Onitsha: J M G Le Clezio

Image Credit: Rupa Publications

As I finished reading “Onitsha” by J M G Le Clezio, an idea came up in my head. Why not include a couple of new words that I had learnt from the book along with my review? Tipsy Traveler agreed wholeheartedly so here goes. Onitsha won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2008 and when I saw it in the bookshop I was a bit surprised. I was expecting a respectably thick volume with pages of tiny print filled with language that I would test my patience. On the contrary, Onitsha is a slim volume filled with lyrical, poetical language that makes pretty simple reading. It tells the story of Fintan who comes with his Italian mother Maou to Onitsha in Nigeria to be with his father Geoffroy (sic). They come at a time when Nigeria is in the vestiges of colonialism but when slavery was still prominent. Fintan befriends Bony who proves to be a major influence in his life. When Fintan and his family go back to England, Fintan finds it difficult to re-adjust to the different setting. Onitsha remains a part of him and he eventually returns for a visit later in his life.

Onitsha is partly autobiographical. Clezio was eight when he, along with his mother and brother, joined his father in the province of Ogoja in Nigeria. It is his time there that proves to be the background for Onitsha. The book is filled with atmosphere – descriptions of rain, muggy hot nights, approaching thunder, the buzz of flies and the chirring of crickets abound. The African landscape seems to come alive in his sketches providing lush sensory delight. The story oscillates in time between the present and the past, as Maou remembers her romance with Geoffroy and her family’s reactions to it.

Onitsha contains powerful images of racism and slavery. But it also shows that not all whites are colonizers through Maou who strongly disapproves of the colonial activities around her. Also, Clezio subverts colonialism in the novel. Africa colonizes Fintan. He becomes one of them. One of the most powerful images that displays this subversion is his natural inclination towards pidgin by the end of the novel.

“When he arrived at the school, Fintan spoke pidgin inadvertently. He said, “He don go nawnaw, he tok say”; he said, “Di book bilong mi.”

Memories of Onitsha sustain Fintan when he has to resume “civilized” life in England.

“Not for one instant have I lost sight of Ibusun, the grassy plain, the tin roofs baking in the sun, the river with its islands – Jersey, Brokkedon.”

Onitsha is a simple yet complex read with many underlying themes, a lot of which I feel I am missing as reviewer Annabel Lee so aptly put. But it doesn’t matter, Fintan’s journey is riveting enough and Onitsha’s landscape and people long remain with you after you put the book down.

Verdict: A langurously delicious read

Rating: 5/5

Interesting words I learnt: Catafalque, Pirogue, Perfidy

Falling Leaves: Adeline Yen Mah

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I was already in a bluesy mood when I picked up to read “Falling Leaves” by Adeline Yen Mah. And at the end of the book I was nothing better if not worse with puzzlement and annoyance tagging along. Falling Leaves is a memoir that describes Yen Mah’s childhood in Shanghai and life at the hands of a very toxic family that included uncaring brothers, abusive sisters and cruel parents. Yen Mah was ostracized by her family because her mother died two weeks after giving birth to her. Her father remarried and Niang, as she was called, exercised complete control over everyone’s lives and particularly Yen Mah’s life was made nothing short of miserable. Her only solace were her subdued aunt and grandfather. But she manages to finish her studies and escape to Hong Kong and London and then on to the US to become a well-settled anesthesiologist and writer.

Falling Leaves unravels like a film noir that speaks at three levels to the reader. At one level, it traces Yen Mah’s personal journey, at the second it is an informative portrait of China’s fall and rise along with that of Hong Kong and on the last it forms an observatory of Chinese people. Yen Mah obviously has hardly had a normal childhood with care and affection sorely missing. The subtitle of the book says it all – ‘memoir of an unwanted Chinese daughter.’ I appreciate the fact that she was able to pull herself out of the vortex of depression that weaker individuals would have got into and ruined themselves. Yen Mah braved odds later in life too as her first marriage spiraled into a sham and she was left alone with a baby. She picks herself up from there with help from a couple of benefactors and builds her life again until she meets the man who truly cares for her. She is definitely not an ordinary individual and her poignant story deserves to be read.

I learnt that China was socially just a shadow of its current self just about 50 years back. She casually mentions of female newborns wrapped in newspaper lying by the roadside depicting the intense cultural bias towards women. Inflation was so high that one dollar would buy a million Chinese yuan. There was sharp class division and beggars were rampant. Yen Mah speaks of the subservient attitude of the Chinese people towards Westerners and about racism, which they faced not just in America but within their own country.

