Christian Marek's "In the Land of a Thousand Gods": Book Review

After two millennia, the legacy of early Greece continues to fascinate scholars and tourists. Less appreciated may be its neighboring realm, which spawned both rivals to and recipients of Hellenic control. Asia Minor, its very name standing for the exotic beyond the ethnocentric Mediterranean, bridges the East and the West. As events from today's headlines verify, the tension between the Asian and European, the Middle East and the great sea over which so many powers have battled for power exerts itself upon this heartland, where from prehistory on, many forces emanate from an epicenter.

In the Land of a Thousand Gods tells the story of this cultural and political hub, from the Stone Age to the Roman Empire. A massive work, it began with the research into cuneiform and hieroglyphics provided by Peter Frei, who taught ancient history at the University of Zurich. His student and successor, Christian Marek, completes this survey. Steven Rendell translates the 2010 German edition and incorporates a few updates to a compilation encompassing classics, Oriental Studies, linguistics, archaeology, prehistory and anthropology. Supplemented by necessary genealogies, maps, documentation and black-and-white illustrations, these appendices total over 170 pages. The text itself, while densely printed and closely argued, nevertheless aims at the general, if diligent, reader.

Details linger within the academic exploits recorded by Marek on every page, as excavators and discoverers vied to leave their mark upon the ruins opened up to acquisition by those in the vanguard of European colonial expansion. Inscriptions upon stone drove Phillipe Le Bas, as the 19th century closed, to boast of his triumph. "I left Mylasa, having squeezed every drop of juice from the lemon. In future, travelers can dispense with going there. I have not left them the slightest kernel to find."

This eagerness to claim and conquer spurred many in centuries previous, too. The region rests on its rubble. Buildings were often destroyed to excavate even older sites. Dams flood nowadays more and more of Anatolia, hastening current archaeological digs. In the past, of course, conquerors eradicated peoples and razed cities, only to have their inhabitants, returning or replacing those victims of war, raise up new edifices, streets rising to shove levels higher. These striated remnants challenge scholars who delve beneath the surfaces, over thousands of years of occupation. From coinage to economics, religion to poetry, science and strategy, Marek allows patient students a comprehensive guide to this evolution from the Bronze and Iron Ages to the incursions of the Persians and then their bitter enemies, the Greeks. The Hellenistic polity in the wake of Alexander the Great gives way to the enforced Pax Romana. Then, the Roman republic capitulating to the imperial imposition of order, the provinces of Asia Minor emerge. Administration and socio-political considerations are then covered.

The results in this hefty volume will overwhelm any casual inquirer, but this book stands as a reference for anyone needing information about nearly any aspect of this period and this landmass. While in-depth as a whole, the chapters, needing to span so much, can race by. The reader will find that the sudden conclusion, as the Byzantine Christian establishment supplants and soon attempts to eliminate its pagan Roman forebears, comes as hastily as the onset of the new faith must have appeared to many who had long lived in Anatolia and its environs, worshiping a thousand gods. (Spectrum Culture 11/11/16; Amazon US 12/9/16.)

Demographics + DNA

The Jarnsaxa Scale  was devised by a heathen practitioner who goes by Jarnsaxa Thorskona, a while back. She explains at the link that she devised this to differentiate between 1-6 a rough continuum or division between those who affiliated with Ásatrú. As I've been exploring the claims and contexts of this and other native European as well as Celtic Reconstructionist movements, I am posting the link to bring back the scale, which its creator admits she tried to erase during a time of separation from her spiritual path, and since more than one search engine's results, I found, attested to the dead content a seeker might encounter now.

"Rags" at this blog under "Divisions, Intensified" notes that the scale is not perfect, of course. For "many people (including the scale's creator) find that they fit somewhere in between numbers on the scale, showing further how complex the issue really is. However, in general the scale is a fairly balanced way of gauging where a person fits in the endless discussion of ancestry." You can scan too a summation of the folkish-universalist/adoptivist debate there, for FAQ reference.

Suffice to say I've set this down as notes of my own reflective study lately. This folkish controversy--if inevitably you want to label it as such in a year where "whiteness" sparks campaign clickbait--makes me wonder how applicable its adherents see it in Celtic cultures. For as the Paganachd CR site's authors explain, the construct of Celt is that of linguistics and not bloodlines. This to my admittedly general understanding differs from the importance on pedigree that tribal membership, whether among Native Americans or Ásatrúar, looms as fundamentally crucial to who gets to stay and who has to go, when ceremonies and rituals begin.

