The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright

Tuesday, June 15, 2021--San Antonio

I became aware of the book The Man Who Lived Underground by Richard Wright because of an NPR story.  It's a unique publishing situation.  The book was written in the early 1940's, but was not published until this year.  The author is a Black man who had two very successful novels published (one before and one after this book) plus other publications.  This book was not published at the time, because the publishing company thought the readers would not be comfortable with the first quarter of it which deals with a young Black man being picked up by 3 policemen as he walks home from his job working for a wealthy family next door to another family where an intruder, unknown to him, has killed the residents that day.  In an attempt to quickly solve the crime, the policemen dismiss everything he tells them and torture him through the night.  Finally, they tell him they can send him home to his pregnant wife if he signs a paper (which he is now too disoriented to read and includes a confession to having committed the murders. 

It was difficult for me to read those pages, just as the original publishers had expected it to be then.  I had to stop and wait for another day to continue.  But I forced myself to go back to it because I wanted to know about the underground life he had lived and how he had managed to escape from the police to live it.  The book has gotten very good reviews, and it was quite interesting.  It includes another short piece that the author wrote that explains his (the author's) background story of having been raised by a stern 7th Day Adventist grandmother and how that affected his writing of this short book.  Overall, I enjoyed the book and I appreciated the added feature that explained so much of it.  I gave the book 3 stars out of 5. 

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

Wednesday, May 19, 2021--San Antonio

 Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson is a short novel, but one with a fascinating story of 4 generations of a family spanning time from the Tulsa massacre which was followed by moves to Chicago and to two different locations in Brooklyn.  It is the story of mostly the women within a successful and educated (college degrees) Black family.  It is also a story of caution, love, alienation, declaring independence, and adapting.  The characters are fascinating.  The story is captivating.  I gave it 4 1/2 stars out of 5.

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy

 Thursday, May 13, 2021--San Antonio

The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy is a confusing book.  It's meant to be that way.  Everyone reading it has to decide what's happening and why things are supposedly known in advance of when they happen.  I've come to my own conclusion which I will type two lines below where I give my rating for the book, so SPOILER ALERT for then.

The story is told from the perspective of a British scholar who teaches Eastern European history and makes a research trip to East Berlin in 1988.  His mother died when he was 10, and he was raised by his manual laborer father who believed in socialism as the best political solution for overcoming poverty and hardship along with his brother who was also a manual laborer.  He had little in common with either of them.  He appears to be sexually fluid with the father and brother being confounded by the way he is "different" from what they expect him to be.  For instance, he wears his mother's string of pearls every day from the time of her death as a way of remembering her as his protector within the family while she was alive and he has sexual relationships with both men and women.  Also, he is so narcissistic that he has difficulty maintaining any relationships due to thinking only of his own needs and interests with no concern about those of others.   On his research trip to East Berlin, he demonstrates a suspicion of Stasi agents having listening bugs, following him, etc., while not being aware enough that expressing his love via letter to a man and trying to help a woman get the opportunity to escape to the west via the efforts of a new local acquaintance who has a better standard of living and more privileges than the normal East German standards are ill-advised acts that could get him and the others all in trouble.  In time, the reader learns a lot about what has happened, but has to come to his/her own conclusion regarding the true circumstances.  I gave the book a rating of 4 stars out of 5.

SPOILER:  Personally, I think the character is suffering from dementia.  I think that in the first half of the book he is remembering the distant memories from 1988 and describing them rather clearly because he is in the early stages of dementia when long-term memory is better than short-term memory.  That would explain why the story is told so clearly while he also somehow already knows that in just a year, the wall will come down.  In the second half of the book, his dementia has progressed to the point that he is mixing memories up in his mind and making associations between memories that may not be related.  By the end, he is jumping quickly through his memories as they flash through his mind as a part of the dying process.

