Alma Whittaker is the friend I needed during a cold winter of grief. The secret life of mosses revealed truths for her that science had not yet seen in her time. She loved reading and her mother taught her to read, write and speak several languages before her premature death of cancer in Alma's adolescence. Her adopted, beautiful, sister Prudence is in many things her opposite but also her most faithful friend. Prudence does not put much effort into science. In stead she dedicates her whole life to fight slavery and rescue former slaves to freedom.
This novel that literally offers the reader a trip around the world of science and the search for the answer to the question which Darwin never could understand: why we do good to each other. Why are there so many Dorothea Brookes and Prudences in this world of survival of the fittest?
Sometimes we cannot get answers to the questions we have but it is a great comfort that we have that question, still unanswered, for without that phenomenon, who would survive at all? What would become of us all?
One of the novels I've read that will remain in my heart and head for as long as I breath is Toni Morrison's magnificent Beloved. When I first read it I was expecting my fourth child, exactly as Sethe, the main character of the novel does in the beginning of her escape from "Sweet Home farm" in Kentucky, to freedom on the north shore of the Ohio. I felt her love for the third child so deeply , the premature beautiful little girl Beloved that had to die to give her family a new life in freedom. Oh, the love you can hold for your baby girl, nothing compares to that. It's a "thick love" as Paul D puts it, "too thick". Toni Morrison manages to conjure up this love so vividly that it almost suffocated me. Pregnant with number four, as Sethe was when she escaped Scoolteacher's boys who stole the milk Beloved should have once they were all safe on the north bank of the Ohio. When I read the novel for the first time I was Sethe.
Sethe filled with strength and ardour. Sethe filled to the brim with the thickest love you can think of. Sethe fighting for freedom and for her children. Sethe finding an unexpected midwife in the forest on the river bank: a whitewoman. This white young woman is not amongst those who turn in fugitive slaves for rewards. In stead she helps Sethe to give birth to a baby girl with a charmed life. This little girls gets her name, Denver, from the whitewoman Amy Denver.
I think I felt so close to Sethe because my number three also felt so especially close to me when I was pregnant with number four. I realized how she felt when she wanted to save her children from the slave hunters by killing them and I had experienced her agony when her breasts were filled with milk but had none to give it to, since I had lost a child , the first number four, a year before I first read Beloved.
This time I felt so close to Denver I saw her grow up to a head strong woman with self esteem in the centre of her community, from being a weak, lonely and dependent child. Denver saved her mother from mental illness and grief that almost killed her. The vengeful baby that almost killed Sethe made Denver find herself and the grown up Denver resembled her father Halle who couldn't escape slavery but paved the wave for his mother, the spiritual leader Baby Suggs, and family with his own hard working body.
Paul D is also a character that stands out more this time, when I read Beloved together with a class of only male students in the same age and passage of life as Denver is in the novel. Paul D is a person to relate to for a young construction worker-to-be. Intelligent, though he can't read and write, a handyman, he figures out how to survive 18 years of tribulations knowing his value as a slave, exactly, put in dollars-rather high. A man with a tin box heart and hands that can take the pain from the choke cherry tree whipped into Sethe's back by the boys who stole Sethe's milk. A trustworthy man. Always remembering Sethe and her glowing eyes, the girl all the Sweet Home men fell in love with, but only Halle got for a wife.
The notion of a real wedding made the kind Mrs. Garner laugh out loud. She cared for her slaves but who would think of an atrocity as a real wedding for slaves? Mrs. Garner was like a mother to Sethe, however, it's hardly likely that Mrs. Garner felt like a mother to Sethe. For Sethe all human beings were alike; good or bad, no matter the colour of skin. Although Mrs. Garner was a kind and "good" slave owner, she still was a slave owner. Sometimes she acted as if Sweet Home really was one, but when Mr. Garner died and she fell fatally ill with cancer the Sweet Home men and women got to see reality: it's a difference between being free and not. Slave owners and slaves don't relate as mother and daughter. Schoolteacher comes since Mrs. Garner wouldn't trust those who imagined themselves to be her family. To her they were family, sort of, but no more than her horses and dogs were family.