I think back to my visit to Taos Pueblo. Parts of the settlement were blocked off with signs and sawhorses for sacred purposes. I doubt any of us visiting felt excluded or discriminated against as a result. Their Blue Lake origins demand protection, after a century-plus battle to preserve a sanctuary. Sarah Merfeld explains: "Due to the persistence of the Pueblo and all who assisted in their campaign, the native people are now able to enjoy their sanctuary in privacy. The area is currently accessible only to the Taos Pueblo and outsiders are not allowed entrance. This secrecy and stick ban of any non-Pueblo members is certainly a reaction to the abusive treatment the Pueblo have received."

Therefore, I understand the analogy. Folkish rituals celebrate and commemorate ties to the ancestral roots of one's kin. They can also put up a protective barrier, a palisade, against the intruder or gawker. It's not popular now to extend this right of tribal inclusion to those of European descent, but as Stephen McNallen asks in a 2014 interview, why is one group alone not allowed to assert this claim? We live in a multicultural society, but as tensions reveal this election year, this inquiry skirts taboo.

And, logically although I have yet to find anyone arguing this at length at least on the net, that may be why the CR band opens up admission to all fellow-travelers called to that path, opposed to McNallen's AFA  indicating in its declaration their cautious approach, higher on that Jarnsaxa Scale. The proto-Celts formed a looser conglomeration; the Nordics a tighter troop committed to the core? Certainly the local stress on "where are your family from" connects, say, Iceland and Ireland. I regard these indigenous ideas as fascinating. In a nation where "demographics" stirs us into a tossed salad, it's wise to resist the "we're all mutts" resignation cutting us off from our inherited wisdom tradition. Yet I can contemplate this counter-reaction, to invite others to share our legacy, if they're sincere in it.

The argument folkish folks make is that in us, we gravitate towards our accustomed ways of affinity. The monotheistic elimination of such ties being very recent, compared to millennia among one's own. A few feel the urge to connect, as re-ligio or re-binding denotes, with this attenuated or severed flow. It may be inexplicable, and to me as intellectually uncertain as AFA's "metagenetics" claim that I doubt any biologist would accept any more than he or she would the Jungian archetype, but that tug back to recover what has been demolished persists in me, too. I recall cheering on the Druids, not St. Patrick, as I read the chronicles of my native land, and its surrounding islands, struggling for identity.

We all face forces of assimilation. Capitulated, my pre-Catholic family, and many more, 1600 years ago. What happens when the language is lost is more recent, just a century past, for my mother's father's household on the East Mayo border. Scars can be inside one's soul; trauma passed down to us to nurse. Recognizing the losses of a common tongue, a shared outlook, a cherished mindset need not expose us to charges of romanticizing a harsh existence under feudal lords and rapacious clergy. Deeply rooted, as when we hear the pipes or taste a whiskey, there persists a moment of recognition.

Yes, that does complicate it, too. If Ásatrúar argue for common bonds of the Northern peoples, this is more ancient than the Celtic-Roman-Norman-Viking-Saxon-Pict mishmash that divided up the North Atlantic Archipelago during the ages of invasion and destruction of the old heathen ways. Celts, too, I suggest, might have been more open to a less restrictive idea of unity, given the mythic nine waves of invaders, Fir Bolg and Tuatha De Danaan, Formorians and Milesians and All That. Who gets accepted as Irish simply means who lives there after a while. And a roll call of rebels and Fenians lists surnames de Valera, Pearse, Kent, Gonne, Plunkett, Tone, and Colbert, no O/Mc clans these.

Judaism is not a missionary faith, but converts after screening and preparation can prove their bona fides. Zoroastrianism, on the other hand, forbids conversion and risks dying out among the Parsees in India, let alone its persecuted homeland of Iran. DNA as I have mused before suggests intriguing results. My 93% score indicates a definite "Celtic"(sic) haplotype marking me as Irish as Paddy's pig.

But it's that 6% Central Asian, perhaps going back to 25,000 years ago and more, and maybe with bits of Neanderthal and Denisovan strains, that also makes me wonder. And that 1% East Asian tint. In shamans and in divination, in spirit-searches and transmigrations of all kinds, my family tree stretches back to ice and fur, incantations and inspirations I strain to glimpse, part of my own quest.

