The Reader Travels

My sixth and final review for the The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge takes us to the jungles of Paraguay. Lily Tuck brings us The News from Paraguay, during the late 1800s in a time of war and turmoil for this land-locked country in South America.

I always find it nice to have a map when I’m journeying in a foreign land. The adventure takes us from Paris, across the Atlantic Ocean to enter the South American continent at Buenos Ayres. We can track our course along the map as we travel up the Paraguay River in Argentina to reach the river’s namesake country, enjoying the lush foliage, colorful birds and chirping monkeys, all the while fearing the crocodiles and swatting the mosquitoes.

This historical novel gives us a look at the tragic reign of Francisco “Franco” Lopez. Inspired by the French, Franco sees himself as an emperor trying to conquer the Brazilians and their allied forces from Argentina and Banda Orientale (now Uruguay). The story follows his paramour as she travels with him from Paris into the jungles and bears him many sons. Though she is rejected by his family, Franco builds her a beautiful mansion, showers her with gifts and adores their sons.

The story is written in short segments as though emulating news briefs, shifting quickly from one character to the next, a collection of narratives, diary entries, letters and excerpts from official documents. It was a little hard to follow at first as we jumped from one point of view to another, and Tuck writes a lot of sentences that interrupt themselves with parenthetical interjections.

Because of this news clip style, the story lacks any in-depth character development, but overall, it was well researched and masterfully written, a good read, entertaining and educational.

My fifth trip for the The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge took me to the island of Crete, one of the many treasures of Greece. Since Zorba the Greek was written before the tourist industry started booming in Crete, Nikos Kazantzakis gives us an unspoiled look at the land and the culture. We see beautiful blue waters, birds and carob trees. We take a trip up into the forested mountains to a burned out monastery, along the coast to a convent and into some ruins left by the ancient inhabitants of the land.

Zorba the Greek is at once a celebration of and an apology for the misogyny that had its roots in ancient Greece and gained a new flavor with the transition to Christianity. I never read a book that had more to say about how wretched and disgusting women are. Zorba who claims to love women can’t say enough about how evil, and at the same time pathetic, they are. He takes pity on them.

We see all of this feminine vileness as a contrast to the beauty of the Platonic ideal of two men, one older, one younger, sharing a higher love with one another than could ever be achieved with a woman. Zorba the Greek explores the history of Greece, from the ancient religion to the philosophies of Plato to the Greek Orthodox faith to the politics of nationalism.

The book is thin on plot but strong on characterization. It seems as though nothing really happens until the last four chapters of the book, and then it’s over, back to the philosophical meanderings of the narrator.

On the other hand, the vivid characterization of Zorba makes him a perfect candidate for both stage and screen. He is Zeus and Dionysus and Eros, his life a celebration of women and wine and song. He is to be immortalized.

My fourth review for the The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge explores a book of poetry by Robinson Jeffers, poet of Big Sur. Rock and Hawk: A Selection of Shorter Poems gives us a nice look into the poet’s prolific but not always popular career, spanning his life along the California coast with images of Carmel, Point Lobos, seals, otters, hawks and cormorants.

This is a book to own, one to read at leisure and revisit again and again. It is not one to read as I did, crammed into a plane trip from Texas to California and back, trying to absorb as much imagery as I could on a weeklong trip filled with fast cars, family and frenzy.

The collection starts with a nice introduction by the editor, Robert Hass, who spoke of Jeffers’ appreciation for the beauty of wholeness, where wars and violence are but one part of the whole of creation that includes the majesty of nature. He also spoke of Jeffers’ Puritan upbringing, his lifelong guilt over an adulterous affair and his politics of isolationism in a time when US imperialism was in its infancy.

The book includes selections from a number of smaller volumes of poetry, and though there are similar themes that unite Jeffers’ entire body of work, you lose the concentration and power of a compact book of poetry by piling it all up together like this. It’s much like listening to a greatest hits album. You lose a little of the power of the art by ripping it apart. Regardless, it’s still pretty powerful stuff.

The Puritanism and the guilt made me want to hate Robinson Jeffers. I had also received warnings from other poetry enthusiasts that he was depressing, obsessed with death and way too political. So the first poem was read with a pretty strong bias.

I may not have liked Robinson Jeffers as a person, but he was an undeniable talent as a poet. I was amazed at how he could look out at the beauty of nature and see in it the wretchedness of mankind. When many isolationists would see themselves as looking inward, he saw himself as looking outward, to God.

And all that stuff about death… righteous.

My third review for the The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge takes us to the Eastern European city of Prague in the Bohemian land now known as the Czech Republic.

Originally published in 1891, The Witch of Prague, by F. Marion Crawford, gives us a picture of Prague rife with history, alchemy and images of architecture that still stands today. For a book written over a hundred years ago, the language is engaging and fluid, more action than description.

It does get pretty melodramatic, though, especially in the latter chapters. At times I felt like I was watching the action on a stage. The scene would open, the drama would unfold, and the scene would close, curtains dropping, adding to the mystery.

