Tag Archives: American Literature

Daisy Miller by Henry James

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The novella Daisy Miller was published in 1878, the same year James published his novel The Europeans and two years before the publication of Washington Square. Portrait of a Lady came a little later, in 1881. It’s a pure coincidence that those are exactly the books by Henry James that I’ve read so far. Plus, the novella Madame de Mauves, which is from 1874. Madame de Mauves is the only one I’ve read while blogging. You can find the review here.

Henry James was very fond of novellas and as soon as you look at his extensive bibliography, you can see just how fond of them he was. Maybe I’m wrong, but I got the impression that Daisy Miller might be his most famous novella. That’s not surprising as it’s James at his most readable. People often complain that he’s not accessible, that his sentences are difficult. None of this is the case here. The writing is fluid and elegant, never clunky, never overcomplicated. And the story is engaging too.

Winterbourne is a young American who lives in Geneva most of the time. At the beginning of the story, he’s visiting his aunt in Vevey. While out on a walk, he meets a peculiar boy who is followed by his older sister. Winterbourne can’t take his eyes off the young woman. She’s so beautiful and elegant. But very different from the other young American women he met in Switzerland. She walks around without her mother or another chaperone, openly flirts with Winterbourne, teases him and is very capricious. Flirting is something young American girls, unlike the Europeans, do a lot. But not exactly with as much liberty as Daisy.

Certainly she was very charming, but how deucedly sociable! Was she simply a pretty girl from New York State? Were they all like that, the pretty girls who had a good deal of gentlemen’s society? Or was she also a designing, an audacious, an unscrupulous young person? Winterbourne had lost his instinct in this matter, and his reason could not help him. Miss Daisy Miller looked extremely innocent. Some people had told him that, after all, American girls were exceedingly innocent; and others had told him that, after all, they were not. He was inclined to think Miss Daisy Miller was a flirt—a pretty American flirt. He had never, as yet, had any relations with young ladies of this category

His aunt tells Winterbourne right away, that she’s beneath him, even though it’s obvious she’s extremely rich.

But don’t they all do these things–the young girls in America?” Winterbourne inquired.

Mrs. Costello stared a moment. “I should like to see my granddaughters do them!” she declared grimly. This seemed to throw some light upon the matter, for Winterbourne remembered to have heard that his pretty cousins in New York were “tremendous flirts

After a trip to Château de Chillon, Winterbourne returns to Geneva and Daisy and her mother and brother travel to Rome.

The following winter, Winterbourne meets Daisy again in Rome. She’s the talk of the town. People gossip because she’s always seen alone with men, most of the time with one very good looking Italian.

The news that Daisy Miller was surrounded by half a dozen wonderful mustaches checked Winterbourne’s impulse to go straightway to see her. He had, perhaps, not definitely flattered himself that he had made an ineffaceable impression upon her heart, but he was annoyed at hearing of a state of affairs so little in harmony with an image that had lately flitted in and out of his own meditations; the image of a very pretty girl looking out of an old Roman window and asking herself urgently when Mr. Winterbourne would arrive.

While Winterbourne found many excuses for her when he first met her, surprising her, in the middle of the night, in the Colosseum alone with the Italian, disgusts him.

Since Daisy Miller is a novella, writing more would give away the ending. Let’s just say – it’s tragic.

Daisy Miller is such a strong creation. She’s free, she’s witty, she doesn’t care about what people say. But Winterbourne and the reader wonder why. Is it because she is so innocent or is it because she’s without morals? The ending reveals which of the impressions is right.

James is always interested in the different attitudes of Europeans and Americans and how these change through travel and living abroad. It seems that Daisy Miller puzzles them all. She’s entirely her own person. The little brother is very unusual too and so is the mother who doesn’t seem to be able to guide her two children. I would have loved to be introduced to the dad, but we never get to see him as he stayed in the US.

The society James describes in this novella, is very cruel. They have their rules and if you don’t play by them you get shunned or ostracized. No matter how rich you are.

