Duthie Books to Close

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Sad news from Vancouver:

VANCOUVER – Independent bookseller Duthie Books will shut its doors at the end of February after 52 years in business.

Facing pressure from online bookseller Amazon and multi-national chains such as Chapters, owner Cathy Duthie Legate has decided to pack it in and close the last of eight locations on Fourth Avenue in Kitsilano.

The family-owned chain was founded in 1957 by Bill Duthie.

“I’m just not making it, so I’m going to close it down,” said Duthie Legate. “We are going to start our regular sale January 28, but it will be better, of course, with discounts of 40, 60 then 80 percent and I hope to have all the books out of here by the end of February.”

“Then I will tear down the store,” she said. “I’m sorry that it will leave a void in the city.”

Duthie Books has been hurt in recent years by encroachment on the traditional book market from every direction: big box stores, online sellers and most recently Kindle.

(via, full story here)

I think the original Duthie’s on 10th Avenue was the first place I consciously shopped for books.

Somehow Murchie’s was saved; where’s the backer with a heart of gold, a lot of money, and a great personal library to keep Duthie’s going?

Recent Reading: Ghosts (or Not)

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It was an interesting experience reading Sarah Waters’s The Little Stranger and Audrey Niffenegger’s Her Fearful Symmetry one after the other. Both are well-written, original books by consummate story-tellers. Both invite us to imagine a lot of “what if” questions about our world, particularly about whether there’s more to it than we can see, whether we (at least some of us) live in it longer than our physical bodies do, and whether those remnants (call them supernatural, or spiritual, or perhaps metaphysical), if they are around us, might be trying to tell us something. Both seem self-conscious about their Gothic inheritance; both treat that legacy somewhat playfully, Waters, as in Fingersmith, showing herself especially deft at the evocative use of intertextuality (of course the peeling wallpaper in the house is yellow, for instance). The similarities seem to me to end there, however, except that in my estimation at least, both books also have in common that they are good but not great.

The Little Stranger is certainly the more ambitious of the two novels. Like Waters’s other period pieces, it is conspicuously researched without being tediously expository; she has the enviable knack of weaving in historical details (in this case, about life in Britain in the post-war years) as if they belong to the immediate perspective of the characters rather than the retrospective discovery of the author (or reader). She’s also extraordinarily sure-footed with dialogue, not just in creating voices for her characters but, again, in sustaining a faintly outdated tone that nonetheless feels completely modern: yes, people use words like “bloke” and “chum,” but not too often, and often enough with their own sense of irony at play, so that we can sustain our connection with them without losing our self-conscious historical distance. I’ve read a couple of historical novels recently that I thought really struggled with how to make their people sound. I think Waters grasps the important principle that people who might have spoken in what, to us, would be an archaic idiom, in their own moment were wholly contemporary and idiomatic, and she avoids the hazard of attempting versions of Olde Englishe or, equally annoying, having everyone speak with extreme formality, as if slang hadn’t been invented yet and wearing corsets (or the post-war equivalents) meant you actually were uptight all the time. She’s an excellent plotter, of course, too, and The Little Stranger is suspenseful without relying on cheap thrills. I think one way in which her expertise in 19th-century fiction has influenced her as a novelist is in convincing her that a good story can be the basis for a serious, intelligent, and subtle novel–can be literary, in other words.

So for all those reasons, I enjoyed The Little Stranger. But . . . I was also a bit disappointed in it by the end. It is not quite as well written as Fingersmith or The Night Watch, for one thing. It’s a bit prosy at times; the energy flags–or at least mine did, reading along (the long saga of the man with the burst appendix near the end, for instance). Of more significance, though (because after all, my own favourite novelist is extremely vulnerable to just that charge), is that I felt the novel did not exploit its ingredients as fully as Fingersmith does. There’s Dr. Faraday, for instance. As the novel went along I began really hoping there was more to him than there seemed to be. I could imagine a few pretty cool twists, either involving him more directly in the uncanny events at Hundreds Hall, or, from a more metafictional perspective, undermining our trust in his narration. The ambiguity or uncertainy on which the story turns–is it, can it be, a ghost, or at least some kind of a haunting, something “spawned from the troubled unconscious of someone connected with the house itself,” causing all the upsets, or do they all exist in the minds of the characters, or in his mind?–is not resolved, which is fine (that’s how uncanny things stay uncanny, right?). But our inability to know for sure ought to have mattered more: think The Turn of the Screw. Or his inability to know for sure should have been more of a problem. Instead, unless I missed some crucial detail, he is, throughout, the perfect foil for the more psychologically susceptible Ayres family, a medical man, a man of science, always ready with the skeptical explanation, always taking the practical steps. At the end he admits to being “troubled” by the details he couldn’t explain away, but there’s no weight to his wavering, though surely there should be: if he can even entertain the supernatural explanation, where are we left, in the battle between rational and irrational, natural and supernatural?

The other interpretive option, of course, is symbolic, and here’s where the book is at once smartest and dullest. Throughout, it’s made clear that Hundreds Hall represents a decaying way of life, one out of step with modernity and under threat from all sides as the estate loses money and the house quite literally falls apart. This is a fight the family cannot win, unless it can adapt, and under the pressure of time, or history, the Ayreses prove maladaptive. Faraday sees the family with a real, if faintly bitter, nostalgia, due in part to family connections (his mother was ‘in service’ at Hundreds Hall) and in part to his own consciousness of the changing times. He loves the house first, and the family, including his eventual fiancee, as much because of their home as for themselves, as Caroline protests at one point. He is in an interestingly conflicted position, then, representing, as a doctor, the forces of progress, but as a man, regret for the erosion of a certain idea of England. So far, great: we have everything we need to grasp that the mysterious events at Hundreds Hall, and their catastrophic consequences, are heavily freighted thematically. Why doesn’t Waters trust us enough to bring things to a crisis without then laying out our options, as she does at the very end? Faraday’s colleague Seeley offers the “defeated by history” theory; Faraday rehearses the “other, odder theory”; and then he concludes with his own perplexity, and the possibility that all he really saw in the old Hall was his own reflection–his desires, his longings. All of those options are activated effectively enough in the telling that it seemed inept to sum them up in this way. At the same time, though, I didn’t feel the novel had shown me clearly enough what difference it would make which option I (or Faraday) ultimately believed. What are the stakes in this interpretive decision, or indecision? (Also, how much cooler would it have been if Faraday turned out to have been scheming all along to somehow get the house for himself? I was really hoping–half expecting–that he would turn out to be quite, if not wholly, unreliable.)

