"Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that's what catastrophe is for.”

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters by Julian Barnes
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

The first question one asks about Julian Barnes's A History of the World in 10½ Chapters is, of course, "why the 1/2?"

We don't arrive at our answer until we read the 8.5th chapter, Parenthesis, which, unlike its fictitious predecessors, is more akin to contemplative musing than short story. It synthesizes the stories that have gone before to show that, as we are told in one story, "Everything is connected, even the parts we don’t like, especially the parts we don’t like." But before we get there -

We begin with the gem of the book, a fictitious account of Noah's Ark recounted by a mysterious (not to mention unreliable) narrator who repudiates everything we know about the ark and only reveals his identity in the last sentence of the story, brilliantly crushing any barriers to the imagination that might have stood inside the readers' heads. Anything can happen if woodworm were aboard Noah's ark!

None of the stories that follow can match the wit and surprises of the first, yet all demonstrate Barnes's inexhaustible capacity for wit and storytelling. In The Wars of Religion, he demonstrates his versatility through legal-speak (the story is of a man vs woodworm trial before the court). The Survivor, with its mentions of "persistent victim syndrome" and "fabulation", puts a modern take on the 'ark' - in this story, a boat carrying a doomsday-fearing woman and two cats. Upstream! is hilarious and consists of letters written by a pretentious and ignorant narrator filming a movie with an Indian tribe.

Thus, all stories differ wildly in terms of plot; however, the best part about reading this book was discovering the common motifs that bind them. One is the woodworm, which is seamlessly referenced in nearly all stories; the other is the ark, which crops up in the form of a raft in Shipwreck and the St. Louis ship in Three Simple Stories. An element of the holy is present in nearly all stories as well, with the curious pilgrimage in Project Ararat and the description of 'heaven' in the final story, The Dream.

The first Julian Barnes book I read was The Sense of An Ending, and a memorable line from it is: “History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”

I was reminded of this quote when reading this line from A History of the World in 10½ Chapters: "We know how to distinguish myth from reality. We are sophisticated people". The ironic tone this claim carries, however, along with the fabulations in this novel, suggest that we do not always know how to make this distinction. Barnes also quotes Marx, saying that "history repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce". History is certainly repeated as farce through the fictitious tales in this novel.

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters is a clever, intelligent book, not as accessible or captivating as some make it to be, but one that challenges us to ask big questions, doubt its narrators, and look for the connections that sew together the many "histories" - from biblical to personal - explored in it.

“History isn't what happened, history is just what historians tell us.”

“The history of the world? Just voices echoing in the dark; images that burn for a few centuries and then fade; stories, old stories that sometimes seem to overlap; strange links, impertinent connections. We lie here in our hospital bed of the present (what nice clean sheets we get nowadays) with a bubble of daily news drip-fed into our arm. We think we know who we are, though we don't quite know why we're here, or how long we shall be forced to stay. And while we fret and write in bandaged uncertainty - are we a voluntary patient? - we fabulate. We make up a story to cover the facts we don't know or can't accept; we keep a few true facts and spin a new story round them. Our panic and our pain are only eased by soothing fabulation; we call it history.”

“Perhaps love is essential because it's unnecessary.”

“You can deal with the brain, as I say; it looks sensible, whereas the heart, the human heart, I'm afraid, looks a fucking mess.”

"Well, at least it produced art. Perhaps, in the end, that's what catastrophe is for.”

“We must be precise with love, its language and its gestures. If it is to save us, we must look at it as clearly as we should learn to look at death.”

"‘I love you.’ Subject, verb, object: the unadorned, impregnable sentence. The subject is a short word, implying the self-effacement of the lover. The verb is longer but unambiguous, a demonstrative moment as the tongue flicks anxiously away from the palate to release the vowel. The object, like the subject, has no consonants, and is attained by pushing the lips forward as if for a kiss. ‘I love you.’ How serious, how weighted, how freighted it sounds.”

