Category: book reviews / recommendations
The eleven stories that make up Hannah Tinti’s new collection, Animal Crackers are engaging, often disturbing, yet compelling looks at what it means to be human in an animalistic world and what it means to be an animal in the world of humans.
The collection opens with the zookeeper in the title story reflecting on how people who work with large animals all have blessures de guerre. It’s part of the job, his colleagues say. “Everyone who works with animals has a mark somewhere.” But the same is true about the people in the story, their cruelty to one another often leaving physical marks behind, as is the case for the zookeeper and his wife. “Home Sweet Home” opens as a murder mystery, witnessed by a dead couple’s dog, but it slowly builds into an intense drama where the reader’s allegiances may switch several times as the story unfolds, without being resolved.
The characters in these ambitious and original stories are often lonely and crave human or animal contact, but Tinti’s eye is unsentimental. “Slim’s Last Ride,” about a woman, her son, and the rabbit given to him by his absent father, is a difficult story to read and yet impossible to put down. This is not to say that the writer doesn’t have warmth for her characters. For example, a filial relationship is keenly, tenderly observed in “Preservation,” where a young painter at the natural museum is in charge of finishing the work of her terminally ill artist father.
Mary takes out one of the prepared needles left by Mercedes, the hospice nurse, and pulls up his nightgown. With a grunt, her father turns, and she jabs the syringe into his small white flat buttock. Her father’s paintings hang in the Whitney and the Museum of Modern Art. Large canvases of abstract blues and greens, enveloping the viewer with emotion. There have been two books written about his life. He taught her how to mix colors, how to create perspective, and how to live without a mother. Now he wears a nightgown and lives from shot to shot.
Parent-child relationships are also center stage in “Talk Turkey,” in which three teenage boys struggling with abusive, absent, or neglectful progenitors, run away to the other side of the country. Tinti’s prose is at once sharp and illuminating.
Joey’s mother was standing at the entrance of the kitchen and smoking a cigarette. She looked like a cake under glass, beautiful but tasteless.
A couple of the stories in this collection seem to be fillers, as though an animal was slipped into the tale as an afterthought. The result is clearly less organic, less impressive, as in “Hit Man of the Year” about a young boy who becomes a mafia killing machine but never loses interest in his childhood crush. In others, the animal is central to the story, but becomes more of a gimmick, as in “Reasonable Terms,” about a group of giraffes who decide to wage a strike to improve their living conditions at the zoo.
Despite this, Animal Crackers is a fantastic read. Tinti displays a lot of range, both in subject matter and style, and her striking new collection is a harbinger of bigger things.
Ahmed Marzouki’s Tazmamart, Cellule 10 is a memoir of the eighteen years he spent in the infamous jail of Tazmamart, in Morocco. In 1971, Marzouki was a student officer at the Ecole Militaire d’Ahermoumou. He was taken, along with hundreds of other classmates, to the town of Skhirat for what he believed were military exercises, but later turned out to be a coup d’Etat, plotted by General Mohamed Medbouh and by the director of the school, Lieutenant-Colonel Mhamed Ababou.
The coup failed, and the entire student body was arrested, jailed, and sentenced to serve various terms in the military prison at Kenitra. Then, two years into their sentences, fifty-eight of the prisoners (some of whom, like Marzouki, not only didn’t know about the coup but didn’t even fire a single shot) were taken to a new prison that had been built for them: Tazmamart. They were to stay in solitary confinement for eighteen years. Only twenty-eight of them survived.
Marzouki struggled for years to understand the arbitrariness of his imprisonment, so it’s perhaps not surprising that this book is written not so much as the narrative of his years in jail but as a close examination of the facts of the case. The reader is given the names and biographies of each of the prisoners, the names and dispositions of the guards, the daily menu, the schedule devised by the prisoners, the constant (denied) requests for water or medicine.
Of course, this is all interesting but the book is somewhat lacking in two aspects. First, the chapter on the coup feels very distant and doesn’t go into what Marzouki saw. This is a missed opportunity to give us an eyewitness account that is different from the accepted, official narrative. The second shortcoming is that, although Marzouki’s fate was decided by an apparatus which was ultimately controlled by King Hassan, the king is curiously absent from the book. Still, Tazmamart, Cellule 10 is an important and necessary read.