Her Fearful Symmetry is a lighter book, morbid, perhaps, in its fascination with death and cemeteries, but not scary or even really poignant. It too is meticulously researched: one of my favourite aspects of it was all the lore about Highgate Cemetery. I had hoped to get out there on my recent trip to London and didn’t; next time, for sure. While Waters is working with the uncanny possibility that there are forces beyond our senses (or our control), Niffenegger takes a resolutely literal and definite stance on ghosts: there are such, and they ‘live’ (exist? operate?) according to fairly specific constraints and possibilities, which you have to accept without too much quibbling or you might as well stop reading. (One of my problems with this book, much as I enjoyed it, was that it kept reminding me of Ghost, in which Patrick Swayze struggles mightily to move pennies and so forth but somehow never, say, falls right through the floor. Niffenegger’s ghost also spends a lot of time learning how to concentrate her “energy” enough to have an impact on the material world. In case you’re wondering, her big breakthrough is discovering that dust is light enough for her to move. Fortunately, the piano is dusty so she can write messages there! For some reason, she can fit in a drawer or pass through walls but not leave the flat. No quibbles. Just accept it.)

I liked that Niffenegger is not sentimental, about either death or ghosts. There’s a bit of a twist near the end, for instance, that I really appreciated because it kept the ghost consistent with the highly imperfect and self-serving character she was when alive. There’s no heaven in this novel, no angels, no starry reunions with loved ones, no catering to wishful thinking about everything being all right at the, or past the, end (The Lovely Bones, anyone?). Even love is not treated sentimentally here. A couple of the most intense loving relationships are claustrophobic for those in them, one, in fact, literally so, as the wife of a man with severe OCD chafes against living with the windows papered over and most of the contents of their flat in boxes. Life, we come to see, is not always all it’s cracked up to be–not, that is, if death is a viable option. But death, too, has its drawbacks: it’s cold, and you can’t smell people, or feel them. The novel’s climax is built around a quirky version of a sensational plot involving switching identities (with two sets of twins in the case, I kind of saw that coming, though I admit I hadn’t anticipated quite how it would resolve) and body-snatching (sort of). Here too, as with The Little Stranger, I wanted people to be more devious than they turned out to be: as I’m trying not to give too much away, I’ll just say that I wish the whole thing had been planned more or less from the get-go. But I liked that Niffenegger avoids the saccharine ending that would justify all the cliches about loves that endure past death. Perhaps she wanted to write a kind of antidote to The Time-Traveller’s Wife.

So where’s the problem with this one? Well, basically, I thought it lacked ideas. My dissatisfaction with The Little Stranger was that, good as it was, I thought it could have been even better, because it was smart enough to do so much already. In this case, the story really is all. I realize that in some quarters it is considered ‘middlebrow’ to expect a novel to be about something. I’m not altogether afraid of being middlebrow, but I should be clear that I’m not regretting the lack of a didactic moral or a message. It’s just that there don’t seem to be any ideas under all the activity in the novel, except maybe that love is unpredictable and potentially dangerous, and that dead people can be selfish too (does that count as an idea if it deals with something as hypothetical as the emotional status of the dead?). Here Niffenegger has taken as her setting a site filled, literally, with many great literary figures, many of whom write with great creativity and insight about love and death. But Her Fearful Symmetry doesn’t raise questions about, for instance, who framed that symmetry and what intention or design we might thus infer from it. It doesn’t exploit the irony that sisterhood can be as constricting as saving, which it might have illustrated with some lines from “Goblin Market.” It doesn’t put up an idea about how death is constructed today to put up against its evocation of Victorian death, which it deals with so engagingly through its account of the development of Highgate Cemetery. It takes us to a wonderful little park full of plaques commemorating acts of ordinary heroism, but this illuminates (at most) our sense of the character who loved to picnic there, not a commitment to “unhistoric acts” as the real foundation of life after death, when we join “the choir invisible.” What, ultimately, is this book about, then? It’s about an inventive cast of characters (and I definitely give Niffenegger credit for making them interesting and vivid) and a “what if” scenario: what if, after death, your opportunities to interfere in the lives of others turns out not to be over? It’s very clever, but that’s not really enough.

This Week in My Classes (January 13, 2010): “Most of them seem to be twaddling stuff”

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It’s always fun when there’s an unexpected synchronicity between two (or more) courses. Even the sheer coincidence of juxtapositions can be fruitful: I remember the thrill I felt as an undergraduate when I happened to be assigned the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality in my historiography seminar for the same week I was reading John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman for my English honours seminar. I still have the paper I wrote as a result, “Changing the Angle: A Re-Interpretation of Sex, Power, and Sexuality in The French Lieutenant’s Woman“–and oh my goodness, glancing through it, was my undergraduate writing self a painful blend of sincerity and sententiousness (plus ca change etc., I know).

Anyway, I had a modest version of that intertextual thrill this week rereading Adam Bede for my graduate seminar. In waltzes our “hero,” the dashing young squire Arthur Donnithorne, and almost the first thing out of his mouth is this pithy assessment of Lyrical Ballads, hot off the press when the novel is set:

“It’s a volume of poems . . . : most of them seem to be twaddling stuff; but the first is in a different style–‘The Ancient Mariner’ is the title. I can hardly make head or tail of it as a story, but it’s a strange, striking thing.”

