No Reservation: "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian"

In my contemporary literature course I was exposed to Sherman Alexie’s premiere book of poetry and prose, The Business of Fancy Dancing. His play with language and innovative but relentless outlook on Native American culture on the rez were astounding. He has written much since, which I have not read, but I committed to reading his recent young-adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. As I embarked on reading this book, I used the mantra “MTV” to help myself as I attempted to re-imagine myself in the prime of teenage life, which was not more than six years ago.

First thing: the illustrations. The “art” by Ellen Forney. It proliferates throughout the novel. At times a gimmick, but more often complementary to the story with humor or expansive shading of the characters or scenes in which they dwell. They are drawn from Arnold’s perspective, but we forget this as its use as a literary device is more obvious. Still, they fit seamlessly in the story. My favorites were the caricatures of people in his life: his parents, sister, coach, friends, and girlfriend. These literal portraits of characters are vivid and plant the individuals as unique in the reader’s mind. A lot of culture references are included, usually playing on pop icons or stereotypes, which adds to Arnold’s white-Indian identity conflict. A coping strategy, the drawings merge humor with sadness in a profound way at points. How else can Arnold deal with his abysmal surroundings and pangs of humor?

Alexie overplays the Indian card at points - treading on territory in ways he has trodden before. He addresses this in an excerpt from an interview I include below. Still, the straightforward plot does take strange turns at points and even when predictable, remains engaging. Arnold’s a smart kid who breaks away from “the tribe” and attends a well-funded, whitewashed high school outside the reservation. He falls in love with a white girl (one of Alexie’s obsessions in his writing) and has a fall-out with his best friend, only to find another one at his new school. His parents let him down, his sister runs away, he becomes a basketball star, and reconciles his relationship with his best friend, Rowdy. Alexie tackles the popular issues high school students run into, mostly in successful ways, with striking candidness.

The writing style is sparse, consistent with his approach in Fancydancing, but in a different way. The book was too dialogue-ridden and at times felt like an Indian version of Wonder Years. Alexie’s po-mo irony shines through during some pivotal moments. He is steeped in a sharp sense of reality though, and respectfully doesn’t protect Arnold from real-world tragedy when his sister senselessly dies in a fire. I could tell from the honesty that this “diary” was at least semi-autobiographical. While this raised the “level” of the book in my eyes, on the whole it could have been slightly more sophisticated for the intended audience. After finishing the last page: Highly enjoyable. It succeeds in what it strives to do. I connected with Arnold’s experiences and reminisced about my own. A little more unconventionality would have perfected it.

From Seattle Times interview:
Q: So do you still feel like the title, that you're a part-time Indian?
A: God, I don't know what I am now. I'm a writer. I'm this sort of amorphous, ever-shifting writer.

Q: How do you answer criticism that you're exposing kids to a lot of negatives in Native American culture, from poverty to alcoholism to bullying?
A: It's what happened and what continues to happen. My dad died three years ago from alcoholism. ...

They [his critics] have no idea how bad it is. Nothing I've written actually comes close to how bad it can be and how bad it is, the level of desperation. The people who don't want it written about or who think it's stereotypical, within the Indian world, are just dealing with a lot of shame. And outside the Indian world, it's just a lot of romantic bastards.

Q: You mock white people in the book who say they love Native Americans. Is there a respectful way for white people to admire the culture?
A: The best way to deal with it is just to leave it alone. You know, you don't need to go into a sweat lodge to respect us. You don't need to wear turquoise earrings to come to my readings. ... People who are way into the Native culture rarely look at the whole picture. We're just as messy and ugly as anybody else. So "admiring" worries me. That's pretty myopic — widen your lens, I guess I'd say.

Stein’s Top Chef: “Book of Salt”

My campus will receive the author Monique Truong as its guest tomorrow. She will read a selection from her only published novel, The Book of Salt, and then an excerpt from a more recent project. I’m looking forward to her reading but also the following Q&A session. Her work fits into the discussions I’ve participated in during my Multicultural Literature course (a.k.a. books about women getting raped and “coming-of-age”). Seriously, I think she will have something to say about identity as an author and how an author connects to his or her characters.