Because the book is called Daisy Miller, one could assume its eponymous heroine is the main character, which in a way she is. But Winterbourne is just as important because we see the story filtered through his eyes. This filtering, and the way he interprets everything, tells us a lot about him and the society he lives in.

As I said, Daisy Miller is highly readable and very accessible. Even though the end is tragic, it’s neither sombre nor depressing as so many of James’ other books.

That Old Cape Magic by Richard Russo – Broken Dreams and Childhood Memories

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Richard Russo is an American novelist who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls which came out in 2001. That Old Cape Magic was published in 2009. I remember buying it back then but I’m not entirely sure whether because of a review or a blog post. At the time, I hadn’t heard of Richard Russo but liked the idea of a book about memories, set mostly at Cape Cod.

The book begins with Griffin driving to the Cape to attend his daughter’s friend’s wedding. He’s carrying the urn with his father’s ashes in his trunk. He wants to scatter the ashes at the Cape. Normally his wife Joy should have been with him but because of a minor argument, he’s on his own and in a bad mood. The moment he crosses Sagamore Bridge, which will lead him to the Cape, he starts singing That Old Black Magic, or rather, as his parents used to sing, That Old Cape Magic. This opens the door to memories of his childhood and suddenly this isn’t a book about a middle-aged man in a possible marriage crisis, but the story of his complicated parents. Parents, who failed to live the life they longed for. Instead of being professors at a minor college in the “Mid-fucking-West”, they wanted to be at an elite university with a summer house at the Cape. As a substitute, they spend every summer at the Cape, renting a house. Depending on their fluctuating income, the house was either shabby or decent.

We’re immediately introduced to Griffin’s mother and can see why she’s difficult.

Griffin’s mother loathed grading papers, too, of course. Who didn’t? But she was meticulous about correcting errors, offering style and content suggestions in the margins, asking pointed, often insulting, questions (How long did you work on this?) and then answering them herself (Not long, one hopes, given the result).

The book has two parts, one set at Cape Cod, the other in Coastal Maine. Both are about a wedding and, in both instances, Griffin has urns with him. First his father’s, then his father’s and his mother’s.

Odd that the future should be so difficult to bring into focus when the past, uninvited, offered itself up so easily for inspection.

Told in flashbacks, we get to know both his parents and Griffin. Griffin suffered and still suffers because of his parents, two academic snobs, who were judgemental, sarcastic, and narcissistic. They had a way of judging people and things that was very cruel. At the same time, they were deeply disappointed in themselves. While they didn’t judge themselves openly, it was clear from the way they spoke about other people and how they rated things. The most telling was the way they rated the cottages and houses at Cape Cod, where they felt they should be able to live. Either it was “Wouldn’t Have It As A Gift” or “Can’t Afford It.” Basically, nothing was ever right or attainable. Because of that, back in the Mid-West, they also never bought their own house but always rented furnished places which they treated with disregard, breaking and staining things.

The drive back to the Mid-fucking-west was always brutal, his parents barely speaking to each other, as if suddenly recalling last year’s infidelities, or maybe contemplating whom they’d settle for this year. Sex, if you went by Griffin’s parents, definitely took a backseat to real estate on the passion gauge.

They are unlikable characters but not free of their own tragedy. It’s not their fault that their dreams weren’t fulfilled. But it’s their fault that they can’t move past it. They felt that they were better than what they got but not as good as what they wanted.

Griffin’s life turned out differently but is also not entirely successful. He started as screen writer, but only wrote cheap made-for-TV scripts and finally left L.A. and became a professor of screenwriting. Griffin always thought that he was different, but his interior monologues show clearly, he’s not only quoting his parents or hearing, especially his mother’s voice, but he’s a little like them too. He frowns upon simple people, easily calls someone a moron. This leads to conflicts with his wife Joy who comes from a family that’s anything but academic.