Now that I finally have a new address I was able to order the last volume of Persepolis. This last installment takes Marji from her return to Iran as a teenager, through her tribulations as she studies arts in Tehran, to her relationship with a fellow arts major. I enjoyed it tremendously (and will probably write my thoughts in more detail when the book comes out here. Volumes 1 and 2 of Persepolis were previously released in the U.S. together in one edition. )
I spent the day trying to get over my cold but had time to finish reading The Namesake. I had enjoyed Interpreter of Maladies and so I’d been waiting for this book with great expectation. But The Namesake disappointed me. The book is exceedingly well-written and the characters carefully drawn and very engaging. Still, I found that the numerous descriptions sometimes substituted for plot and that certain writerly tics (lists, for example) became obvious in this longer work, whereas they weren’t in the short stories. Next up is The Margaret-Ghost by Barbara Novak.
Like Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, with whom she will inevitably be compared, Chimamanda Ngozi-Adichie is a Nigerian writer whose fiction grapples with the political turmoil of her country. But while Adichie and Soyinka use satire to deal with these issues, Adichie chooses to highlight them through the subtle transformations that a small family undergoes during and after a military coup.
Purple Hibiscus tells the story of Kambili, a studious and dutiful teenager, and her older brother Jaja, a protective and bright young man, as they struggle under their father Eugene’s fanatical rule. Eugene is a very successful businessman and something of a local hero. He gives money to his church, helps people from his village, and, through the newspaper that he publishes, tries to uphold freedom of the press. He is “a man of integrity, the bravest man I know,” according to the newspaper editor he helps free.
But Eugene is also a controlling man, watching over every detail of his family’s life. His children must have free time penciled in on their schedules. He forbids them to speak Igbo outside the home. “We had to sound civilized in public, he told us; we had to speak English.” In addition, Eugene is a fundamentalist Christian who repudiates his elderly father because he still keeps traditionalist icons at home, beats his wife because she says she is too tired to visit the priest after mass, and slaps his daughter for breaking the Eucharistic fast (this, despite the fact that it was for medical reasons.) Eugene is precise in his religious requirements, brutal in his punishments.
Kambili and Jaja’s world is turned on its ear when they are unexpectedly allowed to stay for a few days with their Aunt Ifeoma, a lecturer, in the university town of Nsukka. Unlike her brother, Ifeoma allows her children to speak at the table, play music, watch television, agree and disagree with her. Being transplanted from a world in which life centers on religion to one in which freedom is in focus affects both Kambili and Jaja. The purple hibiscus of the title refers to an experimental variety of hibiscus “rare, fragrant with the undertones of freedom, a different kind of freedom from the one the crowds waving green leaves chanted at Government Square after the coup. A freedom to be, to do.” The themes of faith and freedom run steadily throughout the book, and Aunty Ifeoma summarizes hers and Eugene’s positions well: “Eugene has to stop doing God’s job. God is big enough to do his own job.” As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that, upon their return home, Kambili and Jaja are different people.
From its opening line (“Things began to fall apart,” possibly a nod to Achebe), to its harrowing end, Purple Hibiscus gives us characters we care deeply about. At times, some of them turn into mouthpieces, and the protagonist’s quietness borders on passiveness. Yet these minor faults are more than made up for by Adichie’s subtle handling of the characters’ emotions. The writing is fluid, even lyrical, always sensuous.
Adichie has already made her mark as a short-story writer with haunting, deftly told pieces, like “Half of a Yellow Sun” or “The American Embassy,” the latter an O. Henry award winner. With Purple Hibiscus, she announces herself as a gifted novelist as well.
I just finished reading Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel/memoir Persepolis. Already a best-seller in France, where it first appeared, the book has recently been published in the States. Satrapi is the great-granddaughter of the emperor of Iran, who was overthrown by Reza Shah in what at first was a bid to create a republic but in the end simply ushered in the Pahlavi dynasty. The book tells the story of Marjane (or Marji) who is 10 years old at the time of the 1979 revolution in Iran, and chronicles the next four years of her life, up until the moment when her parents, fearing for her future, send her off alone to Austria to stay with a friend of theirs.
Unlike many Iranians who fled in 1979, Satrapi has no romantic nostalgia for the reign of the Shah of Iran, and rightly so. The Shah was a brutal dictator who lived it up while the people suffered. But she is also disappointed in the revolution that followed. Although the opening chapter on the veil is overly simplistic (a panel shows two groups of women, one chanting “the veil” and the other chanting “freedom”), Satrapi has a keen eye for how the fundamentalists changed people around her (there is a scene of kids who brag about how many times a day they pray.) There are many poignant scenes in this book (Marji’s dialogues with God are one example, the yellow plastic keys to heaven is another.) The story is gripping, the dialogue is sharp, and the charcters are well observed. Like Maus or Palestine, Persepolis is a landmark. A must for anyone who wants to understand modern-day Iran.