As it happens, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was Monday’s reading for my Brit Lit survey class, and so I spent much of my weekend renewing my acquaintance with its “strange, striking” verse and browsing in the vast array of attempts to “make head or tail of it.” As I’m sure I would have known more definitely if I were a Romanticist, “Mariner” is one of those poems that have become as significant for their critical history as for themselves (if there’s a distinction, an issue which of course underlies many of the articles I was reviewing). Having introduced Romanticism last week with some Wordsworth, particularly “Tintern Abbey,” it is certainly vexing to turn to “Mariner” and see how it messes with one’s generalizations (the language of common men? I don’t think so!)–and yet that’s the point, or one of them, that there aren’t going to be any truly stable generalizations in our course even though we will need them to move forward, or to start from. And I’m in some sympathy with Arthur about Wordsworth’s contributions; as was remarked over at Wuthering Expectations some time ago, Wordsworth is probably “the most boring great poet in history.” Great, yes, but the risk of trying to write unpoetically is writing, well, unpoetically at times.

But I know I shouldn’t sympathize with Arthur’s reading taste too far, and in fact one of the interesting issues we discussed about Adam Bede in our seminar was characters’ reading (or not) and how it affects both their thinking about their own lives and our judgments of them. Hetty doesn’t read novels, we’re told, and so spins her fantasies about becoming a lady oblivious to the potential complications; Arthur should have finished Zeluco, which might have strengthened his moral resolve by emphasizing the consequences of seducing innocent young girls. A lot of our attention ended up being on our own reading of Hetty, and in particular on whether the narrator’s close attention to her interiority and the inadequacies of her self-perception and moral development in any way compensates for those defects, or whether that attention is (perhaps inevitably) condescending, or worse. We remarked that everyone around Hetty attributes qualities to her that she doesn’t really have, largely because of her deceptive beauty (leading Adam, for instance, to assume a tenderness of character equal to the softness of her arms and other curves). Dinah too mistakes Hetty for something more than she is, but Dinah’s case is particularly interesting because she gives Hetty credit for greater moral elevation, seeing in Hetty’s sobs, for instance, “the stirring of a divine impulse” when in fact Hetty is just moody, in an “excitable state of mind.” “[W]hile the lower nature can never understand the higher,” the narrator remarks,

the higher nature commands a complete view of the lower. But I think the higher nature has to learn this comprehension, as we learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience.

The hierarchical language is potentially troubling here, especially in combination with the frequent associations of Hetty with animals and other “lower” creatures. Some judgment on Hetty for her vanity and selfishness (eventually destructive not just to herself, but, most painfully, to her child) is surely essential. But if she is of a “lower” kind, how far ought we to hold her responsible? It’s striking that the “hard experience” called for here is Dinah’s, or the “higher” nature’s: Dinah is capable of moral growth and the expansion of her sympathy even to Hetty as she really is, seems to be the message, but isn’t it Hetty’s “hard experience” to which much of the novel is primarily dedicated? But it’s Hetty who is not able to read her own experience and learn from it: that’s for Dinah, and us, to do.

This Week in My Classes (January 13, 2010): “Most of them seem to be twaddling stuff”

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

It’s always fun when there’s an unexpected synchronicity between two (or more) courses. Even the sheer coincidence of juxtapositions can be fruitful: I remember the thrill I felt as an undergraduate when I happened to be assigned the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality in my historiography seminar for the same week I was reading John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman for my English honours seminar. I still have the paper I wrote as a result, “Changing the Angle: A Re-Interpretation of Sex, Power, and Sexuality in The French Lieutenant’s Woman“–and oh my goodness, glancing through it, was my undergraduate writing self a painful blend of sincerity and sententiousness (plus ca change etc., I know).

Anyway, I had a modest version of that intertextual thrill this week rereading Adam Bede for my graduate seminar. In waltzes our “hero,” the dashing young squire Arthur Donnithorne, and almost the first thing out of his mouth is this pithy assessment of Lyrical Ballads, hot off the press when the novel is set:

“It’s a volume of poems . . . : most of them seem to be twaddling stuff; but the first is in a different style–‘The Ancient Mariner’ is the title. I can hardly make head or tail of it as a story, but it’s a strange, striking thing.”

As it happens, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” was Monday’s reading for my Brit Lit survey class, and so I spent much of my weekend renewing my acquaintance with its “strange, striking” verse and browsing in the vast array of attempts to “make head or tail of it.” As I’m sure I would have known more definitely if I were a Romanticist, “Mariner” is one of those poems that have become as significant for their critical history as for themselves (if there’s a distinction, an issue which of course underlies many of the articles I was reviewing). Having introduced Romanticism last week with some Wordsworth, particularly “Tintern Abbey,” it is certainly vexing to turn to “Mariner” and see how it messes with one’s generalizations (the language of common men? I don’t think so!)–and yet that’s the point, or one of them, that there aren’t going to be any truly stable generalizations in our course even though we will need them to move forward, or to start from. And I’m in some sympathy with Arthur about Wordsworth’s contributions; as was remarked over at Wuthering Expectations some time ago, Wordsworth is probably “the most boring great poet in history.” Great, yes, but the risk of trying to write unpoetically is writing, well, unpoetically at times.

But I know I shouldn’t sympathize with Arthur’s reading taste too far, and in fact one of the interesting issues we discussed about Adam Bede in our seminar was characters’ reading (or not) and how it affects both their thinking about their own lives and our judgments of them. Hetty doesn’t read novels, we’re told, and so spins her fantasies about becoming a lady oblivious to the potential complications; Arthur should have finished Zeluco, which might have strengthened his moral resolve by emphasizing the consequences of seducing innocent young girls. A lot of our attention ended up being on our own reading of Hetty, and in particular on whether the narrator’s close attention to her interiority and the inadequacies of her self-perception and moral development in any way compensates for those defects, or whether that attention is (perhaps inevitably) condescending, or worse. We remarked that everyone around Hetty attributes qualities to her that she doesn’t really have, largely because of her deceptive beauty (leading Adam, for instance, to assume a tenderness of character equal to the softness of her arms and other curves). Dinah too mistakes Hetty for something more than she is, but Dinah’s case is particularly interesting because she gives Hetty credit for greater moral elevation, seeing in Hetty’s sobs, for instance, “the stirring of a divine impulse” when in fact Hetty is just moody, in an “excitable state of mind.” “[W]hile the lower nature can never understand the higher,” the narrator remarks,

the higher nature commands a complete view of the lower. But I think the higher nature has to learn this comprehension, as we learn the art of vision, by a good deal of hard experience.