Griffin dismissed their (his parents) snobbery and unearned sense of entitlement, but swallowed whole the rationale on which it was based (Can’t Afford It; Wouldn’t Have It As A Gift).

Weddings often trigger hidden feelings about marriage and life in general and it’s no different here. The first leads to total emotional chaos, while the second, his daughter’s wedding, one year later, turns into a farce.

In the comment section of a post about funny novels, Tom from Wuthering Expectations suggested Russo’s campus novel Straight Man. After reading That Old Cape Magic, and especially the hilarious scenes during the second wedding, I’m keen on finally reading it. The mean and snarky comments of Griffins mother often made me chuckle, but the scenes at the wedding rehearsal made me laugh out loud.

When I started this book, I expected something different. Something more lyrical, more atmospheric. But that’s not the way Russo writes. There’s a subtlety here but its more psychological, sarcastic, and humorous. I think it says a lot about a book when someone like me, who prefers lyrical, atmospheric books, ended up enjoying this as much as I did. It’s not only funny but says so much about family dynamics, marriage, broken dreams, family rituals, coming to terms with the past, and also the bond between parents and children and between spouses.

For anyone who has complicated parents or who has or had to deal with someone who is both judgemental and always seems to feel entitled, this will ring very true.

I attached a short video in which Richard Russo speaks about That Old Cape Magic and tells how this book, which started out as a short story, turned into a novel. It’s not only a good intro to the book but says a lot about the creative process.

If you’re looking for a funny novel – here’s the link to my post on Funny Novels again. It’s a great resource as many people added suggestions.

 

If You Come Softly by Jacqueline Woodson – A New York Setting – A Post A Day in May

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I’ve had Jacqueline Woodson’s novel(la) If You Come Softly (published in 1998) on my piles for almost ten years. When I discovered her name on this year’s Women’s Prize For Fiction Longlist, I decided it was finally time to read it. I was a bit surprised to find her on that list, as I thought she only wrote books for Young Adults and I don’t seem to remember having seen any YA titles on the past lists. I suppose, one could also call Red at Bone a YA novel, as the protagonist is a young woman.

I know, a lot of people shy away from reading YA literature but that’s a real shame as one can find some of the most original writing under that label.

The epigraph to If You Come Softly and the title are taken from a poem by Audre Lorde

If you come as softly

as the wind within the trees

You may hear what I hear

See what sorrow sees

I couldn’t think of a better epigraph to set the tone and capture the mood of this beautiful, mournful book.

If You Come Softly tells the love story of Jeremiah and Ellie. They fall in love at first sight on their first day in their new private school. Ellie lives with her parents in a huge flat overlooking Central Park. Jeremiah is from Brooklyn. He too, is from a rich family. His dad is a famous film director, but nobody at his new school knows that. Nobody even thinks that Jeremiah’s family has money, they think he attends the expensive school because of a scholarship. Why would they think that, you may wonder? Because Jeremiah is black, and this school is mostly white. And so is Ellie who is white and Jewish.

These two young people couldn’t care less about the colour of their skin and, while they think it might be difficult to be together, they do not expect it to be this difficult.

This is a very short book and I’m still surprised it manages to be so deep. Love at first sight stories often don’t work but this one does. Woodson conveys the feelings so well. There’s something magical about Jeremiah’s and Ellie’s love. And it’s exactly that soft, mellow magic that stands in such stark contrast with the world these two live in.

Towards the end, when Jeremiah is on his way to visit Ellie, there’s a very short passage that punched me in the gut.

He hated lying to his father. Yes, he did go to Central Park, but it was to hang out with Ellie- to sit and talk with her for hours and hours.

“You be careful over there. No running.”

Ever since he was a little boy, his father had always warned him about running in white neighbourhoods. Once, when he was about ten, he had torn away from his father and taken off down Madison Avenue. When his father caught up to him, he grabbed Miah’s shoulder, Don’t you ever run in a white neighbourhood, he’d whispered fiercely, tears in his eyes. Then he had pulled Miah toward him. Ever.

