Review

Yalo – A Review

~ bythefirelight

Yalo
Elias Khoury

Through torture one can learn—if you are the reader. Elias Khoury’s sometimes tough, sometimes disorienting novel, but always interesting, uses torture as a tool not only to to examine the politics and history of Lebanon, but the lives of Syriac (Maronite) Christians, and more broadly how can one be certain of what one knows in the worst of times.

Daniel Yalo, as we learn, is a veteran and deserter of the civil way who has led a directionless life that has amounted to little. Now imprisoned for planning a bombing the authorities ruthlessly interrogate him for information. Of course, he has little to give and as the sessions continue and become more extreme and degrading, they reduce him physically and mentally to a weakling willing to say or do anything. By novel’s end he barely knows what he has done and hasn’t done. Yalo is a novel where truth shifts and facts are never quite clear. With each torture sessions he finds himself changing his stories to tell the guards what he thinks they want to know. At first he denies he has done anything illegal, but slowly as he is beaten and tortured he begins to admit to things. Most of these crimes, though, don’t have anything to do with the bombing, but instead break apart the self deceit and lies he has told himself over the years. He admits to a series of rapes, not all at once, but in fragments that only make it clear he is not the most redeeming character. He also admits to robberies and affairs. Yet with each admission, with each life story he writes, he contradicts a previous admission so that it is never clear which admission is the truth. By the end of the novel it is obvious that Yalo is anything but a good man, but whether he is a rapist and thief or something lesser it is hard to know.

Along with the admissions of guilt Yalo looks back at his childhood and the war and he tries to explain in his life stories why he is the way he is. It is seldom useful, for the interrogators are seldom interested in the past, but like a fool who never quite understands what is happening to him, he continues to write more and more. Slowly he reveals enough details to piece together a rough, if inaccurate, life story. The illegitimate son of a tailor and the daughter of a Siriac priest, he is raised by his mother and grandfather who he calls his father. The grandfather is a strange man given to going to the seashore to drink sea water in a religious ritual. He is also a servier man incapable of compromise and his harsh character marks the boy.

Now, sir, even as he is suspended between the earth and the sky, the rapture runs through Yalo’s veins when he remembers the difference between a cooked woman and a raw woman. The theory was devised by my grandfather, God rest his soul. No, sir, my grandfather had no women, for he was a man riddled with complexes, but he divided food into two categories: meat and vegetables. After giving up the eating of all variations of meant, he assigned vegetables to three categories: defective, uncertain, and perfect. The defective do not ripen to be fit for consumption until they are cooked over the fire, like zucchini or beans or okra, and so on. The uncertain also ripen by fire even though they can be eaten raw, like eggplant, spinach, fava beans, and chick peas, etc. As to the perfect, they ripen in the sun and need no flame, because they have interior fire. These were all varieties of the finest fruit, grapes, figs, and tomatoes. My grandfather chose the perfect vegetables, and he ended his life eating nothing but raw vegetables. He even gave up eating bread. He began to shrink, he got very thin, his bones grew as porous as clay, and his flesh grew as rough as bone. He died with the intention of becoming a clay figure backed by the sun.

Through the interplay of these memories such as these , Khoury sketches a metaphor for Lebanon where truth is precarious and reflects not only where you come from, but who wants to know and when. Given the precariousness of it all is possible to go forward or they domed to repeat the war where “the Lebanese had dug up the history of all their past wars to justify their madness, which made talking to them impossible.”

Amitav Ghosh at Elliott Bay Books

~ bythefirelight

Last night I had the opportunity to go to a reading by Amitav Ghosh at Elliot Bay Books where he read from his new book, Sea of Poppies. He read a long and funny passage from the book the that was part political discussion about the rightness of the opium trade and part comedy of manners which ended in a hilarious description of oral sex. It sounds well worth the read.

When he took questions he made a couple of interesting points. One, unlike the maritime history of the United States, Britain, and other western countries, the maritime history of Asia doesn’t exist. Sure there are histories from the western officer class that manned the ships, but there is nothing like Two Years Before the Mast or Red Beard. There is not even an oral tradition. It is a big hole in the history. Second, he compared Indians of the 19th century to the Africans of the 17th and 18th century. Each was taken from their homeland and put into a condition of enslavement or indenturement. But unlike the slave narratives like Olaudah Equiano’s early account to the more famous by Frederick Douglas, there are no narratives of the Asian sailors. Ghosh sees part of what he is doing is to rediscover the missing history, not as a historian who has to focus on one little section, but as a novelist who can create a broader portrait of the time.

You can also hear a interview with him on NPR.

