Reading: Uwem Akpan

Akpan's story is about a Catholic priest on his way to see his brother in Nigeria. After suffering great loss while living on the rivers edge, believes himself to be used to the tribulations of this country: "After an oil fire killed hundreds of my fellow swamp-dwellers in the Niger Delta, after the mass burials, after negotiating with the leaders of the scores of tribes that make up our church." As a priest, he is compelled to follow ritual and deal every woman, man and child their due respect. Lagos is going through great turmoil as the OPC (Oodua People's Congress) is striking, expecting they have the right to the land. In near every part of the world, a group of people will use a sort of squatter's rights ideal to demand land. "We were here first, we deserve the land." As history has shown, however, it is not who was there first, but rather who was the most convincing and most powerful.

Based on what the priest said, we are to assume this is a common occurrence. They are currently low on fuel and low on peace. With any scarcity of a major resource, anger runs rampant. This certainly is the case in Nigeria. The priest hopes his status as a priest will give him some slack with the Nigerians. However, it becomes pretty evident this is not the case when his first of a series of unfortunate events lands him a dead VW Beetle. "So? You Nigerian clerics just want everything free! You flash your status at every chance" says the Lagosian who had come to help him.

He is stuck with the very same Lagosian guiding him through the city. Runs over a corpse. Mugged by some policemen. Fears being kidnapped. Car, of course, dies again. Accused of highway pooping. More or less, everytime his car dies, something bad happens.

The most interesting part of this story, and likely the most important, is the well phrased setting images. Each description of setting so clearly constructs itself into the reader's mind.

My car dies again, in spite of my revs, at a roundabout. Half a mile down the road, there’s a petrol station. Cars are lined up in pairs, bumper to bumper, coated with a week-old layer of dust. Drivers lounge around, with no idea when fuel will come. The queue has formed a tightening noose around the roundabout, reducing three lanes of traffic to the one that contains my dead Beetle.

It leaves very little up to the imagination in one way, but makes load more room for the imagination in another. Rather than force our minds to draw our pictures of the scene, we can now clearly reenact it with such force that it pulls out our emotions, immersing ourselves in each changing scene.

-Mark

Reading: Bolano

The Eye is the story of Mauricio Silva, known as "The Eye", but is narrated by a non-omniscient third party. I never actually caught the name of the narrator, just that he became good friends with "The Eye" while they lived in Mexico. As you would imagine, when The Eye tells the narrator he is gay, their conversation remains on the topic for quite some time.

That night he confessed to me that he was a homosexual...and that he was leaving Mexico. For a moment I thought he was leaving because he was a homosexual. But no, a friend had found him a job with a photographic agency in Paris...He said that for years he had felt guilty and hidden his sexuality, mainly because he [was] a socialist and there was a certain degree of prejudice among his friend on the Left. (p 108)

Instantly the narrator fears that The Eye's decision to leave was not for gain but rather for prevention of ridicule. I think we always assume the negatives and fear prejudice causes decisions rather than acceptance. I found it quite interesting that the narrator has no prior reservations when it comes to The Eye's sexuality. No emotional distraught or disdain. Nothing. This may be due to Bolano focusing on The Eye rather than the narrator, who's emotions and thoughts are rarely revealing.
"Do you understand what I'm saying? Sort of, I said. We fell silent again. When I was finally able to speak I said, No, I have no idea. Neither do I, said the Eye. No one can have any idea. Not the victim. Not the people who did it to him. Not the people who watched" (p 115). They speak after The Eye tells the story of a child who is emasculated by festival priests to become a Eunuch. Rejected by his family, he is left to a Brothel. None can understand fully the events that occurred. No one will get the full story, or clearly read all sides, points of view. The awful event cannot be accurately portrayed.

In The Vagabond, the story is of a gentleman bt the name of B. Reading a story full of names, it is so unnerving that the protagonist has but a singular letter. Bolano chose also to name those he meets with singulars as well. I am left in bewilderment to the meaning.
Halfway through the story, B heads to a topless bar. He picked up a black girl, presumably at the bar. "Her voice, which B remembers as soft and musical, has become hoarse and querulous, as if at some point during the night...her vocal cords had undergone a transformation...her voice wakes him with the effect of a hammer blow" (p 182). I love the quips thrown throughout pieces like this, certainly adding a spell of cheerfulness amidst plains of uncertainty and confusion.