An overly pessimistic and tough critic, (in all modes of life, not only books) I’ll only devote one paragraph to my problems with her novel. In fact, I’ll include an efficient, nifty list of the top three things that irked me.

1) She writes like a lawyer (she used to be one): the structure’s too tight and the figurative language overdone. Food is sensual and kinda like sex, or at the least an aphrodisiac. Okay, I get it. Too many parallels – the book ends up a funhouse of mirrors. More on this follows.
2) Binh is a slut. He sleeps around too much. Also, we get claustrophobic in his point of view – too many second person chapters to lovers or his bosses. Keep it in your pants, man, you’ll be less miserable. The overbearing religious father was pigeonholed from the outset. Not that he had to have moments of being a decent father, but there could have been moments of doubt about his hatred of his son - doubts that could be rescinded anyway.
3) Redundancy. Without a crucial plot, besides the point where Binh decides whether to return home or go to America, the layering of his character has to be diverse. Some sections could be consolidated to get through to the reader about Binh’s identity and conflict. One of the story’s threads could be cut out at no great cost.

Disregarding my immature tendency to make gay-food jokes, and to insist this book will become a Bravo Original Movie, let’s move on to how I enjoyed this novel. First, the Ho Chi Minh episode was worth the risk Truong took. She successfully avoided dropping cameos, any of the celebs whom Stein included in her company, and when she did include an incredibly well-knonw historical figure, made it worthwhile. The “man on a bridge” provided more depth to Binh’s crisis of returning home. But precisely what home? Minh’s emergence and the death of Binh’s father signify the rise of a new Vietnam. The French would soon be driven out and Communism would rise. Besides, the description of the meal they shared was tantalizing. Truong uses the art of cooking and the sport of eating in tremendous fashion. Lost on most Americans and descendants of the culinary-challenged United Kingdom/Ireland, the fusion of French and Asian senses for cooking and consuming is perhaps the novel’s strongest assets.

Some examples of how food works in the novel:
“We then exchanged words, sparingly, between generous forkfuls of food. Chopsticks had not been offered, and we did not ask for them. Why waste time on the technicalities of tableware when a feast is before us?”

“Salt-and-pepper shrimp finished in a glaze of browned butter!”

“He will always cook from all the places where he has been. It is his way of remembering the world.”

The relationship between Stein and Toklas is not central to the novel, but the bits offered to the reader are usually tasty. The portrayal of Stein’s eccentric artfulness and Toklas’ more rational, day-to-day thinking was well-executed. I especially enjoyed the moments where Toklas instructed Binh and communicated her particularity. Binh is allowed moments of creativity, but his adherence to meticulous recipes was needed.

Overall: A great premise carried out with lovely language and makes your mouth water with descriptions of food. But the desire for a trip to the fridge outweighs the desire for Binh to find happiness.

Bad Potatoes - "Law of Dreams"

I express or have enacted my Irish heritage in the following ways: 1) I read Angela’s Ashes in high school, 2) my favorite meal consists of Harp, medium-rare steak, mashed potatoes, bread, following by an Irish coffee and dessert, 3) I perpetually keep a bottle of Jameson on my desk - a balm on those late nights writing papers. So when my friend gave me a pre-publication (“Advanced Reader’s Edition”) version of a novel his friend obtained at a book publisher fair, I obliged.

I felt like a reviewer for the New York Times Book Review, sifting through the pages with a curious, scrupulous eye. I kept several deft comparisons to similar novels in my pocket along with witty cultural references or jokes about the Irish that The Law of Dreams would confirm or disavow. Maybe I would boost the novel’s sales with my grand review.

