A Portable Magic

A Life In Books

Book 75: The White Tiger

 “If I were making a country, I’d get the sewage pipes first, then the democracy, then I’d go about giving pamphlets and statues of Gandhi to other people, but what do I know? I’m just a murderer!”

Read: August 1-3, 2016

Rating: 8/10

Lists/Awards: 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die (2012), Man Booker Prize

Here’s a weird thing: I am actively pro-spoiler. Which you’ve probably noticed reading this blog…I try not to be gratuitous, but I will spoil things if it’s necessary to talk about what I want to talk about regarding a book. I maintain that if your work (and I’m including movies and TV here) doesn’t hang together if you know the Big Plot Twist, it’s because it’s not very good in the first place: the characterization, the quality of the writing, the dialogue, the pacing…if those aren’t there, you don’t have a well-told story, you just have a plot twist. Discovering the why is always more compelling for me than discovering the what.

Which is why I have a soft spot for books, like Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger, that tell you their big plot twist right up front. We know at the end of the first chapter that our narrator Balram, a former servant turned entrepreneur in India, killed his former master. What unfolds over the rest of the book is the story of why. It’s the story of India in the modern day, a place of desperate poverty but also extravagant wealth, where ancient temples are just as much a part of life as smartphones. Balram is born into poverty in a rural area, and even though he seems destined to become a laborer, he resists the forces (including his family) that try to keep him in the underclass as long as he can. He finds himself a position as a driver for an upper-class landowner, and eventually moves with one of the landowner’s sons to New Delhi to be his driver there.

New Delhi fundamentally changes both that son, Ashok, and Balram. Ashok has been educated in America, and treats his servants more or less like people. As he gets more and more sucked into the mire of his family’s business (they’re in the coal industry, and Ashok does a lot of running around with briefcases full of money to drop off with various politicians and officials), he becomes harder and harsher. When Balram is nearly forced to take the fall for a bad accident caused by Ashok’s wife’s drunk driving, Balram realizes that even as far as he’s come from his roots, he’s still not really safe. As long as he’s poor and a servant, he’ll always be expendable. But in order to get out of his situation, he needs money, and the money he has the easiest access to? Those briefcases that he’s driving Ashok around with.

It’s a dark satire, and after reading a lot of Serious Literature, I appreciated its wit and liveliness even more than I otherwise might have. But I would have enjoyed it no matter what. It’s an epistolary novel (Balram writes to the prime minister of China, who is visiting India at the time, to explain India’s entrepreneurial spirit), which allows it to skip around in time a little for maximum impact…we know that he’s committed murder and gone on to start his own business, but how (and why) did he do it? How did he get away with it? What exactly does he do now?  The organic tension propels the book forward without being too mysterious. Balram is an indelible character, and I really appreciated the way that Adiga developed Ashok as well, portraying his moral decay even though we only see him through Balram’s eyes. It’s a quick read that manages to be thought-provoking while still being entertaining.

 Tell me, blog friends…how do you feel about spoilers?

One year ago, I was reading: Enchanted Islands

Top Ten Tuesday: Books I Haven’t Read Yet, But Want To Because Of Their Covers

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! Since I talked about my favorite covers of books I’ve read fairly recently, I decided to take a slightly different tack and look at books on my TBR with especially intriguing cover art! So here are ten of my favorite book covers from my upcoming reads.

The Sense of an Ending: There’s something very evocative about the image of dandelion seeds blowing.

In the Woods: I’ve heard this is actually the weakest of Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series, but the cover art creates a foreboding, spooky mood on sight.

Stiff: This I just find delightfully clever, using the toe tag as a place for the title of the book

Boy, Snow, Bird: That image of the snake winding among greenery is a subtle biblical allusion and is eye-catching besides.

Life After Life: The simple image of a double sided rose is striking and intriguing.

The Luminaries: I love the way this cover moves through the phases of the moon.

The Goldfinch: The little 3D-esque effect, with the painting being “revealed”, is neat and I’m super excited about getting around to reading this after all the praise.

Wild: The dirty, crusty, broken boot speaks to the central hiking/breakdown and self-discovery narrative of this memoir.

The Vacationers: The vivid aqua of this cover is unusual and it creates a sense of intrigue about what will happen to those floating people.

Dear Thief: The broken face of the bust, combined with the title, immediately makes me ask a bunch of questions, which makes me want to read the book.

A Month In The Life: April 2017

The winter-or-spring dance has continued from March, with surprising (and honestly, desperately needed) amounts of water coming out of the sky. Nevada’s the driest state in the nation and we’ve been in a bad drought even by our own sad standards for the last few years, so it’s great, but since these are the four months every other year that I have to be driving about 40 minutes each way to work every day, I wish had happened any other time. On the bright side, I’ve been racing through podcasts and audiobooks lately!