-Mark

Reading: Nam Le

Nam Le's Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice is about a Vietnamese boy with the same title as the author. The name and origin of the protagonist lead us to draw parallels between both Nam Les (character and author). Nam Le however stated:

A lot of people presume if I'm writing a narrator who has clear parallels to me, that's just sheer inertia; that there's a natural adaptation from so-called life to so-called text. But any careful reader or writer would understand how much artifice and contrivance go into making this self-standing and self-contained

Basically, even though the story has similarities, it isn't about him. It is self-contained, standalone, as if written by anyone.
Nam Le (the character) is in Iowa with his sick dad attending a writing workshop. On page 18, Nam Le sees Linda at a coffee shop while he is going over his paper. He notices she is "unmaking a smile". A phrase not found anywhere else and has an interesting connotation. As she began speaking to him, I belief this unmade smile to be a precursor to a very well made frown.

"You know what I think?...I think you're making excuses for him...You're romanticizing his past to make sense of the things you said he did to you." (Linda speaking to Nam Le about his paper, pg 18)

Unmaking a smile leave uncertainty as to the true emotion left both on the face and beneath.
Several times throughout the story Nam Le mentions tips for writing. "The thing is not to write what no one else could have written but to write what only you could have written" (p 23). I've been told that write only what what I know. This statement could not be more true. While many could write about the same experience, the same story, none of their tellings would be the same. Each affected by location, past experiences, personalities, morals, even what they were doing when the event began. The past so vastly affects our thoughts but we tend to oversee that, believing everyone else so very biased in their stories not realizing we are just as bad.
Shortly after, Nam Le tells his father "If I write a true story...I'll have a better chance of selling it" (pg 24). Most readers want to read for entertainment rather than for gaining knowledge, not to say that isn't an added bonus or that some reading is done specifically for that purpose. Fiction sells easier than nonfiction. Our society is far less fond of long-prose in age. The largest generation buying books today are still in school, many looking for a adventurous escape. Fiction draws on our imaginations, allowing us to go where no one ever could, do what could never be done. There is a great appeal to just sit down in the afternoon after school and imagine yourself away to Hogwarts or the USS Enterprise.

-Mark

Reading: Aleksandar Hemon 4

Aleksander Hemon seems to have an odd fixation on dreams. I say odd simply because he focuses not on the meaning of the dreams, what stories they tell, who people become because of them, but rather on the forgetting of dreams. "I normally remembered only fragments of my dreams; I forgot a lot of them, too, though I could often abstractly recall their intensity" (p 257). The chapter immediately following starts out with a similar statement: "Unsettling dreams have been swarming in Isador's head, but when he snaps out of slumber he cannot remember them" (p 268). These come after a very focused dream forgetfulness on 126-7. Brik basically repeats himself and Hemon adds a new character with forgetful dreaming. This kind of metaphor repetition weakens the more its use. Especially if the repetition isn't actually for a new character but rather just a recapitulation.

On 255, Rora spoke of how during the war, Miller (his boss) demanded he take pictures of fleeing children and actually paid some to run back and forth from sniper fire. Rora clearly found the man despicable, putting the value of the picture over the value of the life. "Still, I felt bad when Rambo clipped Miller. He deserved a good beating, but not death. Nobody deserves death, yet everybody gets it." The idea of deserving one the or another is interesting and brings up far too many questions. Do we deserve the lives we are given? Do we deserve fair treatment? What power sets out who is deserving and what is to be deserved? Are we somehow born with innate knowledge of the "inalienable rights" or do they come from society? If it is societal, how did it start?

I found this statement quite clever and got a chuckle out of the pure bluntness of it. "Seryozha was packing at least a knife, probably a gun, and I did not want to get stabbed or take a bullet in the head" (p 260). With this is quite simply referring to the top reason why they could not do anything to help Elena (the woman that was to be sold).

-Mark

Reading: Aleksandar Hemon 3

Page 126 and 127 presents an interesting (if not entirely new) idea of dreaming. Brik talks of his nights with his animate mind.

It often got out of hand: possible stories sprouted from the recalled instants and images...many of those stories turned unnoticeably into a dream, whereby the narrative went completely haywire and I became but a confused character within it.