The underground railroad across the Ohio was the life
line for those who realized that freedom is something else than slavery, no matter how life like the home feeling gets on the plantation that also were their prison camp. When the illusion of home died with Mrs. Garner's fading voice-lost to cancer- and the cruel Schoolteacher, slavery showed its real self.
Although freedom hardly was the schlaraffen land they imagined before they
settled outside Cincinnatti it was as far from slavery as the harvest moon from the corn field where Sethe's children were concieved.
Stamp Paid knew the river, every snag and curve,
all the banks and shores and under water rocks. He knew the river and he knew what happened when Baby Suggs gave a party for her daughter-in-law and her children. Stam Paid saved lives on the river as well as he saved the lives of Sethe's two small sons when Sethe paid for their freedom with the blood of her beloved baby girl. She bought their freedom but was it worth it? Yes, she never had to be parted from her children. Baby suggs had to part with seven children. Than Halle bought her freedom but perished before he could reach it himself. Eight children the only remianing were Sethe and three of her grand children. Yes, freedom was even worth the horrible prize Sethe payed.
Stamp Paid, he was also paid for. his freedom also had a proze as all creation's freedom has a prize. So many allusions to the Great Story of redemption. i didnät notice them before, but this time we read the novel during Lent. My students also noticed Jesus everywhere. And all the music.
Beloved is a novel of realistic hope. Presented as a down to earth low fantasy, horror and documentary in one, created by the means of exquisite prose. The story of 124, number three is missing, on the outskirts og Cincinatti is the American equivalent of Middlemarch filled with characters that we all could relate to because we are all human beings born to be free, lost in captivity and bought back to freedom with thick love.
New Bern, a small Southern town on the river Neuse remains the lasting impression of the cute love story told by Nicholas Sparks in his award winning novel The Notebook. This doesn't indicate that the novel is disposable. On the contrary it is a small novel that grows from a rather ordinary romantic novel to something special in the end. You rarely follow the happy couple through all those years when they lived happily until death did them apart. In this novel you do, the end of life with all its trials and tribulations is in fact tying this story together which embraces a life time from 1935 up until the 1990's when the happily ever aftr comes to its tragic and tender end.
In the end Sparks examines the process of falling in love in a way which I have never seen it penetrated before. To be able to depict romantic love with old people as the main characters must be as easy as doing it with young people, and yet there are so few novels about mature love. Why so many novels and stories about young love and so few about life long love? I guess someone out there thinks that we want to read about young love all the time. However, most readers are not extremely young today and I predict that more novels will deal with similar subjects as this one.
I also hope that more novels will deal with age and sickness even if they are written for a young audience. Right now my pupils aged 16 and 17 read The Notebook. I hope they will remember it and that they get tools to confront old age when it comes to them, 60 years from reading this at school.
Back to New Bern, why was that such a lasting impression of this novel? Simply because my picture of a small river town in North Carolina was very vague and with this novel I felt that I got to know it a little bit. The life on the river, water fowl and kayaking plays an important part in the story and suddenly, for the first time in my life I feel an urge to go to North Carolina. Don't worry, this too will pass.
This song creates a sound track suitable to this saga of neverending courtship that begins and ends when the ever after part is almost over. In fact, the love story in The Notebook is exactly like this: "I don't know if the suns gonna shine and I don't know if you'll ever be mine, but I make love to you anytime"
This semi-classic novel was an adventure to read with pupils in Upper Secondary School. They found themes and stories hidden in the text that we missed at the University. His Catholic friend, that everyone bullied but he secretly felt close to and secure with, although he didn't want to show him or the rest of the mob that he did. Did my pupils recognize a pattern in their own lives?
The kid sister Phoebe was also a character they felt close to and she is amiable in every respect, feisty and kind at the same time. No wonder Holden trusts her and is willing to do everything to make her happy. She is fut´rthermore a rather rare character in a novel of this genre: "angry young man going frantic". In those novels you rarely meet any positive female characters.
My own strongest impression from the novel this time was that cruel treatment of upper class children has to do something with the ruling groups in society. To be a top dog is to begin your life unhappy, lost and lonely, friendless in spite of all the money. I hope all those boarding schools make Catcher in the Rye compulsory reading.
