Category: book reviews / recommendations

Michelle de Kretser’s The Hamilton Case is an unusual work–a mystery novel in which the murder is hardly the most important puzzle in the book. Rather, the real mystery here is the protagonist, Sam Obeysekere.

Set in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) The Hamilton Case tells the story of Obeysekere, who was born to wealth but who is destined to watch as Pater unburdens himself of his inheritance while Mater spends the better part of her time smoking, drinking, and pursuing lovers. Sam doesn’t find solace in his relationship with his younger sister Claudia, whom he views as weak and inconsequential. At prep school, he meets his arch-nemesis, the popular Donald Jayasinghe. Jaya immediately pegs Sam as a lackey.

Your people were Buddhist under our kings, Catholic under the Portuguese, Reformists under the Dutch, Anglicans under the English. You can’t help yourself can you? Obey by name, Obey by nature.

The name sticks, and, one later finds, for good reason.

By the time Sam comes of age, all that is left of his family’s grandeur is a dilapidated estate up-country, in Lokugama. He rents a house in the capital of Colombo and takes up a position as a public prosecutor. He carefully selects a wealthy wife whose parents live conveniently far, and proceeds to amass wealth of the kind he had grown up with. When Mater has squandered all that is left of her money, Sam offers her only one option: Lokugama, where she lives in seclusion for the rest of her life and where she serendipitiously uncovers one of Sam’s darkest secrets.

Then a tea grower named Angus Hamilton is murdered on his way back to his estate. The investigator initially suspects a pair of coolies. But, priding himself on his analytical methods, Sam points to someone else, a British subject. Although he’s warned about this, Sam feels that the British love of ‘fair play’ would dictate that if one of their own has committed murder, he should pay for it, even if the sentence is handed down by a ‘native court.’ Sam moves on, but his miscalculation in the Hamilton Case essentially determines the course of his life. He retains his faith in all things British and is disingaged from the turmoil that arises as Ceylon changes around him. He seems hardly affected by the exceptional times he lives in, except, perhaps in the way of someone who’s mourning the good old days. Even his relationship with his son comes too late in the novel to make a real change.

I noticed that a couple of reviews have referred to Obeysekere as “more British than the British.” But there’s more to it than that. Obeysekere hasn’t just inherited a different way of doing business. He’s also inherited the colonial mindset, often looking down on his compatriots. Even though he himself is the victim of racist invectives (for instance, by Miss Vandestraaten, his English teacher) and even though he’s essentially passed for a position because he’s Sinhalese rather than British, Obey practices the same racism toward his compatriots. In one particularly astounding paragraph, he refers to one of his foes as a “monkey.” He disapproves of the independence movement, and is opposed to even the most basic democratic advances.

The British made a fatal error when they brought in universal suffrage. It might be plausible in Europe, but here, with our ignorant masses, what can it lead to but the disasters we’ve seen since independence?

When I started The Hamilton Case I had high hopes I could finally find a novel that deals with the colonial issue rather than skirt it, but I don’t think this one is it. De Kretser’s book is beautifully written, at times wonderfully subversive. (I loved her skewering of the current madness for the exotic novel.) But to this reader Sam Obeysekere remains as mysterious at the end as he was at the beginning.

Comic fans everywhere, rejoice! Tomer and Assaf Hanuka’s Bipolar is unlike most other comics currently being read. There aren’t any spandex-clad superheroes fighting crime, or sullen anti-heroes saving the world from destruction. Instead, Bipolar brings us into the brothers’ sometimes diametrically opposed worlds.

The first section, written and illustrated by Tomer Hanuka, is essentially a series of vignettes characterized by philosophical musings. Many of the panels show the action without any dialogue, relying on visual language only to convey Tomer Hanuka’s disjointed vision of a life where neglect and cruelty are ever-present, and where instances of kindness and humanity are almost accidental.

