Psst! You wanna see some books?

[amari_z]

I’ve been very, very bad with the book-buying thing. I will happily blame New York’s “Amazon law,” which recently required online retailers with New York affiliates to start charging New York sales tax. Its legality is questionable, but in the meantime it provided an excuse for me to buy a whole bunch of books at five minutes to midnight the day before it went into effect. My 2008 Big List of Shame is now updated (mostly, I think), and it is more shameful than ever. But I have been crossing things off as well (if at a much slower rate), and I’ve read some great stuff.

I don’t think I’ve done any of my periodic mini-book reviews so far this year, but that seems rather daunting at this point. Instead, I’m going to do something different, and quote a few lines from some of my recent reads. If anyone’s interest is piqued, feel free to ask for more information.

The Museum, nominally a place of dignity and order, a great sanctuary in the midst of roaring traffic for the choicest products of the human spirit, was, to those who worked in it, a free-for-all struggle of the crudest kind. Even in total silence, one could sense the ferocious efforts of the highly cultured staff trying to ascend the narrow ladder of promotion. There was so little scope and those at the top seemed, like the exhibits themselves, to be preserved so long.

~Penelope Fitzgerald, The Golden Child

There was a young man of military age in the studio; he was due to be called up in the near future. “I don’t know what to do about it,” he said. “Of course I could always plead conscientious objections, but I haven’t got a conscience. It would be a denial of everything we’ve stood for if I said I had a conscience.”

“No, Tom,” they said to comfort him. “We know you haven’t got a conscience.”

“But then,” said the perplexed young man, “if I haven’t got a conscience, why in God’s name should I mind so much saying that I have?”

~Evelyn Waugh, Put Out More Flags

I can’t help but think of what I’m doing as going home. “I’m going back home.” I say the words out loud as I turn left on Massachusetts Avenue, leaving the last of the city’s downtown towers to itself. The sidewalks and streets are thick with traffic. There is a simple and startling power to that phrase: going back home. There’s an implied contradiction, a sense of moving forward and backward at the same time, but there’s no tension in the phrase. Instead, the contradiction gives in to something else: an understanding, perhaps, that what you’re returning to can never be the same as what you left. I understand now that distant, faraway look I’ve seen in other immigrants when they talk about returning where it was they first came from.

~Dinaw Mengestu, The Beautiful Things that Heaven Bears

It was called a fire alarm, and when one came along you had to drop everything. There was no going to the gym. Theater tickets were canceled. You saw no one, not your five-year-old, not your marriage counselor, not your sponsor, not even your dog. We feared the fire alarm. At the same, we were all in it together, and we could be taken by surprise, after five days of grind, by the transformation of the team. Eating takeout, laughing around a cubicle, putting our minds together to solve something hard—five or six days of that and there was no immunization against the camaraderie. The people we worked with, with all their tics and pieties and limitations—we had to admit to ourselves, they weren’t all that bad. Where did that come from? Whence this friendliness? “’The Love flooding you for your brother,’” said Hank Neary, quoting something or other. He was always quoting something or other and we hated him for it, unless we were in the middle of a fire alarm, in which case we loved him like a brother. That love would dissipate in a week. But while it lasted, work was a wellspring, a real source of light, the nurture of a beloved community

Then the downturn came and there were no more fire alarms. No speeding out to Palatine, no one o’clock nights, no love flooding us for our brother.

~Joshua Ferris, Then We Came To An End

I cannot explain why so many of them have hated us so much over so many years, and even if I could, it would make it too easy for them. They cut our tongues and make us speechless and then they try to get an answer for us. They do not wish to think for themselves and they dislike those who do. They are comfortable only with the whip above their heads, yet so many of us have spent our lives armed with little more dangerous than a song. I am filled with the memory of those who have lived and died. We have our own fools and evils, chonorroeja, but we are pulled together by the hatred of those who surround us. Show me a single patch of land we did not leave, or would not leave, a single space we have not turned from. And while I have cursed so many of my own, our sleight of hand, our twin tongues, my own vain stupidities, even the worst of us has never been amongst the worst of them. They make enemies of us so that they do not have to look at themselves. They take freedom from one and give it to another. They turn justice into revenge and still call it by its old name. They expect us to see the future or at least to rob its pockets. They shave our heads and say: You are thieves, you are liars, you are filthy, why can’t you be like us?