I have neglected you for too long, so many griefs and bereavements got in between us, but now I am back and the reading has found me again, although most words are lost to me. I have not forgotten you, though, I still want to become more like you and those who made so much difference and still are buried in unvisited tombs.
I am currently reading about your literary brother, Silas Marner, he is conceived by the same parent as you, George Eliot. You will hear from him soon.
Greetings in Christ!
måndag 6 april 2015
Grace in Practice by Paul M Zahl
The past month has turned my life up-side-down. First of all my father past away abruptly and unexpectedly. Secondly I've read about grace as the centre of God's intention with creation and human kind. Normally this blog deals with fiction, this book is theology. However, it brings out the qualities I look for in fictional literature; an envigorating language and depths of thought.
A quote may guide you to realize the genius of this book:
We are not born in community, nor do we die in community. We are single, alone. It is the first fact of human existence. Grace must speak to this.
I love this novel, it is not modern , nor postmodern although it's written in the early 21st C, I think it's one of the reasons for me to love it. Instead of trying to create a new artistic prose and format, the author, Susan Abulhawa, has something to tell. A story. A story which grows almost organically out of historical events which occured in the early 1940's up to now in the British protectorate Palestine, Israel, Jordan and the West Bank.
There are so many features in this novel that render it the epithet masterpiece; it is clearly a call for compassion with the arabs in Palestine against the Israeli violence and still one of the families that we get to know in the book is jewish, belonging to the group of jews that fled Europe just before the holocaust. Another one is the love story between the daughter-in-law, Dalia, and her mother - in -law, Basima, who at first was against the marriage between her son and the bedouine girl, yet takes her to her heart, as if she was the daughter she never got herself, after getting to know her. Another is the story about Darweesh and his beautiful stallion Ganoosh.
The novel consists of these mini-portraits of villagers spread around the world. The assorted portraits give the novel a resemblance to a great French 19th C novel such as Germinal by Zola or any work by Balzac.To the great shame of European culture we are not used to reading these kind of novels about people outside Europe. We see novels like Mornings in Jenin as something new and thus interesting. Of course 19th C novels have to be written about others too, Europeans are not the only persons who got stories to tell. Terefore Mornings in Jenin is not interesteing because of the novelty of it, because there is nothing modern about it, it is interesting exactly in the same way as Crime and Punishment, Les Miserables or Middlemarch is interesting; it has a great story to tell about real human beings.
You might criticize Mornings in Jenin for being biased for the Palestinian arabs and against jews in general and Isreli jews in particular. For instance it once claims thet the 6-day war started by Israeli forces attacking Egypt. However, this is the story told from the perspective of a child that survived, a child that got all her news from highly biased media, it is not a history book, it is a story about real human beings, a human tragedy striking innocent people who are used for other's benefit in many ways. It's claims are not historic accuracy but humanitarian accuracy and in this it is a great success.
I have met people that, thanks to Mornings in Jenin has understood the complexity and gravity of the conflict in the Middle East. Like the Diary of Anne Frank's brought us to understand that behind the monstrous figures of millions and millions perishing in the Holocaust are real human beings like you and me, Mornings in Jenin give voice and face to those who suffered and suffers from the clearing of Israeli land to let jews take over what arabs had built up during centuries. This novel let us know that behind the figures of hundred thousands of Palestinians living in refugee camps for generations there are persons, real human beings, with voices and wishes, hopes and dreams.
This truth becomes extra visible by showing us the joys of the refugees from Ein Hoda, we are all too familiar with the sorrows of them. Such as the trip back to the village of grandpa to harvest his own gardens or the mornings which Amal spent with her father reading and discussing, listening to him reciting poems by Gibran or when Huda and Amal painted their finger and toe nails with red nail polish one week before the war.
In search of the human good of Dorothea Brooke, Mornings in Jenin gives us clues to and maps out a possible way to reach there. The novel certainly is biased and lacks the complexity of a novel by Tolstoy, where you never really manages to pin point who are the good guys and who are the bad ones, but it gives you an understanding of the human mind, the ugliness of war and the beauty of what people can do to relief suffering of others despite ethnical barriers raised between them by people with more power than heart. Read it!
