Too Good to Be True by Benjamin Anastas

I picked up Benjamin Anastas’ memoir Too Good To Be True to read about his particular version of how a writer can fail in this day and age.  Because failure is very simple:  your book either doesn’t sell to an editor, or even if you do get a publisher, the sales are poor and there goes your career. Which is what happened to Anastas except it happened after he’d had a bite of the literary life gone right: graduating from Iowa’s prestigious writing program, signing with good literary agent, getting a three book deal, getting critical acclaim, getting invited to the right parties, contributing to the right journals, being feted and then feted again. Until of course you stop making money and suddenly your agent is not answering your calls and your publisher doesn’t remember you at all.  But Too Good To Be True is much more than simply a writer’s nightmare. Anastas writes about his debt ridden existence, his affair, his wife’s affair, their son whom his wife allows to be someone else’s son, and underlying all this, growing up in a time when parents forget that they were the adults, that is the sixties and seventies.  My favorite chapter, in fact, is the eponymous Too Good To Be True, when Anastas relates the time he and his three year old twin sister, their seven year old elder brother and their  mother spent a summer in a residential group therapy program called Freedom To Be.  Anastas seemed trapped by the memories of that time, especially the trauma of the sign hung around his neck ‘Too Good To Be True’. His sister’s said ‘Crybaby’. And his brother’s ‘Mr. Know. It All.’ This is a beautifully written and tender chapter and Anastas’ stark candidness,  refreshing throughout the memoir,  is here gut wrenching as the reader imagines what these three little kids must have been through psychologically. However the chapter that blew me away, by far,  is ‘Old Friends’. For this chapter alone, please read this memoir. ‘Old Friends’ is a beautiful meditation on a parent/child, father/son, writer to writer relationship rolled into one. Anastas’ father also wrote fiction and, forty years after having written it, sent him a story called ‘Old Friends’. Till he sent it, in fact, his father even says he’d forgotten about the story, that the story had lain in a box with the divorce decree.

from the chapter:

I remember that oak tree where we mobbed my mother that day. Where we held onto her so tightly– all of us– because we wanted her to feel better about the garden, we wanted her to live. But we also held onto her for selfish reasons, to feel safe from the dangers that were closing in around our family. If we could just hold her under the oak tree long enough, pin her there with our arms and legs, then maybe disaster would never reach us. I used to go back to that oak tree without knowing why. I had never read my father’s story. I didn’t remember the garden and my mother’s tears. It was an old pain. It was ancient already.

To read your life on paper written by your parent, except it’s not your parent only, that is that parent is also a writer, and it’s not really about you, it’s fiction after all, after all it’s fiction, how strange, disconcerting, amazing and awesome reading something like this must be. I can only imagine perhaps forty years from now Anastas’ son reading his father’s memoir, that is his own life, in the same vein. Perhaps Anastas’ son will write a memoir too.  Too Good To Be True doesn’t give any new insight on the publishing industry that most writers aren’t aware of: when you’re up, you’re up, and when you’re down, you’re fucked. (unless of course you happen to write another book that breaks out and then you’re up again). But then it’s more than simply a memoir of a writer who was once up and then learned what it mean to be down: Too Good Be True is a story about, up or down, how to go on.

Mornings in Jenin by Susan Abulhawa, and Palestine and Israel

Susan Abulhawa’s novel ‘Mornings in Jenin‘ was originally published under the title ‘The Scar of David’ by Journeys Press that soon after went out of business.  Hard enough as it is to write a novel, find a publisher, and look forward to readers, it is downright traumatic to watch your book disappear like this. Only Abulhawa’s novel did not disappear and I quote from her Author’s Note

‘…that went out of business shortly thereafter. But in the meantime, it was translated into French and published by Editions Buchet/Chastel under the title ‘Les matins de Jenine.’ And it was through Marc Parent, my wonderful editor at Buchet/Chastel, that Anna Soler-Pont, of Pontas Literary and Film Agency, became my agent two years after the original publication. From there, Anna began breathing new life into this novel. As a result of her efforts, the story was translated into twenty languages and Bloomsbury offered to release it again in English. I am immensely grateful to Anna and to Bloomsbury for this second chance. In particular, I wish to thank Alexandra Pringle, who believed in this story enough to take it on under such unusual circumstances.’