Now my biggest point of criticism with the book is based on its very premise – Yen Mah was an unwanted Chinese daughter. Why then did she constantly hanker for the affections of those who had treated her worse than rubbish? All through her life she was emotionally chained to her father and Niang, seeking their opinion and hardly ever disobeying them. Her father alternatively chooses to be silent and turn a blind eye and add to the injustice around him. But for most parts he is under his wife’s control as are her sons. Yen Mah buys expensive presents for them and even goes for a job that her father had recommended to please him. At one point she speaks of her father’s, “expression of care and concern,” when he questions her about her first husband and she feels moved. Would fleeting care like this really touch you after lifelong abuse and mistreatment?

Niang is painted as the typical fairytale step-mother who is angry all the time and viciously abusive especially to her daughters. She gave me the impression of being a domineering phallic worshiper and someone whose heart was governed only by materialism. And yet towards the end when her father is hospitalized Yen Mah calls Niang to tell her she will come down to Hong Kong from the US but she is met with the rebuttal that there is no time to “entertain” her.

Despite constantly being humiliated and denigrated Yen Mah tries to win her parents appreciation. She offers an explanation towards the end of the book saying that she is aware that Niang is “neither kind nor good” but for some reason she felt that her parents would turn around at some point and love her. The BBC asks a similar question asking why she didn't run away and she says, "I didn’t dare – in those days I thought my parents had the power of life and death over me."

Falling Leaves is a complex book, weaving multitudinous stories and makes interesting reading. But on an emotional level it only left me annoyed with Yen Mah’s extremely self-effacing attitude and portrayal of herself as the tearful, silent sufferer, ever-willing to help her money-minded, scheming family.

Verdict: Definitely readable

Rating: 3.7/5

The Story Of A Marriage : Andrew Sean Greer

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The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer is the sort of book that polarizes readers - you either love it or you hate it. It is almost impossible to remain neutral on this one. The theme is simple : do we really know the ones we love?

We think we know the ones we love, and though we should not be surprised to find that we don't, it is heartbreaking nonetheless.

Pearlie is a housewife in a San Francisco just emerging from the chaos of Second World War. Into her carefully controlled life with her son, Sonny, and husband Holland, enters a stranger, Buzz Drumer, who forces her to reexamine her life and the equations that determine it.

Is the book really a story of a marriage? In a way it is : there are secrets to human beings that weave themselves like cobwebs and leave a sticky mess that those are confronted with it just can't seem to shake off. Who is Holland? Was he really the man for who Buzz is determined to give up his fortune, his business, indeed his life? And who is Pearlie? How does she accept a crumbling marriage with the seemingly ruthless logic of protecting Sonny?

Greer writes with poetic flair - there are sentences in the book that I found myself gasping with awe at, yet it was the premise of his story that I found myself difficult to reconcile myself with. And my biggest gripe would be that Holland never has a voice. Both Pearlie and Buzz plot and scheme ways to obtain him. He is this Adonis with the brooding silence that both crave. Yet, towards the end I wanted to know : Holland, what do you think?For goodness sake, speak up! Both Pearlie and Holland don't seem to talk about the situation that Buzz's arrival has placed them into, and the resolution to their marriage is decided again in silence. If all marriages work on silence, well, I know now why there are so many divorces.

In the end, this proved a difficult book for me to like. When we read, we somehow feel in ourselves the emotions that our characters go through. We may never have to imagine our lives as theirs, but emotions we can all feel. The Story of Marriage divested me of any emotion except curiosity to find out what really Holland does. His 'crooked heart' should really have spoken out loud.

Verdict: Beautiful writing but a lack of connect with the story. 
Rating: 2/5

Malka: Mirjam Pressler

Image Credit: The Guardian

It had been some time since I read a book with one of my favorite themes – the Second World War. So I decided to read Malka by Mirjam Pressler, which had been sitting on my ‘unread books’ shelf for some time now. Malka, the eponymous central character, is a seven year old girl who gets separated from her mother due to circumstances as the family tries to flee from the Nazis encroaching on their town. Malka wanders alone and manages to survive until her mother is reunited with her.

Malka is actually fiction for young readers. But as I finished reading it I realized that by no means can it be limited to children. Malka’s desperate struggle for survival as she hangs on to life braving danger, cold, homelessness and hunger is told in very simple language. In fact the lack of grandiose language only emphasizes the starkness of the situation, making it eerily banal, acting as a foil to Malka’s helplessness. Hunger almost becomes another character in the novel and descriptions of how Malka tries to quell her hunger by, ‘slowly chewing on her food to make it last,’ are particularly moving. Malka goes through such trying situations that she becomes emotionally detached and a different person altogether and Pressler’s writing makes that gradual transformation almost palpable to the reader. It also explores her mother’s guilt at leaving her daughter albeit with good intentions of keeping her safe.