In Books…

  • Innocent Traitor: I love Alison Weir’s non-fiction, so I wanted to love her first stab into a fictional story about the time period she so often writes about. But I didn’t…her inexperience with the genre is obvious, and although there’s interesting stuff here, the writing of both dialogue and internal monologues come off clunky. But her later fiction has good reviews, so I’m looking forward to reading more.
  • Moonglow: Even though I haven’t been able to be to book club since January (I can’t wait to get back in June!), I have been keeping up with our selections. This month’s pick was Michael Chabon’s latest novel, the first of his that I’ve read. Loosely based on his actual great-uncle’s life, it’s a wonderful blend of the personal and the epic.
  • Big Little Lies: Instead of reading an Amazon freebie that I was not looking forward to, I let myself pull it out and bump up a book I’ve been really wanting to read since I started hearing rave reviews of the HBO series. Liane Moriarty is outside my usual wheelhouse, but I quite enjoyed this fast-paced look at marriage, mommy politics, and murder.
  • The Children of Henry VIII: Back into Alison Weir, but this time nonfiction. There was a lot of overlap with the novel I read earlier in the month, honestly, since it covers many of the same people in the same time period, but I found it a much more rewarding experience. She’s got such a great touch with history. 
  • The Leavers: I won a copy of Lisa Ko’s hyped debut through LibraryThing’s Early Reviewers program, and I had a hard time with it, honestly. While I loved the portions of the book that told the mother’s story, I found the dominant narrative around the son to be difficult because I found him such a hard character to connect with or like. 

    In Life…

    • Still in session, but only about 5 weeks left to go! This month saw our first two major bill movement deadlines: bills had to pass out of their first committee, and then their first house. A significant number of bills failed at each of these deadlines, so we’re now left with a smaller pool of bills to track and work on. But a smaller number doesn’t mean any less work, things are still very busy and will be until sine die. 

    One Thing:

    • I’ve long since been a better baker than I am a cook (probably because my mom was the same way), but for the past few celebrations with my in-laws, including Easter a few weeks ago, I’ve found recipes on Sally’s Baking Addiction and they’ve turned out amazing! Her recipes are straightforward, tested, and delicious. I even bought her cookbook!


    Gratuitous Pug Picture:

    Book 74: Masha Regina

     
    “The wind of time blows in two directions. It’s the rare person who feels its current parallel to his ongoing life. It’s a special skill to catch time wafting, from the future, on your cheeks. In the emptiness between the train carriages, Masha felt- her fingers went icy from the certainty of that sensation- as though those ten minutes on the jolting train carriages, with her on one side and the boy on the other, would become a sort of tuning fork for her happiness.”

    Read: July 29-August 1, 2016


    Rating: 7/10

    I can’t imagine how hard it must be to be a professional translator, especially for literature. I took two years of Italian in college, and even the simple school exercise of translating song lyrics was rendered often frustrating because of the inability to directly translate in a way that makes actual sense. Even something as simple as “I miss you” (mi manchi) literally translates as “you are missing to me”. It’s essentially the same thing, but it takes the focus from I to you, making it feel softer somehow (at least in my overly romantic brain). Translating an entire book? Eep.

    Translating Vadim Levental’s Masha Regina must have been an especially delicate endeavor, so props to Lisa Hayden. Levental spent five years writing the book and it’s obvious that he chose each word carefully. Hayden’s translation is lush and evocative…obviously I can’t read it in the original Russian, but it’s hard to believe that it suffered any real loss being taken into English. Masha Regina is the story of the titular woman (her given name is actually Maria, but she’s almost exclusively referred to by her nickname during the course of the novel), from about the time she’s a teenager to well into her adulthood. It’s hard to tell how old she’s supposed to be by the end, exactly, because the novel progresses in a loosely linear way but with lots of digressions backwards and forwards and it can be hard to tell at any given moment where we are in Masha’s life. It works when you’re reading it, as long as you’re paying attention, but it makes it hard to summarize the novel in a straightfoward way.

    I do love a good summary, though, so I’ll take a crack at it. Masha is an artistically gifted teenager living in a small, decaying town in the Russian countryside. She doesn’t necessarily know what she wants, but she knows she doesn’t want to get stuck there like her parents, and when she’s probably about 15 she manages to get her parents to send her to St. Petersburg to go to boarding school. On the train to the city, she meets Roma, another teenager who’s heading back to his own studies in the city. He helps her get to her school and she falls a little bit in love with him, which she continues to be even as she has a long-term relationship with one of her teachers and he rejects her when she comes to see him. It’s only later in their lives, after they’ve graduated and begun working towards careers in filmmaking (she as a director, he as a cinematographer) that they finally get together and become romantically as well as professionally involved. Their relationship is tempestuous, and Masha becomes pregnant with their child shortly before she leaves him for good, taking up with an older German actor while he romances a former school friend of hers.

