book reviews

The Museum of Innocence by Orhan Pamuk

I don’t quite know exactly what I feel about this book. Half of the book completely drew me in because I could personally sympathize with both Kemal and Füsun— the desolation and emptiness that swallows you whole when the one you love suddenly leaves you hanging, the loneliness that greets you every morning when you have given yourself up completely to someone you know you can’t have, and that terrible helplessness you face when love takes hold of your entire being. This book is about that, about  a love so powerful it destroys you at the wake of promising you happiness. Just as what Pamuk himself says at the end of the novel (he is one of the characters, which makes the story some sort of metafiction), however, this isn’t just a story about lovers, it’s a story about Istanbul.

Pamuk’s literary genius lies, as evidenced by the reason highlighted by the comittee that awarded him his Nobel Prize in Literature, in tailoring stories that weave western and eastern culture seamlessly into a colorful and intricate fabric. Turkey’s strategic location, just beneath Europe and beside the rest of middle eastern Asia, makes it a meeting ground of oriental tradition and modern Western practices. Pamuk tells his love story with this admixture in the background, always hinting that the glory of old Turkey is now slowly making way for European influences. Whether he thinks this a good or not, he doesn’t explicitly declare. 

Although I admire Pamuk’s meticulous penchant for details, his undeniable talent for language, and the depth and heart of his words, I feel I am inclined to say that I found  the latter part of the novel incredibly dragging and superfluous. He lets eight years pass with a single sentence and enumerates the story of a single glance with a whole chapter! This was just one of his authorial idiosyncrasies that I found surprising, oftentimes even annoying. Another thing that really irked me, after having read more than seven hundred pages of this book, was his unexpected use of deux ex machina. I felt it was really uncalled for, and that if that was what he really planned to write all along, he could have done it more tastefully. Not like that. Reading how it ended left a bad, searing thump in my temples, making me almost regret that I even read this book to begin with.

I also didn’t like the way he developed the two main characters. I started out feeling sorry for them, but I ended up genuinely irritated with them both. I understand how painful it must be to lose the one you love, how depressing it is to be haunted by regret every day, but Kemal’s inability to resurface from his sadness is just ridiculous. I think his decline to obsessive melancholy is gravely unfounded. So Füsun was a young beautiful girl with shapely legs and large breasts. So almost every men in Istanbul stopped in their tracks to look at her. So they had good sex every day for forty-four days. So she was witty and surprisingly modern. But are these justified reasons to be so madly in love that you break up your engagement with a woman who is willing to remain at your side even after finding out you cheated on her and lapse into a miserable, almost catatonic way of living? The novel seems to think so. As for me, I think it doesn’t make sense. If the one I love suddenly left me or got engaged to someone else, I would accept the pain and suffer. I would cry incessantly for days, maybe even skip meals, but I would get up again. I wouldn’t spend a year wallowing over what-could-have-beens and pitying myself. That’s just pathetic.

But this isn’t about me. In the heart of Pamuk’s story is obsessiove love, the kind that first sweeps you off your feet and makes you float in the clouds only to have you mercilessly falling back to earth with a thunderous, deathly crash. Whether you choose to get up or stay crawling in between the cracks owes to how deeply you understand life and its meaning, to how you see your beloved as “self” or the “other.” Suffering is an inevitable consequence of falling in love, but the best way to deal with it is just to let it be. But why settle for sadness? Reality is positive, so if life beckons you to move again and smile, then why the hell shouldn’t you?

The titular museum is borne out of Kemal’s compulsion for keeping, stealing, and buying things that remind him of Füsun. His collection ranges from quince graters, china dogs,  raki glasses to cigratte stubs, tisssues, and even locks of her hair.  After ten years of hoarding all these objects, he decides to tell his and Füsun’s story through them by opening a museum. He wants everyone in Istanbul (who had gossiped about him for years) to know this woman he had loved so painfully for so long and whom he had lost far too many times. He wants them to ponder the stories behind every single one of the four thousand cigarette butts she had smoked. He wants them to know her dreams and frustrations of becoming an actress, her wish to go to Europe, her annoying selfishness typical of thinking women, and the attractive way she curls her hair when she watches television. He wants everyone to understand why he loved her with this strange and rare intensity, with a persistence and passion that is unimaginable but undeniably true. 