The best part about the series, though, is the second section, titled Pizza Kamikaze. Adapted from a story by Etgar Keret and illustrated by Assaf Hanuka, Kamikaze centers around Mordi, a man who commits suicide after a breakup with his girlfriend and finds himself in an afterworld populated solely by other people who have ended their lives. The people still bear the marks of their death: slit wrists, gun shot wounds, wrinkles from drowning. Everyone is mostly alone here, but sometimes entire families are unexpectedly re-united. Mordi soon learns that his lost love has recently arrived to this world. He embarks on a journey to find her. The dark artwork beautifully helps establish the subtle presence of death, but the story isn’t without humor. Kurt Cobain makes a brief appearance, for instance, and people complain that he won’t stop bitching because everything in this after-world reminds him of a song he wrote.

Keret and Hanuka join the likes of Takehiko Inoue ,Neil Gaiman, and Michael Chabon in creating work that showcases how the comic media can be read as literary fiction. If a publisher decides to release Pizzeria Kamikaze in graphic novel form, I’ll be first in line.

Bipolar isn’t available at Powells.com or Amazon.com, but you can purchase it at Mars Import.

Another re-read this week, Junot Díaz’s Drown, in honor of a writing workshop with the man himself, next week in San Francisco. Like Maud, I’m a fan of Díaz’s work, and in going through Drown again, I’m surprised at how much some stories have stayed with me since the book came out eight years ago. I remember reading “How to Date a Browngirl, Blackgirl, Whitegirl, or Halfie” in the New Yorker and, at work the next day, striking up a conversation with a nerdy rocket scientist in line at the cafeteria. (I worked for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the time.) I started telling this guy about this fantastic story, how Díaz’s use of language had opened up new doors for me, and the guy was like, hey, I’ll check it out. There aren’t many writers that trigger this reaction in me, this wanting to stop a stranger in a cafeteria. Unfortunately, new material from Díaz is hard to come by. There’s a non-fiction piece in this week’s New Yorker, for instance, but I’m not aware of any new fiction work in the last year or so.

I haven’t been able to find anything that excites me for longer than twenty pages, so I’m re-reading and enjoying) Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. I think the last thing this book needs is yet another review, so I’m taking a break this week. If you’ve read something good lately, feel free to send me your suggestions.

Although the theme of dual identity has been explored countless times in fiction, one would be hard pressed to find a more poignant account of it than that in Sayed Kashua’s debut novel, Dancing Arabs.

Kashua’s narrator was born in Tira, a small Palestinian village in the Galilee, which became a part of Israel in 1948. (He is a citizen of the Jewish state, albeit one whose blue ID card identifies him as different, somehow.) He is a sheltered, fearful child who tiptoes to his grandmother’s room at night to sleep in her bed. An excellent student, his grades win him the approval of his teachers even if he doesn’t always escape the corporal punishment they dole out with disturbing frequency. The narrator’s grandmother puts him in charge of a secret key, the key to a blue suitcase she keeps in her closet, and which, she says, should only be opened and used after she’s dead. Curiosity gets the better of him and, one day, he opens the suitcase. Under the immaculate towels and shroud that the grandmother wants used for her burial, the narrator finds newspaper clippings, pictures, and postcards dating back to the 1960s. He learns that his father was once suspected of blowing up a cafeteria at the Hebrew University, and was held for several years in administrative detention, without trial. The events broke the grandmother’s heart; she had high hopes that her son, who was also the smartest student in his class, would someday become a scientist.

Unsurprisingly, the narrator, too, grows up with his family’s expectations that he’ll become a successful scientist, maybe even a rocket scientist. He is plucked from his village to go a Jewish boarding school, where he is one of only two Arab students. His Jewish classmates laugh at him when he says he doesn’t know who the Beatles are, they tease him for his pronunciation, and they make fun of the pink sheets his mother bought specially for his stay. The end of the first week at school coincides with Rosh Hashanah, and the narrator is sent back home for the holiday. On the bus, he is harassed by a group of Jewish students and later pulled off the bus by a soldier, who asks him for his papers and goes through his luggage. The narrator is so humiliated that he starts sobbing, and the soldier, feeling sorry for him, gets him a glass of water and says that it’s “just routine.”

One might think that this kind of treatment would have made the narrator cling to his roots, but instead he consciously decides to become a Jew. He perfects his Hebrew, getting rid of that pesky ‘b’ and correctly pronouncing his ‘p’. He shaves his mustache, listens to Hebrew music, never carries a khamsa. Whenever he is on the bus or in a public space, he takes a book in Hebrew with him. (His pick? Wittgenstein’s Nephew.)