Yes thank you Anna and Alexandra because I of course read ‘Mornings in Jenin’ in English. Though Abulhawa’s own family was turned upside down because of the Palestine-Israeli conflict, and though ‘Mornings in Jenin’ is a family saga spanning six decades, from the 1940s to 200s, it is not autobiographical although it is a parable for Palestine: what it was, who it ‘belongs’ to, and what it has become.  In the first few chapters, which mesmerize with their lyricism, Abulhawa introduces the Palestinian Hasan, the Bedouin  Dalia, and the Jewish Ari, characters whose essence is going to reverberate throughout the story no matter what decade it is.  As their children have children have children, Abulhawa weaves an expert narrative of how politics changes the land and friendships and how, in these changing landscapes, people live, merely survive, or die. The original title, ‘The Scar of David,’ refers to a heart breaking episode with a meaning sure to haunt the reader long after the novel is read.  The new title, ‘Mornings in Jenin’, though less heartbreaking  is no less symbolic and powerful. (The main difference between titles, I feel, is while the new has positive connotations, the original is seeped in tragedy.)  Abulhawa has successfully been evenhanded between her Palestinian and Jewish characters, but make no mistake, this is a story about Palestine and Palestinians, their plight, a plight which continues to this day. But this is in no way  an anti-semitic novel and the fact that I feel I must make this point is sad. In fact for readers looking for the other side of the story, if you will, ‘Mornings in Jenin’ is the perfect novel to read: taut and powerful without being didactic or melodramatic. For both sides of the story I suggest  ‘Mornings in Jenin’ in conjunction with Leon Uris’ seminal novel about Israel, ‘Exodus’.   Please make time to read the novel ‘Mornings in Jenin’. It will make you cry. It will make you laugh. It will certainly make you think. An excellent book club novel.

‘ by Susan Abulhawa

Susan Abulhawa has written a piercing novel about

In the Garden of Beasts: The Scientist Responsible for Zyklon B Won a Nobel Peace Prize

In my old age few things manage to shock me. This does: that the man, Fritz Haber, responsible for the Zyklon B formula, the killer gas used in concentrations camps, was also awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Also he was born Jewish. I learn this while reading ‘In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin’ by Erik Larson. Garden of Beasts is a heavy read about the ‘adventures’ of the hapless American Ambassador (Dodd) to Germany during Hitler’s time, and his impressionable daughter. It’s a dense read with lots of names and lots of information crammed onto every page and though this can get overwhelming, for those interested in this time period it is never the less a very worthy read. Although Larson does not go into Dodd’s feelings about segregation in the U.S. (yes, this is not a book about civil rights in the U.S.), I did wonder about Dodd  reconciling his disgust with separate benches for Aryans and Jews, versus all the separate amenities for blacks and white in the segregated South. In one of the final chapters, chapter 55 ‘As Darkness Fell’, Larson mentions ‘a strange episode’ i.e. while driving Dodd has a hit and run with a four year old black girl.  Considering Dodd is the hero, if you will, of In the Garden of Beasts on account of his sense of right, wrong, fairness and moral righteousness, his subsequent reactions and actions after this accident are a very interesting look into this man’s ethics in his ‘own’ world.Dodd did pay her medical bills and the girl did recover, but Dodd did not stop at the scene and he also wrote a rather interesting letter to the girl’s mother.  Which makes me ask: are we someone else abroad and someone else at home?  

from ‘In the Garden of Beasts’:
 

“Another of Dodd’s early visitors was, as Dodd wrote, ‘perhaps the foremost chemist in Germany,’…..He was Fritz Haber. To any German the name was well known and revered, or had been until the advent of Hitler. Until recently, Haber had been director of the famed Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Chemistry. He was a war hero and a Novel laureate. Hoping to break the stalemate in the trenches during the Great War, Haber had invented a poison chlorine gas. He had devised what became known as Haber’s rule, a formula, C  x t = k, elegant in its lethality: a low exposure to gas over a long period will have the same result as a high exposure over a short period. He also invented a means to distribute his poison gas at the front and was himself present in 1915 for its first use against French forces at Ypres. On a personal level, that day at Ypres cost him dearly. His wife of thirty-two years, Clara, had long condemned his work as inhumane and immoral and demanded he stop, but to such concerns he gave a stock reply: death was death, no matter the cause. Nine days after the gas attack at Ypres, she committed suicide. Despite international outcry over his poison gas research, Haber was awarded the 1918 Novel Prize for chemistry for discovering a means of mining nitrogen from air and thus allowing the manufacture of plentiful, cheap fertilizer–and, of course, gunpowder. Despite a prewar conversion to Protestantism, Haber was classified under the new Nazi laws as non-Aryan, but an except granted to Jewish war veterans allowed him to remain director of the institute……Within a decade, however, the Third Reich would find a new use for Haber’s rule, and for an insecticide that Haber had invented at his institute, composed in part of cyanide gas and typically deployed to fumigate structures used for the storage of grain. At first called Zyklon A, it would be transformed by German chemists into a more lethal variant: Zyklon B.'”

