If you can read this, thank a teacher.

If anyone can take you to Ayemenem, Kerala in India, during the hot Maydays in the 1960’s in great detail, it is Arundati Roy.

She manages to write lyrically about its local color; a river snaking behind her protagonist’s home, the two children who used to live in it, their English cousin who perishes in the river. She narrates the medley of adult lives that become extraordinary in spite of their Indian ordinariness. These are Angliophiles and their love affairs and travails, adventures in Oxford and London. These are the orangedrinklemonade man who molests Estha in a movie theater kiosk. Set in the height of Marxist leanings that have taken over in Kerala in the 60’s as protests against the caste system was at its height, she focuses on the factory owners, their rich landed heritage and their Pickle and Jam Factory founded by a semi blind Mammachi. She writes about The Imperial entomolgist patriach, Pappachi and his sadness that a new species of moth that he discovered was not named after him. She weaves a believable tale of the family who employs Velutha and his family as hired hands in their factory. A paravan, Velutha has a love relationship with Ammu, the mother of the twins, and daughter of the owner of the affluent household. Ammu’s relationship with their paravan is taboo and a complex weave of events lead to Velutha’s mistakenly being accused of the death of Sophie Mol. Fraternal twins Estha and Rahel run away after their mother Ammu, in a fit of anger and frustration, reprimanded them and tells them that the twins are responsible for her miserable and ill fated life. Sophie Mol tags along and drowns as the make shift boat sinks in the river. Baby Kochamma, an aunt whose life is strewn with could have beens and should have beens contrives to have the death of Sophie Mol be pinned on Velutha. Upon her knowing that Velutha was having a love affair with Ammu, she connives to persuade Estha and Rahel to point to Velutha as the “murderer”. Velutha is beaten to death by the police.

In the light of the tragic events that rule the lives of the kids, their parents and their next of kin, the small events that happen in their lives are the only things that they can look at, ignoring the bigger things like injustice and political strife. They seem to be grieving something all the time and as a consequence make poor choices about their life and their relationships.

There are many elements of child abuse, spitting, vomiting and the denigration of women in this novel.

One wonders how the God of small things permit this to happen.

 Fascinating, inspiring, daunting and brave, these are the words to describe the efforts of one man to make a difference that will be palpable through the generations of Pakistani women and men that education touched. This is a recounting of the efforts of Greg Mortenson, consumate mountain climber, relentless fundraiser, intrepid leader, inspirational follower, Berkeley bum, errant husband, on and off emergency room nurse and humanitarian. In the barren, poorest interstices of the Himalayan mountains resided the most hospitable, Karkoran mountain people whose children were deprived of not only proper nutrition but of any opportunity to go to school. Young girls would gather in hillsides and wait for instruction, they were writing with sticks on the ground. Greg’s promise to come back to help the people of Korphe  began with writing letters to potential funders, helpers and good souls only to be discouraged by the lack of response of people, except for one Dr.  Jim Hoerni who gave him $12,000 to get started. Then his real climb that was more formidable than climbing K2 (world’s steepest and next highest mountain in the world in Pakistan) began.    In 1993 in a Pakistani village in the Karakoram Mountains.Having come back to make good on a promise to help young women and children, he  has built 57 schools in remote regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Now in these remote places, he is a hero who has gained the trust of Islamic mullahadins, village chiefs, military commanders,  and tribal lords for his unrelenting gift of  girls’ education in those rural areas.

