The Wind from the Plain

 By Yaşar Kemal

This story tells of the lives of a poor peasant family struggling through epic challenges to survive and get ahead in a mid-century Turkish village. The family makes an annual trek over a mountain pass to the cotton fields where they hope to have a good enough harvest to improve their lives. But everything seems to be against them: village families fight among each other for advantage; corrupt village leaders play them off to get a profitable deal from the landowners; different generations within the family fight for respect and attention; the land, the weather, even the spirits, seem to exist just to make things harder. And the final result from their labours is disappointment. (This book is the first of a trilogy, so maybe things will get better in the future.)

The story has the feel of an epic struggle against fate and the elements, but told within the personal details of peasant life. Ali is a heroic and sympathetic character. He tries to build up his family’s position by taking on enormous tasks and facing overwhelming risks. Inspired by his mother, he pushes on against a raging storm (his mother rages against her fate like Lear in the storm). He tries to help his village and the lying braggart Old Halil, although they don’t return his support. Ali is a good soul who would be a good friend, although he is beaten down by bad luck time after time.

While his story is unrelenting struggle, it is not unending misery. The family cares for each other, even while they play out their personal issues. Ali resents his mother, but over and over he risks his life and his family’s future to look after her. Ali’s wife makes his favourite foods even though she has only what she can carry on her back. His kids play and sing, but they also have their ideas about how they can support the family. Occasionally, it seems that things are going their way, and they can take a break. Then their life appears almost idyllic, loving and rich.

The concrete details of their environment and their lives make the story real and relatable. The smells in the wind, the sparkle of a stubble field, the offerings hanging from a holy tree seem to come from first-hand knowledge, and they place a reader in the scene. They give insight into what the characters are seeing and feeling, and help a Canadian urban reader empathize with them on their journey over the Turkish mountains.

This makes the struggle of a traditional family in the modern world more poignant. Things don’t work the way they used to, and a corrupt modern political and economic system undermines them as much as their struggles against nature. They face their epic struggle yearly, and the village leaders aligned with the modern Turkish state of the 1950s exploit them for their labour or send them off to the army. The villagers know they need to organize to protect themselves, but they are stuck in their atomized families, each one struggling alone to survive.

Perhaps this conflict is the key theme that Yashar Kemal wants to point to in the novel – the need for traditional Turkish peasantry to organize together instead of fighting alone among themselves. He shows that it will not be easy – their attempts flounder twice in the novel, and the village leader is shown trying to buy off each family individually – but it seems to be the only way that the families will get ahead in a market economy that does not support them.

Although set in a culture and place that I know nothing about, the story and the characters are interesting enough that I want to read the rest of the trilogy.

Candide

 By Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet)

What a horrific story! All of the central characters, and many others, suffer the most brutal cruelties from the first page, with only brief pauses to set up the next horror. While I do enjoy a good satire, this story made me want to quit reading. 

The story might have been more enjoyable to read if the storyline were more nuanced, but the point is fully evident within the first ten pages and, in stringing it out, Voltaire merely inflicts the pain on his readers as well as his characters. Piling one misery on top of another makes Voltaire’s view of the nature of the world inescapable and affirms that there is neither reason nor consolation in philosophy. The only chance of wisdom and security seems to lie in staying home and cultivating one’s garden, although even this is far from secure.

Who would want to read a story of endless varieties of torture and misery if they did not lead to some outcome? This is like watching a horror movie with no resolution (and I’m not one who chooses to watch horror movies anyway). The satire might be justified if it took on a worthy target, but this storyline is not the true nature of the world. The philosophers Voltaire describes are thoughtless idiots, a false caricature that is not worth satirizing. And nor is Voltaire’s picture of the world any more realistic. While there is pain and misery in life for no purpose, most of us lead a good part of our lives in general comfort and even well-being. Even acknowledging the relative privilege I enjoy as a middle-class Canadian, I don’t think the people living in poverty or in underdeveloped countries or countries at war live lives of unrelenting pain.

Len & Cub: A Queer History

by Meredith Batt and Dusty Green

Len and Cub were two rural New Brunswick men who, it seems, had a loving relationship for several years in the early decades of the twentieth century. The photos collected in this book give insight into their lives. But the book is equally valuable for the careful way it lays out the contemporary social and legal circumstances of their society, and how the authors pieced together their stories through inferences and interpretations of the few facts available.