I think this passage hit me so hard, because as a reader one instinctively understands, on a very visceral level, what it means: One senses how scary it must be to be a black person in a world where even running can be dangerous.

As I said before, this is a short book but it’s powerful and tightly written. You won’t find a superfluous word or passage. Only key scenes that manage to move and touch.

I can see why Jacqueline Woodson won so many awards. I’m pretty sure, I’ll read more of her. She might even become a favourite writer.

A word about the cover – Since I bought my book ten years ago, the cover I added, is the old cover. Sadly, they have changed it meanwhile. This one worked so well on so many levels.

Amy Bloom: White Houses (2018)

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I’m not that familiar with most of the pre-Reagan American presidents and even less with their respective wives, but Eleanor Roosevelt was someone who had piqued my curiosity, years ago, as a teenager. I read a terrific book by Gloria Steinem, called a Book of Self Esteem and she made a comparison between Eleanor Roosevelt and Margaret Mead. Both women were highly intelligent and successful, but not exactly known for their conventional beauty. As Steinem showed, Mead couldn’t have cared less, while Roosevelt, when asked by an interviewer, whether she had any regrets looking back on her life said: “Just one. I wish I had been prettier.” This struck me as incredibly sad and touched me because it was so frank. I also wondered, what kind of life she thinks she’d have had if she had been prettier. After all, she was married to one of the most popular US presidents. When I came across Amy Bloom’s latest novel White Houses and saw it was about her relationship with Lorena Hickock, I remembered the Steinem book and picked it up. I wasn’t surprised to find out that Eleanor Roosevelt’s looks were also an important topic in this novel.

Of course, White Houses, is a novel, not a nonfiction book, so we have to assume Bloom took some liberties, nonetheless it was fascinating for many reasons. I had an idea of president Roosevelt, like many do, and while I still believe he was one of the better presidents, I don’t think he was that good a man. At least not, judging by this novel. Not only was he a philanderer but quite cruel to his mistresses. When they had served their purpose, he dropped them like a hot potato. But this is only a tiny part of what this book is about.

He was the greatest president of my life-time and he was a son of a bitch every day. His charm and cheer blinded you, made you deaf to your own thoughts, until all you could do was nod and smile, while the frost came down, killing you were you stood. He broke hearts and ambitions across his knee like bits of kindling and then he dusted off his hands and said, Who’s for cocktails? If Missy’s stroke hadn’t killed her, Franklin’s cold heart would have.

White Houses is told by Lorena Hickock, a journalist and writer who seems to have had a love affair with Eleanor Roosevelt. Quite a passionate affair, as it seems. They were drawn to each other physically, emotionally, and intellectually.

While she may not have been a great beauty, Eleanor was very attentive and caring, which endeared her to people.

We love the attentiveness of powerful people, because it’s such a pleasant, gratifying surprise, but Eleanor was not a grand light shining briefly on the lucky little people. She reached for the soul of everyone who spoke to her, every day. She bowed her head towards yours, as if there was nothing but the time and necessary space for two people to briefly love each other.

For many years, Hickock lived with the Roosevelts at the White House. Just like Eleanor accepted her husbands affairs, he seems to have accepted that his wife had hers.

We learn a lot about Lorena Hickock who came from a dirt poor family, was abused by her father and later, during the depression, abandoned. It’s remarkable that she was able, in spite of her hardships, to get a good education and become one of the first female journalists who covered important cases, like that of the Lindbergh baby.

Eleanor came from a totally different background but there’s still a lot of tragedy there. Even though she had six children, she was only really attached to one and he died shortly after his birth. The other kids were brought up by Franklin’s mother, the bossy clan matriarch with whom Eleanor didn’t get along too well. It seems to have been clear for everyone that motherhood was never Eleanor’s calling. And she hated having sex with her husband. It’s sad to think that she still had to go through so many pregnancies.

