Category: Modern Fiction

A Woman is No Man

By Etaf Rum

Published 2019

Read Sept 2019

In 1990, in Palestine, Isra’s family receives a suitor, Adam and his mother, Fareeda.  Adam’s family had migrated from a refugee camp in Palestine to Brooklyn, NY in 1976.  Fareeda brought her son, Adam, to their homeland in 1990 to find a good Arab wife for him.  Within a few weeks Isra (17) has been married to Adam (30) and moved into to his parents’ home in Brooklyn.  Seven years later, Fareeda and her husband are left to raise Deya and her three sisters after their parent were killed in a car accident.  In 2008, Fareeda is focused on finding a suitor for Deya who is torn between loyalty to her family and Arab culture and her desire to have a life beyond being an obedient wife and mother.

Rum tells this story through Deya chapters in 2008-9, Isra chapters progressing through the 1990’s, and Fareeda chapters in both time periods as well as some flashbacks to her earlier years.   Through these three perspectives we learn about how three women have struggled with the culture Fareeda is so committed to maintaining even though they now live in America:  1) the only path for a woman is marriage; 2) a wife’s role is to have children, preferably sons, clean, cook and obey her husband and her husband’s parents; 3)  the role of the man is to provide for his family and keep his wife and daughters safe, pure, and obedient, beating them if necessary; 4) the role of sons is to support his father in providing for the family while supporting his own and to obey his parents.  This lead to the situation that a girl must be married off quickly to both to relieve the father’s financial burden and to ensure she is considered pure and desirable for marriage.  Fareeda’s marriage was fully arranged—she met her husband the day they were married.  By Isra’s time, the suitor and potential bride did meet before they were married but both sets of parents had authority over the decision.  For Deya and Fareeda’s own daughter, Sarah, the mothers sought out potential arrangements but the suitor and potential bride had some involvement in the decision.  However, both suitor and potential bride knew they had no choice but to marry someone suitable to their parents so their say was still limited. 

Deya she is anxious to go to college before marrying and to marry for love, not by arrangement.  She was only seven when her parents died but she knows her mother was very sad and was regularly beaten by her husband.  She wants to avoid that fate and wants to know more about her mother to understand the whys behind the situation.  Her grandmother wants her to forget the past and agree to a suitor as quickly as possible—most of Deya’s Islamic girls-only school classmates have already made contracts with suitors or are even already married.  She even tells Deya that Isra’s problem was that she was possessed by jinn.

I leave the rest of the story for you to discover but will indicate aspects Rum asks us to consider.  What barriers must be overcome by an individual, family, or a community to enable their culture to change and allow new roles and responsibilities for both women and men and how to accomplish this?  While the story of Isra is clearly heart-breaking, Rum gives us some view of Adam’s situation as well—a man who wants to be an imam but is forced by his family (through the requirement of obedience to his parents) to tend his father’s business, set up his own business, set up a business for his brother, pay for his other brother’s college education and father sons and not the four daughters he and Isra have.  Neither Isra nor Adam appears to have much choice in their individual or collective life path nor has either been given any tools which they can use to make their lives or the lives of their children satisfying.  Role modelling of their parents hasn’t been helpful but loyalty to family and their culture has been thoroughly taught and learned.

Throughout history, nearly regardless of location in the world, women and men have been initially rooted in a role and responsibility system that makes unmarried daughters a burden to the father and sons an asset to the family both as sources of financial support and a path for keeping wealth in the family.  Slowly this system has been cracked in many places and the roles and responsibilities of partners within families is much less rigid and choices are can be made by the partners, not solely dictated by past practices and customs.  This reader proposes this trend has allowed for a general lifting of well being for all parties.  Unfortunately some cultures retain the oppressive gender roles and responsibilities system, the members of which are literally moving to new locations through immigration as a result of oppression created by man (war waged at the country or “tribe” level) or climate change (i.e. drought).    America and other countries receiving immigrants are faced with the dilemma of wanting immigrants to assimilate into their society (whether or not they will allow them to become citizens (!)) and recognizing, to some extent, that immigrants shouldn’t be completely stripped of their culture as a result.  How then to handle the situation of Fareeda’s family whose culture includes wife beating as acceptable?  How then to challenge the value of loyalty to family when that family’s culture teaches and advocates practices unacceptable to other parts of society.