Also it is often said that a country can be judged by how well its animals are treated. The nexty quote struck me because whenever I have taught how to write well-rounded characters, one of my examples is always the fact that as horrid as Hitler was his dogs loved him and he loved his dogs. 

from In the Garden of Beasts

‘At a time when nearly every German is afraid to speak a word to any but the closest friends, horses and dogs are so happy that one feels they wish to talk,” he (Dodd) wrote. “A woman who may report on a neighbor for disloyalty and jeopardize his life, even cause his death, takes her big kindly-looking dog in the Tiergarten for a walk. She talks to him and coddles him as she sits on a bench and he attends to the requirements of nature….” In Germany, Dodd had noticed, no one ever abused a dog, and as a consequence dogs were never fearful around men and were always plump and obviously well-tended. “Only horses seem to be equally happy, never the children or the youth,” he wrote. “I often stop as I walk to my office and have a word with a pair or beautiful horses waiting while their wagon is being unloaded. They are so clean and fat and happy that one feels that they are on the point of speaking.” He called it ‘horse happiness’ and had noticed the same phenomenon in Nuremberg and Dresden. In part, he knew, this happiness was fostered by German law, which forbade cruelty to animals and punished violators with prison, and here Dodd found the deepest irony. ‘At a time when hundreds of men have been put to death without trial or any sort of evidence of guilt, and when the population literally trembles with fear, animals have rights guaranteed them which men and woman cannot think of expecting. He added, ‘One might easily wish he were a horse.’

Qanta Ahmed’s Memoir: In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom

A while back Shaun Randol invited me to contribute to ‘The Mantle’.  I am so pleased to  finally be doing that.  Here is my review for ‘The Mantle’ of Qanta Ahmed’s memoir ‘In the Land of Invisible Women: A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom.’

“The U.S. cover of Qanta Ahmed’s memoir In the Land of Invisible Women features a woman’s head shrouded in a black headdress against minarets and skies. I can’t help but wonder, since the subtitle is A Female Doctor’s Journey in the Saudi Kingdom, whether it might have made more sense for the cover to show a woman with a stethoscope against a Saudi hospital, or an operating room; that is, a cover that better reflected the memoir’s subtitle, rather than the usual clichéd woman in a veil. Because I wanted to read something other than an exposé on the subjugation of women in Saudi Arabia, it was with some reluctance that I took a chance on the book.
My chance proved to be illuminating, if not entirely satisfactory.read rest here“

Ten ‘Things I Hate About Me’ by Randa Abdel-Faatah

No. This is not the teeny movie ‘Ten Things I Hate About You‘ starring Julia Stiles. This is the novel by Randa Abdel-Faateh set in Australia about high school, racism, finding your own identity, and more importantly once you find it being proud of it no matter what. ‘Ten Things I Hate About Me’ is a smart and quick read. The main character’s voice is funny and sassy and will carry you along through important  themes without ever being preachy. She’s living a double identity, her sister is a feminist in a hijab and really that is not an anomaly, and their brother is allowed to date and get away with everything accept choosing his own career. Add to this mix a loud but lovable father. And I must say for once a hijab on the cover works all too well!!