The hierarchical language is potentially troubling here, especially in combination with the frequent associations of Hetty with animals and other “lower” creatures. Some judgment on Hetty for her vanity and selfishness (eventually destructive not just to herself, but, most painfully, to her child) is surely essential. But if she is of a “lower” kind, how far ought we to hold her responsible? It’s striking that the “hard experience” called for here is Dinah’s, or the “higher” nature’s: Dinah is capable of moral growth and the expansion of her sympathy even to Hetty as she really is, seems to be the message, but isn’t it Hetty’s “hard experience” to which much of the novel is primarily dedicated? But it’s Hetty who is not able to read her own experience and learn from it: that’s for Dinah, and us, to do.

Just Briefly…

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I hope to write a proper post soon on the combined efforts of Audrey Niffenegger and Sarah Waters to make me believe in ghosts (or not). In the meantime, I thought this was as nice a suggestion about the difference that marks out “literature” from other written texts as I’ve seen:

Art that is not in an argument with itself declines to entertainment.

It’s a bit of Howard Jacobson’s commentary in a Guardian round-up of contemporary novelists on whether Tolstoy is “the greatest writer of all time.” None of them really answers that question directly, but they all seem to be fans. Which reminds me: my lovely copy of the Pevear and Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace still sits pristine on my shelf: I hereby commit myself to reading it in 2010!

This Week in My Classes (January 6, 2010): Beginnings

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It feels as if this year there was an unpleasantly (even, unconscionably) short time between the end of exams–or, more significantly, the end of marking exams–and the beginning of our new term. The feeling of hurtling headling into another round of, well, everything was exacerbated by the entire administrative structure of the university being closed from the day I submitted my final grades until the day I showed up to teach again. Well, it’s nice that some people weren’t working between December 24 and January 3, but for some reason I didn’t think I could just show up on January 4, walk into the classroom and start talking. Good thing I didn’t need the library, a/v support, answers about anything from room booking or the Registrar’s Office, or a printer.

Sigh.

But I was, mostly, ready. And the truth about teaching (one truth, anyway) is that there’s only so much you can do in advance. I find I can’t even draft detailed lecture notes much ahead of time if I want to really mean the things I say. For one thing, transitions and examples that seem absolutely reasonable at one moment can look wholly obscure at another (“Why have I put ‘quote Arnold’ here, again? Which Arnold?”). And for another, each class meeting has to be to some extent responsive to the one that came before it (and the ones that came before that). So I usually focus a lot of energy and attention on the scaffolding for my classes–planning reading and assignment sequences, tweaking course policies, setting up Blackboard sites and so forth. This time I obsessed about the wiki projects I am doing with my Brit Lit survey class (very similar to the one JBJ describes here), especially the instructions (detailed! with screen shots!) and the evaluation rubric. I also puzzled for some time over what assignments to use in my graduate seminar, as I am tired of going through the ritual round of in-class seminar presentations (in the end, I decided to move a fair amount of writing and discussion onto, you guessed it, a class blog). I’m hopeful that these mildly innovative formats for our work will be energizing for the students as well as for me, but right now I feel exhausted from the effort it took to create the sites and then explain (and justify, pedagogically or methodologically) their use.

And even having laboured over syllabi and websites and reserve lists and discussion questions until my eyes were all starey and red, the problem still remained: what to say in class? Luckily, for one class (Mystery & Detective Fiction) I have a lot of material to draw on from previous years, so this time all I added was some pizazz in the form of PowerPoint slides. There really is no lecture that can’t be improved by a large picture of Humphrey Bogart. For my graduate seminar, I knew I wanted to begin with an overview of George Eliot’s life and philosophy, also something I’ve done before. I also had asked them to read three of her major essays (“Woman in France,” “The Natural History of German Life,” and “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists”), so we could begin our seminar work with some discussion of, among other things, gender and voice.

The big blank for me was how to start up the Brit Lit survey. In the end I decided to go with a sort of ‘motivational speaker does literary history’ thing, emphasizing ways in which a text can hum with unexpected significance if we bring to it a keen enough sense of the contexts and forms on which it draws, or to which it responds. To feel that energy ourselves, we have to stock up on ideas and information, including historical and literary-historical, so that, for instance, we can look at something that otherwise might seem entirely innocuous, even trivial (my example was “I wandered lonely as a cloud”) and see it as, in its own way, revolutionary. Why would someone say this thing, in this way, at this time? Under the circumstances, what did it mean? And then, of course, given all that and everything else we know, what does it mean for us? I had the idea that they should not take the class, or literary history for that matter, for granted–not just sit there and be writing down things about what the texts meant, or who wrote them and when. Nobody has ever (I think!) written literature in the hope of being anthologized, after all. People write (or so I assume) so that other people will join with them, if only temporarily or provisionally. Anyway, I tried to communicate some sense of why I think it matters (and helps) to know something about literary and historical contexts; I tried to make the discussion at once abstract and personal (for them, not for me). Today, on the other hand, I made large generalizations about “Romanticism” and pointed to some sections of “Tintern Abbey.” I think that was more what they were expecting from the course.

First Day of Classes

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Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less under anxious control.

How many years, exactly, do I have to do this before I no longer feel jittery on the first day?

Novel Readings 2009

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It’s time for my annual review of the highs and lows of my reading year.