Rum’s story suggests that the individual plays the critical role.  Individuals can muster their strength to challenge.  Individuals can mentor, help, support other individuals in their fight to challenge and break ground for themselves or their children.  This too is a universal truth—individuals helped individual slaves find a path to free states, individuals help other battered women find safety, individuals help other alcoholics break free of their disease.  Individuals have responsibility to find strength for themselves and then have a responsibility to help others.  Then individuals can become a movement. 

Read this book to become aware of a culture that remains present in our own country and in other places.  Become aware of the challenges these individuals face.  Become an individual open to “the other story”.   Grow. 

The Devil’s Cave

By Martin Walker

Published 2012

Read Sept 2019

This reader received this book from her travel companion when we were about to embark on a biking trip in France.  What a delightful present!  This is a fun to read book for someone who enjoys criminal investigation stories.  I fully agree with the Washingtonian’s praise published in the edition read by this reader:  “An affordable way to have an adventure in the French countryside this summer…Strikes a captivating balance between suspense and delight.” 

This reader looks forward to more enjoyable reads from this author.

The Female Persuasion

By Meg  Wolitzer

Published 2018

Read Sept 2019

This reader has mixed feelings about this book. 

We meet Greer during the first weekend of her college career.  She is disappointed and angry with her parents that she had to accept a full scholarship at a lower tier liberal arts college instead of attending Yale. She couldn’t attend Yale, although she was accepted there, because Greer didn’t get any financial support from Yale due to incomplete a financial aid application provided them by her parents.   At a party that first Friday night, she is inappropriately touched by a young man at a frat party.  Eventually there is a hearing at the college about this and other similar incidents and the young man is given essentially a soft slap on the wrist.  Greer is angry but feels impotent.  Fortunately her new activist friend, Zee, takes her to a campus lecture by Faith Frank, a 60-something editor of a feminist magazine, Bloomer.  Greer and Zee run into Faith in the women’s room after the lecture and Greer leaves with her business card and substantial enthusiasm for the feminist concepts she heard at the lecture. 

After graduation, Greer lands an interview for a job at Bloomer.  Unfortunately Bloomer closes the day of her interview, but she is later contacted by Faith Frank for a job with her new foundation that is being financially backed by a venture capitalist (with whom Faith had a one-night stand some 40 years previously).  Greer joins with enthusiasm and Faith Frank becomes a mentor.  Over time the foundation’s work directly impacting women decreases and its work producing slick conferences with high ticket prices increases.  Eventually Greer learns of a controversy associated with a recent conference, confronts Faith, and quits the foundation.  In that encounter, Faith reminds Greer that Greer also had an ethical lapse when she first joined the foundation—Greer told Faith about, but never passed onto Faith, a letter from her friend, Zee, requesting consideration for a position. 

In the meantime, boyfriend Cory, following graduation from Princeton, where he had a full-ride scholarship, has joined a high-end consulting firm and is living somewhat decadently with other similarly aged consultants at the company’s Malaysian site.  His plans to make a lot of money fast to fund a start-up with some friends are interrupted when his family suffers a significant tragedy.  He returns home to care for his mother.  Greer initially shares his pain but becomes confused as he continues stays to help his mom and seems to have given up on his career aspirations. 

After graduation, college friend Zee joins a program that provides a few weeks of training to become a teacher in charter schools that have contracted with them to supply teacher.  She quickly becomes overwhelmed by the challenges she faces as an underqualified teacher in the charter school with high aspirations but little capabilities.  She leaves this position and gets training for and becomes a crisis counselor.  During this period, Zee comes out as gay and finds a life partner.  She learns that Greer did not pass on her letter to Faith but the friends eventually reconcile.