Based entirely on photos with the barest of notations (subjects, dates, locations at best) and a few remembered rumours, supplemented with a few surviving official records and news clippings, the story is drawn out by two archivists who came across the photo collection with the description that it referred to a man and his “boyfriend.” I’d be curious, too, especially since many of the photos, taken by Len, illustrate a close and intimate friendship. The authors use their professional training and what must have been a significant amount of personal time to piece together the story, without romanticizing or going beyond reasonable inference. As a result, they create a detailed portrait of what a same-sex relationship must have been like in their specific time and place. This is a much richer and more human picture than one gets in broader histories, which often rely only on collections of small snippets and anecdotes to represent a social setting in general terms. It’s a remarkable addition to the “microhistory” approach that focuses in depth on a specific story to add understanding that is hard to get out of a broader historical approach.

Their story seems similar in many ways to what might occur in a rural town 100 years later. A young man, Len, finds that his interest in a younger neighbour, Cub, is reciprocated. They hang out together, becoming increasingly close. Having a car allows Len, the more affluent of the pair, to arrange private getaways, and having a camera allows him to make a record of their friendship. In their gossipy town, they keep their relationship private, in a way that many do now. They risk social sanctions and perhaps condemnation from their families and friends, although the danger of criminal prosecution that they faced no longer exists. Over time, their relationship weakens, possibly because the structures that could strengthen it did not exist. Len is driven from the town over a scandal that is apparently covered up by his family’s social standing. Cub enters a childless marriage to a 39-year-old woman, and after a time moves to a larger city. While the legal repercussions are no longer as strong, and a couple today would have many more options, young men today who want to remain within a conservative small town could find themselves on similar tracks.

While the personal details are thin, the photos themselves give the richness that makes the book unique. Len was an early photo buff and apparently took thousands of photos of his friends and family, his surroundings and, with the aid of a timer, himself. Many are deliberately posed to show the relationship that Len wanted to capture. Some are candid snapshots. Some are not great shots and the reproduction in some is unfortunately grey, but many show the facial expressions, gestures and physicality of their relationship. A reader can see the lives of Len and Cub in the photos and from the pictures infer a story that is much more concrete and memorable than a simple text description would be.

A string of lucky circumstances led to the photos being saved by Len’s sister, purchased and donated to the New Brunswick archive, and then discovered and researched by the authors. They offer a unique view into the lives of two men who could perhaps stand in for many of those living in small towns across Canada and the USA in the 1910s and ’20s.

The Goldfinch

by Donna Tartt

“Furniture, like all living things, acquired marks and scars over the course of time,” Theo reflects, which could be a metaphor for his own life. We start with a bright, artistic youth who doesn’t see how he fits into the world around him. Things happen to him over which he has no control, leading him from one disaster to another. He survives them all, thanks to improbably good luck more than anything he does. In the end, he concludes that beauty and love make life worthwhile in a world without meaning.

Theo loses his mother early in the story, but spends most of the 770 pages of the novel searching for a father. His own is absent, even when he’s present, and offers little stability or the connection that Theo needs. “Rotten luck” is his father’s explanation for the world. The father of his best friend, Boris, is also absent and violent, but he cares for his son in his damaged way. Theo is drawn to other father figures and finds one in Hobie, the antique restorer.

Like the furniture, Theo mainly sits around and lets the big events of his life happen to him. He initiates nothing and lets other people drag him from one catastrophe to another. Even the love of his life drifts in and out and he makes no serious move to hold on to her. (Although, she gives him no encouragement, and he tries to respect that.) This is the part of the novel that I found a bit off-putting. For long sections of the novel, Theo lives a passive and repetitive life, with nothing happening to advance the story, and little of interest in his internal rambling.

When I started the novel, it seemed to be a post-traumatic reflection of America’s reaction to the terrorist attacks of the early 21^st century. The explosion that Theo survives marks him in ways that the author occasionally describes as a PTSD reaction. But if this is a reflection of America in PTSD, then it’s floundering passively. (Is that what it feels like to some people living in America? It it’s not what’s happening to people living in Iraq or Afghanistan, or to those in America living with the security response.) But if America’s PTSD is one way of looking at the story, then what does it mean that Theo’s best friend, and the person who resolves his crisis, is a Russian-speaking Ukrainian criminal? Boris is clearly the antithesis to Theo, dynamic, self-driven to excesses of food, alcohol and drugs, but the only character who succeeds in getting anything done. (Actually, I find him the most attractive and memorable character in the book.) The other Americans are decadent wasters who spend their lives throwing away the wealth they have access to or ripping off other people. Even lovable Hobie, the careful craftsman who makes the objects of the past perfect again, can’t run his own workshop without someone else keeping him from bankruptcy. And Theo’s love interest Pippa, who survives her childhood trauma to become a caring and skilled musician, leaves the country. She takes up with a Britisher who, in Theo’s eyes at least, is a bit of a loser as well. Perhaps by way of balance, the Europe that Theo sees seems to be equally corrupt, criminal and decadent.