Since they were public figures, it’s easy to imagine how difficult the relationship between Lorena and Eleanor was. Maybe it was because of that or because of other reasons, but they slowly drifted apart. The book begins right after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s death and then moves back and forth in time. The short period after her husband’s death, marks also the end of the love story between Eleanor and Lorena. Why? We don’t know.

White Houses is a elegantly written novel. It’s fascinating and has some wonderful scenes that I enjoyed a lot. The relationship between the women is very affectionate.

We drove to a cabin overlooking the ocean at dusk and unpacked before dark. We shared a brandy and the last of the pretzels and stood in our nightclothes on the little porch, the big quilt around us. The mottled, bright white moon pulled the tide like a silver rug, onto the dark pebbled beach. It should have been a starry sky, but it was deep indigo, like the sea below, with nothing in it but the one North Star.

What I found very well done was the way Bloom described the White House. It is, after all, not only a famous house, but a place where a family, their friends, and entourage live, in other words, it is someone’s home. And that aspect of home, is well captured.

While the novel had many interesting elements, I was a little disappointed. I was left with too many questions and felt I would have done better to pick up a biography. But maybe that’s unfair, as I didn’t regret reading it. Both women are so fascinating and the book manages to show what a complex person the president was.

They loved him. History should show him to be a great man, a great leader, a silver-tongued con man and a devil with women, but if it doesn’t show that they adored him, it’s not telling the truth.

And it does its title justice. It evokes both sides of the White House – the public place and the home of a family.

William Maxwell: They Came Like Swallows (1937)

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They Came Like Swallows is American author William Maxwell’s second novel. Maxwell was famous as an author and editor. He helped shape the careers of writers like Eudora Welty, John Cheever, John Updike, John O’Hara and many others. I read and reviewed one of his later novels, So Long, See You Tomorrow in the early days of this blog. I was very impressed with it and keen on reading more of his work. Two of his books were suggested in the comments – One was They Came Like Swallows, the other one was The Château. Although I was so keen, it took me eight years to return to him. While I liked So Long, See You Tomorrow more, I found a lot to admire in They came Like Swallows. Once again, it is obvious why he’s called a “writer’s writer”. He’s so skillful.

They Came Like Swallows is a tragic book, even more so because we know it’s based on Maxwell’s childhood story. It’s set at the end of WWI, during the flu pandemic that killed twenty to forty million people. The story is told in three parts, each part told by another narrator. They don’t tell the same story from different angles, but each of them begins, where the other one stops.

Part one is told by eight-year-old Bunny, the younger child of the Morison family. His world turns around his mother and his mother only. He’s a very sensitive child, needs constant encouragement. He also has a keen imagination. Through his eyes we see the world transform into small villages, battles take place, fantastical things happen. His relationship with his older brother Robert is a source of terror. Robert is eight years older than Bunny and has little patience for the kid. At the end of part one, Bunny has been told, his mother’s expecting another child and he has come down with the flu.

Part two is told from Robert’s point of view. The tone is completely different. Robert has sorrows of his own. He’s lost a leg in an accident and tries hard to live a life like any other boy his age. He’s in this in-between state, not a kid anymore, but not yet a grownup. Because his mother had difficult pregnancies in the past, she and the boys’ father leave the kids with an aunt. Robert too, gets the flu and soon they hear that their parents have come down with it as well.

Part three is told from James Morison’s point of view and it’s the most devastating part. It’s obvious from the beginning, the mother will die, it’s only not clear, if anyone else will die, so I’m not going to mention that. The dad’s account is devastating on many levels. He’s lost his wife and the way grief grabs him and threatens to destroy him, is so well described. Equally well described are the reactions of the people who come to the funeral. I always find people are notoriously bad at expressing their sentiments when they hear of someone’s death. All the awkward phrases, the awkward and often unemphatic reactions are captured so well here.

I’m not so keen on stories told by kids usually but it’s done exceptionally well here because William Maxwell uses the kid’s imaginations. He doesn’t try to sound like a child but to let us experience the world through the eyes of a small child and a teenager and, later, a bereaved husband.