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You have it, too

My IB exams began today, so I'm not celebrating Star Wars Day
the way one should (see: this), but I write this post nonetheless
to maintain my annual tradition of wishing anyone reading this
post right now the very best: may the force be with you
always! I am very much looking forward to spending my
summer catching up on Star Wars lore so that I can walk into
the cinema on December 18th with some dignity (and with
tissues ready). The force is a concept that has meant a lot to me ever
since I first watched the movies; yes, I had a 6 year old phase
where I was terrified by Darth Maul (I am sure that I am not
alone in this), but I was always fascinated by the force. Back then,
it was primarily because the force allowed one to summon
tangibles without touching them (ah, those childhood afternoons spent
in bed with a fever, my hands outstretched, fingers twitching,
trying to will the thermometer towards me or saying Accio if all
else failed). But as "an energy field created by all living things" that
"surrounds us and penetrates us," "binds the galaxy together" and
"gives a Jedi his power," is it not, in some ways, also -- hope?
But then again, there is a "dark side," so I will reflect more on this
when exams are over. Stress out, I will not.

All the sleeping women / Are now awake and moving

The Essential Feminist Reader by Estelle B. Freedman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The Essential Feminist Reader is a collection of feminist essays edited and compiled by Estelle B. Freedman, a U.S. historian specializing in women's history at Stanford University.

The essays in the book span time and geography. We begin with an essay published in France in 1405 by Christine de Pizan, who lamented, "in my folly I considered myself most unfortunate because God has made me inhabit a female body;" we conclude with a statement issued in 2004 by a women's group from Afghanistan, celebrating International Women's Day and looking towards "the road to democracy and prosperity." How far we have come! Containing essays written by Alva Myrdal, a member of the Swedish Government in the 1940s, as well as Ding Ling, the director of the Chinese Literature and Arts Association in Yan'an during Mao's time, The Essential Feminist Reader powerfully attests to the extended and universal fight for women's rights.

Kishida Toshiko uses a sublime extended metaphor in her essay to describe how women are confined inside a "box." Like Toshiko,  Simon de Beauvoir argues that the "physiological, psychological, or economic forces" of women decide their destiny and deny them "full membership in the human race." On the subject of women's victimization, Susan Brownmiller presents one of the strongest arguments in the whole book by saying that "to talk about rape, even with nervous laughter, is to acknowledge a woman's special victim status."On a similar plane, The Committee on the Status of Women in India argues that "prostitution is the worst form of women's exploitation and inequality" because it forces a woman to be "viewed solely as a sex object and as an outlet for man's baser instincts." These are just some examples of the problems facing women that are illustrated in the book. 

It is fascinating to see how the arguments for feminism have evolved over time. Mary Astell, like many  early feminists writers, framed her argument in religious terms in order to appeal to a secular audience. Many also stress the advantages that gender equality brings to men: Flora Tristan argues that a female workforce would double productivity levels in industries, and that better-educated women would raise better-educated sons. Despite the pragmatic truth in such arguments, however, the best essays are those that vouch for feminism with less of an accent on how feminism is important because it benefits men. For example, François Poullaine de la Barre points out the absurdity of laying so much emphasis "on the constitution of the body to justify the difference between the sexes." One of the most memorable lines in the whole anthology is her argument that "the mind has no sex."

The writers in the anthology also present solutions for the problem of gender inequality. Many essays emphasize the importance of education and being well-informed; in particular, the Boston Women's Health Book Collective puts forward the argument that learning about women's health can help women understand their own image "on a firmer base," becoming "better friends and better lovers, better people, more self-confident, more autonomous, stronger, and more whole." Margaret Sanger argues for birth control as a way of giving women more agency over their bodies. Susan B. Anthony also claims that it is important for marriage to "be a luxury, not a necessity" and that only working women can see it as so because "whoever controls work and wages, controls morals." John Stuart Mill shares the same philosophy, saying that the "power of earning is essential to the dignity of the woman." Most memorably of all, Virginia Woolf presents an elegant solution in Three Guineas, arguing that financial support in preventing war, promoting women's education and providing for professional women would help women have a more significant presence in the public sphere. 

The road to gender equality, however, is no easy path. Qasim Amin, writing from Egypt, considers the status of women "inseparably tied to the status of a nation. She rejects the traditional veil and instead advocates for "a type of upbringing that will itself become an impenetrable veil and fortress protecting a woman from all forms of corruption at each stage of her liberation.” Mary Wollesetencraft blames upper-class women who are "so intoxicated by the admiration" they receive that they neglect to assert their own rights as individuals. (In other words, she is saying, "wake up," to these women.)  

