Recent Reviews
The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates
In 2016 I read Ta-Nehisi Coates’ book Between the World and Me. In this letter to his son, Coates describes the painful burdens that African Americans carry from slavery to the present. Coates’s seeks to warn him of our country’s history of enslavement and warn him about the scourge of racism that he will soon navigate.
While Between the World and Me is a polemic, Coates’s first novel, The Water Dancer allows him to write in a freer form. The book illuminates the excruciating emotional toll slaves endured as their families were separated and sold. This painful but liberating story is narrated by Hiram Walker, who was born into slavery on a Virginia plantation called Lockless. The estate is owned by his inept and feckless white father, Howell Walker. When Hiram was young, Howell cruelly sold Hiram’s mother Rose. This trauma haunts Hiram. Realizing that Hiram is curious and capable, Hiram’s father insists that Hiram take care of his lazy white older brother Maynard (repeating the pattern of slaves taking care of their masters). His father says to Hiram, “I have made it known how high you sit in my esteem. It is not fair, I know it, none of it is fair. You have to save Maynard, son. You have to protect him.”
When Maynard drowns in a carriage accident, Hiram’s father needs Hiram to assist with the plantation. His father arranges for a tutor. Since Hiram is intellectually gifted, he learns to read and write quickly. Hiram still lives in the slave quarters and understands that he will always be considered property. Hiram is alone. He soon gains insight into the limited capabilities of Virginia plantation owners. Many slave owners are unskilled farmers who are neither smart nor capable and thus rely on the expertise and experience of their slaves. Hiram states, “The masters could not bring water to boil, harness a horse, nor strap their own drawers without us. We were better than them – we had to be. Sloth was literal death for us, while for them, it was the whole ambition of their lives.”
Hiram witnesses the many ways his father steals from his slaves. Hiram eventually runs away, is captured, escapes captivity, lives as a free man in Philadelphia and becomes part of the Underground Railroad. Besides his ability to forge papers and convey information, Hiram has extraordinary powers, like Harriet Tubman, who appears in this novel. Coates endows them with a magical realism gift called Conduction. Using the power of memory, Hiram, like Harriet Tubman, can transport slaves to freedom.
The novel calls out the pathology of the white plantation owners who project their own fears and desires onto their slaves. Hypocrisy is rampant across many domains. For example, white people propagate the myth that black men want to rape white women, but in reality, those myths are projections. It is slave owners like Hiram’s father who assault black women like Hiram’s mother. As Hiram gets older, he comes to love a woman named Sophie. Sophie is not required to do farm work because she is Hiram’s Uncle Nathaniel’s girl. Nathaniel calls for Sophie whenever he wants. Hiram writes, “This ‘arrangement’ was not unusual, was indeed the custom of the men of ‘quality’. And like the dumbwaiters and secret passages that the quality employed to mask their theft, Nathaniel too employed means to take as though not taking and transfigure robbery into charity.”
Though The Water Dancer meanders at times Coates is a wise and talented writer. What makes this book unique is his insight into the mindset of the mediocre white oppressors who, in attempting to erase the humanity of their slaves, reveal their dishonor and debasement. As Hiram says, “For it is not simply by slavery that you are captured, but by a kind of fraud, which paints its executors, as guardians at the gate, staving off African savagery when it is, they themselves who are savages."
A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende
This review was published in the San Francisco Examiner on January 31, 2020
https://www.sfexaminer.com/entertainment/allende-masterfully-illuminates-refugee-experience/
Isabel Allende’s new novel could not be timelier. With refugees dominating the news, ‘A Long Petal of the Sea’ poignantly reminds us of a lesson we can’t seem to learn. People typically leave home, not because they want to, but because they have to.
This book brings to life the plight of one refugee family shattered by Spain’s Civil War in the 1930s. The story follows them as they escape Spain in an odyssey first to a refugee camp in France and then to Chile. Allende’s writing is lush and lyrical. As in many of her novels, she gives us an engaging way to understand how historical forces shape the lives of ordinary people. Here the historical event is the July 1936 military uprising led by General Francisco Franco. His reactionary forces overthrow Spain’s democratically elected government, causing a civil war that leads to immense loss of life.
We get to know Allende’s characters in the ensuing maelstrom. Two brothers, Victor and Guillem Dalmau, take up the fight against Franco. Victor is a medic, Guillem, a soldier. Before the war, the young brothers had lived peaceful lives with their parents and a young woman named Roser, whom their parents had adopted and Guillem had grown to love. Guillem dies in battle, never knowing that Roser is pregnant with their child.
No one in the Dalmau family wants to leave their beloved Barcelona. But in January of 1939, when it becomes clear the vindictive pro-Franco forces will prevail, the family flees. They hike over the Pyrenees in freezing temperatures with little food and no possessions, only to arrive at a French internment camp where thousands of refugees are being held.