Peter Behrens résumé piqued my interest. After producing a collection of short stories entitled Night Driving in 1987, he has since worked primarily as a screenwriter for Hollywood. This knowledge helped me detect the stench of “novel-written-to-have-movie-made-starring-Scarlett-Johansson.” Because, you know, she’s Irish and needs to reboot her career.

The novel sets out ambitiously and at first delivers but then dissolves into a cyclical mess the last 250 pages (out of nearly 400). The prologue takes a promising look at a pressured farmer/landlord in mid 19th-century Ireland. With the beginning of the famine and typhus fever spreading, he is forced to evict his poor tenants.

“That evening, inspecting his field of ripening wheat, plucking a stalk and pressing the grains out onto his palm, he tastes one on his tongue. Cracks it between his teeth.
Then opens his hand.
Light and dry the pale grains are, wholly ripe, practically weightless.
In a second, the casual wind has swept them away.”

A beautiful image, capturing the blight perfectly. This book promises a country’s beauty and agony, trust and betrayal, redemption, resourcefulness, and a plaintive gaze at evanescence. Our protagonist Fergus O’Brien will fall in love, work through his struggles, and eventually live in happiness or die a hero. He is my ancestor as well as Behrens’.

Wrong. While his struggles are laid out powerfully in the first section of the novel, his journey becomes a repetitive pornographic and disinterested wandering. Yet several Amazon reviewers draw comparisons to Joyce’s Daedalus! His first, unrequited love (Phoebe, the farmer’s daughter) and his second, passionate lover (Luke) are the only two women we care about. Their relationships are poignant and tragic. But then the tone of the story comes through: misogynistic and bitter, Fergus runs into some lamentful women, and eventually arrives at the heels of another intemperate female: America. The language is chauvinistic, especially during the sex scenes (more than the reader could wish for!) and the female characters are portrayed poorly. Fergus’ continuous wet dream leaves the reader unsatisfied.

But how does Fergus’ primary pursuit (perhaps secondary) of the American dream pan out? Can Behrens pull off an overdone conflict? For the most part, it works. The metaphor of salmon in the river – sometimes literally or figuratively caught by Fergus and sometimes himself being caught – is intriguing. The novel loses a beautiful lyrical quality partway through. We go from wheat in the fields and Irish landscape to horses. A blue Mr. Ed becomes man’s best friend.

In the end: a well-intentioned but unsatisfying affair. The idea of researching his family history and creating a story about his great-great-grandfather’s journey to Canada is fantastic. The song of himself – the struggle, hunger, love, violence, racism – all great, but it just doesn’t play a melody we haven’t heard.

Snowed in with Orhan Pamuk

East vs. West: a Crystallization of Humanity
Snow
by Orhan Pamuk
First Vintage International Edition, 2005

Orhan Pamuk’s homeland of Turkey suffers the abrasions of existing as the rift between the tectonic plates of the Eastern and Western worlds. Snow principally succeeds in analyzing this tension; the local politics and the love story are coincidental. A grouping of epigraphs pinpoint the novel’s main sentiment: “The Westerner in me was discomposed,” from Joseph Conrad, and “Well, then, eliminate the people, curtail them, force them to be silent. Because the European enlightenment is more important than people,” from Dostoevsky.



The conflict of the novel is embodied in the poet Ka’s return to his Turkish home city from Germany. Central to Ka’s struggle lies religion: “As Ka knew from the beginning, in this part of the world faith in God was not something achieved by thinking sublime thoughts and stretching one’s creative powers to their outer limits; nor was it something one could do alone; above all it meant joining a mosque, becoming part of a community. Nevertheless, Ka was still disappointed that Muhtar could talk so much about his group without once mentioning God or his own private faith. He despised Muhtar for it.” Pamuk’s characters refresh the tired battle between atheists and fervent believers.