This is the first novel I read on the Amazon Kindle. I must say I had a hard time finishing the book. I made it to my book club without knowing that half of the ladies did not finish reading it too. Maybe because it dragged on for a long time, to be able to portray the loss of confidence and a sense of who we are and our purpose in life. Power’s style must have been the perfect way to reflect the ongoing confusion of his characters. Maybe it was also because I was reading it on new technology, the e-reader, thus I could not get passed the first few chapters.The main characters in the novel were Mark Schluter, Karin, his sister, Dr. Gerald Weber and Sylvie, Dr. Hayes and Barbara. There is Daniel and Robert Karsh, Karin’s lovers. Mark was in a near fatal accident and suffered brain trauma that renders him incapacitated and needing help. The only one who could provide care for him is his sister Karin. She uproots herself from her job and her home and tries to take care of her brother. A neurological disorder, Capgras, ensues after the traumatic brain injury. Mark doesn’t recognize Karin and thinks she is an impostor. Karin seeks the help of a well known physician and the doctor flies in town to examine Mark. He is apparently the authority on brain disorders, with a collection of journal entries chronicling the vast cases of neurological disorders he has seen and has treated and diagnosed. He is published and respected in his field. When Mark’s condition deteriorates, all that Dr. Weber is able to prescribe is CBT (Cognitive Behavior Therapy).Karin struggles with her own life with caring for Mark and reconnects with her hometown, Kearney, Nebraska. She goes out with Daniel, a friend of Mark’s. Daniel, the conservationist-environmentalist and pure hearted soul is somewhat too wimpy.  Karin sleeps with him and another man, Robert Karsh, an evil, selfish, polygamist land developer.In the wetlands of Platte, the cranes migrate and mate, they descend upon the marshes and is the backdrop of the drama that unfolds between Karin, Mark, their doctors and nurse, their friends and the confusion that they are experiencing owing to Mark’s illness and strange recovery.Everybody seems to be going through some kind of Capgras syndrome where the characters start to question their realities and their identities. Only the coming and the going of the cranes, their births and deaths seem to be permanent. The DNA that propels them to do the same rituals every season for all time ensures this. Powers likes to create characters from other classics, and I find this out from a blog review. He has apparently been basing his characters on those in The Wizard of Oz . Karen is Dorothy who wants to go home, Mark is the Scarecrow who doesn’t have a brain, Robert is the Tin man who doesn’t have a heart, Daniel is the lion without bravery. Dr. Weber is the Wizard of Oz, all knowing but is the fraud that misleads his patients. Barbara is Glinda the Goodwitch.The Wizard of Oz, the first American fairytale is the pattern that can be superimposed with the development of Power’s characters. Set in the backdrop of Nebraska, it is the perfect allusion to post 9/11 America where all of us are reeling from Capgras.

The story unfolds with a prologue that portends what happens in the story. The band in the circus was playing the Disaster March. There was a mad melee, the animal menagerie was lose.  Using a first person point of view, Jacob narrates his story from alternating ages, first as a twenty three year old and then from a ninety three year old living in a retirement home.

Jacob Jankowski, the main character in Water for Elephants has some likeness to the biblical Jacob, firstborn son of Isaac. In Genesis, (32:22) the biblical Jacob becomes “Israel” after his wrestling match with God. Jacob asks for the God’s blessing and gets it. Jacob becomes the father of the first thirteen tribes of Israel. He was blessed with prodigious wealth and he was a caretaker to his flock, mainly animals and livestock. The main character in the novel was kindly towards animals, he also had a long prodigious life with the circus during the 1930’s in the Chicago area. Jacob Jankowski in the story, was a final exam shy away from a veterinarian’s degree from Cornell University. His parents were killed and he was left homeless. He found himself traveling with the Benzini Brothers’ flying Squadron, a train car of circus performers and workers. He became the appointed veterinarian of the circus.