    Although it’s Masha’s story and she’s a fascinating character to spend a couple hundred pages with, it’s never quite clear what drives her. At the beginning it’s a desire to escape the drudgery she’s surrounded with, which she does both through art and eventual literal escape. And then it’s a desire to stay escaped, working her way to catch up with school so she can stay in St. Petersburg, building a name for herself as a director. But once she’s got a solid career, her artistic expression seems almost more like a compulsion than a drive or a passion. The cool shell she built herself to keep her propelling through her early life eventually traps her…she doesn’t know how to deal with adversity besides creating a film and throwing herself into the making of it.

    As I read, I found myself mostly focusing on the way fate seems to play a role in the construction of a life…Masha’s life particularly, but all our lives, really. Masha’s chance connection on the train with Roma as a teenager reverberates through her entire life. She gets into directing after accompanying a friend to an audition for an acting graduate program. I know how in my own life, my trip to Nevada was supposed to be a three-month thing until I met my husband doing voter registration. The big things matter, of course, but the little coincidences of our lives can be even more meaningful, in the end. Masha Regina is beautifully written (maybe a little overwritten) and mostly pretty compelling, but the sum of its parts is more than the whole, somehow.

    Tell me, blog friends…what little things ended up making a big difference in your life?

    One year ago, I was reading: The President’s Club

    Top Ten Tuesday: Things That Will Instantly Make Me NOT Want To Read A Book

    Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly linkup of book bloggers hosted by The Broke and The Bookish! This week’s topic is the opposite of last week’s…rather than the things that make us intrigued when we’re thinking about picking up a book, it’s the things that make us put that book back down.

    Mystery/Thriller: Remember how last week I was talking about my preference for character-heavy rather than plot-heavy books? While there are certainly mysteries and thrillers with fantastic character building and/or that I’ve enjoyed immensely, I’ve tried enough out that were duds that I tend to shy away from the genre unless it comes highly recommended.

    Romance: The kind of tropes that tend to give a story with romance at its center its drama…the misunderstandings that could be sorted out with honest conversation, meddling side players like friends and family who try to get in the middle of things, big lies to cover up small mistakes, are just exhausting to me in real life. I have no desire to read about them in print.

    A “boy becomes a man” storyline: Maybe it’s just because I grew up in a family full of women, but stories focused on a specifically male experience of growing up (usually involving violence and/or repression) are so boring to me.

    Memoir: This one, I’ll admit, is odd. I love reading personal blogs and I love stories about people, but an entire book about a not-otherwise-remarkable person always makes me wonder why I’m supposed to care.

    Avant-garde: I’m willing to give a little bit on certain things (like the way Blindness uses no quotation marks), but I hate Hunter S. Thompson and writers who are weird just for the sake of being weird.

    Sparse: If a writer is described as Hemingway-esque, that’s usually a sure sign I’ll hate it. I like adjectives, thank you very much. I want to be immersed in a world when I read, not have to try to fill in all the color and interest on my own.

    Poetry: I like the occasional poem here and there, but as a whole, poetry doesn’t much speak to me. It’s just never been a form I’ve particularly enjoyed.

    Warfare: A book full of descriptions of troops and maneuvers is a book I have little interest in reading. I skimmed the portions of War and Peace and Vanity Fair that were just war stuff because snore.

    Characters described as “quirky”: I am so deeply over the tendency, especially for female characters, to give them a collection of quirks instead of an actual personality. But even for dudes, it’s tiresome. 

    Philosophical: This is an issue I’ve run into with some sci-fi (I’m looking at you, Dune and Stranger in a Strange Land) and some classics, where it’s less about a story with a plot and characters and more about expressing the author’s view of the world as it is/should be. It gets old fast for me. 

    Dreamcasting: The Secret History

    I could talk for hours about how much I loved my AP English class. I read so many great books for the first time in that class, including one of my all-time favorites: The Secret History. Donna Tartt’s novel about a small group of private college students studying the ancient world trying to keep an awful secret has incredible characters and a twisty story that I think would make for a great movie. So who would I cast?

    Richard Papen: Logan Lerman

    Papen is a working-class Californian who finds himself in the middle of a circle of Classics scholars at an elite liberal arts school in the Northeast…in other words, our obvious audience-insert character. He’s kind of bland, and Lerman played a role as a passive, kind of quiet character in The Perks of Being a Wallflower very well, so I think he’d fit right in here.

    Bunny Corcoran: Paul Dano

    He’s a smidge older than I’d like, but Bunny is an important character in the drama so he needs to be done right. Dano is a really talented actor and I think could do really great work as the outwardly glad-handling, inwardly scheming Bunny.

