A good Western gone south: News of the World

It’s been a great revelation to me that I love a good Western novel: The Big Sky, Lonesome Dove, The Son, Ride the Wind, Angle of Repose — dang howdy! And Paulette Jiles’s News of the World has a terrific premise for a Western.

Set in the 1870s, an elderly man agrees, for fifty dollars in gold, to escort an eleven-year-old former Kiowa captive girl back to her relatives in Texas, a long and dangerous journey of about 400 miles by horse and wagon. The man, Captain Kidd, is in his early 70s and makes his living by driving from town-to-town and reading the news, in town hall-like settings, to the locals who pay a dime each for the privilege. He’s a widow, father of two grown daughters, and a Civil War veteran, so he’s got both the parenting skills and mettle for the task. The girl, Johannah (her forgotten German name) or Cicada (her Kiowa name), has spent four years with the tribe after being captured in a raid where her parents were killed. She has lost the language and customs of her birth parents and has become Kiowa in every way. Understandably, she is frightened and defiant, but Captain Kidd is a patient and kind man who not only understands and tolerates her non-European ways, but also empathizes with her situation. As the journey progresses, they develop a bond.

The Underground Railroad

Much has been made about the train in The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, specifically that it’s an actual train and not a metaphorical one that people ride to escape slavery.  Because of all this commentary, I thought, going into the book, that Cora, the escaped slave protagonist of the novel, would spend more time riding the rails than she actually does.. Cora rides the train a few times, but stops for long spells between stations, in different states, and experiences different states of freedom and enslavement.

The most fantastic thing about the train is its unpredictability. It doesn’t follow a regular schedule, and the riders can never be sure where they will arrive next. Each stop is in a different state, and each state has its own treatment of the slave. If the plantation life that Cora flees is one that we reader might recognize as familiar– slave cabins, deprivation, field work, mercurial and cruel masters — each stop on Cora’s journey takes us into less familiar literary narratives about slavery and racial injustice. At one stop, Cora is seemingly treated as a respected member of society, until she realizes that blacks are the subjects of a systematic sterility program.  At another stop, blacks are being lynched out of existence  and so she is hidden in the false ceiling of an attic for months (shades of Anne Frank?). At another stop, she is given a job (a job!) working in a museum, but it turns out she is merely a live figure in a diorama about slave life. The white people watch her from outside the glass like an animal in a cage. It’s just weird and disturbing. All the while, Cora is being chased by a slave catcher named Ridgeway, who eventually does catch up with her. But I won’t tell anymore…

Where I’ve been and what I’ve read

No excuses for not posting except — and it’s a big except — I was gutted by the US election result and continue to writhe like an eel on a spike with every tweet, headline, and cabinet pick. When I can’t deal with reality, I escape to other worlds in books. So the good news is that I’ve been reading a lot in November and December. The bad news is that I’ve not been commenting much about those reads.  This doesn’t bode well for my blogging life in 2017 either. People say they are glad to leave 2016 behind, but I’m afraid 2016 was only the beginning of scarier and sadder times ahead. I suppose I’ll get used to it, but I’ll confidently increase my reading goal next year nevertheless.

Still, I started this blog with the intent of keeping track of my reading and impressions. So here is a short list with “lite” (or simply shallow) commentary on what’s been keeping me away from the headlines and semi-sane for the past few weeks.

Small Obsession: The Visitors

The first thing I ever wanted to be when I grew up was an archaeologist. This realization hit me around 1976 or so, when King Tut’s tomb artifacts were on their second tour of the United States. I think I saw the exhibit at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C. in 1976 or 1977, though I can’t remember exactly. Given the Tut-mania of the time, it wasn’t a particularly original career choice and I never truly took it seriously. Besides, my fascination was equal parts romanticism (gold, discovery) and revulsion (mummies, dead things).

Love & Serpents

One thing I love? This cover!

Last night I stayed up late to proofread an essay my son wrote for his sophomore English class. The topic was love, to define it in his own words and then spin off from there. The night before last, I stayed up late finishing The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry. As I was reading my son’s sometimes humorous, sometimes touching, and sometimes bewildering thoughts on love, my thoughts on the novel became a lot clearer. It’s a novel about love, pure, simple, and complex.

The Rich Stink of the North Water

If you enjoy a lively adventure tale and have a strong stomach, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more rollicking read than Ian McGuire’s The North Water. What a humdinger!

Set in the late 19th century when the world’s population of whales is in decline, a whaling ship is outfitted and sent into far northern waters in search of a few of the beasts to fill their hold with oil. It’s an odd journey — late in the season for finding whales so far north — and yet the ship pushes farther and farther northward at grave (or is it planned?) risk of being locked in the ice for the winter. 

The Hungry Tide

I was on a roll early this year reading strictly from my TBR piles. And even when I broke it, reading the first two books of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan series from the library, I was still, in my mind, reading books I planned on reading for some time.

But I really broke the streak when I picked up The Hungry Tide (Amitav Ghosh, 2005), a book I’d gotten only recently in the library book sale. Perhaps it is the change of seasons, but I was really ready for a book to take me on a journey somewhere else. This book delivered.

The Hungry Tide is set in the Indian Sundarbans. I  think I’d seen part of a TV special on this fascinating region. The Sundarbans are the earth’s largest mangrove forests that make up the delta of four major rivers dumping into the Bay of Bengal. The border of India and Bangladesh runs through the center. The muddy, swampy islands and labyrinthine waterways of the Sundarbans are home to a variety of creatures, many dangerous and or endangered, including saltwater crocodiles, tigers, snakes, birds, and rare river dolphins. The tigers in this region, in particular, are known to be man eaters, and hundreds of people are killed every year by them. The area is poor, and people risk their lives to venture into tiger territory to find honey or collect firewood. The locals lives are also made precarious by the daily tides that engulf entire islands and eat away at the boundaries of others, not to mention the effects of the periodic ravages of storms. But the tides are also what give the area life and bounty. In short, this was — to me — a really fascinating setting for a novel.

Four Shorties

HHhH by Laurent Binet

Told in a distinctly postmodern style, the novel explores the assassination of Reinhart Heydrich, the Blond Beast of the Third Reich and mastermind of the Final Solution, by two Czech men. I’d never heard of Heydrich, but then again, I am not encyclopedic on Nazis or WWII FAQs in general. Still, after completing this book, it seems that Heydrich should be at least as well-known as Himmler or Goring (the title stands for the phrase, in German, Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich).

Catching Up

The last month has been one of the most hectic ever. My husband was offered a new job and suddenly, we are moving to another state this summer. It’s been a mad frenzy of getting the house on the market, traveling out of state to find a new home, packing, cleaning — all while still working and, oh yeah–reading too. But not getting much blogging done, nor will I likely over the next few months. For this summer of upheaval and change, the mini-review is going to be the way to go.

All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr

I try to avoid buying every hot new title, but I am nevertheless frequently curious to take a peek to see if it might be worth the hype. So I’ve taken to requesting books like this from the library. Usually there are several hundred requests before mine. When I get an email that the book is waiting for me, it’s like a nice surprise.

From New Zealand to New Guinea: Euphoria

The same day I finished The Luminaries I picked up Euphoria by Lily King. In just the first chapter I was struck by how intensely dissimilar the two novels are: The Luminaries being all about plot, puzzles, and tricky literary conceits. Euphoria, on the other hand, is textural, lyric, and utterly transports you into a different place, time, and perspective. The opening pages slammed me so fast and hard into the hot, humid, stinking, feverish head of the main character Nell that I quickly realized even more how little The Luminaries was a character driven novel.