Something that struck me was the way the children were treated. Nowadays we have a tendency to treat even small children like grownups and a boy of sixteen would definitely be treated like that. Not so here. The book is eighty years old and to see how much the way we treat children has changed was really interesting.

While I didn’t love this book as much as the last one I read, I’m full of admiration for the craft and looking forward to reading The Château next. And I think it’s an outstanding portrayal of grief and the awkward ways people treat the bereaved. It also shows very well how devastating the pandemic was.

Should you wonder – the title is taken from Coole Park, a poem by William Butler Yeats.

I meditate upon a swallow’s flight,
Upon a aged woman and her house,
A sycamore and lime-tree lost in night
Although that western cloud is luminous,
Great works constructed there in nature’s spite
For scholars and for poets after us,
Thoughts long knitted into a single thought,
A dance-like glory that those walls begot.

There Hyde before he had beaten into prose
That noble blade the Muses buckled on,
There one that ruffled in a manly pose
For all his timid heart, there that slow man,
That meditative man, John Synge, and those
Impetuous men, Shawe-Taylor and Hugh Lane,
Found pride established in humility,
A scene well Set and excellent company.

They came like swallows and like swallows went,
And yet a woman’s powerful character
Could keep a Swallow to its first intent;
And half a dozen in formation there,
That seemed to whirl upon a compass-point,
Found certainty upon the dreaming air,
The intellectual sweetness of those lines
That cut through time or cross it withershins.

Here, traveller, scholar, poet, take your stand
When all those rooms and passages are gone,
When nettles wave upon a shapeless mound
And saplings root among the broken stone,
And dedicate – eyes bent upon the ground,
Back turned upon the brightness of the sun
And all the sensuality of the shade –
A moment’s memory to that laurelled head.

Have you read William Maxwell? Which of his books did you like the most?

Alfred Hayes – My Face for the World to See (1958)

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This wasn’t the best reading year for me. While I was very lucky with my nonfiction choices, more than one novel was a dud. Imagine how happy I was to see my faith in literature fully restored before the end of the year. Alfred Hayes’ novel My Face for the World to See is just marvelous. A perfect gem of a novel. I couldn’t fault a thing. I discovered it a few years ago on Guy’s blog here, but forgot all about it until Jacqui reviewed another of Hayes’ novels, The Girl on the Via Flaminia.

Alfred Hayes was born in London but moved to the US as a child. In 1943 he was drafted and spent time in the US army, in Italy. In Italy he contributed to some of the most famous scripts of Italian neo-realist cinema – Rosselini’s Paisà and de Sica’s Bicycle Thieves. The following ten years, he worked as a screen writer in Hollywood, writing  scripts for people like Fritz Lang, John Huston and many more.

While The Girl on the Via Flaminia, his earlier novel, is set in Italy, My Face for the World to See is set in Hollywood.

Before starting the review, I’d like to share the opening paragraphs, which set the tone and the mood of the novel.

It was a party that had lasted too long; and tired of the voices, a little too animated, and the liquor, a little too available, and thinking it would be nice to be alone, thinking I’d escape for a brief interval, those smiles which pinned you against the piano or those questions which trapped you wriggling in a chair, I went out to look at the ocean.

There it was, exactly as advertised, a dark and heavy swell, and far out the lights of some delayed ship moving slowly south. I stared at the water, across a frontier of a kind, while behind me, from the brightly lit room with its bamboo bar and its bamboo furniture, the voices, detailing a triumph or recounting a joke, of those people who were not entirely strangers and not exactly friends, continued. It seemed silly to stay, tired as I was and the party dying; it seemed silly to go, with nothing home but an empty house.