Greer is the only one of the three that seems to have a fairly easy path to success.  Despite the poor financial aid application, she still gets a full-ride scholarship to the second (third?) tier school.  Faith Frank takes her into a nice paying foundation job and provides her mentorship and sponsorship.  After quitting the foundation, she manages to write a feminist book, Outdoor Voices  that provides her with enough money to buy a brownstone home in Brooklyn and renovate it (if she hadn’t decided to divert the renovation money to her parents and Cory’s mom).  She reconnects with Cory and has a baby by the time she’s touring to promote the book.   

So why does this reader have mixed feelings about this book? 

On the one hand, Wolitzer describes well, and with great detail, the experiences of the three young people as they deal with the challenges of their college days.  She does similarly well with the post-graduation stories for Cory and Zee and raises the question of what constitutes an acceptable career trajectory.  Is Cory wasting his intelligence by caring for his mother, cleaning houses, and working at a local computer store or are family needs more important? On the other hand, this reader didn’t feels Greer’s path had the same credibility.

While the omnipotent narrator presents substantial detail about the feelings of Greer, Cory, and Zee, that narrator is fairly quiet when it comes to Faith Frank.  There is a section devoted to providing Faith Frank’s history, but it’s fairly brief compared to words devoted to the younger characters but does give us some unnecessary (to this reader) details of her short affair with the man who will eventually fund her foundation.   We see Faith’s actions at the foundation through Greer’s eyes but little from Faith’s view.   She’s been a rock star in the feminist world based on her book Female Persuassion.  She’s been the head of a magazine, Bloomer, that, while now closed, existed for 20+ years.  She continued to be a successful speaker, charging up new women to speak up.  But how does she feel about her new role and platform?  It’s not clear.

The most confusing aspect of the book for this reader was the lack of clarity about what feminism means now-its objectives, for whom, and who should be working for it.  Faith Frank’s conferences are priced such that their participants have substantial bank accounts who like to hear about power from movie stars while eating fancy food.  We don’t know how she really feels about her current work.  Why?  We know all the others’ characters feelings about many things.   Greer’s book Outside Voices seems to sending the message that it’s all about speaking up.  This message is being sent by a woman who wrote speeches for other women based on stories she obtained from them, even when it wasn’t true.   Certainly mentoring and supporting younger women is important as is gaining your voice to be able to speak up.  But what else?  This reader is not sure that either Faith or Greer know the answer to this question either. 

In This House of Brede

By Rummer Godden

Published 1969

Read July 2019

Godden gives us a loving look at about twenty years in the life of an English Benedictine Abbey.  A primary character is Philippa Talbot who in her 40’s leaves a successful career to join the Abbey in about 1954.  Fairly shortly after her arrival Abbess Dame Hester Cunningham Proctor dies which provides Godden a useful device to introduce both the process of naming a new Abbess and to introduce us to a number of characters that are fully developed over the course of the book.  Elspeth Scallon enters the Novitiate and becomes Sister Cecilia just as Abbess Proctor dies providing Godden the opportunity to follow her journey on the path to becoming a fully vowed nun and contrasting her path, Phillipa’s and the path of other Noviatates. 

Overall Godden progresses the story of the characters and the overall community from Philippa’s arrival forward, but she takes many opportunities to discuss various aspects of the Benedictine contemplative community including structure of the day, organization of the community, various specific feasts and special events, and challenges facing the community.  In most cases she gives perspectives on the topic from many of the characters which allows her to develop the specific characters, to provide an in-depth view of the topic, and to give a look at the changes potentially or actually introduced as new Noviate arrive and as Pope John initiates the Vatican II Council. 