The Cairo of Naguib Mahfouz

~ bythefirelight

The Cairo of Naguib Mahfouz
Gamal Al-ghitani

If your are going to read the Cairo Trilogy, you should have this book in your lap as you read it. The pictures provide a beautiful look at the streets and alleys Mahfouz writes about. What makes the book so invaluable, is each photo is linked to a quote from a specific book and gives you a chance to see the world that so inspired Mahfouz. Unfortunately, the book is out of print. The last time I looked it was $68 on Amazon.

Las batallas en el desierto (sp)

~ bythefirelight ~ 3 Comments

Las batallas en el desierto
Jose Emilio Pacheco

Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading turned me on to this book. I have always loved Mexican writing and his reviews of the book were quite intriguing. Although, there is a translation from New Directions, I read the book in Spanish, a Spanish is actually quite easy to understand and any third years Spanish student could read the book with few problems. Yet the simplicity belies an insightful understatement.

Ostensibly, the book tells a coming of age of age story set in Mexico City of the late 40s and early 50s. Carlos, the narrator, is the youngest son of a middle class family that has fallen on hard times. His father owns a soap factory but now that World War II is over the American corporations are beginning to take over the Mexican market. The family is forced to live in a neighborhood inhabited with people who have been left behind in Mexico’s rise in prosperity. Carlos isn’t aware of the socio-economic changes in Mexico, but he notices the influence of American culture everywhere. American culture has become the in thing and those with money want more an more of it.

With Carlos’ new status he finds him self at a school whose kids come from a mix of economic ranges. He becomes best friends with a boy named Jim. Jim is a mystery because he says his father is from the states and he visits him occasionally, yet his father is never seen. He even has an American sandwich maker that takes bread and ham and creates round sandwiches that look like flying saucers. Despite the exotic link to the United States, it seems so strange he is stuck in Mexico. Why isn’t he in the US? To make the mystery stranger, he says his mother is the lover of a Mexican official, a former general, one of those heroes of the revolution that found wealth in power after the war in the government. The general, though, can’t leave his wife, but pays for everything. She spends much of her time looking good for him. The general is never seen; he is always just of screen, as if he is about to arrive or leave.

The friendship falls apart when Carlos decides to tell Jim’s mother that he is in love with her. While she finds it touching, Jim gets mad at him. Soon Carlos’ mother also finds out and decides he is one step away from hell. She takes him out of the school and moves him to another, better one. The next opportunity he has to visit them he finds they have moved and no one in the building seems to know who he is talking about. A few years latter when his father’s fortunes have changed and he is now driven around in a limo, he sees an old classmate who is polishing shoes and he treats him to lunch. He asks about Jim and the friend says something bad had happened to him.

Throughout the story Pacheo plays with the inequalities of a fast changing Mexico and questions the myth of the Mexican Miracle of the 40s and 50s. He describes the meal Carlos eats at a friend’s home as greasy brain tacos, something Carlos, even in his reduced circumstances, is not used to. At the same time there is the interplay of American culture, the round sandwiches, the movies, the magazines with American stars, which gives one a sense of a culture on the move, yet also separating into the foreign and native. Are these changes really a miracle, or are they signaling the beginning of the undoing of Mexico? Moreover, the mystery of Jim and his mother suggest something dark and troubling about the power structures. If the the boyfriend really was part of the government, did he have her taken care of in some way? If so what does that say about the myth of the revolution and those who served in the revolution? Given what came latter in the late 60s and 70s, starting with the Tlatelolco massacre and the dirty war it is not a stretch to think the boyfriend may have done something.

The mysteries are never resolved–that is part of growing up. What is true is the mysteries of the novel make one question the certainties of the time.

In Search of a Lost Ladino

~ bythefirelight ~ 2 Comments

In Search of a Lost Ladino
Marcel Cohen

I bought this book because I wanted to read the original Ladino which is quite similar to Spanish., and as a Spanish speaker I was quite curious about the structure of the language and its similarity to Spanish. However, there is something else to this book that makes it a fascinating book, a kind of elegy for the language itself.

Ladino as Cohen says is a dead language and when he speaks it he “speaks a dead language”. But it is more than a language he is talking about, but a memory of his family and more: the memories caught up in the history his language and the language caught up in history. To be Ladino, is not only to speak it, but is also to have lived a certain history that is now gone. And in this sense the elegy takes its full strength as it describes the people of the Ladino barrios in Salonika and else where, their trades, their food, their clothing. The structure of the book is in little chapters that are almost prose poems to an idea or a memory of something lost. It gives one a fleeting glimpse, and almost dream like look at what has been lost. Its as if Cohen is remembering not to forget, but can’t leave the labyrinth of sadness that permeates the book and is unable to structure an over arching narrative.