With hindsight, it’s amazing to see how perfect this beginning is. It captures the tone and the mood of the novel, as well as the narrator’s character. The narrator – he’s never named – is a successful, rich script writer, who spends some months of the year, in Hollywood, far from his wife and kid, who stay in New York. He’s successful but it doesn’t seem to mean much to him. He could be part of a crowd but he stays outside. There’s one person one could call a friend, the host, but other than that, he seems like the ship he watches – passing by, detached. At the same time, he’s the guy who is eternally watching, witnessing. A couple of moments after this short intro, he’s again a witness – this time to the near-suicide of a young, pretty wannabe actress. He saves her and this act is the beginning of a terrible mistake. While he may think he’s just being friendly when he contacts her again, it dawns on the reader that loneliness and boredom – also mentioned in the first paragraphs – might be the true reasons.

From that moment on, the reader gets to witness an awful Maelstrom of an affair. The beginning is somewhat sordid and the end disastrous.

I absolutely loved this novel because of the tone and the mood. And the writing style. It’s pared down and economical, not one superfluous word. It’s also chilling at times, because the narrator never fully engages with anything that happens. It’s almost as if he’s never really there. And the more he is withdrawn, the more the girl seems to sink deeper and deeper into her despair. I felt so sorry for this girl. A typical pretty small town girl who comes to Hollywood with big dreams, which a crushed instantly. She was hoping for “My Face for the World to See”, but what she gets instead is the wrong male attention. Almost all of her lovers seem to have been married and, invariably, it ends badly and she tries to console herself with alcohol. There’s a scene with a cat, who she loves dearly, that’s utterly heartbreaking.

I think one reason why I loved this so much is because it reminded me of Dorothy B. Hughes fantastic novel In a Lonely Place, which made my best of list in 2016. I’m sure Hayes knew the book and certainly knew the movie with Humphrey Bogart. Even though My Face for the World to See isn’t a crime novel, it has all the trademarks of a noir like In A Lonely Place. There’s the melancholy mood, the jaded, lonely people who try to connect but fail, love affairs that turn bitter within weeks.

Of course, Hollywood is the perfect setting for a story like this and one can easily see that Hayes knew what he was writing about.

I’m not entirely sure I will write a best of post this year, but if I do – My Face for the World to See will be on it.

Leslie Marmon Silko: Ceremony (1977) Literature and War Readalong September 2017

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The good news first—I got along better with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony than with N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn. I found the writing evocative; the descriptions of the landscape are stunning and it’s a very rich, multi-layered book. The bad news—it was still hard work. There’s not much of a plot, the story isn’t told chronologically, there’s a mix between prose and poems, and without some research, a lot of it would have gone over my head. And that even though I studied cultural anthropology and have at least some idea of Native American mythology.

Given its complexity and that I did only very little research after finishing it, I can’t write an exhaustive review. But I can give you a brief summary and focus on some of the elements that stood out for me.

Tayo, who is half Laguna and half White, suffers from PTSD. He’s a veteran of the war in the Pacific. But not only that, he was also a prisoner of war and one of only a few to survive the notorious Bataan Death March. He’s haunted by the atrocities of war, like the killing of Japanese prisoners, and the things he saw during the march, especially the death of his best friend Rocky. After his captivity, after the war, Tayo spends time at an army hospital but back at the reservation, it’s clear, he’s not cured. He hallucinates, hears voices, drinks too much and gets violent. His family feels that only a medicine man can help but the first ceremony doesn’t change anything because the medicine man is stuck in the past. Only when Tayo finds another medicine man, who incorporates the changes the world has undergone, does he have a chance to heal.

The book explores many themes. Change and identity, the way white people destroy nature and other humans, war, spirituality, the landscape and nature. One could pick any of these themes and write endlessly about it. Since I read this for the readalong, I’ll focus on  a few of the war elements.

There are several things that stood out. First, Tayo, Rocky, and their friends sign up because they hope that fighting for the US, will help them to be accepted. To become “real Americans” one could say. Once back, they soon learn that nothing has changed. They don’t receive any recognition and are pretty much where they were before, only worse off because now they have to deal with contradictions and trauma. Tayo discovers one of the biggest contradictions once he realizes that the Japanese look similar and that the faces of his friends and the soldiers merge in his hallucinations. That’s when he understands he has been instrumentalized by the whites. But not only that – they value him and his people as little as the Japanese. The atomic bomb was tested near the Indian reservations and then used to bomb people, who look a lot like the Indians. The sequence below illustrates this very well.