Perhaps to a normal person, this kind of obsession already borders on cazy, and even Kemal has admitted this himself. Then again I guess this is what love does: it makes madmen out of us all. And if a man should find the memories of his lost love on the most random objects that she has touched, loved, or simply owned and wants to make a spectacle of them, the imperative question that reason asks is of course why. But this novel has set reason aside to make room for the engulfing fervor that is love, which begs an entirely different question—why not?

PS: Pamuk actually opened a real Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, complete with all the objects he has mentioned in the novel. This is its official website.

The Road by Cormac McCarthy

This book has been with me over a year ago. I bought it with the first-draft edition of Kerouac's On the Road, probably as a tasteless attempt at self-humor (get it? The road?). I read Kerouac immediately and loved the spontaneous grittiness of his semi-autobiographical book, but I had put off McCarthy and only decided to read him now after reading so much philosophical texts. I craved for fiction. And boy was I satisfied.

The first thing I observed starting into it was the absence of quotation marks with the dialogues and apostrophes in some contractions. I didn't mind. As a literature major, I had been exposed to authorial quirks like that quite a lot, and I wasn't really awed. What did impress me was how McCarthy arranged it in a way that the reader still understood who was speaking what; the line breaks make the dialogues almost look like poems—which to me is exactly what they are.

The Road is a post-apocalyptic story about a man and his son who are traveling toward the warmer south as the winter winds start to kick in. The story happens late in an unspecified year, but we are immediately told that it is at a time when almost all the world has been destroyed. McCarthy incontinently—almost casually—sets the dismal tone of the novel: gray skies, burned forests, cheerless empty roads, cold winds, and sad, desperate people. We aren't privy to the nature of the catastrophe that caused the crops and animals to die and leaving only a number of humans (many have resorted to cannibalism) behind scavenging for whatever is left for food, but I have a hunch it had something to do with fire.

Reading literature setting humans against a dystopic background always gives me apprehensions. I am the type of reader who attaches intimately to the characters, so I always get genuinely scared when I know they are about to go through some sort of suffering. This time is no different with the man and the son. Judging only from the few lines they spoke to each other, they immediately struck me as the kind of people who can battle hopelessness with hope and come out victorious. The man, unlike his wife who had killed herself (the novel doesn't say how), believes in the inherent goodness of life, which allows him to value his and his son's over the fear of what may come.

The child provides a foil to the entire desolation to which the novel's world had fallen. He remains kind and pure of heart, always desirous to help the weak people they meet on the road, crying when his father refuses out of fear for their safety. Despite the different faces of death he has seen, the evils he has witnessed and escaped, he manages to still keep his innocence—full of love for his father and hope that there are still good guys out there. To use the novel's phrase, he keeps "carrying the fire in his heart." And in the end, although so much has been lost, the child is at least right: there are still good guys out there.

The Road is the kind of novel that pulls you in its world completely. And being there with the man and the child is fucking frightening. Every time the man wakes up in the middle of the night to some unexplained noise, I feel my heart jumping to my throat, hoping to God nothing would happen to them while they sleep. And when they are momentarily trapped inside the house of those cannibalistic miscreants, my breaths become so heavy I needed to stop reading for a while and remind myself that I'm still here in this world and I can go back anytime I wish. Oh God and when the man lay dying, telling his son that his heart was his the entire time and that he was the best guy he has ever known I just hurt so bad I couldn't help crying.

I also watched the movie immediately after I finished reading the book, and it was equally a harrowing experience. Seeing The Road's world in your head is one thing, seeing it played out in front of you is another, both wonderful to me; the film is a very good adaptation of the book. Allow me to mention as well Viggo Mortensen and  Kodi Smit-McPhee's heartbreaking performance as the man and the son. There is a look about Smit-McPhee that just endears him to you as an audience.