As you read the book you often have a sense of grief, a grief stretches back to Spain and the city of Cuenca when the programs first began some 700 years ago. The grief reemerges in the Ottoman empire when Sultans turn on the Jews or the Malamukes roam through the streets and attack Jews at will. Thus the grief is not only the loss of the language and the community in Salonika during the Holocaust, but a lingering pain of hundreds of years of hope and diaspora. It makes for a beautiful and sad book.

A Spaniard in New York – La ciudad automática

~ bythefirelight

Letras Libres has a review of what looks like a fascinating book. A Spanish reporter, Julio Camba, comes to 1930’s New York and writes his reactions to the the city and the depression. As the review points out, it would make a good contrast to Poet in New York by Lorca. Apparently he didn’t quite like the city nor America, but nerveless his impressions sound worth a read.

Good-Bye

~ bythefirelight ~ 1 Comment

Good-Bye
Yoshihiro Tatsumi

As often as I read graphic novels I often feel there is something lacking, the story perhaps, or maybe the characters, but I think it is the drawings themselves. They draw on traditions or images that once were pulp with little to say and the visual connection between the two weakens the power of the story. I know I had that feeling reading Will Eisner’s Contract with God, another early work in the genre. Tatsumi certainly has moments of visual power as you can see in the first story Hell, which takes place right after the bombing of Hiroshima. His drawings of the city leave a stark power that in later stories seems to more related to romance conics with their simple rendering of faces and expressions that become stand ins for complicated emotions that are difficult to express in 20 word bubbles.

Thematically, though, Tatsumi’s interest range from the complexities of the post war to frustration of everyday loneliness. Taken as a whole it creates a Japan that is not quite the miracle it seemed. Many Japanese have been left out: the veterans who survived the war but are scarred with old memories; old men who seem to be forgotten or lost in the new, hyper modern country; and the women who having ended up as hostesses, prostitutes, or attempted suicides, find themselves unable to break out of the roles thrust on them.

Of particular interest is Hell, a story that questions the sacredness of the victims. An army photographer takes a picture of a carbon shadow, one of those hideous legacies of the Hiroshima bombing. It looks like a son giving his mother a massage. The photographer sells the photo 10 years later and it quickly becomes a national symbol. But the photographer learns that it was really the son’s friend killing his mother for him. The son tries to blackmail him, but the photographer kills him so the image will keep its power. Unfortunately, they find the body of the son and the sweet narrative of a loving son looses its power. The photographer is haunted by the guilt of the crime from then on.

The story according to Tatsumi (in the interview in the back of the book) made a few people uncomfortable. However, it does question how a country creates hits symbols. Are they transitory as the story suggests? No one knew about the murder so the symbol of the mother and son still could have had the same power. It was not just the victim, but the context; or the projection of context, because the shadow only shows two figures. It is up to the reader to determine what they were doing. Tatsumi’s suggestion that not only ate the national symbols constructed, but they are constructions from one’s own perception gives Hell a weight its otherwise Telltale Heart like plot might weaken.

Hell, though, is thematically an exception to most of the stories, which are a mix of loneliness and sexual longing that show a troubled isolated society where sex is easily substituted for relationships. Its a melancholic almost nihilistic view and in Rash and Click Click Click it is taken to its furthest extreme when the protagonists contemplate suicide. Good-Bye, though, might best represent his view of the relations between men, women and families.

Mariko is a prostitute during the American occupation and her clients are all Americans. She has a steady American client who talks about marriage and love and seems to believe him. At the same time her father, a veteran who comes around for handouts, comes into the picture. He councils self control, but she has none and all he can do is slink off to bars and wonder how he ended up the way he has since it wasn’t his fault they lost the war. In the end the American goes home and she decides to get drunk. Her father comes around at the same time and tells her to sober up, but it only enrages her and she grabs him and forces him to receive her sexual motions until he ejaculates. Shamed he walks out of the room. She cries but says it is for the best. The last scenes are of him walking crowded street wondering when it will end, and of Mariko leading an American to her home.

The story creates a world where the traditional has been destroyed and what is left are the power relations: client to prostitute; father to daughter; shame to transgressions. Tatsumi si not only showing the legacy of war, but the movement away from the traditional pre-war Japan to the American influenced culture. At the same time, though, the power relationships have changed: American, youth, tradition, all in that order. While Tatsumi uses prostitutes as his symbol for this a little too often, it illustrates this dynamic quite well, much like Suzuki’s Gates of Flesh.