As I reflect on the book, I’d call it a sad satire on contemporary America. It’s quite comic in places, pointing out the emptiness of high New York culture as well as the Las Vegas desert. The good dad Hobie, Theo’s real bad dad, and Theo’s nihilistic best friend, all observe that good and evil are mixed up in the world, and it’s hard to separate one from the other. The art and beauty that Theo says give life meaning come only from the remnants of a European past.

In spite of which, Theo’s story is an engaging one. I always felt that he was a flawed human being like the rest of us, and I hoped he’d pull through somehow. The length of the story means that a reader spends time getting to know him, and even the slow parts didn’t make me want to quit reading.  The story is one that remains with me because it’s a vivid and detailed picture of a sense of anomie that I could empathize with.

The Black Jacobins

by C.L.R. James

C.L.R. James gives a detailed and gripping story of the revolution that led to the declaration of an independent Haiti in 1803. I didn’t try to keep track of the individual skirmishes and leaders, but the overall picture is fascinating and enriched by the details that James gives.

His start, provocatively titled The Property, is a memorable picture of the life that Haitian slaves faced, and why they fought so strongly for freedom. This was not an abstract notion, but a daily struggle that meant life, death, pain, family, food and more. It’s the reason for violent revolution.

James goes on to describe the complex relationships between the “property” and the small number of free, property-owning blacks, the land-owning whites, the “small” whites, and the people of mixed heritage. As all of these groups had their own interests in relation to land and property in San Domingo and to the colonial powers in France, they looked at the slave revolt from a perspective of identity, but primarily from the perspective of how it would affect their own assets.

This becomes a critical factor as the revolution plays out, with different factions forming alliances and compromises as they attempt to protect their own interests. It’s interesting that all of the factions, and at times some of the former slave leaders, consider – or actively work toward – reinstituting slavery as the only way to restore the economic base of the island, whether as a colony or an independent country. As a result, the freed slaves were ruthless and violent in destroying restoration factions, and faced ruthless repression as well.

The story has many layers, but James keeps it understandable, even for someone like me who does not have much knowledge of the times. As he shows, the complex interaction of class and racialized status makes simple analysis impossible, and no clear path or outcome was predictable. This remains true even today when identity politics is at the forefront, but class retains a powerful force. As he puts it, “The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it so fundamental.”

Especially interesting for me was James’ description of the situation in France, and the impact of the revolution of 1793. The economic significance of the San Domingo colony, and what James calls the “maritime bourgeoisie” that owned properties and got obscenely wealthy on the colonial trade, was the backbone of the rising class that overthrew the old French regime. Their bourgeois revolution to raise the trading class also led to the uprising of the lower classes, who opposed slavery in spite of the bourgeois attempts in the new French parliament to preserve it. So the French San Domingo colonies not only created the economic conditions that drove the French revolution, but also created the conditions that undermined it in favour of a (short-lived) proletarian revolution.

This of course was reversed after the bourgeoisie regained power in the assembly. James’ description of the intrigues and interests playing out in the national assembly gave me an understanding of the meaning of the French revolution that I knew very little of before. Reading those chapters has made me want to find out more about the French revolution if I can find a book that lays it out as clearly as James does. It’s also interesting to see how the English foreign strategy used slavery and a pretense of opposing it to undermine their rivals for economic power in the Caribbean.

The clarity of James’s description and analysis make it clear why his book is viewed as such a model and inspiration among revolutionary thinkers.

Shalimar the Clown

By Salman Rushdie, 2005 

This is a love story between the Hindu Boonyi and the Muslim Shalimar, set in a magical Kashmiri mountain village. But a careless American (with European roots) and an evil English stepmother destroy the relationship, and with it centuries of relatively peaceful coexistence in the disputed mountains between India and Pakistan.

Often told in mythic, poetic language, the story stands in for the poisoned relationship between India and Pakistan, and illustrates how colonialism at many levels has affected the modern history of the two countries, particularly in the senseless, brutal violence in the valleys of Kashmir. Or at least, that’s how Rushdie sees it, although I’m sure there are different interpretations of the history.

Rushdie makes explicit parallels with the Nazi occupation of the Franco-German town of Strasbourg and with the urban riots in the USA. (We Westerners can’t claim any political or moral superiority on this.) And his depiction of the Muslim terrorists in Pakistan and the Philippines has an implicit parallel with his own persecution by religious fanatics intent on assassinating him.