Andre Agassi’s sports memoir ‘Open’ and tennis matches on court and in the mind

I opened ‘Open’ because I’m in the habit of opening every book that comes my way. I could not put this book down.  ‘Open’ is a candid, funny, and fun read simply because Agassi, rather than giving a blow by blow account of every tennis match he ever played, gives a blow by blow account of his inner life. He is often quite snide and he is always very matter of fact. In fact the only aspect of his life Agassi is discrete about is his wife, Steffi Graff, and their children. Every thing else is fair game, be it his drug issues, his feelings about his immigrant father, his feelings about fellow players, his feelings about the sunset, his feelings about Brooke Shields, or his feelings about his hair. Brooke and his hair are, in fact, the stars. The Brooke parts are hilarious and since she apparently okayed them, I felt okay about not feeling too bad at how dim she came across as at times. As for Agassi’s hair: even Agassi was in love with Agassi’s  hair, which at times wasn’t even his hair, but was a toupee, which he was more concerned about losing during a tennis match then the game itself. It’s hilarious to think that while one was watching Agassi run around on court and thinking why has God given a man such amazing hair, Agassi was terrified that his hair piece was going to fall off and humiliate the hell out of him. 
So obviously Agassi didn’t sit down one fine day and discover that he was a fabulous storyteller and writer (yes storytelling and writing are two different creatures) therefore I scrambled to the acknowledgements hoping to find the name of his ghostwriter: it’s J. R. Moehringer, a Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of his own memoir, The Tender Bar.
‘Open’ is a treat to read because of Moehringer. These are Agassi’s stories but it is Moehringer’s pen which brings to them such delight and tenderness for Moehringer has the great talent for taking what could have very well have been bratty whines and transforming them into heartfelt and moving accounts. Apparently, though Agassi wanted to share credit with Moehringer on the cover, Moehringer was content to take a backseat and so Agassi profusely thanks him in the acknowledgements. Here’s a little piece on their collaboration in the New York Times.
If you’re looking for accounts of tennis matches then read Pete Sampras’s memoir, ‘A Champion’s Mind: Lessons from a Life in Tennis’, but if you want something psychologically richer then Agassi’s ‘Open’ is the way to go. For once the titles alone are indicative of the type of read one is going to get!

Please Look After Mother Otherwise You will Die of Guilt

 ‘Please Look After Mother’ the first novel by South Korean writer Kyung-suk Shin to be translated into English recently won the Man Asia Booker Prize, apparently because it illustrates life in modern South Korea. I don’t know if I necessarily got this sense. Mom and Dad live in a village and go to visit their kids in big city Seoul. At the train station, Dad loses Mom and Mom goes missing. The novel is a series of first person narrations by  three of the kids (it is never explained why we don’t get to hear from the fourth) as well as Dad as they try to find Mom.  Each is subsumed by guilt for not taking better care of Mom when she was around. Mom’s voice also makes an appearance and her section is the most powerful of the novel. In fact this novel seemed less to me about how modern Koreans live than about how many sacrifices a Mom like Mom makes for her kids. It is a touching story and familiar in that most kids do not mollycoddle Mom the way Mom did them, but then are kids supposed to? Yes, this novel says, for kids Mom should be # 1. The thing is this novel demands that Mom’s sacrifices be repaid whether the kids asked for them to be made or not. ‘Please Look After Mom’ not only demands you be uber-nice to your mother–always—  but beats you over the head with a guilt trip if you should feel otherwise. Is Mom a good mother? Is Mom an over protective and emotionally domineering mother? Should Mom have developed her own sense of worth in order to expect others, in this case, her own kids to respect her? Am I being ridiculously callous and unsentimental to even raise such questions? If nothing else this is a story which asks where the change occurs from one generation trembling before their parents and another eyeing their parents with disdain and for this alone is worth a read. 

Shalom Auslander. ‘Hope: A Tragedy’. Is it really?

As a child I remember reading Enid Bylton’s allegorical novel ‘The Land of Far Beyond.”  I loved it. At the end of the novel, the main characters are asked what is most important ‘Love, Faith, or Hope?’ No matter what answer the novel deemed right, for me the answer was always hope. Shalom Auslander would think I was a real fool to vote for hope. But then he would think me a fool had I gone with either love or faith. For the witty Auslander the world seems faithless, loveless and hopeless;  his short story collection Beware of God seemed to caution against love, and his memoir Foreskin’s Lament against faith, his debut novel Hope: A Tragedy cautions as well as investigates the precarious nature of hope and why one might precariously cling to it.

“You buy a handgun–for protection, you say– and drop dead that night from a heart attack. You put locks on your doors. You put bars on your windows. You put gates around your house. The doctor phones” It’s cancer, he says. Swimming frantically up to the surface to escape from a menacing shark, you get the bends and drown.”