(Photo: Éamon de Valera, President of the Irish Republic, made an honorary chief of the Ojibwe-Chippewa people, 1919. Find out how and why at: "The Irish Revolution and Native America")

John Gimlette's "Elephant Complex: Travels in Sri Lanka": Book Review

A few years ago, the title "At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig" caught my eye, naturally. It was a travelogue through Paraguay, full of interest and wit. The author, John Gimlette, has wandered into many realms before and since that one, and he's chronicled them similarly. Inspired by his Tamil neighbors in London, he decides to visit Sri Lanka.

While William McGowan's harrowing "Only Man Is Vile" (1992; also reviewed by me) delved into the civil war in the eastern territory between the Hindu Tamils and the Buddhist Sinhalese, Gimlette visits the island nation as its people struggle to recover, a few years into a precarious peace. He is admirably cautious in sifting through the accounts of strife. His notes suggest further reading on topics, a valuable resource to a nation about which much lately had been reported.

His book's chapters track some of the titular paths the elephant takes as it traverses, for thousands of years, the terrain, without caring for the humans who have settled there since. Starting in Colombo, he takes in the dry zone of the north-central province, the cinnamon forts and traces of the Portuguese colonization, echoes of Dutch burghers on the south coast and Sinhalese redoubt, and the Great Road and the highlands. Then he stays in Kandy, and later with "Little England" planters amid the tea terraces. The south-east with both the much-reduced indigenous tribes and the post-war Tamil Tigers populate a remote region. The spirits of "Trinco" from another war, the world one seven decades ago, haunt that area.

The last chapters revolve around the island's conflict and the physical and emotional impacts it left on the nation's peoples. Gimlette, a skilled veteran, keeps the pace steady and his gaze alert. He does not delve into sentiment, but he sympathizes with the damage, and he directs us to follow his itinerary with alertness. He ends by knowing when his welcome is over, and when he passes away from the end of a troubled era here. (Amazon US 12-31-15)

Ryan Pyle's "Chinese Turkestan": Book Review

Ryan Pyle, an award-winning Canadian photographer who travels around and beyond his adapted Chinese home, presents a look at Xinjiang, for which he favors the old Chinese Turkestan title as better suited to its cultural diversity. In his short preface, he notes he does not want to "pontificate," but to present the modernization of this land by the Chinese with minimal commentary. That he does, in spare captions.

The paucity of background beyond the helpful introduction makes the reader turn viewer. Pyle places the captions a few pages away from the black and white photos. This has the advantage of allowing you to sink deeper into them, but the small red typeface (as well as the bright red binding and trim) do jolt you a bit.

Some photos benefit from the two-page layout, but this book is smaller in size than the coffee-table format I anticipated. (I was asked to review it.) Many, over half, document  the fast-changing main city of Kashgar, some in Khotan, and then they roam to the borderlands and wilder places. Fields and desert take over.

I expected more on the desolate Tian Shan mountains, but there is little coverage of the higher places. Most of Pyle's spare images show people, in factories, mills, streets, on paths, and among farms. He keeps the focus on them rather than natural landscapes, as he tries to give us a sense of its inhabitants.

This is welcome for its depiction of a place few of us may know beyond its ancient Silk Road aura. The reality as the Chinese regime changes this place and exploits its resources and imports its Han into a traditionally Muslim and Buddhist enclave must be interpreted. For, these are often minimalist portrayals. Author's site. 
Amazon US 2-6-15

David Mitchell's "The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet": Book Review

Certainly, the ambitious tales David Mitchell tells, by this his fifth novel, involve dreams, culture clashes, and searches for immortality, creepy or seductive. As parts of "Ghostwritten" and "Cloud Atlas" took place in Asia, so "Number 9 Dream" emerged within Japan. As with "Cloud," a British adventurer and Low Countries contexts appear, and as with "Black Swan Green," a study of an empire at war hovers in the margins, and here these contexts become the center stage, 1800 Nagasaki.

"The Thousand Autumns of Jacob De Zoet" follows an ordinary Zeelander clerk in the employ of the Dutch East India Company to Japan, to clean up the books of Dejima, the trading outlet kept apart from the Japanese mainland, an outlet in the harbor, for the rulers strive to keep Christian impacts away, after the natives had eradicated the converts from well over a century earlier (Shusaku Endo's "Silence" (Amazon; see blog) powerfully conveys this era, when Portuguese Jesuits tried to colonize the proud islands.)