Books I’m most glad I read, either for the intrinsic richness of the aesthetic, affective, or intellectual experience they offered, for the conversations they generated, or for the ideas and connections they offered for my teaching and research:

1. Daniel Mendelsohn, The Lost. This book made by far the strongest impression on me of any I read this year. Devastating though it is, it also manages to be surprising, suspenseful, and sometimes even comical. Mendelsohn manages to be self-reflexive about his research and writing, about his own assumptions and limitations, without ever compromising his dedication to reaching after the truth of the story he is telling or his respect for the suffering of those whose story it really is. It’s a remarkable accomplishment.

2. Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk. I ended up enjoying this novel as much for the way it implicitly chastised me for my own assumptions (about fiction, about families) as for the story it told. I’m happy to say that Santa (OK, my mom) sent me Sugar Street and Palace of Desire for Christmas, so I’ll be reading–and, I expect, writing about–Mahfouz again in 2010.

3. Khaled Hosseini, A Thousand Splendid Suns. Although (as I say also in my original review) I don’t think this is actually a great novel by literary standards, and in retrospect I feel my own emotional reaction to it was the result of some heavy-handed narrative and ideological manipulation (pain! suffering! injustice! misogyny!), it’s impossible to ignore the very real pain, suffering, injustice, and misogyny of the world it fictionalizes.

4. Mahbod Seraji, Rooftops of Tehran. Unlike A Thousand Splendid Suns, Rooftops of Tehran is not a sensational or particularly populist treatment of its material. It reaches across cultural differences to tell a story of yearning and love, emphasizing feelings that are universal, if differently embodied or characterized based on circumstances. At times a bit heavy-handedly pedagogical, it still avoids the trap of what I am now thinking about as ‘moral tourism’: it isn’t an Iran packaged for mass consumption and political ends, but something more inward-looking and sincere.

5. Charlotte Bronte, Villette. This year’s choice for our summer reading project at The Valve, Bronte’s perverse exploration of thwarted desire, religious conflict, surveillance, and narrative unreliability offers all kinds of fun and surprises, especially for those who think the Victorians were all naive realists. (D’oh! But there really are people who think that. In my experience, many of them are specialists in late 20th-century fiction whose favourite straw man looks a lot like Trollope, but doesn’t have his metafictional savvy.)

6. Ian Colford, Evidence. Understated, even insidious, these stories leave their mark on your consciousness, like inky thumbprints.

7. Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway. It seems somehow significant that I quoted from this novel instead of writing much about it. It’s not that there aren’t ideas in it, or that its form and technique isn’t inviting to criticism, but for me this was a reading experience that was very much about easing up my critical grip (which seemed to be deforming my reading) and savouring the tactile quality of the language. My feelings about this book were also much affected by my thoughts about a special student, Samantha Li; I only wish I had read it before it was too late to talk to her about it.

8. William Boyd, Any Human Heart. Dear students: The main character in this book is not at all “relatable.” Guess what–that doesn’t matter! You don’t have to like him (though by the end I was fond of him after all, as you are of someone you’ve known their whole life). You just have to go along, feeling the pulses of his idiosyncratic life and personality. He has no special insight, into himself or any larger contexts; he isn’t even especially charismatic. But, as George Eliot points out in Adam Bede, most of the people around us are nothing special–we need to adapt our aesthetic to that reality, and it turns out to be a surprisingly moving experience.

9. Hilary Mantel, Wolf Hall. Wolf Hall surprised me by not resembling any other historical fiction I’ve read. For one thing, there is almost no exposition. Mantel’s trick of referring to Cromwell throughout as “he,” though it does create the occasional awkwardness, also creates an oddly intimate atmosphere: we are with him, in close proximity, as if standing by his shoulder, but there’s a little separation remaining. First-person narration would have overcome it, but then I think the novel would have felt more artificial, and the emotions would have had to run higher–a mistake in a novel remarkable for its restraint (yes, even at 650 pages, it feels tightly controlled). And the language: it is crafted with the precision of Ian McEwan’s prose, but with a higher sheen of poetic possibility. Here’s a little bit that describes and exemplifies the novel’s characteristically taut balance of eloquence and repression:

There’s a feeling of power in reserve, a power that drives right through the bone, like the shiver you sense in the shaft of an axe when you take it into your hand. You can strike, or you can not strike, and if you choose to hold back the blow, you can still feel inside you the resonance of the omitted thing.

The central conflict is not Henry VIII against God, or fate, or his wives, for denying him a son, or Anne against Katherine, or any of the other stock melodramas of Tudor fiction (and television), but Cromwell, the self-made man, the accountant, the bureaucrat, the statesman, the pragmatist, the modern man, against extremism, privilege, waste, indulgence–and especially against Thomas More, who delights in torturing heretics and seeks a pointless (to him, a martyr’s) death.

10. Nadeem Aslam, The Wasted Vigil. Is it wrong to make something so beautiful out of material so terrible? Is terrorism really analogous to vandalism? Both obliterate the beauty (realized or potential) and the creativity of humanity.

This year I’ll skip over the list of low points. There weren’t many, happily–most of the other books I read were in the OK – to – mediocre range, which only irks me when they win awards.

In last year’s post I noted the expansion of my blogging horizons that came with the invitation to write for The Valve. This year I have been pleased to contribute to Open Letters: I’m glad they made room for my piece on Trollope among their many astute and engaging essays and reviews, and I’ve got a little thing on Felix Holt appearing in their January 2010 issue, so stay tuned for that.