The problems of "intersectional feminism" is also tackled in some essays. In "Two Speeches," Sojourner Truth points out the problem of racial discrimination overlaps with gender inequality, stressing that black women do not share the same rights as white women despite their common dream for feminism. Palesa Beverly Ditsie from South Africa urges the members of the Fourth World Conference on Women to "remove the brackets from sexual orientation," saying that some women are victims of not only gender, but also sexual, discrimination. Only through transcending such obstacles can, as Anna Julia Cooper says, "the cause for freedom" become "not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class," but "the cause of human kind." And of course, as Pat Mainardi humorously pointed out in The Politics of Housework, the gender stereotypes of men are bulwarks to the advancement of gender equality. 

Right before we get to the contents page, we see that the book is dedicated "to John."
Indeed, The Essential Feminist Reader is an important read not only for women, but also for men. As Jonah Gokova from Zimbabwe reminds us, "the term 'gender' is not synonymous for 'women.'" Rather, the Federation of South African Women defines it as the search for "permanent peace throughout the world." The anthology is a testament to how the power of the written word, be it in fiction or essays, is harnessed in fighting for equal rights and, as Betty Friedan wrote, in helping women become "complete." 

To quote Sarah M. Grimké: "Thine in the bonds of womanhood,"

May

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Brutaliser une femme, il n'y a pas de quoi être fier

Les belles images by Simone de Beauvoir
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Simone de Beauvoir's Les Belles Images is about the role of women in a modernizing French society during the 1960s. As a femme au foyer (a housewife), Laurence - the novel's narrator - supposedly enjoys "le privilège" of having "tout [sa] temps" (all her time). However, trapped in the social 'image' of what a 'proper' woman should be and suffocated by the confines of a patriarchal household, she eventually descends into anxiety and anorexia.

Although the novel is set in an era where machines are so omniprescent that "les hommes deviendront inutiles," the lack of awareness of women's rights juxtapose such progress and instead reveal the backwardness of society. Indeed, the crushing reality of a woman's dependance on her husband is highlighted throughout the novel. In the first chapter, the people around Laurence assume that she only has her job because of her husband's connections. Similarly, Dominique, although an independent woman who enjoys "le solitude," admits that "même avec un nom une femme sans homme, c'est une demi-ratée, une espèce d'épave." It is in a society where"une femme n’est rien sans homme" (a women is nothing without a man) that the novel takes root.

"Les belles images," pretty pictures, are powerful symbols of deception in the novel. They are all that we see ("on n'aperçoit que des images, proprement encadrées sur le petit écran) but lack the "weight of reality" (leur poids de réalité). For example, the fact that "les objets gardent encore l'aura qui les nimbait sur l'image en papier glacé" suggests how the 'images' inside the window seem glossy and flawless on the surface, even though Laurence recognizes that they are "inerte et froid" underneath their sheen.

The idea of a woman as a "belle image" further emphasizes the objectification of women in the novel. Dominique, for instance, is one 'belle image' but is a broken woman under her mask of independence ("sous les masques, il y a une femme de chair et de sang, avec un cœur, qui se sent vieillir et que la solitude épouvante"). The tragedy is that people "exhorteraient leurs amis à aller voir Athènes et la chaîne de mensonges se perpétuerait, les belles images demeurant intactes en dépit de toutes les désillusions" (people perpetuate the chain of lies, allowing the pretty images to remain intact despite their illusory nature).

Thus, most captivating of all is the fate of Catherine, Laurence's eldest daughter, for she is the only one in the novel to question the meaning of existence (ah, the French and existentialism) and show how the world is not a "belle image". She represents the voice of a young generation that is beginning to consider increasingly independent ideas. When she is sent to psychologist, however, Catherine seems about to suffer the same fate as her mother. Indeed, Laurence thinks of Catherine, she thinks of someone"qu'on était en train d'assassiner" (who one was about to assassinate).

Saying that she wanted to give her daughter "la sécurité, la gaieté, le plaisir d'être au monde," to "lui ouvrir les yeux tout de suite et peut-etre un rayon de lumiere filtrera," Laurence thus reveals her wish to give Catherine the rights she was denied - security, happiness and the light of life. After all, "élever un enfant, ce n’est pas en faire une belle image:" raising a child is not to delude her into believing that the world is a "pretty picture." Only through grasping the truth can Catherine - and the women of her generation - "s'en sortira ... De quoi? De cette nuit" - the darkness of oppression. 