Godden provides us an in-depth view of the workings of the Abbey and helps the reader understand what draws one to join, what the path to full vows entails, and what keeps the nuns actively engaged in their chosen life for decades.  Fortunately Godden provides as well stories of novices that don’t remain part of the community and the numerous challenges that individual members of the community face across their lives in the Abbey.  Godden provides a short glimpse of the community’s reaction to the Vatican II Council and its impact without passing any sort of judgement about it. 

While not a book this reader might have selected for herself (again the value of being in a book discussion group that provides such opportunities!), this reader does feel enriched having read this thoughtful, lovely and loving, but not at all saccharine, look at this type of religious life and the way it was conducted during this period.

House of Broken Angels

by Luis Alberto Urrea

Published 2018

Read Feb 2019

This book tells a family saga through the eyes of two Angels in the family — Big Angel and his half-brother Little Angel—over the course of two days.  The first day the family has gathered for Big Angel’s mother’s (unexpected) funeral and the second the very next day, a planned celebration of Big Angel’s 70^th birthday, which all know will be his last birthday.    Little Angel has returned for the funeral and birthday party from northern California where he now lives.  

Big Angel is dying, presumably of cancer, and is primarily bed-ridden needing help to dress and toilet.  His daughter and wife tend to him. In the opening section, Big Angel is struggling to get himself and his family to his mother’s funeral on time.  He prides himself on not running on “Mexican time”, although his family is less reliable in that regard.  Big Angel was born in Mexico as were his brothers and sisters, wife, and her children from a previous marriage.  All migrate across the border when that wasn’t terribly difficult and in fact they move across the border fairly frequently while Big Angel is younger.  Big Angel has been in love with his wife since he first saw her when a teenager but they were separated for a variety of reasons and only married after he returned home and she has two sons.  Big Angel treats her children as his own although they don’t always appreciate him while growing up.   Big Angel is proud that he moved from a laborer as a young man to an IT specialist for a local company. 

Big Angel is also proud that he was able to buy his family a nice house.  His thoughts about it provide a taste of the wonderful language of the book:  “All the houses had bars on the windows, which scared outsiders but which nobody from there even saw.  None of the grannies on the streets wanted some imagined panuco to break in and steal their Franklin Mint collector plates.  John Wayne and angels defining little blond kids with flaming swords hung on kitchen walls all down the street……All the houses had four bedrooms and a living room, two bathrooms and a nice kitchen/dining area by the sliding door to the quarter-acre backyard.  And myriad garage kingdoms developed as unemployed children came home to Mama’. “ 

As Big Angel lies in his bed and recalls his past for us, he is writing a gratitude book filled with sentences, phrases, and single words describing how he is feeling and what he is remembering:

“Changing the world

Poco a poco

A little better

Right here, right now”

Little Angel is Big Angel’s half-brother.  Big Angel’s Mexican father left his Mexican mother and large family to be with a white woman in the US.  They had a single child, known to the family as Little Angel.  Little Angel was raised apart from the rest of the family and outside the Latino culture, although Big Angel would visit occasionally after he had his own family.  Little Angel has returned for the family events from his current home in northern California where he teaches.  His sections express his feelings of awkwardness being with this family who he doesn’t really know or understand and who he thinks feel he’s not really part of the family.  The sections describing his interactions with some of the family members are quite a hoot. 

Eventually Big Angel’s bed becomes a place where various family members hang out with him and share in ways we wish we could share with our own family.  The big sprawling party going on outside the room contrasts with the intimacy of lying on Big Angel’s bed.  Talking with him both parties knowing he is dying provides them a unique environment for sharing.  Little Angel tells Big Angel “To be here now, to see what you have made, humbles me.  The good parts and the bad.  It doesn’t matter. I thought I was going to save the world, and here you were all along, changing things day by day, minute by minute.”

The title includes the term “Broken Angels”.  While I am not sure the author had anything to do with the title, it does prompt one to think about the definition of a  “broken person”, what a “well-lived life” is, and whether any of the Angels or other characters in the book (or are they all angels?) are broken.  This reader concluded that neither Angel was broken although they had suffered disappointments and had at time doubted themselves.  A book discussion facilitator suggested we consider whether “their cracks had been filled with gold”.  This reader can support that concept.  