I once read within a book the story of a painter's fretful after a dream. In this dream he saw some of the most amazing paintings he had ever seen and the next day went to speak to his friend. "Why is it I can't create such masterpieces as those?" To which he friend aptly responds, "Those are your masterpieces, every one of those your creation. "*

Brik handles his dreams differently. Rather than having his mind as a playground, it's his cemetery. "My dreams were but a means of forgetting...the emptying of the garbarge so that tomorrow could be filled up with new life...I woke up after the nap , the dream, naturally, vanishing without a trace." I found it quite odd that his dream vanished after a nap for those are the dreams I find so easy to recall. Without the hole of NREM to halt my mind's attention.

Brik mentioned:

And if I cared about God, I would be tempted to think that remembering was sinful. For what else could it be, what could remembering all those gorgeous moments when this world was fully present at your fingertips be but a beautiful sin?

I mention this simply because it follows one of my beliefs that with Christianity/Judaism, anything worldly is sinful. The most beautiful part of our existence gets caught up searching for something more important. What makes our life so wonderfully propitious is the sights right before our eyes. Our loveable past and our effervescent present, not our unforgiving future. Not what can't be known. The life "between the two trees" is far too good to be derided by the seeking of "something better" after we leave this.
And as Tim Minchin so wonderfully semi-quoted Shakespeare's King John:

“To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw perfume on the violet… is just fucking silly” (Storm)

-Mark T
*Note: Quotes likely misquoted but in such a slighted way that it still retain original meaning. If I can find where from they come, I will correct.

Reading: Aleksandar Hemon 2

Olga's thoughts in the irst chapter were very interesting. She imagine's writing a letter back to her mum several times throughout, and to the best of my knowledge, she never actually does. She thinks: "Dear Mother, Our Lazarus is asleep, but out of that sleep we may not awake him." (p. 89) Seemingly afraid to write to herself that Lazarus is dead. But then anger takes over: "It seems we can never escape grief. We have lost Lazarus. What have we done to deserve so much suffering?" (p. 89) This progresses through the chapter, morphing with her experience.

The hhatred these men seemed to have for Jews is overwhelmingly odd. I guess as asimilar as many to homosexuals in recent years, there has just been this complete lack of understanding to draw fear and anger from. They were different and different is wrong. As the doctor autopsies the body, he finishes writing his notes to hear the Assisstant Chief say "They are creatures of a different world" (p 88). Creatures...Creatures. While it is very true that they are from a completely different world, they are just as human, just as capable of emotional fear and just as deserving of proper respect.

Brik mentions something quite interesting that I have always found true in America but never thought it to be different elsewhere. "The incessant perpetuation of collective fantasies makes people crave the truth and nothing but the truth -- reality is the fastest American commodity." The television and computer have only strengthened the truth of this statement. As more and more lies are thrown at is in shows and movies, news and sports, we turn to others for our fill of truth, honest story of heroism or terror. Unless our technology, we are not capable of such lability. We need some grounding in the stories of our friends or bar mates.

Reading: Aleksandar Hemon

The Lazarus Project takes place in two complete timeframes. The first, in 1908, where the story is of a foreigner trying to fit in. "The young man says nothing; He doesn't want them to know he is a foreigner." (pg 4) However, because of his silence (and his probable visual differences), a shop owner and his wife draw discomfort from his presence. His name is Lazarus Averbuch, but I know that only from looking at the back cover, as his name is left a mystery within the pages. His story is of interest because of what happens to him when he goes to visit the home of Chief Shippy.

He walks up to the Chief's house at promptly at 9:00 because his attendant told him, "Teresa advises him that iti is much too early [when he first visits] and that Chief Shippy never wishes to see anybody before nine." (pg 1) She immediately assumes negativity from Lazarus simply because she cannot place his accent. When he arrives at 9, from what seems purely out of fear and assumptive suspicion, Chief Shippy concludes that Lazarus must have a gun and in confusion, murders the man, the Chief's own driver and Henry, a visitor in the home. The Papers report the triple homicide as that of the "Anarchist" [Lazarus] likely due to Shippy's quick thinking and self-defense.

The second story is that of Brik, a Bosnian immigrant who at first is visiting Bosnia for their Independence Day. The connection between these two stories is presented on page 15, "I am hoping to write about a Jewish immigrant shot by the Chicago police a hundred years ago." It is odd that Brik's story is in first person, Brik as the narrator and the story of Lazarus is in third person by a possibly "non-psychic" 3rd person, where actions are told rather than thoughts. I am going to assume the story of the past is actually the story as written by Brik, which would provide a very interesting twist as his own plot thickens, discovering more of this quite obvious cover-up.

-Mark