Looking ahead, I’m anticipating an unusually busy term coming up, with three classes including one all-new one and some new kinds of assignments. Still, I hope to have time to keep up my usual series on teaching, and also to fit in some reading for myself. Looking over my year-end posts for 2007 and 2008, it is notable how such ‘pleasure’ reading feeds into my research and teaching (the leading example being Ahdaf Soueif’s In the Eye of the Sun, which went from being just another book I’d read to the lynchpin of a reconceptualized research program). Perhaps something I read in 2010 will end up turning me in another new direction, or adding in some other unanticipated way to my life. But in any case here are some of the books I’m most looking forwarding to reading or re-reading:

  1. Sarah Waters, The Little Stranger. It’s great to feel so confident that a book will be both extremely smart and extremely entertaining.
  2. Hilary Mantel, A Place of Great Safety. Speaking of confidence, Wolf Hall gave me confidence in Mantel as both a stylist and a historical novelist.
  3. Naguib Mahfouz, Sugar Street and The Palace of Desire.
  4. Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf.
  5. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead.
  6. War and Peace. Somehow, it didn’t get read in 2009, but I’m sure it will be there for me when I’m ready for it.
  7. Vikram Seth, A Suitable Boy. I’m going to keep putting this on my TBR list until I actually read it.
  8. Dickens, Our Mutual Friend. I haven’t read this since my undergraduate Victorian fiction class in 1989. Once every twenty years seems like a minimum for what I remember as one of the best of Dickens.
  9. George Eliot, Romola. I’ve assigned this for my graduate seminar on George Eliot this term. It was a tough call between it and Felix Holt, but Romola has been on the back burner the longest. When it is good, it is very, very, very good. When it is bad, characters say things like ‘You are as welcome as the cheese to the macaroni.’
  10. Audrey Niffenegger, Her Fearful Symmetry. All appearances (and movie adaptations) to the contrary, The Time Traveller’s Wife is a gritty, suspenseful, intellectual romance. Sure, you have to accept a wacky premise, but for me at least, it was worked through with surprising toughness. So I’m game to see how Niffenegger follows it up.
  11. David Mitchell, Black Swan Green. Because you told me to!

Greg Mortenson & David Oliver Relin, Three Cups of Tea

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

[April 18, 2011: See below for update.]

The subtitle of Three Cups of Tea is “One Man’s Mission to Promote Peace . . . One School at a Time.” What I found moving and inspiring about this book, however, is that Mortenson’s mission was not to promote peace but to provide education, not to bring an agenda (even one as benign-sounding as peacemaking) to the villages of the Karakoram region but in response to a profound desire he meets there and answers. To put it another way, he does not set out to shape the region to his interests, or American, or ‘Western,’ interests, as the subtitle misleadingly implies, but rather listens to the villagers who become his friends and mentors and then sets out to bring them what they want, for themselves and especially for their children.

During Mortenson’s first stay in the village of Korphe in 1993, after a failed attempt to climb the mountain known as “K2,” Haji Ali, the chief of the village, takes him to see where the children go to study:

He was appalled to see eighty-two children … kneeling on the frosty ground, in the open. Haji Ali, avoiding Mortenson’s eyes, said that the village had no school, and the Pakistani government didn’t provide a teacher. A teacher cost the equivalent of one dollar a day, he explained, which was more than the village could afford. So they shared a teacher with the neighboring village of Munjung, and he taught in Korphe three days a week. The rest of the time the children were left alone to practice the lessons he left behind. . .

After the last note of the [Pakistani] anthem had faded, the chldren sat in a neat circle and began copying their multiplication tables. Most scratched in the dirt with sticks they’d brought for that purpose. The more fortunate . . . had slate boards they wrote on with sticks dipped in a mixture of mud and water. ‘Can you imagine a fourth-grade class in America, alone, without a teacher, sitting there quietly and working on their lessons?’ Mortenson asks. ‘I felt like my heart was being torn out. There was a fierceness in their desire to learn, despite how mightily everything was stacked against them, that reminded me of Christa [his recently deceased sister]. I knew I had to do something.’

Three Cups of Tea is the record of what he did, and his accomplishments are truly astonishing. Working single-mindedly and also, for some time, more or less single-handedly, he raised the money for the Korphe school first and then gradually expanded his efforts (and, even more gradually, his resources) until eventually the Central Asia Institute he created, launched by a $12,000 check from a single generous donor in response to Mortenson’s first fundraising efforts, became a substantial organization that has built, to date, 130 schools. Small amounts of money (by Western standards) were more than matched by the investments of time, labour, and passion made by the local people who worked with Mortenson to realize, not Mortenson’s vision, but their own.

Hushe School Inauguration, Pakistan
Image Courtesy of Central Asia Institute

One of the most memorable scenes comes as the Korphe school is nearing completion. A local strong-man, Haji Mehdi, shows up with his “henchmen,” all carrying clubs, and declares Mortenson an “‘infidel [who] has come to poison Muslim children, boys as well as girls. . . . Allah forbids the education of girls. And I forbid the construction of this school.'” Haji Ali squares off against him and eventually agrees to Haji Mehdi’s terms, which are that he turn over the twelve best rams in the village to save the school. “‘You have to understand,'” Mortenson explains, “‘in these villages, a ram is like a firstborn child, prize cow, and family pet all rolled into one. The most sacred duty of each family’s oldest boy was to care for their rams, and they were devastated.'” But they bring the rams and Haji Ali hands them over to the blackmailer without a word and then “herd[s] his people toward the site of the school.”

‘It was one of the most humbling things I’ve ever seen,’ Mortenson says. ‘Haji Ali had just handed over half the wealth of the village to that crook, but he was smiling like he’d just won a lottery.’

Haji Ali paused before the building everyone in the village had worked so hard to raise. It held its ground firmly before Korphe K2, with snugly built stone walls, plasted and painted yellow, and thick wooden doors to beat back the weather. Never again would Korphe’s children kneel over their lessons on frozen ground. ‘Don’t be sad,’ he told the shattered crowd. ‘Long after all those rams are dead and eaten this school will still stand. Haji Mehdi has food today. Now our children have education forever.’

Later, he shows Mortenson his Koran, which he cannot read, and tells him, “‘This is the greatest sadness in my life. I’ll do anything so the children of my village never have to know this feeling. I’ll pay any price so they have the education they deserve.'”