The Parisian by Isabella Hammad

 Monday, Apr. 26, 2021--San Antonio

The Parisian by Isabella Hammad was named on a number of lists of the best books of 2019.  It is the story of one man from Palestine who was sent to a boarding school in Constantinople in the time of the Ottoman Empire for his secondary education and was sent to France where he studied medicine in Montpelier and other subjects at the Sorbonne through the period of WWI.  But it is also the story of the whole of the Middle East and, in particular, Palestine, from the time of the Ottoman Empire when Palestine was a part of Greater Syria through WWI, the partitioning of the region by France and England, and the increasing immigration of Jews into the area after WWI and as WWII approached.  There is a emphasis on the efforts to establish a Palestinian State throughout that time period that has failed due to harsh rule by the Ottomans and the British during the period of the novel (and has continued to be thwarted long after the novel ends as the country of Israel was eventually took control of the rest of the land area of Palestine after fighting wars with its neighbors).  It's a complex story dealing not only with the history of this man and his home region, but with the young man's appreciation of French culture, his love of a French woman while living in France,  the customs and expectations for a young man from the Middle East, and the extent to which a family will go to enforce the young to comply with those customs and expectations.  The history of the area is such a big part of the story that at times I felt it strayed the story of the central character for period of time that were too long.  But overall, both stories make compelling reading.  I gave the book 4 stars out of 5.

The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom

 Sunday, Mar. 21, 2021--San Antonio

The Kitchen House by Kathleen Grissom is a book gifted to me by friends who had read it.  It takes place on a plantation in Virginia in the late 1700s/early 1800s.  Unlike other plantation novels that emphasize the relationships between the white owners and the black slaves, this one brings in a major character who leaves Ireland on a ship with her family which is contracted to be indentured servants in America.  When her parents both die during the passage, the captain, who uses his ship to financially support his family plantation, brings the girl to live out her indentured servitude at the plantation.  Female slaves there fall into two main categories--house slaves and field slaves.  The girl is assigned to live in the kitchen house, an outbuilding where the cooking takes place, and to assist there with cooking plus having chores assigned to her in the big house.  Unlike other whites on the plantation, she lives with the slaves who become like family to her.  This sets up a contrast in outlook and reaction for her vs. the white family members and the white overseer.  The story covers approximately 40 years.  So many of the turns in the story are based on a persons making wrong assumptions and persons not speaking up to clarify the situation that has caused the wrong assumption.  Almost everything that goes wrong in the story is due to this.  Eventually, I found myself wanting to yell at some of the characters for the poor decisions they were making.  They story is easy to read and moves at a fast enough pace, but I lost respect for it as the poor decisions piled up toward the end.  I rated it 3 1/2 stars out of 5.

The End of Loneliness by Benedict Wells

 Sunday, Mar. 7, 2021--San Antonio

The End of Loneliness by Benedict Wells is a book originally written in German and translated into English.  It won the European Prize for Literature in 2016, is listed among the 100 German must-read books, and was on the best seller list in Germany for almost two years.  It took all of Europe and eventually much of the world by storm due to its translation into many languages.  The book is essentially the story of a family concentrating on the lives of the three children after the sudden death of their parents,  the friends and relationships they have, and especially on the life of one of those children.  The story flows easily for the reader, and the characters are all interesting.  The book, although well reviewed and a prize winner, is often referenced as a tearjerker.  I enjoyed it and read it rather quickly.  I gave the book a rating of 5 stars out of 5.

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga

Tuesday, Mar. 2, 2021--San Antonio

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker Prize in 2008.  It is a delightful novel--funny, interesting, and far more entertaining than the film version which was recently released on Netflix.  As a person who has traveled independently to India 6 times and has observed the relationships that exist there in small communities and big cities between those who have money and those who are the working poor, I found the descriptions of life and of interactions between people of different "stations" in life to be so authentic.  Balram, the main character, is poor and from a small village.  What makes the novel so much fun to read is the way that he expresses himself at times--both the structure of his sentences and the observations he has made of life.  I often found myself laughing aloud.  The book as a whole, however, is also about far more than this man's life; it is about the problems faced by everyone in just getting by in India due to dysfunctional government agencies, corruption, moral contradictions, the perpetuation of the caste restrictions in informal ways (since they formally are banned by law), etc.  If you read this novel, you will get a vivid picture of what life is like in India and what people of all standings in the country face in trying just to live their lives.  I gave the book 4 1/2 stars out of 5.