Where Arissa Gets Every Wish for a Minute

Saffron Dreams by Shaila M. Abdullah
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Maybe 3.5?

It took me ages to finish this, reading a little every few days. This isn't my usual fare, but I found it entertaining enough to keep going, if slowly. And there are things to admire.

I can't remember what connected me to this book originally; I think it was on a list of "read some of these books by South Asian authors" or something. And it is interesting. The main character comes from a wealthy family in Pakistan, but the family is not traditional. They aren't super religious, and they're kinda broken. Her mom has left and is only sometimes in her life. When she marries and moves to New York and gets pregnant, things look up, but then her husband dies on 9/11, and when her baby comes it has lots of special needs.

Told with in a back-and-forth way, with lots of revealing flashbacks, this is really the story of how Arissa longs for, obtains, and then loses an ideal life, eventually coming to terms with that. When, at the very end, her friend talks about how children complete their lives, she agrees reluctantly, adding, "Sometimes not in the way we imagined. Maybe it's wrong to see perfection as the key to bliss." I guess everybody goes through that reassessment.

Speaking as a white dude from Arizona, this novel has the added benefit of being told in the voice of a Pakistani immigrant woman, giving me access to the kind thoughts I wouldn't usually get to hear. It allows Arissa to become a unique voice in my head, differentiating her from generic South Asian Woman, whatever stereotype that has been for me. That education is probably the greatest benefit to me as a reader. Also, seeing her reaction as a both a Muslim and a victim of 9/11 was a useful corrective for many of the narratives emerging from that day.

The prose is fine--not too ornate, not an overabundance of figurative language--and I like the characters okay, especially her in-laws who come to take care of her after their son dies. But the plot is just "How will she get along now, raising a special needs son as a single mother in America?" It's pretty good. It's not my thing, usually. That's why 3 or 3.5 stars. I found it more interesting in a "hmmmm" kind of way than truly entertaining.

Still, it was worth reading for the other benefits, so I'm satisfied overall. Others may enjoy it much more than I did, and that's cool.

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Where I Get Some Questions Answered

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life by George Saunders
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My only real interest in this book is that it was a gift from a friend who wanted to read it and discuss it over coffee or something, and I think that's a fine thing. I did it.

But on my own, I would have never read this or the stories discussed in it. I'm glad I did, for reasons I'll explain, but it was a slog. It took me waaaaayyy to long.

I like the author, or what I can glean of him (seems like a lot) from this discussion. Intelligent. Pleasant. Considerate. Genuinely interested in sharing his love of reading and writing with others. I applaud that. And I think he does a very good job at explaining some things I've been wondering about, so I could give him a five for those things. But I still really really don't like--actively dislike--the stories he's loving, even at the end, and for all of them I'd give a 1. However, I must stress the following: that is my opinion. I do not care to persuade anyone to join me in holding the same opinion. (*If you're curious, though, see below.)

Skippable section on opinion, but I enjoyed writing this, so you do you

Here's my passionate take on that topic: an opinion about art--in this case short stories, or literature more broadly--is a real thing, a genuine, significant, personal matter, one that indicates a meaningful truth about yourself. It might or might not be interesting to others. It might or might not guide some other people's reading. And it can be fun to discuss with others, even debate, sharing insights and interpretations. But that opinion is not right. It isn't possible for it to be right. Nor is it wrong. It's a kind of truth, but not one that stretches across the space between us. A private truth, perhaps.

Very often, critics try to make a case for their perspective on some matter, on some story, attempting to bridge that gap between individual minds, triumphing over mere belief, rendering an opinion so durable that everyone can call it Truth. I don't believe that's possible. In fact, I insist that it is not possible, by definition. I hold that this kind of judgment, no matter how erudite, no matter how glossy, is just very shiny opinion that can never become Judgment. There is no trump card; no professor can say "I am right so listen," nor can a publisher or a literary lion or the most successful critic on booktok. You can't weave straw into gold, nor can you weave opinions into facts.

An author I adore, a writer of genre fiction but also a lover of literature, has often argued in social media that some writers and some literature are simply better than others, and he points to classics like Greek drama to say how plainly they are superior to whatever popular literature you might name. (He does not exclude his own writing, I might add. He is consistent.) I once pushed back, asking better for what purpose? (My contention as a teacher is that I can get more buy-in and participation from a class full of reluctant readers with a YA novel or Twilight or a Dan Brown thriller or [fill in a book or author mocked by Very Smart People] than I ever could with Aristophanes' Frogs or any classic you might name. Could I teach that other stuff? Yes, of course, I had to do it many many many times. But it's hard and it's dry and it turns kids off to school, even when you use every trick available to teacherkind. It's prejudice and magical thinking ("a good teacher could get them excited about Hemingway...") and it has never worked. I'd rather get a bunch of young students engaged in reading a Goosebumps book than waste their time dragging them unwillingly through Ethan Frome again or some other book that makes them lose their minds.)