The story at times feels a little unorganized leading the reader to wonder where things are going.  But the narrative does always go somewhere, sometimes in surprising ways.  It generates the feel of the big day and its long party for Big Angel very well.    The book has much to absorb on every page.  While many of the interactions between family members, their hopes, dreams, and disappointments are quite universal, the reader is hearing a Mexican voice speaking about a particular Mexican’s family’s life and we are expanded as a result of listening to it.

The Night Tiger

By Yangsze Choo

Published 2019

Read May 2019

From Choo’s website: “Yangsze Choo is a fourth generation Malaysian of Chinese descent. Due to a childhood spent in various countries, she can eavesdrop (badly) in several languages. After graduating from Harvard University, she worked in various corporate jobs and had a briefcase before writing her first novel.  “

Choo has set this novel in 1931 Malaya, the British colony that eventually became Malaysia.  Eleven year old Ren is houseboy for Dr MacFarland who dies and commissioned Ren to find his finger, which was lost in the past, so it can be buried with him no more than 49 days after his death. Ren is sent to be a houseboy for Dr William Acton, a friend and colleague of his dead master, and somehow connected to the finger.  Ji Lin is a young woman apprenticed to a dress-maker although she had hoped to study medicine.  However her step-father suspended his support of her schooling while he is sending his son, her step-brother to study medicine. Ji Lin is trying to pay off her mother’s MahJong debts, before her step-father learns about them, by being a dance-hall girl in the evenings.  One of her clients accidentally drops a vial containing a finger and Ji Lin picks it up.  The reader eventually learns that the finger Ji Lin has is the one that Ren seeks. 

So we have knowledge about the finger than the characters don’t have.  But we, like they, don’t know so many other things.  Why are so many fingers missing from the surgical specimen archives? Why did Ji Lin’s client have the finger and why did he die?  Why was William’s liaison found dead in the jungle? Will his finance ever join him? What do the dreams Ren and Ji Lin mean?  Are they somehow linked together beyond the finger?  Is Ren’s dead master a weretiger and somehow causing the curious deaths? Will Ren be able to fulfill his master’s wishes? Will Ji Lin marry Robert just to get out of the house?  And others!

The reader gladly is pulled into Choo’s many layered story.  A narrator describes Ren’s story and reveals to the reader his thoughts; Ji Lin narrates her own story.  Choo gives us an interesting glimpse at the multi-cultural environment of 1931 Malaya—British ex-pats in Malaya separated from their families for various unstated and unrevealed reasons; an ambiance of supernatural phenomenon which no one fully believes nor disbelieves; multiple languages from the various immigrants to the region over time and the cultures they’ve brought; the need for young women to find suitable work while seeking husbands in suitable ways; the structured dance-hall on the fringe of a suitable way for men to interact with women in a suitable way.  As someone who remembers and thinks about dreams upon waking, this reader found the dream sequences and their impact on the characters quite interesting. 

Choo provides the reader with just sufficient resolution to some of the story while leaving other aspects nicely ambiguous.  This approach was very satisfying for this reader who wanted some specific answers but simultaneously didn’t want Choo to decide for the characters what would happen next in their lives.  This is a great relief as we’ve become attached to these characters as we’ve seen them grow and demonstrate and realize they are capable of moving beyond their current situations.   And as well we are nicely left wondering about the fate Dr MacFarland and his finger.

Sing, Unburied, Sing

By Jesmyn Ward

Published 2017

Read March 2019

This is a very difficult book to read.  The family in this book suffers from poverty, racial prejudice, drug addition, loss of a son to a lynching, haunting memories from past that are also racially driven, and impeding death of a loved one to cancer.  It’s sometimes tough to stay with this dark text, but in the end,  well worth the effort.   