The Road weighed down on me with a heavy kind of tenderness. It is in many sense a dystopic novel that has for its heart a love story between a father and a son. It has moved me and shaken me and at times made me curse in my head. It is gut-wrechingly, hauntingly beautiful. It is the kind of book that stays with you, the kind you'll want to read it again and again.

The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion

I think it was fate that one of her essays ("Goodbye to All That") was assigned to me in college. I immediately felt an affinity for her—her wide-eyed wonder at the experience of New York, her sense of miracle living there, her depression, her sadness when she found herself falling out of love with the city. 

I began looking for her books and found six in Booksale. A surge of excitement and wonder always overcomes me when I find precious books there priced ridiculously cheap (but I'm not complaining). I bought three of her books under fifty pesos and others even lower. But then you'd have to turn the place upside down to find the really precious ones (e.g., a hardbound copy of Nabokov's The Original of Laura and Doris Lessing's Under My Skin for fifty pesos each). Not bad, eh?

The Year of Magical Thinking sounds like a fairytale, a happy book about a girl traveling the world and seeing it for all the magic that it is. At least, that was my first impression. However, reading into the first few pages immediately shook me out of my fantastical ideas and sat me down on a sofa where a man who a second before was just asking for scotch from his wife fell dead the next. Yes, this book is about death.

"You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends."

Joan Didion's writing comes out as easy and personal, and you hear her voice reading out the words in your head. It is surprising how this book isn't the least bit sentimental, considering it was her husband who died on her and her daughter who constantly traveled from one hospital's ICU to another. The way she chronicles her grief is so clear-eyed, her language always steady although you know that she is starting to fall apart.

After reading this book, I thought about how my mother dealt with my father's death—because he died unexpectedly too from cardiac arrest like Didion's husband—especially that she's a doctor. When he was falling down dead, did she think she would be able to revive him? Was she even there, or did she discover him dead much later? Was she one of the cool customers at the hospital who weren't hysterically shouting and pulling at their hair? Did she cry immediately for her loss or did she take some days after he died to realize the he's never coming back? Sometimes I want to ask her this. But I never did. I probably won't. We have moved on and she's happy, that's all that matters.

I guess you just never really know when people die, and you're never really ready when they do. They could just be eating breakfast across from you and suddenly their heart stops or a vein in their brain ruptures. You find yourself asking why: why them? why now? why so suddenly? The usual answer to this is the simple "Perhaps it is just their time." And maybe this is the truth. Death is one of the fundamental conditions of being human. We can never really escape it. But we can accept it—with gratitude for life, with courage, and with  the hope that as things end, other things begin.

The Animal Farm by George Orwell 

Is it wrong for me to say that I enjoyed this book a lot? Perhaps too much. I read this immediately after reading Life and Fate because I was so hungover from Stalin that I needed to know more about him, needed to know why he was revered, almost to the point of worship, by his followers and despised by his enemies and critics. But before I go ahead with my book rant, I feel it is important for me to say that although I condemn senseless deaths and human cruelty, I always want to understand what makes the person behind such evil capable. How do they find it in their hearts to kill another person, even more so thousands of persons?  I don't believe Stalin, or even Hitler, was born evil. Something made them evil. And reading this book, at least now I know that with Stalin, it wasn't a childhood trauma or a psychological disease that made him what he was. It was an idea.

I consider Orwell a genius for having written this book and for planting as much satirical humor in it as he had without sounding farcical. Come on, a pig named Snowball standing in for Trotsky or even Lenin is bound to make you laugh out of incongruity. The story starts out with Old Major, an aging boar who seems to be quite the authority at the farm—well, next to humans of course—giving the rest of the farm animals a speech about the cruelty of humans and how it was necessary for them to claim freedom and overtake the farm. He however dies before he could see his revolutionary ideas materialize. Two pigs take his place, Snowball and Napoleon, under whose leadership the animals finally take courage to rebel and successfully drive their human masters out the farm. They rename it "Animal Farm" and establish commandments collectively called Animalism. (Didn't I tell you this book is genius?) Their number one rule is "All Animals are Equal."