Ka’s visit is incited by a report of suicides committed by Muslim girls who take drastic action after being prohibited from attending school covered in head scarves. His ostensible purpose is to investigate and write a report for a German newspaper, but his real motive is to reacquaint himself with the beautiful and recently divorced Ipek and marry her. His desire for her is entirely shallow, based on her tremendous beauty, and nothing more substantial than lust composes their relationship. The presence of a second author, the translator, may be the source of the inanity. It is possible that idiosyncrasies of the Turkish language are lost in the English language. Nevertheless, when their relationship tragically falls apart in the throes of miscommunication, the reader is neither surprised nor significantly affected. As our narrator informs us that “we are now approaching the heart of the matter: for until that moment I could have said I had seen nothing for which I had the story I have related in this book: Ipek was more beautiful than anyone could have imagined,” we are frustrated by a lack of imagination in describing her beauty.

Ka’s visit to the economically and spiritually depressed Kars is strangely enchanted. The city is blanketed in snow (a reiterated image) and awash in blinding whiteness. “It was as if snow cast a veil over hatreds, greed, and wrath and made everyone feel close to one another. They fell silent for a while.” Rather than simply a sign of renewal or redemption for the town, the oppressive weather signifies a “carnivalesque” period. In a brilliant ironic twist, the roads are all closed and the town falls to a takeover by a “coup-de-theatre.” Nationalistic actors and a few soldiers stage a play in which an actress removes her head scarf – not to cleanse it as the audience expects – but to burn it in an act of defiance. Religious youths in the crowd become boisterous and protest this blatant offense against Islam, only to witness some soldiers/actors fire rounds into the crowd. Based on the premise of the theater and a play being performed, the audience is slow to comprehend that the guns have shot actual rounds, killing nearly a dozen people. This section is a striking depiction of political upstarts, using the theatricality of the event to point to the absurd events. During the last performance by the troupe, the leader Sunay is shot, lamenting, “How stupid all this is! They know nothing about modern art, they’ll never be modern!”

As a reader biased with the privileges and prejudices of being a member of the Western world, I experienced moments of uncertainty. I stood guilty in the face of characters who provided such indictments as: “When they write poems or sing songs in the West, they speak for all humanity. They’re human beings—but we’re just Muslims. When we write something, it’s just called ethnic poetry.” I appreciated the irony, but was unsure if I was missing out on other aspects of the story. Westerners are helped by the encouraged empathy with the narrator and his protagonist, who is just as much of a stranger in Kars as the reader. Narrated by a phantom for most of the novel, we only learn more about the author’s identity and relation to Ka late in the novel. “Here, perhaps, we have arrived at the heart of our story. How much can we ever know about the love and pain in another’s heart? How much can we hope to understand those who have suffered deeper anguish, greater deprivation, and more crushing disappointments than we ourselves have known? So it is when Orhan the novelist peers into the dark corners of his poet friend’s difficult and painful life: How much can he really see?” If this is truly the heart of the story, it is frail; the relationship between the two is unwisely presupposed and referenced to as an entity outside the novel. With the elision of all but six lines of Ka’s poetry, where we would hope to glimpse more of his life, the reader cannot see very much at all.

My expectations may have been inflated with the knowledge that Pamuk received the Nobel Prize for Literature. Pamuk displays ingenious marks of the great Russian writers, such as Dostoyevsky and Turgenev. Snow openly wrestles with ideas of freedom, religion, and humanity by employing similar techniques as Brothers Karamazov. Instead of the Grand Inquisition, we have Muhtar preaching on the tragic loss of identity in the East: ‘“But I didn’t tell you this beautiful story to show you what it means to me or how I relate it to my life; I told it to point out that it’s forgotten. This thousand-year-old story comes from Firdevsi’s Shehname. Once upon a time, millions of people knew it by heart—from Tabriz to Istanbul, from Bosnia to Trabzon—and when they recalled it they found the meaning in their lives. The story spoke to them in just the same way that Oedipus’ murder of his father and Macbeth’s obsession with power and death speak to the people throughout the Western world. But now, because we’ve fallen under the spell of the West, we’ve forgotten our own stories…How do you explain this?”