    Camilla Macaulay: Dakota Johnson

    Camilla is the only girl in the group, and the object of fantasy for several of the boys. Dakota Johnson is beautiful, but in an approachable, college girl kind of way that I think works for Camilla. In 50 Shades, she created an interesting character out of a completely ridiculous idiot on the page, so I’d love to see her bring her charm to this role.

    Charles Macaulay: Miles Teller

    Charles is Camilla’s fraternal twin, and has the kind of dark, moody intensity that I think of when I think about Charles.

    Francis Abernathy: Ezra Miller

    Francis is a dramatic spirit, and Ezra Miller has played a role with a similar vibe alongside Logan Lerman before, in Perks. Miller has become one of my favorite young actors because of his incredible screen presence and he could really be a scene-stealer as Francis.

    Henry Winter: Matthew Lewis

    The tall genius is really the main character of the book, and I had a really hard time trying to figure out who could pull it off. He needs to be big, attractive but not a stereotypical dreamboat type, intense. I have no idea if the erstwhile Neville Longbottom could pull off an American accent, but he’s the closest I could come in the right age range that I feel like meets the picture in my head.

    Julian Morrow: Dominic West

    The professor at the center of the very tightly knit group, Julian needs to be European and charismatic and morally questionable. Kind of like McNulty in The Wire, except a polished and without the need for the (patchy) accent work. 

    Judy Poovey: Jennifer Lawrence

    Judy is the ditzy party girl that serves as the comic relief in this otherwise dark novel, and even though this role is so small that it’s definitely beneath her stature, I’d love to see Jennifer Lawrence do the few scenes it would require because she’d be hilarious.

    Book 73: Behave

    “The most difficult part, you would think, is realizing that the person you idealized, whom you regarded as infallible, was imperfect all along. Instead, the hardest part is stopping to wonder what was so imperfect or unfinished within oneself as to impede comprehension of the obvious.”

    Read: July 25-29, 2016

    Rating: 5/10
     
    Anyone who’s taken so much as an Introduction to Psychology course has probably heard about the Little Albert experiment. Very young children often don’t display fear responses to things that adults do, like rats, and Albert was no different in that respect. Albert was taught/conditioned to fear a white rat by pairing the appearance of the rat with a loud crash, which scared him. With repetition, Albert grew to be afraid of all fluffy white things, including dogs and even a Santa Claus beard. Before Albert could be deconditioned from this fear, the experiment ended.

    The researcher conducting that experiment (which could never be conducted today) was John Watson, a prominent behaviorist, with his assistant Rosalie Rayner. Andromeda Romano-Lax’s Behave is a fictional account of Rosalie’s life, beginning just before she graduates from Vassar with a degree in psychology and continuing through her time as a research assistant in Watson’s lab and her relationship with John, first as his paramour and then as his wife and mother of their children. Children who are expected, of course, to be raised according to their father’s behaviorist principles. Before she could actually finish raising those children, though, Rosalie died of dysentery in her mid-thirties.

    Rosalie’s story is an interesting one to tackle, because she was both a serious scientist at a time when it was possible but difficult to be a female scientist and a subject of tabloid gossip when she was named as a co-respondent in John’s divorce from his first wife. The affair led to John’s firing from Johns Hopkins, where Rosalie had been working with him while she pursued a graduate degree in psychology. The notoriety caused a hitch in his professional life, but completely destroyed hers. Even as their lives move away from professional psychology, though, the specter of Little Albert haunts them.  Behave reminded me a little of The Group…not just because it’s also set in part at Vassar (about 15 years earlier), but because they both deal with the struggles of intelligent, educated women to be all they want to be in a society that’s not really comfortable with working ladies. Rosalie is just as smart and driven as her husband, but her gender and her eventual motherhood conspire to keep her in the home, with doing drafting and editing work for John’s books as her only real intellectual outlet.

    I didn’t know that I thought Romano-Lax quite nailed Rosalie’s characterization…I feel like I was supposed to read her as spunky and ambitious but her actions, particularly within her relationship, didn’t fit with that. She wants a job both before and after she has children, but makes only token efforts toward employment. She’s frustrated with her husband’s continuous womanizing, but only confronts him about it once. Reading about her life story, you can surmise that the scandal caused by her and John’s relationship put her in a position where it would have been difficult for her to leave him, but that’s never articulated in so many words. And John himself…Rosalie is constantly referring to his handsomeness and charm, but we don’t ever really see him be charming. We just see his poor behavior. If we’re meant to buy into the central love story that propels the narrative, it doesn’t quite work. The prose is solid and Rosalie Rayner is someone I didn’t know about, so I’m glad I was introduced to her story, but this just didn’t quite deliver for me.

    Tell me, blog friends…did you take any psychology classes in college?

    One year ago, I was reading: Dune

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