In the circus during the Depression, he bunks with Walter “Kinko”, a midget performer. He and the miscreant eventually harbors and takes care of Camel, an elderly circus worker who becomes old and paralyzed, a throwaway employee because he was no longer useful to the circus. Jacob is drawn to Marlena, the equestrian-performer and wife to the cruel animal trainer August. Marlena is equally drawn to him. At first, August is kindly towards Jacob, giving him favors and invitations to dine in the fancier cars where the accommodations were luxurious, unlike the decrepit quarters and conditions that the rest of performers and the workers were housed in. Even the animals were subjected to inhumane conditions, being fed from goat stock and animal entrails that are on the verge of spoilage. Circus owners who are on the verge of bankruptcy were often salvaged by competing shows. Like vultures hovering around a near dying animal,  shows purchase menageries and lure performers like fat ladies, Siamese twins, and all sorts of odd, deformed human and animal attractions. The Benzini Brothers purchased a menagerie of animals that included Rosie, a bull elephant. She was first considered dumb and worthless until Jacob discovered she responded to commands only her in her native tongue, Polish. Rosie and Marlena performed successfully and became a hit show. Rosie is treated badly by her trainer August.

Jacob however, makes sure that the menagerie is cared for, much to the pride and delight of Uncle Al. Jacob gets Marlena pregnant as they carry on an illicit love affair. Kinko and Camel get redlighted. During the Depression, resources were tight and all workers who did not contribute to the circus were expended. August becomes paranoid and hits Marlena, he becomes increasingly cruel to everyone including the animals. In the succeeding events, the circus starts to fall apart.

In the melee that occurs, a stampede ruins the performance and August perishes. Uncle Al is also found dead underneath a collapsed tent. The circus is dismantled but Jacob and Marlena refused to part with their menagerie, including Rosie whom they were very fond of. They join the Ringling Brothers Circus and become successful performers.

Jacob recollects his youth in the circus, this is prompted by his is eagerness to watch a circus performance that happens to be passing through. Simon, one of his sons, forgets to visit him on the day of the show but Jacob manages to go by himself in spite of his feebleness and being wheelchair bound. In the end, he rejoins the circus through some force of circumstance and extraordinary fortune.

Control. The issue is about pedophilia, but the main thread that connects all the psychological and philosophical fabric of abuse is about possession and control.

Nabokov’s classic is a master in visceral and intellectual sexual excitation, and the reader is hooked from page 1.  It opens with a letter to the gentlemen of the jury, Humbert Humbert is making an appeal for himself as he is convicted for a crime of passion, shooting Clare Quilty, the man who lured Lolita to run away from him.

The letter is lengthy, and it chronicles Humbert Humbert’s beginnings from Europe (Swiss, Parisian, somewhat Russian) and his predilection for young girls aged 12 and around that.  He journals his attraction and having married girls who exhibited childish and prepubescent behaviors, Monique and Valeria who he either leaves of leaves him.  In his vagabond migration to America, he settles in a Ramsdale, New England lodging home of Charlotte Haze and her young daughter, Lolita. (L, Lola, Lo, Dolly).  He immediately gets enamored  with the child and plots to be near her, coveting, lusting.  He marries her mother.  Lolita is sent to camp for that summer and Humbert plans to eliminate Charlotte who wildly mon cheried  the newly acquired groom.

Charlotte Haze perishes in a freakish accident and  Lolita falls into Humbert’s hands. He extricates Lolita from camp and tells her that her mother is ill, dying in a hospital. They  travel  to pass the time to look at scenery, driving from motel to motel in the pretext of him minding a daughter.   The language of seduction during these parts of the novel gets steamy, erotic and racy. The story is picaresque.

Lolita gets raped twice a day,  but the irony is that she was the one who seduced Humbert on that first night of their sexual encounter.  Lolita had sexual relations before Humbert that really characterized her as being precocious and not the innocent child that Humbert originally imagined she was. Humbert doted and cared for Lolita but he  isolated her from all contact with others, making sure that she is aware that there is no other place for her to go.  If they were caught, he threatened that she will be the ward of the state and that would be a far bigger misfortune than what she had then. They travel to 311 sites across the country, 27,000 miles across the sad scenery of motels and parks that dot the maps that they used, they had no destination and every night Lolita was in tears, Humbert was sexually gratified. Lolita was not the compliant and mousy little girl that one would expect under the control of Humbert.  She was feisty and fought with Humbert, exchanged sexual favors for her demands of where to go and what to buy as well as what to do with their time. She controlled him as much as he controlled her.