And making it more jarring is the fact that the book is based on a true story. Malka Mai today lives in Israel with her three children and Pressler met her there. Malka doesn’t remember much of what happened because she was too young and also because her mind has suppressed much of her extreme suffering. But what little she has remembered, enough to create this book, is unnerving in itself.

Verdict: Powerful.

Rating: 5/5

Pay It Forward : Catherine Ryan Hyde

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It's funny this world of books. So many of them, and so little space in our heads to cram them all in. And you make a compromise to yourself and you think - oh well, I will never know them all but at least let me know the best, the rarest, the classics, the favorites, let me know them all at least you think. And how wrong you can be! You can spend a decade not knowing that there is this classic book called Pay It Forward, which was made into a movie, which became a foundation, and a movement, and you sit here in your small corner in this world, and you think to yourself that this world of books is just so humbling in its vastness.

Catherine Ryan Hyde wrote Pay It Forward in early 2000, and although the concept of her novel is not new, the love it received was indeed new. According to good ol' Wiki, Benjamin Franklin is credited with coining the term 'pay it forward' when he wrote in a letter to Benjamin Webb:

I do not pretend to give such a Sum; I only lend it to you. When you [...] meet with another honest Man in similar Distress, you must pay me by lending this Sum to him; enjoining him to discharge the Debt by a like operation, when he shall be able, and shall meet with another opportunity. I hope it may thus go thro' many hands, before it meets with a Knave that will stop its Progress. This is a trick of mine for doing a deal of good with a little money.

And so is the book too. Little Trevor has this now-famous idea of helping others in need, and asking nothing in return but that they repay three others. "So nine people get helped. Then those people have to do twenty-seven.... Then it sort of spreads out." Does his idea work? Trevor's faith in humanity is touching, and despite your own cynicism you find yourself hoping that his idea works, praying that the addict Jerry Busconi will not fail him again, that Reuben would really marry Arlene, that life would really pay you forward.

To those who have seen the movie, and believe they have read the book in the process, it is not so. Catherine Hyde herself admits that the movie is different, and I am yet to watch a movie that captures a book in all its essence. I have not read her other books but now I know I will. My only complaint? I found that it took me a while to get used to the way the story is narrated - in different voices, and across different characters. I would suddenly find myself having to turn back a page and figure who is saying what. But that is a minor quibble when the story is so beautiful. Read it, and ask three others to read it too. It's my way of paying it forward.

Verdict: Touching. 


Rating: 5/5

Water for Elephants : Sarah Gruen

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Water for Elephants is what a racy Hollywood movie may be if pinned into a book. Jacob Jankowski, an almost vet jumps a travelling circus' train, and from there on his life is transformed. He jumps no ordinary train but the train that carries the cast, crew, performers and menagerie of the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show On Earth. Sarah Gruen has researched this historical novel in great detail, and I found myself tripping over vocabulary that I had never come across but yet so intimate with the circus life - roustabouts, cooch, rubes...

And Gruen spares no effort either in educating us on the life of the circus - I was enthralled and beguiled into a world I had never seen, or even remotely heard of. I vaguely remember going to a circus or two as a child but certainly was stunned to learn that the really big circuses of yore used to have their own train. Jankowski lands himself a job as a vet on the Benzini Brothers show, and falls in love with the beautiful Malena, wife of the schizophrenic August, and we, the readers, fall in love with Rosie, the elephant who knows no English but only Polish, and whose bizarre role in the almost unbelievable finale makes you almost stand and applaud.

Water for Elephants is truly one of those books that can be "unputdownable." It is marvelously rich storytelling at its very best - vivid characters, astounding scenes, and a touching love story - there can't be more that a book can do. Oh, yes it can. It can make you extremely sleepy because I guarantee that you would spend the night wide awake reading it .

Verdict: Superb.
Rating: 5/5

Married to a Bedouin: Marguerite van Geldermalsen

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Most people shift to or settle in a different country because it has a better quality of life. But in “Married to a Bedouin” by Marguerite van Geldermalsen she does the opposite. It is a book that immediately swept me into its folds with its tale of life in a setting as different as any I have read. Marguerite or Marg as she is known later is a New Zealander who comes to Petra in Jordan as a tourist, falls in love with Mohammad and decides to marry him and stay in the cave that is his dwelling. The story goes on to tell of life in a cave, adjusting to an antipodean culture and the experiences of being a foreign wife.

Bedouin is fascinating with its account of Marg’s trysts with the rituals of a culture she is unaccustomed to, the beliefs and the habits that come with it. Marg describes how she adjusts to these, sometimes with alacrity but sometimes with profound irritation. On the surface the book is a synopsis of Bedouin culture but underlying it is the strong current of a pure love that is hard to find. For why would Marg live in a cave and Mohammad even consider settling in New Zealand? What can be seen as her innocence and naïveté, as she agrees to marry Mohammad without any knowledge of Arabic culture or his past, can also be interpreted as an unheard of openness towards new experiences.