In August of 1939, the Chilean poet-diplomat Pablo Neruda charters a freight boat, the Winnipeg, to transport Spanish immigrants from France to Chile, which he calls “a long petal of sea and wine and snow.” Families receive priority, so Victor makes a dramatic choice. He marries Roser and affirms that baby Marcel is his son. Victor, Roser and Marcel board the boat and leave for Chile.
After suffering through persistent hunger, lack of sleep and poor sanitation, they feel relieved to leave France but fearful about Chile. They had heard Chileans “considered them to be a mob of Reds, atheists, and possibly criminals.” By luck, they meet Felipe del Solar, son of a wealthy, conservative and Catholic Chilean family. While Felipe’s father opposes the resettlement of the Spanish refugees, Felipe feels empathetic. He invites Roser and Victor to live with him until they find jobs.
Victor and Roser still hope to return to Spain. But they start their life as spouses while stopping short of a romantic relationship. Victor enrolls at the School of Medicine and Roser teaches music and performs piano. They both adore Marcel. This novel beautifully explores Victor and Roser’s evolving and deepening love. Over time, their complicated feelings about Victor’s brother ease and their love for one another intensifies into a real marriage.
But history repeats. In 1973, General Augusto Pinochet leads a right-wing military coup, which results in the murder of Chile’s democratically elected President Salvador Allende (Isabel’s father’s first cousin). Having known Allende socially, Victor is imprisoned and tortured. When Victor finally gets paroled, the family must make another difficult decision: stay in Chile or escape again.
Allende’s powerful novel shows how war and conflict crush families, forcing them to flee their homes to survive. Currently, millions of refugees have fled from Syria, Guatemala and Mexico as a result of conflict and economic desperation. ‘A Long Petal of the Sea’ helps us to imagine the human stories behind the headlines. Allende has written an epic saga about one family’s experience of unwanted exile. Her admiration and empathy for the resilience of refugees find expression in this heartbreaking yet inspiring story.
Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout
Elizabeth Strout is a wise and talented writer. This truth is reinforced in Olive, Again, her seventh novel. In these thirteen interconnected stories, Strout reveals a keen insight into the human condition. These stories are a meditation about people who are unclear about who they are and why they made the choices they did.
This book is a sequel to Strout’s 2008 Pulitzer-Prize winning novel Olive Kittredge. In that novel, Olive was stubborn, bossy and not the least bit reflective. Like a kaleidoscope, the book showed readers Olive’s many selves. We saw Olive’s shifting emotions and actions in her role as mother, wife, teacher and neighbor. And though we didn’t always like what we saw, Strout highlighted the many selves that dwell in a person. Twenty years later, Olive is still cantankerous, opinionated, and self-involved, but she has softened. Her narcissism has given way to humility as she begins to question what it might feel like - to be another person. In her eighth decade, Olive’s revelation is poignant because she knows her time on earth is coming to an end.
Olive still resides in the small town of Crosby, Maine. After her husband Henry died, she married Jack Kennison, a former Harvard professor who also harbors regret about several of his decisions. Olive and Jack wrestle with their diminishing physical capabilities and imminent decline. They struggle to make sense of the relationships in their lives. Olive wonders why she was mean to her first husband Henry and why she feels such distance from her son Christopher. Jack wonders why he had an affair when he loved his wife, Betsy. He, too, is estranged from his only child, Cassie, who lives in San Francisco.
When Olive’s son Christopher, his wife Ann and their four children visit Olive, their time together is not easy. There is misunderstandings and miscommunication. Belatedly, Olive has begun to contemplate the small choices and big decisions that shaped her life. She realizes her frayed relationships might derive from her actions and not solely the deficiencies in Christopher and Ann. “She could not understand what it was about her, but it was about her that had caused this to happen. And it had to have been there for years, maybe all of her life, how would she know. As she sat across from Jack -stunned – she felt as though she had lived her life as though blind.”
One night, Jack and Olive are at a restaurant and the woman with whom Jack had an affair walks by their table. They speak and Jack is shaken. “What frightened him was how much of his life he had lived without knowing who he was or what he was doing. … He senses that he had lived his life in a way that he had not known. This meant there had been a large blindspot directly in front of his eyes. It meant that he did not understand, not really at all, how others had perceived him. And it meant that he did not know how to perceive himself.”
Olive and Jack seem to lack an understanding of their current selves or the factors that shaped their personalities. Olive does know that her father’s suicide affected her, but that tragedy was never processed. Now as they reach the end of their lives, Olive and Jack feel distressed about what their lives meant and how they chose to live. Could they have changed themselves in a significant way? Maybe. Maybe not. But awareness might have led to them to more intentional lives.
Melancholy hovers around the characters. Loneliness haunts every story Some readers might say the novel is dark. It is hard to read about regret and remorse. But I believe Elizabeth Strout’s beautiful book is a gift, a wake-up call to us all. She is warning readers that even though self-awareness is hard, we don’t have to live with so little understanding of ourselves. We can reflect on how our behavior affects not just those who we love, but everyone we encounter.
