Book Review (OT): If: The Untold Story of Kipling's American Years (VT, history)

If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years, by Christopher Benfey (Penguin Press, 2019, 242 pages, $28)

I was so excited to start If: The Untold Story of Kipling’s American Years. I hadn’t known that Rudyard Kipling spent a decade in the US, much less in Brattleboro, Vermont, where I have visited.

Give it a Chance

If starts out slooooowly. It might appeal to you if you are an English major, a grad student in English, or an English professor or teacher (or History). I am not, so, many names mentioned were lost on me, like Henry James. Others, not so much: Mark Twain, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Teddy Roosevelt, Bram Stoker and Andrew Carnegie: all friends of Kipling.

Names

As a matter of fact, If reminded me of someone who talks only about others – a name-dropper – in order to appear more important than they really are. Many unnecessary and long-winded diversions abound by author Christopher Benfey, an English professor (what else?), perhaps in an attempt to make this quasi-history book a quasi-analysis of many of Kipling’s works.

However, Kipling is important. Did you know he won the Nobel Prize back in 1907? A member of the upper crust of expatriate British society, he lived on three continents and lost all his money in a Japanese bank (but recovered, thanks to his writings). Kipling is also known as the soldier’s poet, which is expounded upon extensively in the epilogue where author Benfey brings us up to date on Iraq and Afghanistan but spends considerable time comparing Kipling’s work with the Vietnam* Conflict.

Everyday Kipling

If you have never read Kipling, you are, at least, aware of his stories and poems from Kim to The Jungle Book to Captains Courageous to Gunga Din to Mandalay to The White Man’s Burden to The Man Who Would Be King to If.

Style

I once told myself I would read any book by an English professor. Then I read If. Benfey’s style is tedious: although his sentence structure, paragraphs, and organization are good, If sounds like a book report written to impress the teacher with one quote after another. The sheer number of quotes (and diversions) interferes with reading about Kipling.

Which brings us to:

            “And the end of the fight is a tombstone white with the name of the late deceased,

            “And the epitaph drear: ’A Fool lies here who tried to hustle the East.’”

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*"If any question why we died,

"Tell them, because our fathers lied."

Book Review: My Sister, The Serial Killer (Nigeria, murder, murder, . . . . family) (OT)

My Sister, The Serial Killer, by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Doubleday, 2018, 226 pages, $22.95)

 My Kind of Book

Small and short. Short chapters. Actually the hardback copy is the size of a paperback!

Fascinating Title! Intriguing Cover!

Who wouldn’t want to read this book? But, will it be grisly?

My Sister. . . .

Is blood really thicker than water? How does your family compare to the one in the book? Does either parent favor one child, or even seem to (to the other child)? Perhaps (hopefully!) you don’t have a serial killer or even a murderer in your family but does one member always seem to have to rescue the other? Or, does one member always bully or pick on the other? If so, why do they stay together? Because they are family and therefore, one (the serial killer) needs the other (the nurse) and because the nurse envies her sister?

Also in Portuguese

Will the tables ever turn? Will your younger sister ever grow up and stop stealing your boyfriends? Will you ever move out and force her to face her problems?

The Setting

Lagos, Nigeria (a megalopolis). Names that American readers are not used to.

A Very Unusual Read!

Book Review: Lot: Stories (Houston, ethics, poverty) (OT)

Lot: Stories, by Bryan Washington (Riverhead Books, 2019, 222 pages, $25)

If a book can be melodic, this is it. “. . . talking, words bursting our of my nose, my ears, . . . . “

What is a Family?

A story of stories of Houston, on first names with streets* and neighborhoods but now you see them in a different light from different eyes (hookers, druggies, dealers, workers).

On first names with a hurricane: before Harvey, after Rita. If you can afford to come back, if you can afford to come back AND to rebuild. If not, . . . .”Rumors glide through the complex like vines.” (p. 14)

A Different Houston

Author Bryan Washington shows us a different Houston, a different life, peopled with disintegration and a different set of ethics. Is it real? Just as one seems to be getting his life together, he is shot down (or dies in a car accident) but there are those who get out and get a PhD – how, is anyone’s guess: the survival of the fittest. For the few, the very few.