The story plays on the juxtaposition of science and mysticism which underlies Prague’s historical obsession with alchemy. The title character, whose name is Unorna, is known as a witch, and her talent lies in her ability to hypnotize people at will. There’s a whole discourse on the popular psychology of the day, speaking of hypnotism in scientific terms even as the nuns fear her talent as something granted by the devil.

Unorna works with a bearded little man named Keyork Arabian trying to find the key to immortality, which is Keyork’s life obsession. This search for the “elixir of life” is their secret as Unorna travels a journey of her own, falling in love with a man we know only as The Traveler. Her goal is to have him as her own, even if it means hypnotizing him into loving her.

I found the racism to be a little disconcerting in this book. The Devil is represented by a short Arab, while God is a tall old white man. One of Unorna’s victims is a Jew, who is described as having vulture like features and as suffering from “one of those intermittent phases of blind fatalism to which the Semitic races are peculiarly subject.”

One special touch in reading this book, was the volume itself. I checked the book out via inter-library loan from the Texas Tech University library. It had been printed in 1909, its binding worn, its pages yellowed and powdery, the illustrations fading. There was an old date stamp log glued to the inside cover, and I could see the dates where it been checked out -– 1924, 1945… It added to the gothic intrigue, the feelings of continuity, history and eternity.

Overall, the journey to Prague was time well spent.

My second review for The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge took me on a canoe trip down a wild river in northern Georgia. Although the Cahulawassee River referenced in James Dickey’s Deliverance is fictional, the rapids and the cliffs, the forests and the kudzu are a very real and beautiful part of that country. Both the Coosawattee and Chattooga Rivers claim influence on Dickey’s Cahulawassee, sparkling blue water and white rapids flowing through deep green, hilly country.

The novel starts in the city of Atlanta with Ed Gentry wishing for something fresh and new to take him out of the meaningless rut and routine of his life. He goes to work every day and goes through the motions of making love with his wife, fantasizing about another woman, her “gold eye” looking back at him, “the promise of it that promised other things, another life, deliverance.”

Dickey’s language is poetic, his descriptions vibrant, his pace intense, and this book truly is a great American novel. At the beginning of it, I found myself comparing it to Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, the camaraderie of men traveling together on a new adventure, the narrator idolizing the strong, fearless, adventurous one. Ed’s son is even named Dean, perhaps as some kind of tribute to Dean Moriarty, perhaps a mere coincidence.

But unlike Kerouac’s somewhat pretentious and irresponsible characters, I actually liked Ed Gentry and Lewis Medlock and their buddies, perhaps because they were so real to me, like I knew them and the meaningless routines they were trying to break through.

The river does deliver them from their routine, safe existence into a world of uncertainty and danger, their lives changed forever. One thing that is masterful about Dickey’s language is his sparse use of dialogue, making every conversation count. Their language in the city is structured and citified, sometimes whiny. But once they have made it through the hardest part of their journey, the language changes to something more decisive but informal, like what you would hear in the country. It was as if they had become part of the river and the folk who live there.

And as Ed said in the end, the river would always be with him, no matter what the rest of his life would hold for him.

My first review for The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge takes us to the three Indian states of Punjab, West Bengal and Maharashtra, with a brief trip to the beach in Goa.

Monica Pradhan’s The Hindi Bindi Club shares some history, customs and flavors from the various parts of India, flashes of color floating in the melting pot of America. The recipes made my mouth water, and the cultural references were educational. But overall, the characters and their stories lacked substance and seemed only to stand as a vehicle for the research performed by the author.

It’s the story of three young American women who don’t like each other very much, but their mothers are best friends, sharing a homeland in common. Even though the mothers are all from India, they come from different states, each with its own customs and language.

The mothers were halfway interesting, and the best parts of the book involved the one named Saroj Chawla, a spunky business woman born in the town of Lahore which became part of Pakistan when the borders were drawn in the 1940s. Her family was uprooted, and her struggle with animosity toward Muslims and the memory of her childhood Muslim friend makes for a real and sympathetic story.

I would have liked to see Saroj’s story in more detail, for all the others were dull, cliché tales of modern Americans shooting e-mails and calling each other on their cell phones, embracing pharmaceuticals and online dating. I suppose you might consider that Monica Pradhan was trying to make it a point that regardless of their Indian origins, these people lead ordinary American lives, but I think she might have taken that concept a little too far.

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» For an Indian American book I actually liked see Present Tension from the November ‘06 archives.

OK, so I’m not really into competitive reading, and I don’t usually write real book reviews, but The Armchair Traveler Reading Challenge posted on A Life in Books had too dear a theme for me to pass up.

Get this, it’s all about travelling to distant places by way of books. Can you believe it? What have we been doing here for the past 10 months, anyway? In the rules, we have to go to real places, so I’m glad my tour of Middle Earth is over (see archives from back in March).

Anyway, here are the places I plan to go over the next few months, so expect the occasional “review.”

1) India via The Hindi Bindi Club

2) Prague via The Witch of Prague

3) Kabul via The Kite Runner

4) Argentina via Imagining Argentina

5) Backwoods Georgia via Deliverance

6) Africa via To Asmara: A Novel of Africa