Anyway, I exceeded his patience in debating the topic and he didn't reply. That's cool.

But the subjectiveness of opinion is a basic idea that can't be defeated by Superior Knowledge or Greater Success in Literature or any other marker of personal worth. Opinions just will never be facts, and someone's opinion will never be better than someone else's. The value in any work is the value the individual reader finds in it. Any hierarchy people think they can perceive in the collected works of literature from around the world is an illusion propped up by vanity, especially those endorsed by white supremacists and other deep lovers of the Western Canon. [My caveat--all such works are worth discussing and possibly studying to trace the history of literature, which is a worthwhile topic, but I absolutely repudiate the notion that they should be used exclusively because they are the Best Writing Available, or the Best Models, or whatever argument you might see.]

My final thought on that can be summed up by this simple advice: like what you like.

Back to the book, finally

Reading this book by George Saunders brought all of these thoughts to mind because I have often wondered why people like books and stories that I absolutely do not. I also wonder why they are so often held up as the very best in literature when I find them much less to my taste than almost anything. [I tried to like Rushdie's Midnight's Children, a Booker Prize-winning novel, and I hated it. Stopped reading for a year. Started again. Hated it. Finished it. Hated it. Readers online: "My favorite novel ever!" WTF?] I've finished a number of books that had me thinking the same thing: Sterne's Tristram Shandy; several books by Faulkner; Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel; and some others. People love them. I hated them--if you will forgive the strong expression. But the discussion throughout this book, looking at Russian short stories, describing ways to analyze them, noticing things, trying out theories, attempting to piece together the author's purpose, asking why the author made the choices he did--I sort of get it now. It's a scavenger hunt, an attempt to solve a mystery, trying to solve the puzzle of how the author's mind is working. It is necessarily--at least speaking of the analyses offered by Saunders here--a metacognitive approach to reading. What am I seeing? Why is it here? Why did the author choose that? What is he trying to make me see? What conjectures can I make about the meaning of this work? How well has he achieved his aim?

And so on.

None of those questions are the reason I read, however, any more than I watch movies to analyze the cinematography. And the stuff I do read might not yield interesting results if put to these particular tests. It's like listening to my favorite indie bands only to have someone say that they are terrible to dance to. Well... I'm not trying to dance. That's the wrong question to ask this music. Other genres work well for that. This is something else.

To connect this all to my diatribe on opinion versus fact (or judgment), I believe that some readers will totally love what he does here, and will enjoy Russian short stories (in particular) or literary fiction (in general) as much as he does, and will see in all of this valuable lessons in writing their own stories. I will not. Our opinions are not compatible. That does not make any of this less true for those other people. They can Like What They Like, just as I will.

So I learned some things. I will not be reading any more Russian literature. Life is short. But if you like it, go for it. If you like literary fiction in general, read it all you want. I'm not even cynical about it, and I'm not being sarcastic. If you like it, it's good.

Same for all of us, whatever we're reading.

_________________________________________

*[Why don't I like these stories? In simple terms, they are dreary. A downer. They make me sad. I don't have room in my emotional life for art that only wounds. Nothing good happens--except for a moment, sometimes--but that moment is followed by things like early death, bad marriage, physical abuse, hopelessness, alcoholism, missed opportunities, injustice, and depression. Some of it is ugly. But there is no payoff, no resolution, no correction, no possibility for happiness. I hate all of that. It's like watching replays of your favorite sport, but only the ones where your team loses. How is this fun? That has been my question. I feel like I've had it answered to some extent.]

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Where the Story's Too Damn Real, but I Like It

The Spanish Doctor by Matt Cohen
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a hard book, a painful book, but a good one. Well written. Affecting. Not what I expected, frankly, but that's on me.

This is the story of a Jewish man in 14th Century Spain who becomes a successful doctor, much in demand, but finds that doesn't protect him from his enemies. As much as anything, it is a biography, following him across Europe and across the decades of his life. But in a broader sense, it is the story of the violence against Jews at that time in Spain and France and Italy and elsewhere in Europe, and the intolerable choice they were given--convert, giving up your identity, or face extermination at the hands of the mob, which was fully supported by the church. And, if you convert, be ready to be hated and attacked anyway.