~Colum McCann, Zoli

People like it when you tell them things, in suitable portions, in a modest, intimate tone, and they think they know you, but they do not, they know about you, for what they are let in on are facts, not feelings, not what your opinion is about anything at all, nor how what has happened to you and how all the decisions you have made have turned you into who you are. What they do is they fill in with their own feelings and opinions and assumptions, and they compose a new life which has precious little to do with yours, and that lets you off the hook. No-one can touch you unless you yourself want them to. You only have to be polite and smile and keep paranoid thoughts at bay, because they will talk about you no matter how much you squirm, it is inevitable, and you would do the same thing yourself.

~Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

The villages were far apart and as we walked without water and food, my vision blurred. I’d open my eyes wide, but everything surrounding me would turn red and then colorless dark with dim stars that made me dizzy. When I wanted to forget walking and sit down, someone would say, “Carry on. I can hear a cock crowing from the next village.” I’d force my eyes wide open but all I could see were little boys like me, only heads and hips, staggering along.

~Benson Deng, Alephonsion Deng, Benjamin Ajak, They Poured Fire on Us From the Sky: The Story of Three Lost Boys from Sudan


Many words here, but so worth it for the beautifully written but long, long sentence. I loved it so much, I actually typed it out. *shakes sore wrist* Huzun, by the way, is Turkish for “melancholy.” It has some accenty things, but I have no idea how to make those appear on LJ.

But what I am trying to describe now is not the melancholy of Istanbul but the huzun in which we see ourselves reflected, the huzun we absorb with pride and share as a community. To feel this huzun is to see the scenes, evoke the memories, in which the city itself becomes the very illustration, the very essence, of huzun. I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the back-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one financial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on the cobble stoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they where pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, in ruins since end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbed; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unflinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-year-old mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men fishing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering affairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of the mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuses, fifties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huffing and puffing up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadikoy to Karakoy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the officials”; of the readers’ letters, squeezed into a corner of the papers and read by no one, announcing that the dome of the neighborhood mosque, having stood for some 375 years, has begun to cave in and asking why the state has not done something; of the underpasses in most crowded intersections; of the overpasses in which every step is broken in a different way; of the girls who read Big Sister Gusin’s column in Freedom, Turkey’s most popular newspaper; of the beggars who accost you in the least likely places and those who stand in the same spot uttering the same appeal day after day; of the powerful whiffs of urine that hit you on the crowded avenues, ships, passageways, and underpasses; of the man who has been selling postcards in the same spot for the past forty years; of the reddish-orange glint in the windows of Uskudar at sunset; of the earliest hours of the morning, when everyone is asleep except for the fishermen heading out to sea; of the corner of the Gulhane Park that calls itself a zoo but houses only two goats and three bored cats, languishing in cages; of the third-rate singers doing their best to imitate American vocalists and Turkish pop stars in cheap nightclubs, and of first-rate singers too; of the bored high school students in never-ending English classes where after six years no one has learned to say anything but “yes” or “no”; of the immigrants waiting on the Galata docks; of the fruits and vegetables, garbage and plastic bags and wastepaper, empty sacks, boxes, and chests strewn across abandoned street markets on a winter evening; of beautiful covered women timidly bargaining in the street markets; of young mothers struggling down streets with their three children; of the all the ships in the sea sounding their horns at the same time as the city comes to a halt to salute the memory of Ataturk at 9:05 on the morning of November tenth; of the a cobblestone staircase with so much asphalt poured over it that its steps have disappeared; of marble ruins that were for centuries glorious street fountains but now stand dry, their faucets stolen; of the apartment building in the side streets where during my childhood middle-class families—of doctors, lawyers, teachers, and their wives and children—would sit in their apartments listening to the radio in the evenings, and where today the same apartments are packed with knitting and button machines and young girls working all night long for the lowest wages in the city to meet urgent orders; of the view of the Golden Horn, looking toward Eyup from the Galata Bridge; of the simit vendors on the pier who gaze at the view as they wait for customers; of everything being broken, worn out, past its prime; of the storks flying south from the Balkans and northern and western Europe as autumn nears, gazing down over the entire city as they waft over the Bosphorus and the islands of the Sea of Marmara; of the crowds of men smoking cigarettes after the national soccer matches, which during my childhood never failed to end in abject defeat: I speak of them all.

~Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memories and the City

Comments

[shelley-stone.livejournal.com]

I'm starting my vacation July 11. I hope to get some reading done. Although I think I'll stick to mindless historical fiction. I can forget the plot 10 minutes after I finish the book. I do feel a certain amount of shame for not diving into more meaty works, but, lately, my brain has been in park mode. Hopefully, this much needed vacation will help me get out of the reading slump I seem to be in. You've certainly nudged me in that direction ;p

Shelley

[amari-z.livejournal.com]

I think you should read whatever you enjoy. I used to read a lot more of what, for a want of a better phrase, I'll call non-literary fiction (a lot of fantasy, sci-fi, etc.), but I find most of it unreadable these days. Partly it's because time has become more precious and I'm more impatient, partly its probably that I'm a lot more particular about the writing, partly it's also that I fell like I've read it all before and my tastes have changed somewhat, and partly its because in the absence of school, I don't have serious reading assigned to me, so I have to potter around myself. But I do love it on those rare occasions when I find something from the old genres that sucks me in. There's nothing quite like it.

[esmerelda-t.livejournal.com]

I'm always looking for new books to read, I especially enjoyed the blurbs from Put Out More Flags and Zoli, could you give me more info on those?

[amari-z.livejournal.com]

Have you read any Waugh? Put out More Flags is set in England the year of the outbreak of the Second World War. It’s one of the last comic novels that Waugh wrote, and I thought it was one of his best. It’s a satire, with Waugh’s usual preoccupations with class and his usual merciless eye for the ridiculous, but with an undertone that is quite pointedly serious. The anti-hero is an unscrupulous type who has never been able to keep a job, and whose female relations see the war as his great opportunity to reedmen himself (and his mother hopes he’ll die heroically doing so). The other main character is a communist Jewish aesthete who wants to do something meaningful, and so decides to start a literary magazine.

Zoli is loosely based on the life of the poet Papusza. It tells something of the plight of the Romany (gypsies) in Eastern Europe starting around World War II, but in particular it follows the story of a young woman whose oral poetry is co-opted and used in communist Czechoslovakia. As a result, she’s banished by her people, who blame her for dealing with outsiders and for their forced settlement under the communist regime. The story is told from different view points: a modern day journalist trying to trace her story; Zoli herself as a child (in first person); an English expatriate who plays a role in making her famous and then nearly destroying her; and Zoli herself again (but in third person). It’s really a beautiful book, filled with melancholy, but through it all the ultimately indomitable spirit of Zoli shines through.

Anyway, both books are wonderful reads, although very different. If you want to know anything else, feel free to ask. As is probably apparent, books are quite a preoccupation of mine. :)

[esmerelda-t.livejournal.com]

I haven't read any Waugh (although I recently read an article about him which had something to do with him being a very cranky person to interview which was very amusing) but I think I'll be starting with this one.

Both have piqued my interest so I think I think I've found my next book purchases, thanks. :)

[amari-z.livejournal.com]

He was known to be a cranky bastard in general. :) If you do read either of both, I'd love to know how you liked them.