He had been so close to it, caught up in it for so long that its simplicity struck him deep inside his chest: Trinity Site, where they exploded the first atomic bomb, was only three hundred miles to the southeast, at White Sands. And the top-secret laboratories where the bomb had been created were deep in the Jemez Mountains, on land the Government took from Cochiti Pueblo: Los Alamos, only a hundred miles northeast of him now, still surrounded by high electric fences and the ponderosa pine and tawny sand rock of the Jemez mountain canyon where the shrine of the twin mountain lions had always been. There was no end to it; it knew no boundaries; and he had arrived at the point of convergence where the fate of all living things, and even the earth had been laid. From the jungles of his dreaming he recognised why the Japanese voices had merged with Laguna voices, with Josiah’s voice and Rocky’s voice; the lines of cultures and world were drawn in flat dark lines on fine light sand, converging in the middle of witchery’s final ceremonial sand painting. From that time on, human beings were one clan again, united by the fate the destroyers planned for all of them, for all living things; united by a circle of death that devoured people in cities twelve thousand miles away, victims who had never known these mesas, who had never seen the delicate color of the rocks which boiled up their slaughter.

Needless to say, that the book is to a large extent a criticism of white society and the way White people destroy everything – other people, animals, and nature. In the ceremony, Tayo learns that there are forces, called destroyers, who brought witchery, or dark witchcraft into the world to destroy it. The whites seem to have been the most infected and now act according to the destroyers’ will.

I know I’m not doing this book justice. It’s extremely complex and poetic. To properly review and analyse it, it would need, at least, a second reading.

I didn’t fully warm to Ceremony. I liked the descriptions of the landscape best. And the parts where Tayo’s on a quest to find his uncle’s cattle. Tayo’s a keen observer and the harsh beauty of the land, the precariousness of life in a dry, desert like place, where livestock is constantly threatened to die of thirst, is powerfully rendered. On the other hand, when I look at our world today, the way climate change affects us all, when I think of the 6th extinction that’s currently underway, and how “he who shall not be named” uses a rhetoric of total destruction, I can’t help but notice that Ceremony is an important book. Many of the themes are as actual today as they were when Leslie Marmon Silko wrote it.

I hope I could give a bit of an idea of the book. Its’ definitely ideal for students of American and/or Native American Literature, as it’s so rich and offers so many topics for analysis and discussion. 

Here’s one of my favourite quotes:

The buzzing of grasshopper wings came from the weeds in the yard, and the sound made his backbone loose. He lay back in the red dust on the old mattress and closed his eyes. The dreams had been terror at loss, at something lost forever; but nothing was lost; all was retained between the sky and the earth, and within himself. He had lost nothing. The snow-covered mountain remained, without regard to titles of ownership or the white ranchers who thought they possessed it. They logged the trees, they killed the deer, bear and mountain lions, they built their fences high; but the mountain was far greater than any or all of these things. The mountain outdistanced their destruction, just as love had outdistanced death. The mountain could not be lost to them, because it was in their bones; Josiah and Rocky were not far away. They were close; they had always been close. And he loved them then as he had always loved them, the feeling pushing over him as strong as it had ever been. They loved him that way; he could still feel the love they had for him. The damage that had been done had never reached his feeling. This feeling was their life, vitality locked deep in blood memory, and the people were strong, and the fifth world endured, and nothing was ever lost as long as the love remained.

Other Reviews

TJ (My Book Strings)

 

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Ceremony is the fifth book in the Literature and War Readalong 2017. The next book is the French WWII novel Suite Française by Irène Nemirovsky. Discussion starts on Tuesday 31 October, 2017. You can  find further information on the Literature and War Readalong 2017, including the book blurbs here.