Jojo, a mixed-race thirteen year old boy living with his black grandparents in poor rural Mississippi who clearly loves and is loved by his grandfather, is a primary narrator.  His mother, Leonie, had Jojo when she was 17 and a daughter when she was 26, is a second narrator.  Richie, a boy Jojo’s grandfather knew when he was in Parchman (now Mississippi State Penitentiary) eventually joins as a third narrator.

Jojo’s voice starts us on our journey with this fractured family with “I like to think I know what death is.  I like to think that it’s something I could look at straight.”  He’s about to join his grandfather in butchering a goat that will become his 13^th birthday dinner.  He desperately wants his grandfather, Pop, to “think I’ve earned these thirteen years” and that he’s ready to do the work that needs to be done.  We learn that he’s already doing a lot of work as the primary caregiver of his three year old sister, Kayla.  Jojo’s grandmother “Mam” is dying of cancer and is now confined to her bed and dealing with searing pain and the gradual loss of her body to her disease so she is no longer able to provide care to her daughter’s children.  Jojo’s mother, Leonie, is not around much and Jojo has learned to expect little or nothing from her when she is around. 

Through Leonie’s narration we learn of her enduring love for the father of her children, Michael, the son of a white family that has essentially disowned him for taking up with a black girl.  Michael is currently at Parchman for an unnamed offense.  They apparently lived together with their children in an apartment while he worked on the Deepwater Horizon oil rig.  After it blew up he lost his job, they lost the apartment when his severance ran out, and they moved in with her parents.  Leonie now works at a bar with Misty, a white girl who lives in a MEMA (Mississippi Emergency Management Agency) cottage, courtesy Katrina. Leonie and Misty are heavily into drugs, apparently selling as well as using. 

When Leonie receives word that Michael will be released from Parchman, she decides to take the kids with her to pick him up so they can again be a family.  Pop and Mam are not excited about this road trip and she eventually decides to have Misty come along too.  Much of the alternating narration between Jojo, and Leonie, and eventually Richie, is focused on the road trip which includes some drug dealing, an interaction with the police, essentially no care or feeding of the children, and vivid descriptions of Kayla’s puking all over everything repeatedly which certainly heightens the stress in this heavily loaded car (five people and hidden drugs) driving the back roads of hot and humid Mississippi.  (Why does so much of modern TV, film, and literature involve throwing up—starting in the first chapter of this book after the goat is slaughtered?)

Through a supernatural vein, Ward brings forward the horrors of Parchman, the death of Leonie’s brother, Given, by the hands of Michael’s cousin, and countless other atrocities committed against black men and women through the history of the country.  Jojo, Leoine, and Kayla are blessed with (?) and burdened by their abilities to interact with those that have met violent deaths. Richie is desperately seeking the land across the water where everything is peaceful and beautiful.  It’s not clear to this reader that this approach for highlighting Ward’s theme of continued racial hatred and its consequences in this country is the most engaging.  Certainly we hope Richie and future children don’t have to find peaceful and beautiful places to live only after they die and leave this planet.  However, Ward lost my attention a bit when Richie’s vision described” yurts and adobe dwellings and teepees and longhouses and villas.”  This language wasn’t quite compatible, to this reader’s ears, with the story of the twelve-year-old sent to Parchman for stealing food for his starving siblings.

Fortunately there are some positive moments in the book, although they carry a heavy undertone as well.  The descriptions of Kayla clinging to Jojo shows how deeply committed Jojo is to her care and well-being, but this is in stark contrast to Leonie’s inability to care for either child herself.  Similarly, Jojo’s relationship with his Pop is beautifully drawn, but the story Pop slowly reels out to Jojo about Richie is a very dark one. 