You'd have to read the book yourself if you want to know the rest of the story. Suffice it is to say that Napoleon and his lot turned out—pardon the lame pun—disgusting pigs who personified everything they've been denouncing in the first place. The last scene gave me goosebumps!

What I love about this book isn't just the humor but more importantly Orwell's clever and effective use of allegory. He has deliciously packed the falseness and potential evil of Marxist ideology into a fable that is easy to digest and enjoy. He doesn't exaggerate his analogies, maintains a friendly language, and keeps the tone light. If you're too lazy to read The Communist Manifesto and but curious to know why so many people are against communism, this book is a good place to start.

Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman

This is not an easy book to read—not because it's more than eight hundred pages long but because it deals with a sensitive subject: humanity in the face of war, cruelty, collectivization, and death. I profess that I don't really fancy war stories all that much, if only because I really don't understand war at all (its nature, its purpose, its meaning [if it even has one to begin with]).

Often compared to Tolstoy's War and Peace for its breadth and remarkable, very human characters, Life and Fate is a World War II story centered on the Battle of Stalingrad and narrated through the Shaposhnikovs, a middle-class Russian family. When you have a book that chronicles the two giant evils of the past century—that is, Soviet communism and German fascism—you get a brave epic that spans thousands of lives, from the poor-foot soldier who misses the soup of his mother to the feared Comrade Stalin himself. And in fact this book is so brave that the State considered it a danger and Anti-Soviet: it was confiscated and censored with Grossman consequently becoming a persona non grata.

This book crushed my heart and made me cry so many times! The kind of loss and separation that war brings with it is so deep and profound that after the fighting is over, you find that you're no longer the person you once were; and although you struggle to remember the face that you had before the war, you find that you no longer recognize it. And deaths! So many senseless deaths! Of Russians who just happened to live at the wrong place at the wrong time. Of Jews who were told they were going to a bathhouse and instead found themselves gassed or burned to death. Of soldiers, Russians and Germans alike, who are fighting for their country but who really just want to go home to their wives, children, mothers.

Amid all this political monstrosity that claims lives, destroys cities, and separates families, Grossman gently, unabashedly plants a flower. This flower is kindness. What does it mean to be human in face of death, cruelty, chaos? Grossman says it is kindness, that tenderness that swells in our being when we see someone suffering, compelling us to move toward that person and do something. It is that feeling of closeness you feel toward a stranger who has gone through the same things that you have. It is recognizing that whether you are German or Russian or Jew, you are still, underneath it all, just a human being like me. And you deserve to live. You deserve to be free.

What makes this book such a wonderful experience to read isn't only the truth that it so boldly tells, but the language with which it is told. Grossman's grasp on language is beautiful and affecting, almost hypnotic. His personifications of Russia as an aging dowager made me feel regret for the glory she once possessed but now lost. His heartfelt, soul-crushing description of the extermination camps and the feelings of the people who were killed there sends you into an emotional stupor and makes you ask how anyone could have the heart to send these innocent people to their deaths. And finally the honesty and fragility with which he embodies his characters. He doesn't make you hate any of them, not even Stalin, not even Hitler. He exposes every one of his characters in their most human face—proud, vulnerable, confused, and capable of a kindness that even they themselves do not understand.

If you've read War and Peace, Life and Fate makes for an excellent supplementary reading. No, scratch that. It makes for a good reading in itself. It takes patience to read, but after the last page, you'll find that it is easily one of the best war epics this century has produced.

Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn

Finished this last Saturday. I have to say that as much as I loved the entirety of the book and the style it is written, I hated the ending. So anyway. This book is about a couple (Nick and Amy) who go through hell during their fifth anniversary because Amy has suddenly gone missing, and the state of things in their apartment when she disappeared points to Nick as the main suspect. Their marriage is troubled to say the least,  and evidence against Nick piles up. The book fluctuates between Amy and Nick's point of view, so we get to pick sides and actually have basis for our choice from their personal thoughts. Nick had met at hello, but Amy---I am a lot like Amy in so many ways, which is scary. What I love best about this book is that it is much a romance as it is a suspense/thriller. Flynn never deviates from the light, romantic tone and this is the reason that when the truth is finally revealed, it is twice as shocking, twice as unbelievable.