I did not like my reaction to this novel. I was seduced by its eloquent and vibrant portrayals of images, sensual and otherwise. His language was fluid, ridden with erudition and poetic imagery. Nabokov is the master of crafting words, he is credited for coining new words like “nymphet” and “faunlet”. I did not like that I felt sorry for the pedophile. I do not know whether this was a romance novel with grotesque underpinnings, but a romance anyway.  I know that there was too much eroticism and that it was love expressed the wrong way. But I thought the language that expressed the “romance” was very beguiling and indeed romantic, but ironically, was about abuse, debasement and wretchedness.

The setting is 1865, Cambridge, Massachusetts. The sudden high profile deaths of a Supreme Court justice, a minister and a high ranking member of society upset Bostoners and the investigators policing criminal activity. The deaths were gruesome, horrific and very surreal. Judge Healy is found by the river, his entire body teeming with maggots, blowflies (hominovorax) that have laid their eggs and consumed his flesh. He was still, apparently alive while the critters consumed his living tissue. A well regarded Unitarian minister, Talbot, is buried with his head first in a vertical grave and his feet were burned as he squirmed. A third victim is cut into halves and parts with a sharp slicing tool, and his skin is opened to expose his tissues and muscles. Somehow, these deaths have an eerie correspondence to the deaths and “contrapasso” of characters in Dante’s Inferno, a renaissance allegory and epic poem. Three Harvard poets whose lives revolve around the first English translation of the Italian Divine Comedy become involved in the investigation. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell became suspects of the serial crimes, and were also on the trail of the murderer as they unravel the mysterious perpetrator. Being members of an exclusive Dante Club, they have sworn to protect Dante and their reputations as being the guardians of the legacy of the famous work of literature.

The story also revolves around the historical account of how the elite Ticknors, Dr. Manning and J.T. Fields, publishers of “The Atlantic Monthly Magazine and Review” were the controllers of Harvard University publications and consequent influence on what was going to be allowed to become mainstream influences in literature and culture at the august institution of higher learning. The litterati were biased against letting Italian culture and its faculty infiltrate the Harvard hallowed portals of learning. Unauthorized translations of Dante’s Inferno would be suspect and not worthy of publication. This would explain the banishment of Italian professors and struggling poets like Pietro Bacchi who had to resort to clandestine and menial ways to conduct their livelihood, tutoring Italian language to women and those who wanted to learn how to speak and translate.

Entrance to Hell, etching by Gustave Dore

Matthew Pearl masterfully uses historical fiction to portray Boston during the civil war, where soldiers were exposed to the ravages and cruelties of fighting and infamy. He presented the sins of the holders of power, particularly simony, treachery and non-commitment to cause others to suffer. According to Dante’s Inferno, retribution for sins have corresponding levels in a spiral that narrows toward Lucifer, who is frozen in the bottom. His companions are betrayers and traitors. Simony is the sin of taking monies for offices in the church, and that begets egregious punishment as well. People who are in positions of power and fail to make moral decisions and watch others suffer on account of their failure to make those judgments are to be held accountable for their lack of backbone. An example of one who sinned this way is Pontius Pilate.

The author succeeds in taking Dante’s Inferno into many levels of interpretation that points to his relevance in modern times. He successfully synthesizes the scholarly study of Dante’s work, a historical account of America’s most beloved poets and their lives. It delineates their contributions to American literary history at a specific historical epoch where citizens were just reeling from the effects of war and strife. The murder mystery trail points to a soldier, an “insider” who has access to Dantean translations and galley proofs.

The poets are exonerated from suspicions of their having committed the Dantean murders.

The chase scenes are almost too hilarious to imagine, men in soire suits and with mustaches and beards are jumping in and out of carriages and horses along the cobbled streets of Boston. Pearl succeeds in making a world classic come back to life in a historical scenario of war and the state of affairs of a the highest regarded learning institution. We get a peek at America’s most prominent poets and literary icons and their legacy of upholding one of the world’s greatest works of literature.