I look more Israeli than the average Israeli. I’m always pleased when Jews tell me this. “You don’t look like an Arab at all,” they say. Some people claim it’s a racist thing to say, but I’ve always taken it as a compliment, a sign of success. That’s what I’ve always wanted to be, after all: a Jew. I’ve worked hard at it, and I’ve finally pulled it off.

But despite his efforts, he isn’t a Jew. His girlfriend’s mother tells her that she’d rather have a lesbian for a daughter than someone who dates Arabs.

After flunking his final exams in high school, he escapes to Jerusalem, crashing on a friend’s dorm room floor. He resents his family and their way of life. Their music gives him headaches. Their traditions strike him as prehistorical. He manages to register at Hebrew University, and supports himself with a low-paying job at a health clinic, and later as a barman. He dates an Arab girl named Samia, whom he marries more out of duty and boredom than out of love. Now that she’s slept with him, he says, she’s “damaged goods” and if he doesn’t marry her, no one else will.

Samia’s parents agree because they have no choice. The rumors have finished them off already. Her mother had gone to pay a condolence call and overheard people discussing her promiscuous daughter who was studying in Jerusalem. In the mosque where her father prays every Friday, they mentioned her in the sermon. Not by name, but they spoke of parents who send their daughters off to university, where they turn into prostitutes.

At this point, the novel starts to lose focus. The narrator’s baby daughter is mentioned almost as an afterthought, as are some other major life events. Increasingly, his musings verge on self-hate. He isn’t alone, though. Shadia, a fellow Arab Israeli who works with him at the night club, agrees with him. Sometimes, he tries to find a shred of his old self, even accompanies a friend on his pilgrimage to Mecca. Sometimes, he daydreams about a perfect life in Israel. Other times, he is angry and wants to take revenge on soldiers. Above all, he seems to hate his father.

I hate my father. Because of him, I can’t leave this country, because he taught us that there was no other place for us, and we must never give up; it would be better to die for the land. I picture him and tell him everything that’s on my mind. I say that if it weren’t for all the nonsense he drummed into us I would have left long ago.

Kashua provides not a single, sustained moment of comfort in this book. There are no heroes, no bad guys. Nearly every anecdote that might make one have hope is followed by another that will destroy it. The overall effect is that the book leaves the reader, like the narrator, feeling confused, stuck between two worlds, two identities.

Dancing Arabs is a difficult book for both Arabs and Jews to read–neither group is shown in a particularly good light, and, no doubt, people on either side will be angered by the mirror that the writer holds up– yet Kashua’s unsparing account is a necessary read for both.

In Imad Rahman’s debut collection, I Dream of Microwaves, B-movie actor Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, has just lost his role on America’s Most Wanted (playing Manuel Gutman, a convicted felon who had “crossed the line from gun-toting menace to shotgun-wielding assassin”), and his prospects are so poor that his next job is to play a Bosnian refugee in order to get his wife Eileen’s philanthropic grandmother to part with her money.

Abdul-Jabbar’s wife convinces him to act the part because, she says,

Americans have no sense of international politics, of global community, of social duty outside their neighborhoods. The world falls apart and we dream of microwaves.

Eileen takes off for South America shortly thereafter, and Abdul-Jabbar drifts from one job to the next, dressing as Zima Zorro to hawk booze to customers, renting his wife’s home out to pornographers who want to “combine fucking with intellectual social commentary,” posing as a repo-man for a video-rental company, taking a part in Apocalypse Now: The Musical, and so on.

There are some wonderfully realized moments in the book. The opening story, for instance, works both as an ironic send-up of how we look at minorities and as a reflection of the struggle to fit into expectations. And Rahman displays a biting sense of humor throughout.

Eventually, however, the one-liners and absurd set-ups are all that keep the stories going, each new joke trying to top the one before it. Substance recedes to the background in favor of pop-culture references, and the reader ends up alienated.

I really wanted to like this book. So few short-story collections are published these days that I often start them with a favorable stance. But this Eugene Ionesco-style universe didn’t quite work for me.