Interestingly, these sections are written in a flat, almost neutral tone that contrasts with the mythic tone of the traditional village life and love story. Rushdie seems to be deliberately making the modern parts of the story into a black and white cartoon comic book in contrast to the richness of the traditional story. It’s a little disappointing, though, that the child at the centre of the story, named Kashmiri by her mother and India by her stepmother, is mainly described in the flatter style. By the end of the novel, however, her story becomes joined with Greek mythology that represents either a unity of Western and Eastern stories or an overcoming of the East by the West. (This is left unresolved.)

I liked the story of the politics, which makes the Kashmir dispute very concrete without going into the details of the history. Rushdie’s view of the brutality of both sides – the responsibility of the Indian government and army on the one side and the Muslim fighters supported by Pakistan on the other – is unforgettably clear. Even more, I liked Rushdie’s telling of the village history, the characters of Boonyi and Shalimar how they become caught in the events. The destruction of their relationship and its outcome become an evil inverse of their love. Rushdie reflects this in the references to twin planets that both exist and do not exist, and to the combined creation and destruction in Indian cosmology.

In fact, Rushdie’s story and his writing are so complex that it takes a while to process. He brings so much into it, history, myth, personalities, magic and very playful word work, that I find it hard to assess. Many sections feel very thin, and many characterizations are cartoonish stereotypes. But in spite of being a little mystified by these choices, I very much enjoy reading him. His writing is so creative that it’s a pleasure to spend time in his imagination. What I’ve read of his other novels seems to capture people at their worst and blackest periods, but nevertheless leads to an outcome that is if not quite positive at least hopeful.

I’m not sure that this is Rushdie’s best book. The neutral style of some of the prose left me less engaged than his more playful writing, although his depiction of modern Kashmir certainly has impact. But in spite of my hesitation, this is the only book in many years that I’ve read twice, so clearly I’m willing to spend my time with it. It’s complexity and unsettling character are what drew me back for a second and more thoughtful read. To use the metaphor of the dual planets, it both is and isn’t satisfying and that makes it really interesting.

The Story of the Night

By Colm Tóibín 

My thoughts as I was reading this novel were, why is an Irish writer setting a gay coming out story in Argentina in the 1980s? And what, I asked myself, does the title mean? I came to see the setting as a metaphor for the storyline.

In the story, Richard grows up in Argentina with his British mother. We see him discover his interest in other men at an early age, although in the homophobic culture of Argentina, he allows his identity to be repressed, and expresses it only in secret. This parallels his coming to political consciousness, discovering but repressing his knowledge of the brutal dictatorship. As Argentina slowly opens to into a liberal democracy, he finds more room to express his sexuality, although both are distorted by links to the past and the corruption of the present. Richard and Argentina are challenged by an existential threat, which, in Richard’s case at least, he is able to face through the strength of his love. The future of Argentina is less clear.

“Argentina after the humiliation of the war and the disappearances would have done anything to please the outside world, and privatization was the price the outside world required. Everything the country had that was valuable would be sold and this would tie Argentina to outside interests so that it would never be able to behave badly again.”

Is this an illuminating metaphor? It describes a combined win and loss that the gay community took on in the 1980s, a longing for acceptance even at the cost of what made the community unique and valuable. It also works to clarify the situation that Richard finds himself in. Richard, like Argentina after the dictatorship, is very passive, which makes him somewhat unattractive as a protagonist. He hangs around in a dead-end job in his mother’s apartment until an Argentine politico and an American couple find his translation skills useful, and bring him into their world. He gets some money and contacts in a corrupt system, but they allow him to create a gay identity and find a loving partner.

Richard feels alienated and humiliated as a repressed gay men, and he lets other people tell him what to do. Later he becomes successful, but is sick at heart. He pays the price for letting other people control his life. I think this is what the story of the night refers to: the survival of gay men in the darkness of a hostile world where they cannot show themselves. The end feels like the coming of light, although it is a compromised future that Richard faces.

As a novel set in the gay milieu of the 1980s, the story reflects on the devastating impact of AIDS in the characters’ lives, but it’s interesting that it does not define them or their relationship. It’s a hurdle to overcome, but in spite of that the story ends on a positive note of hope.

I did quite like the depictions of Richard’s life, from his first sexual experiences to his callow youth and his later growth in maturity. The hopefulness and the alienation seem very true to the character and situation, and even though they were set in Argentina, I related to them as real stories. In fact, they appear so realistic that they made me think that Tóibín must have spent some time there, although his bio doesn’t refer to any time in Argentina. While wishing that Richard was not so passive, I also found his story offered insight into gay life in a certain time and place.

I also admire Tóibín’s writing. It’s very descriptive and creates an atmosphere that is easy to imagine. I come away with very clear pictures of Buenos Aires, Barcelona, and the other settings in the story. I’ve no idea how these images resonate with an actual Argentinian, but for me they make the story real and relatable.