Auslander is nothing if not the king of black humor; it’s his saving grace since you better be able to elicit chuckles if you’re going to write a novel narrated by a chronic worry wort who finds, of all people, a witch-like Anne Frank hiding in his attic and trying to churn out a bestseller to top her bestseller of bestsellers. Certainly Auslander has no time for sacred cows and pushes every button he possibly can. There are riffs on gas chambers, cattle cars, products made of people, being gravely injured but not yet dead at the top or bottom of a mass grave, a visit to a concentration camp: ‘Are there ovens at least? The trip shouldn’t be a total waste?’
A while back I attended a talk given by Yann Martel on his novel ‘Beatrice and Virgil’, a Holocaust allegory, at the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta.  The discussion that followed was a bit volatile since many in the audience felt that Martel had stepped on a sacred cow. I wonder what would happen were Auslander speaking at such a venue? Would the audience be just as upset or a little less since Auslander was brought up an orthodox Jew? But who else could ‘get away’ with making a minor mockery of Anne Frank and what she stands for if not a Jew, and is this fair? (Fairness an expectation I’m sure Auslander would have plenty of things to say about). One could also ask why someone would want to get away with something like that; but then why not– and Auslander explores in full honesty the implications of ‘sacred cows’.
Auslander’s prose is crisp and flows very well, as does the plot which hinges on the protagonist coming to terms with hope at different stages of his life. The novel also features a woman who believes she was in the Holocaust and her tale makes for an arresting case of survivor’s guilt. I would have liked to know what happens to the wife and son at the end of the novel, but they just disappear, and perhaps their disappearance is intended, perhaps all I’m meant to do is wonder if they survive and hope that they do.

Review of ‘Perfect Peace’ by Daniel Black

I began Daniel Black’s novel ‘Perfect Peace’ last night and could not put it down. In 1940s Arkansas Emma Jean gives birth to her sixth son but so desperate is she for a daughter that she lies to everyone that the boy is a girl, a ‘girl’ she names Perfect. This lie continues till Perfect’s eighth birthday.

Black has written a rivetting novel about identity, gender, sexuality and above all flawed parents, their confused children and small town mentality. ‘Perfect Peace’ (the names in this novel are delicious as is the chapter delineating how each son got his name) raises some very interesting questions about parental obligations and the far reaching legacy of abuse. Had Emma Jean’s mother loved her even a little bit would she have been as desperate to cherish a daughter as she herself was never cherished? Had her sisters been a little nicer might they have saved her from herself? Had Gus been a little less worried about community might Perfect’s transition have been a little easier for everyone? Had King Solomon’s (by far my favorite character) dreams truly broken could he too have entered into the spiral of abuse?

Emma Jean’s mother is a thoroughly believable monster whose poisonous spirit informs every page of the novel as does Emma Jean’s struggle between hating her mother and desperately wanting to love her and be loved by her. Can people really ever heal from wounds inflicted by parents? Can siblings affection truly be a  balm? Can people honestly find happiness once they ‘choose’ to settle into lives they know they will regret? Since Emma Jean was herself a victim of ‘favoratism’ should she have known not to pick and choose amongst her own children? Can a ‘sorry’ really heal all ills? What sort of a person can and cannot live with regrets?

Black has employed the interesting stylistic device of interrupting a character’s present story in order to divulege their future; no doubt for a reader who wants to get to the end only at the end and not in media res this will be very irritating, however, once I got used to this tic I enjoyed it but only because Black prose flows very well and his characters are full and rich. There is so much in this novel– child abuse, incest, rape, madness, domestic violence, mean spiritedness, shadenfreude,– which could have been heavy handed and yet is all the more terrible for Black showing these things through his characters rather than harping on about these ills.  I loved the way children innocently told each other how Daddies and Mummies behave. As for the explorations of why it is  ‘happier’ to be a girl rather than a boy and that too a pretty girl, they are pitch perfect and heart breaking. I was also rivetted by the explorations of what it means to be a ‘pretty boy’ or an ‘ugly girl’ and how these description, true or not, can mold one’s character.

I would have liked more of an ending to Perfect/Paul’s story as well as that of Mister and Johnny Ray and King Solomon but is it really a flaw when the reader wants the story to never end?