It is hard to believe that someone would go from the relative comfort of a developed setting to the very basic environs of a pre-historic cave and end up loving it so much that they feel uncomfortable when they return to more developed places. That is what happens to Marg. She and Mohammad go to New Zealand for a few months but realize that they miss Jordan too terribly to settle down there. Marg had the answer when some journalists asked her why she lived where she did. She glanced at Mohammad and simply said, “Its him.” And I don’t think any other answer would be as justifiable as that.

Verdict: Fascinating, extraordinary and touching

Rating: 4.7/5

Molly Fox’s Birthday – Deirdre Madden

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I bought a new bookshelf! Now, finally, all those poor darlings of mine, who had been languishing hidden in the wardrobe due to lack of space now finally have their own place!

Now that I got that celebratory fact out of the way, I read Molly Fox's Birthday by Deirdre Madden last week. I picked up this book on a whim from my local bookstore, and well, not really a whim - it had themes that I am attracted to - themes of friendship, art, and theater, and a whole lot of introspection at the way our lives turn out. Madden manages this introspection very well - we have an unnamed narrator, a close friend of noted actor Molly Fox, who stays in Molly's house for a little while in Dublin while Molly herself is away, and the entire book is viewed from both Molly and the narrator's thoughts. Who is the narrator? A playwright who was best friends with the other main character, Andrew, in college, and the two still remain in touch. Over the course of time, Andrew and Molly meet too, and become just as good friends. We know about Andrew again through the narrator - the earnest art historian and TV presenter who has had a tortured passage into adulthood, and it is clear that the narrator idolizes him,but perhaps not so much as she does Molly.

Molly is provided to us in snippets - she had her own difficulties as a child, has a depressive brother who she fiercely protects, a mother who gave up on them, and her stardom and power in the theater that can transform a play. Molly Fox's birthday is June 21 - the longest day of the year, symbolic, and yet, we know through the narrator that Molly hates celebrating her birthday.

Madden paints a psychological depth to her characters that resonates with sympathy and understanding. I wouldn't say the book was gripping in the usual, stale manner we write of bestsellers, but I found myself drawn to it again and again till I finished it. It was only that - the finish that had me perplexed. It ended all too abruptly, and I felt a bit cheated - "What? This is it? Molly never appears in the novel?" But I quibble. It's not the story but the stories that make up the story that drives this book.

I would recommend this book to anyone who would be looking for themes of friendship and a search for identity. But perhaps, such people are hard to find. We seek the free and easy - contemplation and a good friend are luxuries that are not necessary amidst the hectic hustle of leading a busy life.

From the Guardian review of the book:

Essentially, this is a book about friendship of various kinds - it contains wonderfully truthful sequences about friendships between siblings - and it crackles with the constant if understated irony that a playwright knows everything about a fictional character, whereas as a real-life friend or even a lover knows relatively little.

Fact: Longlisted for the 2009 Orange Prize

Verdict: Moving and insightful

Rating: 4/5

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society : Mary Ann Schaffer and Annie Barrows

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Rare is it to find a book that makes you feel that there is some cup-cake goodness in life, that the simple things need not be so complex at all, and that there exists in a world so cruelly divided on boundaries that there are people who genuinely radiate a quality that goes missing all too often - the quality of love, compassion and sheer goodwill.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is one such book. I have not loved a book like this in a long while. Written in the form of letters, Mary Ann Schaffer draws the reader in through the sheer warmth of her characters. There is the writer Juliet Ashton, who is rediscovering her life after the War left her London apartment bombed and in ruins. She begins to receive letters from the island of Guersney and through that begins her acquaintance with Guersney's oddly named the Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. Juliet begins to be drawn to the people there, and eventually moves to Guersney. Who are these people? There is fierce Isola, the poet-lover Clovis, valet John Booker, Eben Ramsey, lover of Shakespeare, and the wonderful Charles Lamb fan in Dawsey Adams. What is one of the quirks of the novel is that the main character, Elizabeth, never appears in the novel, but her spirit is indeed present through the book.

Why is the society called so? I would not spoil the book for you by revealing that - but if you are lookin for a book that makes you forget the world out there (actually aren't all books meant to do that?), and believe in some honest-to-goodness folks, then please do pick this up. There is something warm, tender, and well, heartwarming in reading this. Good feelings like this don't last but when they do arrive, they are so worth it.

Mary Ann Schaffer died shortly after completing the initial drafts of the book, and the final version of the book was lent Annie Barrows' gentle touch. As Elizabeth Gilbert says, "treat yourself to this book."

Watch : Trailer to the book



Verdict: Heartwarming. A must for book lovers.
Rating: 5/5