I would totally recommend this book to pseudo-feminists like me. You'll love the spontaneous, heart-in-mouth style of the narrative, the chronological disarray, the unlikeable characters that you are forced to feel sorry for. Here's one of my favorite lines from the ending:

“My gosh, Nick, why are you so wonderful to me?' He was supposed to say: You deserve it. I love you.
But he said, "Because I feel sorry for you." 
"Why?" 
"Because every morning you have to wake up and be you.” 

Inferno by Dan Brown

Spoiler alert! First of all, I'm not going to be a hypocrite and say that Dan Brown is a mediocrity of a writer. That's not even true. If you judge his work in context to his genre, he is easily one of the best. So Inferno. You're probably thinking Brown has gone bankrupt in the creativity department because the title is so simplistic; the book's title, however, is that way for a reason. Yes, Inferno is a direct allusion to Dante's masterpiece, but at the same time it is also the name of the book's pivotal element, which is a plague. Yes, the literal plague where lots (thousands to hundreds of thousands) of people get sick and die. Brown's subjects always intricately weave science and history together, which he does very masterfully (you can tell he does his research). This time though, unlike his other novels that employ research/technology science, Inferno involves the World Health Organization, genetic engineering, and epidemic jargon like "ground zero" to create a quite interesting thriller about---wait for it---overpopulation.

Believe me I was surprised too when the word blatantly, without invitation, appeared somewhere on the page. The feeling was quite anti-climactic, like you were expecting a Lamborghini and instead got a bicycle. My initial thought was, really? This is what this book is about? Overpopulation? I mean the book is titled Inferno; somehow it makes you expect some controversial unraveling about Dante or about his book which Brown will cleverly connect to an equally controversial issue in the present. Granted overpopulation is a controversy, but it's a matter people don't really take seriously because they're eating three square meals a day with leftovers. The great thing about this book is it forces you to take overpopulation seriously. Trust me, it will scare you how it is actually happening in the real world. It surely scared the shit out of me.

Dante is involved in the story only because the antagonist (not really) is obsessed with him and uses references to The Divine Comedy to plot a treasure hunt leading to inferno, which is what he calls his creation. The antagonist is a Swedish genetic engineer named Bertrand Zobrist and out of his genius, he engineers a virus that, when released, will cause a widespread infection, possibly wiping a third of the world's population. This is what Zobrist believes as the ultimate solution to overpopulation, akin to the Black Death that plagued Europe during the Dark Ages.

Enter Robert Langdon who has contracted amnesia and can't remember that he already solved the puzzle. So he wakes up from the hospital, is pursued by a spiked-haired girl assassin named Vayentha, and escapes with the help of a lady doctor (no surprise there) named Sienna Brooks. Robert and Sienna race through Florence, evading men who we are lead to believe are under the control of a man called the Provost. They find clues in the painting of Vasari, which then leads them to Dante's death mask, which they find have been stolen---by Robert himself the night before, but he couldn't remember that he stole the mask and where he put it so now two groups are after them: the provost's men and the Italian carabinieri.

They find the mask, find more clues, and they end up in Venice where they travel with a Dr. Ferris who has a rash and a blacken chest. Come on. Anyone will think Oh no! He's got the plague! But this is Dan Brown. Nothing is what it seems. They find that the plague is in Enrico Dandolo's tomb which--surprise, surprise--isn't in Venice but in Istanbul. At the end of their Venice ordeal, Sienna and Robert get separated and we learn that one of the groups chasing them are actually from the World Health Organization. Mindblown. Not really. We also learn that Sienna (gasp!) is actually Bertrand Zobrist's girlfriend. We are led away from this theory when Dan Brown distracts us by letting us believe, several pages before, that Bertrand is gay and Dr. Ferris is his boyfriend (el-oh-el). But you somehow get the feeling that Sienna is hiding something  when she conspicuously fangirls about Zobrist and his accomplishments to Robert (this is where I stopped trusting her altogether).