In the novel, Laurence is a victim of her time:"Qu’a-t-on fait de moi ? Cette femme qui n’aime personne, insensible aux beautés du monde, incapable même de pleurer, cette femme que je vomis." According to Laurence's husband, Jean-Charles, the 'solution' to this malaise is "le docteur," an approach reminiscent of the remedies presented to Jane in The Yellow Wallpaper and Emma in Madame Bovary.

Laurence, however, understands what she must do to save herself. Saying that she must "se débarrasser de Lucien" (remove herself from her lover, Lucien), she echoes the importance of "le solitude" in finding independence. Stronger still, the shouting match between her and her husband at the end of the novel captures the boldness of a woman bravely fighting to help her daughter see a better future.

The novel is an engaging critique on the social stereotypes in 19th century France, as well as a cry for the liberation of women. "Quelle chance," what chance, will "les enfants," the children, have? Laurence asks herself this question at the end of the novel. "Elle ne le sait" - she did not know - yet in today's France, where local elections have introduced a voting system that ensures each ballot will have a male and female candidate, the chance is slowly, but surely, approaching.

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The world is. It just is.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Despite having spent the good part of the last two weeks studying the two world wars for my history mock exams, I decided to dive back into Richard Flanagan's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Narrow Road to the Deep North the day exams ended. 

Dorrigo Evans, who worked as a surgeon during the construction of the Burma-Thailand railway between 1942 and 1943, is celebrated as a war hero during the post-war years. As a novel about the war, The Narrow Road to the Deep North tells the story of Dorrigo's work as a surgeon, the experiences of the many Australians who were "the slaves of the yellow man," as well as their lives after the war. Since the novel is also a love story, however, another undercurrent runs through it: Dorry's love affair with his uncle's wife, Amy, during the war years.

While the novel does not progress chronologically, the overtones of war are established from the beginning. We start with a moment from Dorry's childhood, when a simple wound foreshadows the blood to be shed later on, just as the brief expletive - "F*ck!" - on page 9 is a mere harbinger of the many more foul words to come as the Australians are dragged into a war that is not theirs. 

I found the most striking element of the novel to be its depiction of war."The Line," evoking an image of ironic simplicity and brutal straightforwardness, is the Japanese railway that millions of prisoners of war were enlisted to help build. To do so,

They went on trudging and falling, they went on stumbling and slipping and swearing as they thought of food, or as they thought of nothing, they went on crawling and shitting and hoping, on and on in a day that had not yet even begun.

Life is reduced to a bare minimum when it becomes "only about getting the next footstep right:" an aim that is at once deceptively simple and infinitely cruel.

The harshness of war is further emphasized through the bestial imagery in the novel. When all vestiges of civilization are stripped away, Choi Sang-min, a Korean guard, "lived like an animal." He "behaved as an animal, he understood as an animal, he thought as an animal. And he understood that such an animal was the only human thing he had ever been allowed to be." Saying that the war turned the prisoners into "a strange animal, a single organism," Flanagan also stresses the sense of solidarity - for survival - that comes with war. 

Another comparison between the POWs and animals is drawn in the novel, but to more tragic effect: like the fish in Mr. Nikitaris's fish shop in Hobart, the POWs are imprisoned in the "tank of war". It is fitting, then, that they - although in a drunk frenzy - smash the shop after the war, freeing the fish into the sea.

Through the way Flanagan has narrated the novel, we are also invited to consider the perspectives of  different characters and, henceforth, different cultures in the novel. Unlike the Australian POWs, who sing when working, the Japanese approach the project of the railway with a strong, cold sense of nationalism that excludes responsibility and emphasizes duty:

War "is human beings . . . Railway might kill human beings, but I do not make human beings. I make railway. Progress does not demand freedom. Progress has no need of freedom. You, doctor, call it non-freedom. We call it spirit, nation, Emperor."

In a similarly cruelly pragmatic fashion, Major Nakaruma believes in the necessity of punishment by force. He is the one who encourages the beating of Darky Gardiner, a young sergeant who eventually drowns in his own excrement.

At one point in the novel, Evans says that he wants to curse God for "for our lives," for "not being here and for not saving the men burning on the f*cking bamboo.” In the novel, war is rightly portrayed as "a terrifying world in which one could not escape horror, in which violence was eternal, the great and only verity, greater than the civilizations it created, greater than any god man worshipped." 