At today’s meeting, 6 of us showed up in contrast to a well attended 12. Some of the members are on vacation and are out of town. There were 5 bottles of wine that were brought by the attendees and a sundry of chips, carrots and puff pastry sticks completed the ample refreshments. We discussed the 2007 Pulitzer Prize winner Cormac McCarthy and his latest 2006 novel The Road.It was a story of a father and son. They were journeying on a desolate road towards the coast in a fictional setting of America in ruins, an apocalyptic scenario when the earth is no more, nothing grows, people have resorted to looting, carnage and cannibalism. The weather is no longer seasonal, everybody has some form of disease because it is perpetually cold and wet. It is not specified if the deluge was caused by global warming or a nuclear bomb, but the devastation is beyond repair. The earth had stopped being able to sustain life and whoever survived had no chance of living any quality form of existence. Each man would have to fend for himself to ensure his being able to stay alive. The exception was this man who would do everything to protect his emaciated son. He shields him from “others” on the road, predatory human beings who eat people, including infants and their own children. Throughout the story, the father and son encounter places where food was left over or stored for disasters and long term emergencies (maybe devastation of this proportions). They forage and “take”, eat in a manner that they are grateful for their good fortune but hoard the cans and other preserved comestibles to bring on their journey. The father had no inclinations to share their food with hungry and needy people they run into. The young boy was more compassionate, he questions and protests his father’s selfishness and apathy towards other people they meet. They possess a gun with two bullets, and they are able to protect themselves from attacks by people from the “other side”. As they finally reach their destination, the duo finds nothing on the coast that is any different from their path. The father dies and the child gets left under the care of a family who does not eat their kind.What a depressing, horrendous, decrepit, viscerally disgusting description of a human future condition. We should probably unanimously nominate Al Gore for president!I have not seen more beautiful prose in a long time. McCarthy’s images vividly describes in short incisive detail. His words are chosen with great care, telling a horrific story but at the same time giving great attention to the tender love between a parent and son. This love is probably what he forsees will remain after all memories of humanity and life on earth have vanished. His last paragraph that summarizes the story so lyrically read:”Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back, Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”I would say that “The Road” is a metaphor for where we all are at different stages of our lives. The minute we are born, we are on the road to our finality, and there are many adventures, twists and turns of fortune while we are on our journey. We have children, wives and husbands, friends and foes, we go on adventures and pay attention to our connectedness to God and one another whether we do it consciously or not. In the end of the story, the boy’s father dies and leaves him in the care of a family . The boy cries for a long time and when he comes back on the road, a woman embraces him and asks if he was all right.”Oh,” she said,”I am so glad to see you.” She would talk to him sometimes about God. He tried to talk to God but the best thing was to talk to his father and he did talk to him and he didn’t forget. The woman said that was all right. She said that the breath of God was his breath yet though it pass from man to man through all of time”.This book is about hopelessness but it for some reason resonates with resplendent rays of redemption and salvation because of the grace of love that was so eloquently described in the last two paragraphs above. That is the love and voice of God that is connected to our father’s breath and the breath of all men for generations through eternity. This remains even after we have destroyed our planet and annihilated ourselves completely.

They say that those who read get smarter. Now, the word is that those who blog even do better. Welcome to the Aragon staff book readers’ blogsite. I think this is exciting for its members who have been meeting for at least three years now, once a month, to discuss a book of the month that we vote on.

We have enjoyed ripping novels apart, picking the minutiae in each short story, essay, fiction, non-fiction books we’ve come across. Now, we can even write about it and have it on record!

Please create a wordpress.com account for yourself so that you can participate in this blog. It is completely voluntary, however, you may be kicking yourself if you do not catch what each member has to say or have said about our recent selections.

Have a great time!