This is getting long. Okay, to wrap it up, they find the virus in Istanbul and are horrified to learn that it has already been released for over a week and has already gone global. Sienna and Robert reconcile. Sienna tells Robert that (sigh of relief) the virus is actually a vector virus and isn't programmed to kill. What it does is it inserts genetic information in our DNA and makes us infertile. Like we can't have babies. I loved this part because as a solution to overpopulation, though unimaginable, it makes sense.

The book doesn't end in a solution to the virus infection, but ends happily nonetheless. Everyone is redeemed. Good for the book. But what about in reality? I can't talk about overpopulation because I myself can't see its repercussions yet. But soon it will come. And when it does we will need a Bertrand Zobrist to engineer drastic genetic solutions. When I closed the book, a feeling of dread came over me and remained in my chest until now. I saw the future this book wanted me to see. It was ominous.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

I stumbled into the hardcover edition when I was snooping around Booksale. I originally went there to buy Deception Point by Dan Brown. Unbelievably, Splendid Suns was priced P 138 while Deception Point was valued at P 198. I've read both books and I can tell you the price has nothing to do with the value of the story. If that had been the case, I'm sure as hell I wouldn't be able to afford Khaled Hosseini's books.  

I'm not at all big on Middle Eastern literature nor had I been acquainted with it before, so I had second thoughts about buying the book. But then something about the book spoke to me and I knew it wouldn't disappoint. I was right. It is one of the most moving books I've read in a long time. I had to restrain myself from crying because I read most of it at work and I would've looked ridiculous. If you want the plot details, you can visit the Wikipedia page here, but do it at the risk of major spoilers.

The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

If you've read Splendid Suns first, it's impossible for you not to want to read The Kite Runner, the more famous book of the two. If you've seen the movie, don't settle. Read the book. The movie doesn't even measure half of its emotional impact. They left out so many pivotal details that I couldn't help but feel disappointed.

My aunt gave me an e-reader last week, so I downloaded the e-book and read away. I couldn't put it down. So much pain and so much ordeal that I found myself glad that it was all fiction. But it might as well have happened to someone in post-Soviet Afghanistan. My heart breaks to even think about it.

By the time I finished the book I've learned so much about Afghanistan that I completely shed all the negativity I had associated with them re 9/11 terrorist attacks.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera

"Lovers are like empires: when the idea they are founded on crumbles. they too fade away."

There is more, much more, where that came from. This book is ripe with so many ideas about individuality, about wanting to be with another person without compromising what makes you different. It's a unique love story between four people who can't quite get things right and struggle with loss, heartbreak, and death. I both identified with Sabina and Tereza. I too want to be a body different from other bodies.

If you have read Kundera before, you probably know that his works are existentialist, meaning they are as philosophical as they are literary. The lightness of being here, in a sense, is Kundera's rebuttal to Nietzsche's theory of eternal recurrence---the idea that everything in the universe has happened before and will happen again in an infinite cycle.

This novel says that we only have one life, one chance to make things happen. This is why we are light, because we are not burdened of having to repeat everything in our lives over and over and over. The message really is simple. Make everything count, because when the moment passes, it won't come back ever again.

The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

I know what you're thinking. You'e thinking that this is just some sappy love story with a less-than-creative title about a Jew after the Second World War. You've read far too many post-war love stories, blah blah blah. Wrong. This isn't just a love story. It isn't just a post-war story. It could be both and it could be neither. It could be an anthology. This book is too multifaceted that categorizing it into something familiar would be a disservice.

The History of Love is actually a book that one of the major narrators (yes, there is more than one narrator) wrote as sort of a gift to the woman he loved and the son who never got to know him. Somehow this book ends up with another person who claims it as his own work. Then another person gets hold of the book. In a nutshell, this story is about the different people who ended up with The History of Love and how, in the end, they are all connected to each other in some weird, cosmic way.

What I loved so much about The History of Love is how Krauss wrote it. The style is just so refreshing to me, so humorous and sad, so unlike anything I've read before that I scouted all the major bookstores to find a hardcopy when I already had a copy with me in PDF format. It's the kind of book that you want to hold in your hands---with a story that will stick with you for a long, long time.