Mortenson was working on schools and, eventually, other projects in this region long before it became the focus of world, and especially American, attention after September 11, 2001. In fact, he was in Pakistan on 9/11, when he gets the news from his host that “‘A village called New York has been bombed.'” On September 14, he and his colleague George McCown attended an opening ceremony for another school, in Kuardu village, at which Syed Abbas, an important Shia leader in the region, gives the keynote address:

‘Today is a day that you children will remember forever and tell your children and grandchildren. Today, from the darkness of illiteracy, the light of education shines bright.

‘We share in the sorrow as people weep and suffer in America today, as we inaugurate this school. Those who have committed this evil act against the innocent, the women and children, to create thousands of widows and orphans, do not do so in the name of Islam. By the grace of Allah the Almighty, may justice be served upon them. . . .

‘These two Christian men have come halfway around the world to bring our Muslim children the light of education. Why have we not been able to bring education to our children on our own? Fathers and parents, I implore you to dedicate your full effort and commitment to see that all your children are educated. Otherwise, they will merely graze like sheep in the field, at the mercy of nature and the world changing so terrifyingly around us.

Syed Abbas closes with a wish that the people of America would see into the hearts of his people,

‘and see that the great majority of us are not terrorists, but good and simple people. Our land is stricken with poverty because we are without education. But today, another candle of knowledge has been lit. In the name of Allah, may it light our way out of the darkness we find ourselves in.’

A lot changes, for Mortenson’s work and for the regions he works in, after 9/11, and Three Cups of Tea chronicles the increasingly politicized and then militarized context, the danger and suffering caused by the war, and Mortenson’s attempts to explain what he knows (and loves) about the region to everyone he can reach. That education is a vital part of any long term solution, not just to the poverty of the villagers, but to the region’s stability and resistance to extremism is obvious to him and thus becomes a major part of the story he tells and, eventually, almost perversely, Al Qaeda provides Mortenson’s ticket to success. Suddenly, everyone is interested in those mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and Mortenson’s school projects catch the sympathetic imagination of enough of the American public that the CAI really takes off. He stays doggedly independent, though, refusing any government money, for instance, because he knows that such an affiliation would undermine the trust he has built up through nearly a decade of close personal contact.

The larger socio-political argument for Mortenson’s work is compelling, but the heart of his project is really what an opportunity to go to school can mean for a village, or even more, for a particular student: it’s the students scraping out their lessons in the dirt who inspired Mortenson to help them, not some grandiose theory about reconciling East and West. Haji Ali’s granddaughter Jahan is one of those students in Korphe. Later, after becoming “one of the Korphe school’s best students,” she interrupts a meeting Mortenson is having with the village elders to demand he fulfill another of his promises, to help her realize her dream of becoming a doctor. “‘I’m ready to begin my medical training,'” she announces, “‘and I need twenty thousand rupees.'” Journalist Kevin Fedarko was there:

‘It was one of the most incredible things I’ve ever seen in my life,’ Fedarko says. ‘Here comes this teenage girl, in the center of a conservative Islamic village, waltzing into a circle of men, breaking through about sixteen layers of tradition at once. She had graduated from school and was the first educated woman in a valley of three thousand people. She didn’t defer to anyone, sat down right in front of Greg, and handed him the product of the revolutionary skills she’d acquired–a proposal, in English, to better herself, and improve the life of her village.’

With help from the CAI, Jahan pursues the next level of her studies in the nearby city of Skardu. She flourishes, and as her horizons broaden, so too do her ambitions:

‘I don’t want to be just a health worker. I want to be such a woman that I can start a hospital and be an executive, and look over all the health problems of all the women in the Braldu. I want to become a very famous woman of this area. . . . I want to be a . . . “Superlady,”‘ she said, grinning defiantly, daring anyone, any man, to tell her she couldn’t.

It’s impossible not to agree with Mortenson: “Five hundred and eighty letters, twelve rams, and ten years of work was a small price to pay . . . for such a moment.” And yet it seems important not to forget that though Jahan may indeed be breaking traditions, defiantly daring men in particular to stop her, it was those very village elders, and especially her own grandfather, Haji Ali, whose vision and persistence first brought Mortenson to her.

I thought Three Cups of Tea was overwritten: the descriptions are excessive, the prose sometimes heavy-handed and tendentious. I also wonder about the long passages of dialogue, even speeches, that appear to have been remembered with uncanny precision despite the hectic circumstances of the moment and the passage of time. The story itself, however, is intrinsically so interesting, and such a testimony to the ability of a single person to move mountains (a metaphor that, perhaps inevitably, is exploited endlessly because of Mortenson’s climbing background) that it’s a great read nonetheless. I challenge any of you to read it and not end up, as I did, making a donation. Yes, it is a good thing to promote peace. But whatever the other results, it’s an intrinsically good thing for children to have a clean, safe place to learn, and a particularly great thing for girls to have an equal share in this opportunity.

Girls study in outdoor school, Afghan refugee camp, Pakistan
Image courtesy Central Asia Institute

[Update: April 18, 2011: This week the CBS news show 60 Minutes ran a story raising serious questions about the veracity of key details of Mortenson’s story in Three Cups of Tea as well as about Mortenson’s and CAI’s handling of the money they receive as donations. If they are right and their representation of the situation is accurate, this is certainly very disappointing and disillusioning. Mortenson and CAI have both made statements in response that can be seen here. As one of the many thousands who were moved by Mortenson’s story, I feel uneasy at what seems to have been a betrayal of my trust, and concerned that the donation I made may not have served the purpose I intended it for, namely to contribute to the education  of girls who deserve better than they have.]


This Term in My Classes: “Thank you for such an odd yet interesting course!”