And after the war?

We are told that some veterans turn to drink, some become fathers who can never hit their children and others "died off quickly, strangely, in car crashes and suicides and creeping diseases." Choi San- min tries to develop his "own idea," one divorced from his nationalistic learnings, but is unable to do so. His only consolation is killing anything, a cockroach, before he himself is hanged. What has the war done to him? As for our narrator, Dorrigo's shock when his wife calls him "Alwyn," reinforces the way he - having lost his identity in the war - returns to a former life that will never be the same for him. Indeed,

“He felt the withering of something, the way risk was increasingly evaluated and, as much possible, eliminated, replaced with a bland new world where the viewing of food preparation would be felt to be more moving than the reading of poetry; where excitement would come from paying for a soup made out of foraged grass. He had eaten soup made out of foraged grass in the camps; he preferred food. The Australia that took refuge in his head was mapped with the stories of the dead; the Australia of the living he found an ever stranger country."

So, the war clearly has a long-lasting effect on all who were embroiled in it. "The war pressed, the war deranged, the war undid, the war excused." But what do we remember of the war itself, and how? The structure of the novel is fittingly disjointed, as is memory.

Memory’s only like justice because it’s another wrong idea that makes people feel right.

He would live to see people praised for things that were not worthy of praise, simply because truth was seen to be bad for their feelings.

The aftermath of war brings the conflict between truth and memory. As Choi Sang-min reveals before his execution, some men were hanged even if they did not punish a single POW during the war.

As we are further invited to consider,

Nothing endures. Not empires, not memories. We remember nothing. Maybe for a year or two. Maybe most of a life, if we live. Maybe. But then we will die, and who will ever understand any of this?

We are told that “the Line was broken, as all lines finally are; and it was all for nothing, and of it nothing remained." Yet to replace the line is its "antithesis:" the death poem written by the Japanese poet Shisui, whose poem appears at the beginning of the novel and recurs at the end. It is "the circle," a "contained void, an endless mystery, lengthless breadth, the great wheel, eternal return."

The war is over, but it returns with unrelenting savagery. It returns to haunt Dorrigo, for example, when he finds out that - in the cleverest twist in the novel - Darky Gardiner was actually his nephew.

The importance of the circle is further reinforced by the novel's circular plot. In the first couple of pages, Dorry wonders what his aunt's real name is - in the final pages, he has his answer, "Ruth". In both the beginning and the end, he reminds us that "one man’s feeling is not always equal to all life is. Sometimes it’s not equal to anything much at all. He just stared into the flames."

Yet the one point on the circle that Flanagan keeps drawing us back to is Amy - "Amy, amante, amour." The first sentence of  the novel informs us that there is always light "at the beginning of things." Dorrigo's first encounter with Amy, whom he notices because of the light shone on her inside a bookstore, is thus imbued with significance.

Why involve a love story in a book about the war? I kept asking myself that question as I read on. Undoubtedly, both love and war bring out the "demon of desire" in men, although for different reasons. The separation of Amy and Dorrigo as a consequence of the war also reinforces all that the war has forced those involved in it to lose. Yet the balance between romance and death also sustains a sense of poetic beauty throughout the novel that, like the beautiful haikus scattered throughout and even recited before an execution, contrast sharply with the darkness of war and death.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North is a book that truly made me feel something. I was so tense during the amputation of Jack Rainbow's leg because something in Flanagan's tone suggested that Rainbow was not going to make it; when was a last time a book had me biting my nails in suspense? I had to read the description of beheadings through squinted eyes. When Dorrigo drives into a fire to save his family, at which point his children see a rare moment of tenderness pass between his parents, I wanted to cry.

"Of imperial dreams and dead men, all that remained was long grass." Yet The Narrow Road to the Deep Road is stunning in its attempt to tell this history poetically, faithfully and capture "the suffering, the deaths, the sorrow, the abject, pathetic pointlessness of such immense suffering by so many." As Flanagan points out, "maybe it all exists only within these pages and the pages of a few other books." But in life, "Horror just is," the same way we are infallibly reminded that the world "just is."

A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.

It’s only our faith in illusion that makes life possible. It’s believing in reality that does us in every time”

Humans are only one of many things and all these things long to live, and the highest form of living is freedom: a man to be a man, a cloud to be a cloud, bamboo to be bamboo.

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