“Gloria blew through our lives on a Wednesday, and our mother told us to treat her like pottery, to not ask questions, to creep around the house like ants before their queen. Our mother, who returned grape bunches over single sourings; who’d shipped my sister, Nikki, to Tech with a knife in her pillowcase; who’d slipped into this country, this home, her life, on the whim of a fortune-teller, . . . . “ (p. 43)

Enigma

Lot is an enigma, a puzzle that is not too hard to figure out but you will still be proud of yourself that you can figure it out. Thanks for chapter titles rather than chapter numbers (titles that can mostly be understood, being street names in Houston). You can read each chapter as a stand-alone or in series (better in series, but possible the other way around). Some chapters introduce a new character (Gloria) who is never mentioned again but the chapter in question is all about them and how that person fits into the family and what that person does to advance the story, the break-up.

Lot is an enigma that challenges you to place each chapter in the time dimension, e.g., what has transpired since the previous chapter ended is slowly made apparent and the intervening time can be very long in time and space.

Lot is an enigma in that author Bryan Washington writes a lot of dialogue but without quotation marks – you have to remember who is speaking.

When Does a Family Die?

One by one, they leave. . . .

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*”They touched eyes taking out the trash on MLK Boulevard.” (p. 7)

Book Review: The Plateau (WW2, anthropology) (OT)

The Plateau, by Maggie Paxson (Riverhead Books/Penguin, 2019, $28, 358 pages)

Every once in a while, you come upon a book that is a rare gem from the very first pages. (On the other hand, there are some books that you can tell in the first few pages you will find boring and time-taxing but must nevertheless read because you are a book reviewer.)

The Plateau, by author Maggie Paxson, falls into the former category.  I found the book so inspiring and thought-provoking that I looked up information about the locations, the incidents and the author whose writing style is so, so - melodic.

The Plots

Few books attempt the difficult task of going back and forth in time: The Plateau does so, and accomplishes it seamlessly as it relates two plots intersecting in location, not in time. One may only become mixed up towards the end (or if one reads only every few days) merely because one is slightly taxed reading such a long pair of stories (might it be shorter next time, please?)

The Plateau

The plateau, where Albert Camus wrote The Plague, is a region in south central France near the Alps where one small town of 2,000 residents, whose residents as a whole, protect hundreds if not thousands of immigrants and refugees without a thought to any possible danger (“Risk means facing fears. . . .” p. 180) during the Nazi occupation of the 30s and 40s as well as before and also in contemporary times with today’s influx of people from many countries. It is simply the right thing to do. The plateau is the region visited by our author, an anthropologist*, doing her fieldwork** (she lived there for a while after fieldwork in Soviet locations, and returns to visit).

The Stories

Author Maggie Paxson, PhD, lives in the plateau to try and determine why these residents do what they do and, also, to study peace (so many others have studied war) and why some people are good (“How to be good when it’s hard to be good.” p. 61). She finds that her great-grandmother’s rebel brother*** (one of 12 siblings) was “called” to this region to run a school for children from many countries (including Jewish children but not limited to them). Brother Daniel’s work with the children made him profoundly happy even as he decided not to pursue a doctorate during WW2 or to get married. For this decision, he ended up in Majdanek. . . .

Why?

Perhaps because “This physically beautiful place has somehow produced a morally beautiful people. . . .To be born here makes you good.” (p.55)

What I Would Change

Although I did (finally) understand the front cover illustrations and the innocuous title, I believe more people would find this book if it had a magnetic title or at least a subtitle – very minor comments, indeed.

On the whole, perhaps the best book this reviewer has read in a year!

*An anthropologist attempts to define who is us and who is them. A participant-observer, she searches to discern a group’s Law of Silence (“I didn’t understand the Law of Silence on the Plateau, but one day, I obeyed it anyway, and was silent. And then people began to speak.” p. 118) An anthropologist also attempts to discover who does what with whom.

*“*Fieldwork is always hard at the beginning. . . .You arrive, and almost immediately you are lost.” (p. 60)

***Primarily thanks to the detailed records of the Nazis, Paxson was able to follow Daniel’s life from his beginning in his family’s school in northern France, to Beirut, to the plateau, to Majdanek, to Israel where a tree has been planted in Daniel’s honor.

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“A French Village Committed to Deception” (BBC)

“A Culture of Selflessness” (WSJ)

“Ordinary People Risking Their Lives for an Extraordinary Purpose” (Wash. City Paper)