Ka’s poetry is incredibly intriguing but problematic. Nowhere do we receive more than several lines of his highly esteemed work. Instead, the reader is provided with notes from his journal and an interesting geometric figure – a six-pointed snowflake representative of his newest collection of poetry. Upon visiting Kars, his writing drought ends and a bevy of new poems results from the landscape, his conversations with others about God, religion, and love. The axes of this diagram are labeled “Memory, Imagination and Reason.” It is at these termini that he organizes his poems into different groups and establishes the relationships between them. At the center is the seminal poem, “I, Ka,” which is his European manifesto of individualism. Ka’s solipsistic wandering across town and poetical musing, his attempt to possess a beautiful woman rather than love her, and the narrator’s devotion to having his story told leave the reader wondering what else would Ka expect other than misery and lack of fulfillment?

Capote's Dilemma

How does literature effectively translate into film? Many of us have been disappointed by this endeavor: I may be going against the Academy, but One Who Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest does not sufficiently capture the essence of the novel. The reversal process has proved equally frustrating: watching Requiem for a Dream and then reading Hubert Selby’s fare was anticlimactic. The most pressing problem for film adaptation is consolidation. How can a writer shape a 300+ page novel into a 100+ page screenplay? Does it tell the same story? Surely it must be told in a different way, e.g., highly imagistic, more reliant upon dialogue. The narrative voice is rarely articulated in a voice-over that does not misfit the tone and seriousness of a movie.

Enter 2005’s film, Capote. It traces the five-year journey of the celebrated author researching and writing In Cold Blood, a one-of-a-kind novel about the nonsensical murder of a well-respected family in a small Kansas town. Truman Capote’s incongruity of personality with the conservative community is reconciled with the help of his friend and colleague, Harper Lee. Due to the rapport Capote builds with the community, once the two suspects are captured, he is able to gain unprecedented access to them, garnering the bulk of material for his novel. For all the literati out there, during Capote’s creative/destructive process, Harper Lee’s rise to fame occurs with the advent of her [children’s] novel and subsequent film, To Kill a Mockingbird.

The novel and film complement each other tremendously: where the novel is silent, the film speaks. In Cold Blood invests a considerable amount of attention to setting up the family and their community while the remainder of the novel is mostly concerned with the drawn-out capture of the killers. In comparison, the film opens with the discovery of the dead family, followed by Capote’s first investigation, and then skips ahead to the capture of the killers. From that point, the film spends most of its time building the relationship between Capote and the murderer, Perry Smith. In contrast to the distance Capote maintains in the novel, the film portrays the agony he undergoes through aiding Perry in the appeals process while desiring for the executions to be carried out so that he could conclude his novel. On several occurrences, Capote manipulates Perry to obtain the information he needs to write his novel. The film succeeds much in the same way the novel does: it shows the humanity of such an inhumane person, without excusing his actions, and questions popular notions of judgment and justice. In this case, Capote stands as the accused man. He defends himself to Lee: “There wasn't anything I could have done to save them.” A relentless friend (they grew up together as neighbors), she tells him: “Maybe not. But the fact is, you didn't want to.”

The director, Bennett Miller, has responded to claims that the film is shot “sedately” because of the gray color theme and little camera movement. He argues that the film was shot with composure in a way that sensitizes the audience, heightening awareness of each scene. His artistic choice is matched by the sparseness of the shooting location, Canada, which evokes a bleak, autumnal Kansan landscape perfectly. With this background, the movie resonates strongly in its most subtle moments. For example, Capote talks with Lee about Perry, stating, “It's as if Perry and I grew up in the same house. And one day he stood up and went out the back door, while I went out the front.”

The whispering undertone of the novel becomes an overarching voice upon watching the film. Capote’s ambition for In Cold Blood is astonishing for both admirable and despicable qualities: it is a groundbreaking but egocentric affair. The film beautifully illustrates why he never completed another novel, explaining the profound epigraph to his following incomplete project: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.” The two works combine to tell a lasting story that few novel-film pairs have ever achieved.