There was one more choice: move away, losing everything, but still face the same violence in another country, sooner or later.

It is suffocating and horrifying to read about Avram Halevi and how he tried to navigate a world that hated him from birth. Before birth, really, as he was conceived when a Christian rioter raped his mother. This theme continued throughout. There were no right choices for him or for his people. There was no "Just leave us alone" option. There was no hiding. There was only murder and destruction, followed by the survivors rebuilding and moving on.

This novel is more literary than I expected; I took it for more of a genre novel, historical fiction with a triumphant hero sort of thing, but it's not that. As a result, the pacing is different than I looked for, the story and conflict broader. But I liked it, despite my scant appreciation, usually, for literary novels. The writing is spectacular, the canvas is wide, the history is engrossing, and I'm glad I gave it a chance.

Some of it is ugly. Some is brutal. Some is tragic. But some is beautiful and even hopeful. I'm gonna hold on to those bits.

Recommended, especially for those who lean toward literary fiction.

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Not for me. I hope that's cool with everybody. Thanks.

Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

This won the Booker Prize in 1981. Then it won the prize for the best Booker Prizewinning book out of the first 25. So some people really like this book, and I just don't know why.

I swear, after I gave up on it for a few years, I came back and read the last 300 pages like an anthropologist, trying out a dozen theories as to how someone could enjoy it. (If you like this book, that's awesome. I don't understand, but I'm happy to let you do you.) Everything I look for in a book is subverted here. Like if you wanted to hear music and instead somebody was banging pots and pans instead. Like that.

Pretty language? There's an awful lot of poop and blood and pain and injury and incestuous thought and snot and hairy arms--too much to ever say the language was beautiful.

Story? There were a thousand stories, too many to count, and none of them leading anywhere. It was like a friend showing you a stack of a thousand polaroids, each of something ugly or inconsequential or too close to make out, and he tells you the complete significance of each, and you wonder and wonder why he's telling you these things. Nobody has goals, or if they do, they're so minor (his sister wants white bread) they can't carry a story. None that I cared about.

Love? Hope? Not really. He kinda beat the shit out of those things.

Creativity? Maybe. Like an ADHD fever dream. A jungle of ideas. Near the end, he introduces a character and immediately dismisses him:

Midnight, or thereabouts. A man carrying a folded (and intact) black umbrella walks towards my window from the direction of the railway tracks, stops, squats, shits. Then sees me silhouetted against light and, instead of taking offense at my voyeurism, calls: "Watch this!" and proceeds to extrude the longest turd I have ever seen. "Fifteen inches!" he calls, "How long can you make yours?" Once, when I was more energetic, I would have wanted to tell his life-story; the hour, and his possession of an umbrella, would have been all the connections I needed to begin the process of weaving him into my life, and I have no doubt that I'd have finished by proving his indispensability to anyone who wishes to understand my life and benighted times...

That character, I feel, informs most of the other characters. They are odd and weird and they enter the narrative, participate in the story for a period of time, do strange things, act in strange ways, and then disappear again. Their quirks are described and explained like they're clues to meaning, but in the end they're all red herrings. Or so it seemed to me.

As I read it, I was reminded of Tristram Shandy, a novel that does a lot of the same things. We start the story well before the main character is born; there is a lot of conversation about noses and names; there are body parts that get trimmed in accidents; there is a lot of action that leads nowhere. The joke in Tristram Shandy is the belaboring of the inconsequential. Here, it's different; here, it feels like many things of consequence are occurring, revealed to us in pieces, sort of Forrest Gump-like, but instead of paying attention to it we are concerning ourselves with oddities and billboards and neighbors and minutiae and nonsense.

The promise of the magical children born in the minute India became free was, for me, not met. Nothing happened with them, except to be tortured at the end. I gave up trying to understand them as allegory (which perhaps the author intended; perhaps not) because the action and details were so random that I couldn't connect anything together. Maybe with charts I could do it...

I wanted to like it because other people liked it and because I enjoy the author when he's interviewed. But I didn't like it. I really didn't. (I feel like I can say this about a novel by Salman Rushdie, like saying you don't like the Mona Lisa. Nobody feels bad for the Mona Lisa.) I also didn't solve the mystery of why other people do. I'll just have to go on without knowing.

That's cool. Let it be for them and not for me.

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