This book was selected as the winner of the 2017 National Book Award for fiction over two other books this reader has recently read:  Pachinko by Min Jin Lee and The Leavers by Lisa Ko.    It’s interesting they all discuss challenges to family that are at least partially driven by the society in which the family lives because each is part of “the other” = “not us”.  The Leavers and this book both use first person narratives of a son and mother.  In The Leavers, the son and mother do push through a challenge to their relationship by correcting a misunderstanding about why the mother has left the son, although in the nicely ambiguous ending they continue their separate paths.  In Sing, Unburied, Sing, there is no reconciliation between mother and son, partially driven by the son’s age and substantially because the mother isn’t ready to return in any way to her son.   All of these books require the reader to face many realities past and present of members of our society which we would otherwise not know.  I can only speculate that Sing, Unburied, Sing won over The Leavers partly because Ward’s language is more like that of another revered Mississippi writer, Faulkner, to whom she has been compared, and partly because the racial issues in Ward’s book remain unresolved and violent.  The issues raised in The Leavers may seem more modern but have certainly been present throughout the country’s history, just less devastating for earlier immigrants than the racial issues present in Ward’s book.  At any rate, all these books deserve reading as each will provoke a reader’s thinking about how we treat “other” and the impact of that treatment.  I do remain curious whether any of these books will become “classic” according to this reader’s personal definition— the book is still read 50 years after its publication.  The glorious flood of serious literature annually makes this a large challenge but one that this reader hopes can be met. 

The Handmaid’s Tale

By Margaret Atwood

Published 1985

Read in 1986 and March 2019

I first read The Handmaid’s Tale shortly after its publication because I had read her previous four novels and looked forward to more.  It was sufficiently considered “science fiction” to be considered for the Nebula Award and to win the first Arthur C. Clarke award .  However, her “science fiction” has nothing to do with space or aliens.  Rather she terms her work “speculative fiction” which is a great description—what could the fairly near future be like if society continues some of its current paths…  This particular book, published in 1985, does not specify the specific timing

What I remember most distinctly from reading of the book thirty-three years ago (aside from what the Handmaid was…) is the overnight suspension of Compubank cards for all women.   My reaction was so swift and severe that I nearly called a friend, who had cheerfully indicated she paid for her groceries with an ATM card, to warn her of the dangers of relying on such devices.  While we haven’t had ATM cards shut off for all women since the book’s publication, some of the lines in the book remain remarkably relevant:

“It was after the catastrophe, when they shot the president and machine-gunned the Congress and the army declared a state of emergency.  They blamed it on the Islamic fanatics, at the time. ….. That was when they suspended the Constitution.  They said it would be temporary.  There wasn’t even any rioting in the streets.  People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction.  There wasn’t even an enemy you could put your finger on. … Things continued in that state of suspended animation for weeks, although some things did happen.  Newspapers were censored and some were closed down, for security reasons they said.  The roadblocks began to appear, and Identipasses.  Everyone approved of that, since it was obvious you couldn’t be too careful.”

During my recent reading of the novel, I was again impressed with Atwood’s ability to engage you in the protagonist’s (Offfred) present day-to-day life while slowly reeling out both her personal past and the state of society as she could was aware of it given her new role.  Then Atwood then propels Offred into a new situation that is both destabilizing for and providing some potential hope for Offred and the reader. 

The abrupt and wonderfully ambiguous ending is followed by “Historical Notes” that are brilliantly written.  Atwood provides “a partial transcript of the proceedings of the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies in June, 2195.”  Professor Maryann Crescent Moon, Department of Caucasian Anthropology, University of Denay, Nunavit introduces Professor James Darcy Pieixoto, Director, Twentieth- and Twenty-First Century Archives, Cambridge University, England and the notes then record his talk.   The edition I read most recently was published by Penguin Random House as part of their Everyman’s Library of Contemporary Classics.  I first encountered Everyman’s Library when I read Cranford.  Interestingly, both books are about a woman’s world in a time when women’s place in society was in transition—Cranford about a society that was slowly dying out; Handmaid’s Tale about a society that could never have been imagined by the ladies of Cranford, nor, we hope, us.

Fruit of the Drunken Tree

By Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Published 2018

Read April 2019

This is a vivid and engaging book set in Columbia in the time of the notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar and narrated by two major characters, Chula and Petrona.   

