices for the first quarter of 2011

The book club has selected the first quarter of books for 2011:

January: We/
Мы by Yevgeni Zamyatin
February: Summerhouse later/
Sommerhaus, später by Judith Hermann
March: Johan Padan and the Discovery of the Americas/
Johan Padan a la descoverta de le Americhe by Dario Fo
April: Rosie Carpe by Marie NDiaye

December Book Club Choice

The book club will no longer be voting on a book every month. Rather each person will be choosing a book and the rest of us will read it. December's book will be The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga. This novel won the Man Booker Prize in 2008. It was reviewed in the NYT.

Tediousness is boring. Tediousness is. Tedious.

Lyricism can be beautiful and in the case of Nothing, by Janne Teller it is the only thing the book has going for it.

"A plum tree has many branches. So many endless branches. All too many endless branches" (p. 12). The plum tree is where Pierre Anthon sat once he decided not to go to school anymore. From one of its branches he would call out to the kids who continued going to school and tell them that their actions were meaningless.

In an effort to fight the idea that they led meaningless existences Pierre's classmates band together to identify and stockpile all the meaningful items in their lives. Since they fail to identify for themselves what they find most meaningful, their classmates choose the item. Told through the eyes of a narrator who remains nameless for most of the book, this choosing escalates up until the end with what in reality would be shattering consequences.

Unfortunately, the plotline appears to be cribbed from some after-school TV special about the perils of teenage peer pressure. If it were not a book club selection I would not have finished it. However, if one likes Nihilistic philosophy or is a depressed teenager without a television I might recommend it.

Wildly inventive book blurbs

What is a reader supposed to think when the back of a book such as Kafka on the Shore states that it is "A magnificently bewildering achievement...Brilliantly conceived, bold in its surreal scope, sexy and driven by a snappy plot...exuberant storytelling" (Independent on Sunday). Or that it is "Addictive" (multiple blurbs). Addiction is defined as "The condition of being habitually or compulsively occupied with or or involved in something" (theFreedictionary). Sexy implies that there is some type of sexually attractive person or activity in the book. However, what these two words mean in book blurbs is quite different than what their dictionary definitions, and of the two only addictive might apply to this novel by Haruki Murakami.

The premise is that the fifteen year Kafka is trying to escape an Oedipal prophesy, passed on him by his father, and ends up in a library with helpful, but unusual employees. There are many incidents, some of which involve sex, but none of which could be described as particularly sexy. They are perhaps sad, violent, or disturbing, though.

Another narrative thread follows a rather simple elderly man, Nakata, who has the unusual skill of speaking with cats, and by this means locating the occasional stray feline. The paths of Kafka and Nakata never actually cross, but their stories are intertwined with each other.

The end of the book is quite open to interpretation. There are unanswered questions, and the reader must be willing to either tolerate ambiguity or form hypotheses that are satisfactory.

Multigenerational dramas

Daughter of Fortune, by Isabel Allende is an interesting book, but like all books about multiple generations of characters it is lengthy. Unfortunately, it is also part of a trilogy, with Portrait in Sepia, and The House of the Spirits being the missing books. So, I cannot give a complete review of the entire plotline. However, I can safely classify the book as bildungsroman/romance light.

This novel is a story about Eliza Sommers, who adopted by a British family living in Chile, grows up sheltered in a multicultural household. Historical detail is vividly provided and the cultural attitudes of the British are painted over the Chilean background. Eliza grows up and falls in love with a young Chilean man. The novel moves from romance to adventure as Eliza follows her love to the gold rush in California. On the ship she stows away with the help of a Chinese doctor (to whom Allende has already introduced the reader, through extended flashbacks and descriptions of mainland China and Hong Kong) and with his help searches California for her love. Disguising herself as a boy she searches until her love has become more of a talisman than a memory. Finally, she returns to San Francisco and assists the doctor with his work. The book ends with the long-delayed acknowledgement of love between the doctor and Eliza.

Though this is a good story, the fact that there is no resolution after 399 pages and additional books that continue the story is discouraging. One has to be really interested in the characters to continue. If your not interested in multigenerational stories this is not the book for you.