Rohan MaitzenLeave a comment

As of late yesterday afternoon, I had finally filed all of my grades for my fall term course: a late exam (December 18th) proved both a blessing (because I had time to finish up other things in the meantime) and a curse (because I couldn’t wrap things up sooner even if I wanted to). I know that writing exams is very stressful, so I’m always touched when a student takes a precious minute or two to include a little “thank you” or “happy holidays” message to me at the end. There were several of those this year (and thank you, too, if any of you are reading this, and enjoy your well-earned break!), including the one quoted in the title to this post. As you can imagine, it gave me pause. “Odd yet interesting”? Of course, I’m glad it was interesting, but I wish I knew what was odd about it. Like the frequent comment on my course evaluations that I am “so organized,” this one makes me wonder just what my colleagues are doing, which in turn makes me think about how hermetically sealed our classrooms are, at least to each other. I haven’t had a colleague sit in on one of my own classes since I was compiling my tenure dossier nearly a decade ago; I’ve observed teaching demonstrations by job candidates and sat in once or twice at the request of a graduate student or junior colleague also working on his or her teaching dossier, but that’s it. Although teaching is done in front of an audience, when I think about it it is a strangely isolating experience also: you prepare alone, by and large, you carry out your plans as best you can and measure your success, or not, against your own standards and intentions, then you shuffle back to your office and get ready to do it all over again. Inevitably, after you’ve been doing it for a while, you find strategies (and handouts, and assignments, and textbooks, and so on) that you like and because there aren’t that many opportunities to compare what you are doing to what other people are doing, you start thinking of yourself as the norm–until you discover that, at least to someone, you seem “odd”! Actually, now that I think about it, last year I got a very nice card from a wonderful Honours student who also made a remark that made me wonder about myself: to paraphrase, she said that I had shown her that there were “other ways” of studying literature. Other than what?

Hazarding a guess, it has something to do with my attempts to talk about literature as something of personal and moral significance. I end my Victorian novel classes, for instance, after reviewing the historical and literary contexts we have studied and the major thematic and critical arcs of the specific texts, with a little speech about the conviction most Victorian novelists display that we, the readers, are where the real action has to go on: not only do they engage us in the novels, with strategies such as intrusive narration and direct address to us, the ‘dear readers,’ but they frequently point to public apathy, indifference, ignorance, or prejudice as the source of their characters’ difficulties. Lydgate’s failure? Dorothea’s unhistoric life? We made it possible, with our pettiness and self-absorption. Jo’s death? Well, aren’t they “dying thus around us every day”? The whole of Vanity Fair? Isn’t that where we live? I wrote a bit about these ‘closing perorations’ last year:

A further, and related, feature of these novels, and one that seems to me of increasing importance, is the imperative they communicate that we, as readers, have a lot of responsibilities: to read well, to judge carefully, and to think about our own role in the social worlds and institutions the novelists examine so imaginatively and often so critically—many of which have continuations or counterparts, after all, in modern society. At heart, this is the demand these novels make on us—to get involved, as readers—to acknowledge that the world they talk about is always, if not always literally, our own. When still an aspiring novelist herself, George Eliot remarked that “art is the nearest thing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending our contact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.” Right now, there is a lot of interest in fiction in this way, as a literary form that perhaps is specially suited to bringing about change in the world as well as in individuals. For example, Martha Nussbaum has published a book called Poetic Justice in which she holds up Dickens’s Hard Times as exemplary of the potential role of the literary imagination in public life—holding up a vision of human flourishing that contrasts with the theories most at play in socio-economic theory today, and that she argues is best cultivated precisely through the form of the novel. This is part of a broader attempt on her part to get the novel as a genre recognized as a form of moral philosophy. I myself have published a paper arguing for the value of George Eliot’s Middlemarch as an ethical text.

My general point is that the very qualities that make 19th-century novels problematic if your approach is formalist, aesthetic, or modernist can be those that make them matter if your approach is philosophical, activist, humanist, or communicative—why not, we might ask, use the powers of language and story-telling to get people thinking and talking about the way they live with other people, or about their ability to face themselves in the mirror in the morning? Yes, these novels are demanding in their length and complexity. But the greatest demand they place on us as readers is to be active, rather than passive, whether through the great moral “labour of choice” we experience vicariously in The Mill on the Floss or through the exercise of our sympathetic imagination and social conscience on behalf of those who need our help, as Bleak House might inspire us.

When I describe myself as a ‘Victorianist’ these days, I don’t really mean ‘someone who is immersed in scholarship about Victorian literature and culture’ (in fact, I confess my interest in ‘Victorian Studies’ as a field has been steadily declining, to the point that for the first time in almost twenty years I have changed my settings for the VICTORIA listserv to “digest”–though I still consider this list exemplary for its wisdom, generosity, and collegiality, I’m just not engaged with the topics it covers). I mean something more like ‘someone who embraces some key Victorian ideas about the novel in particular, and about literature more generally.’ Maybe, again, just guessing, this is what seems ‘odd’ or different. But without knowing what other people do or say in the classroom, I can’t be sure.

Otherwise, things have wrapped up without incident this term. The Victorian Sensations seminar picked up a lot of momentum towards the end, or so I thought. I had to put in some strenuous work for a while, especially when we turned our attention to contemporary criticism, but it seemed to pay off, and the discussions in our last couple of weeks showed that, despite what I thought was a stuttering start, everyone had accumulated a range of good critical strategies and contextual frameworks for discussing our primary texts, including the two I consider the most interpretively elusive, Aurora Floyd and East Lynne. And the Victorian novel class (odd though it may have been) seemed typical enough to me. I do think, though, that it might be time for me to re-imagine it, as I have been teaching the two ‘halves’ of it more or less the same since 2003. I enjoy both the Austen to Dickens and the Dickens to Hardy versions a lot; I vary the texts at least a little every time; and I have used a range of assignment structures. It’s great to have notes and handouts ready to be tweaked and reused. But I think it’s starting to make me a little intellectually lazy, knowing so well what I want to do or say with each novel, or at any rate each author. I have no idea how else to run the courses, but next year, for the first time since 2003, I’m not teaching either of them–in fact, we’re hiring a sessional to cover them, as I’m on half-sabbatical starting in January and will be doing other teaching in the fall. So between now and September 2011, maybe I’ll get some new ideas. Maybe I should sit in on some colleagues’ classes, too, and see what they do. I bet in their own ways, they are odd too, but it would be nice–and probably instructive–to see what the difference is.