The book opens with a brief description by 15 year old Chula of a letter she has just received from Petrona, her family’s former housekeeper in Columbia, which includes a photograph of Petrona holding a newborn.  The photograph’s date stamp was 9 months after Chula’s family fled Columbia and arrived in Los Angeles when Chula was about 7.  Thus we learn that Chula’s family fled Columbia and we become aware that Petrona didn’t. 

The book then shifts back to the when Petrona first started working for Chula’s family.  The story progresses by alternating narration between Chula and Petrona.  Chula (7) and her sister Cassandra (9) live in a well-heeled gated community in Bogota with their mother and father.  The father is usually not at home as he works at a distant oil field. Petrona (15) lives with her family in an invasione (land owned by the government on which poor and displaced people have settled) outside Bogota.  Chula’s mother prefers to hire girls in this situation for her housekeeper since she grew up in a similar invasione but since had climbed out of poverty.

Through both narrators we hear about the happenings in the two households and get as well bits and pieces of the political and societal turmoil that is the backdrop to the lives of the narrators.  The author does a very credible job on the perspectives of each narrator.  Chula is somewhat aware of what’s going on through newscasts but is more interested, as expected for any seven year old, in playing Barbies with her sister and spying on the neighbors with her sister and friends.  She is also fascinated by the new and very quiet housekeeper, Petrona.   Petrona is living a difficult life as her brothers are being seduced into working with the guerillas and/or taking drugs to escape their reality.  At the same time, however, she is experiencing the universal trials and tribulations of attraction to a boy she probably should be avoiding.  Chula’s mother is intent on helping Petrona rise above her circumstances and even enrolls her in a First Communion class and throws her a First Communion party after the ceremony.

As the story progresses, the family and Petrona are buffeted by increasingly unstable situations.  Chula’s family leaves the city briefly and stays with Chula’s maternal grandmother who has improved the original shack in the invasione substantially over the years. Unfortunately they don’t completely escape the fighting between the government, paramilitary, and guerillas (the definition of each not told by Chula or Petrona).  While the family is away, Petrona and her boyfriend take up residence in Chula’s house and Chula becomes aware of this but keeps this secret to herself.  Petrona’s love interest involves her in a dangerous plot against her employer which turns out very badly for Petrona.  In parallel, Chula’s father joins the ever expanding ranks of the kidnapped.  A recording of his kidnappers on the phone becomes an essential ingredient to Chula’s family’s successful “Credible Fear Interview” as they enter the US and are accepted as refugees. 

Chula’s entries describing the family’s integration into the US is especially riveting.  Chula’s remarks in the opening section become more poignant.  “US was the land that saved us; Columbia was the land that saw us emerge.”  “We understood how little we were worth, how small our claim in the world.”  We learn the family gains US citizenship when Chula turns 15.  Meanwhile Petrona’s final entry describes her dream to leave someday with her son (to where is not clear) and that she think often of Chula.

The author introduces the reader to a number of aspects of Columbia as experienced by both girls. Among them:  Chula’s mother is insistent Petrona take her First Communion but is equally devoted to various supernatural practices.  Petrona’s family is of nearly pure Spanish blood and Chula’s mother is Indian.  Petrona’s mother’ prejudice based on bloodline makes her especially angry as Chula’s family is wealthy while Petrona’s family essentially has been thrown to the ashes. 

The credibility of the vivid descriptions about what things were like during this period and about Columbian culture is due, in part, to the author’s own experiences as she herself grew up in Columbia during the Pablo Escobar period and came to the US as a refugee.   

This reader very much appreciates that the author writes without any clear political stand on any of the situations she describes.  Rather she tells a story that provides a believable picture of how people try to live in a country with an unstable and generally corrupt government while a drug lord reigns economically through terror and violence.  It was impossible for this reader not to reflect on the current “immigration crisis” and wonder what influences our views of it.