News

My review of Vikram Seth’s Two Lives appears in Sunday’s Boston Globe. Part memoir, part biography, the book tells the story of Seth’s uncle Shanti, a World War II veteran who settled in London, and Shanti’s German wife, Henny. Here is an excerpt:

Although Seth did an enormous amount of research for this book, the reader never gets very close to the inscrutable Henny. Seth’s only sources for drawing this intriguing, mysterious woman are his and his uncle’s memories of her, as well as her correspondence. But Henny’s letters are, by her friends’ own admission, rather distant, leaving Seth to speculate on her frame of mind, on her feelings for the German fiancé who abandoned her and for the man whom she married. Because Seth never interviewed her during her lifetime (one gets the sense she would have been too private to want to speak about such things) the resulting portrait doesn’t quite satisfy.

You can read the full review here. (You may be asked to register, in which case you can use bugmenot to get a free login.)

I’d heard about The Colony, John Tayman’s history of the Kalawao leper settlement on Molokai, in Hawaai, from a reader with whom I correspond on occasion, and I was very intrigued. Mary Roach’s excellent review of the book in the Sunday NYTBR has certainly whet my appetite:

The kicker here, the monumental inequity, is that people with leprosy were exiled for no good medical reason. Leprosy is not an especially contagious disease. Only 5 percent of the population are genetically susceptible to it. And even they would probably emerge untainted: only a third of untreated leprosy patients have the disease in its active, infectious state.

Yet so great was the hysteria surrounding leprosy that hundreds, probably even thousands, of people who only appeared to have the disease were packed off to colonies. At one point, patients in Kalawao were allowed to request a rediagnosis. Ten out of the first 11 to do so did not have leprosy. A diagnosis of leprosy, accurate or inaccurate, amounted to a criminal conviction. By law, people deemed lepers could be hunted down, stripped of their rights and torn from their families. And most of them were – until well after effective treatment was established, in the 1940’s. The story of Kalawao is the story of an injustice as deep and complete as any in human history.

“The Lepers of Molokai,” an essay that Jack London wrote for Woman’s Home Companion in 1908, and in which he “kept himself in check” about the horrors of the place, is available online here.

That’s it for me this week. I will be spending the weekend working on my novel, finishing Amitav Ghosh’s excellent Incendiary Circumstances, and looking for comedy in Albert Brooks’s latest film. On Monday, I will be reading from Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits in Lansing, Michigan. Here are the details:

Monday, January 23, 2006
3:30 PM
Reading and Discussion
Michigan State University
255 Old Horticulture
East Lansing, Michigan

The reading is free and open to the public. See you there!

Maud Newton contributes a column to the American Prospect on the continuing relevance of Mark Twain’s satirical writing. For instance, she argues, King Leopold’s Soliloquy presages

the Bush administration’s doublethink rhetoric about the “progress” being made in Iraq. The king bemoans the “tiresome chatterers” who expose to the world his darkest motivations but don’t balance them with the noble ones; who complain–just substitute “democracy” and “elections” for “religion” and “missionaries”–about “how I am wiping a nation of friendless creatures out of existence by every form of murder, for my private pocket’s sake, and how every shilling I get costs a rape, a mutilation, or a life. But they never say, although they know it, that I have labored in the cause of religion at the same time and all the time, and have sent missionaries there — to teach them the error of their ways and bring them to Him who is all mercy and love, and who is the sleepless guardian and friend of all who suffer.”

You can read a portion of the article here. (The rest is for subscribers, I’m afraid.)

The fifth and last nominee for the LBC Read This! selection is unveiled today: It’s Rupert Thompson’s excellent Divided Kingdom. Check out what the nominating blogger had to say about it.