Mitchell opens this novel with one of two great set-pieces, a childbirth operation and then a removal of a bladder stone, with graphic imagery, tense medical action, and well-elaborated, gruesome details. His research, as with the many stories told by sailors pressed into Dutch service, adds verisimilitude. I admit the title does not seem to apply: "a thousand autumns" sounds nice, but it doesn't match the duration. The pace moves cleanly, and Mitchell as with his other novels does not show off his prose. He employs it diligently to elaborate characters in believable fashion, and he juggles a lot of factual knowledge that must be inserted into the narrative adroitly, although a few scenes find even garrulous sailors or conniving diplomats reciting lengthy explanations that seem to stretch credulity just a bit.

You get to know those on the ship gradually, and like Jacob, you are introduced step-by-step to the predicament faced by the Dutch traders as forces on the mainland and in Britain encircle their outpost. Mitchell keeps the pace of this sprawling historical narrative relatively brisk. The first parts alternate between Jacob and a Ogawa, a Japanese noble, for reasons that I cannot divulge, but which draw in Orito, a midwife, and a mysterious monastery with suitably eerie rituals and menacing presence. Mitchell enjoys the machinations that he sets in motion, and you will too, in a old-fashioned story full of longing, adventure, backstabbing, and court intrigue. While some parts slow down, the latter third, as one key character's fate is left dramatically hanging, opens up more perspectives, such as the slaves, and allows one to see more into both the Japanese setting often left at a distance from the Dutch and onboard the British vessel which enters to complicate matters far more.

It's always fun to trace character lineages from novel to novel in Mitchell. Here, I caught an ancestor of "Number 9" protagonist Eiyi Miyake, a housekeeper from the same island whom Orito knows. Also, Mo Muntervary of "Ghostwritten" finds a Co. Cork ancestor who roams very far from Ireland.

Suffice to say that this remained a lively, often tense, story. I might have trimmed a bit from the final chapter, which felt compressed and rushed, although Mitchell limns mortality well in more than one character's brave fate, and he hones a deft touch which expresses emotion and ethics insightfully. He does not preach, but he lets moral considerations come forward as the characters debate their fates, and he enriches an expansive story when in many parts you have no idea what happens next with a reflection on enduring themes of loyalty, fidelity, aspiration, and determination: always relevant ones.
(Amazon US 5-27-14)

David Mitchell's "Cloud Atlas": Book Review

I'd been meaning to tackle this over the past decade; I wanted to see the adaptation by the Wachowski siblings released in late 2012. In of all places Park City, Utah (home of Sundance), in the off-season, Layne and I missed it and so opted for "Argo" (cheap ticket) in an exurb faux-Western mall. I tried that Christmas to rally my family after we bickered over Zero Dark Thirty and Django Unchained and I held down my paternal foot as I wasn't in the mood for either to celebrate the mythical birthdate of the purported Prince of Peace. We chose neither, settling on On the Road. Rarely do I venture into a theater these days, grousing as I do at people. prices, popcorn and promotion, but when I do, I want to see a spectacle enhanced by the big screen. I'd heard that ambitious adaptation of a sprawling narrative was met with bewilderment or annoyance; I'd reckoned the po-mo structure of the Booker Prize finalist (not for the first time for this 2004 entry) would baffle viewers as it did some readers. I left it unseen and still shelved.

Then, investigating "Buddhist Fiction," I found UU World nominated it for its shortlist. Dozens of copies (credit post-Matrix buzz!) were checked out of all L.A. and Pasadena libraries, but South Pasadena had it. I grabbed it. I took it along on too-brief an out-of-town trip, and I enjoyed it. Not sure if I loved it. The uphill climb for its first half is more rewarding: the challenge invigorates you to keep going. It accelerates into the curve, and through its central section. Out of that turn, it's downhill. The novel's easier to read, moves rapidly, but there's a sense of anti-climactic ennui. That may fit well the nature of David Mitchell's investigation of repetition and reincarnation, all the same.

This entry covers the passages explicating the themes I found most intriguing. It doesn't delve into the "Russian doll"-structure inspired by Italo Calvino's If On a Winter's Night a Traveller (as I suspected long before learning Mitchell in 2010 via The Paris Review credited that novel I loved thirty years ago) for the 1-2-3-4-5-6 then reversed arrangement--as this is now common knowledge. 

"The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" features a Melville tone: Typee is mentioned later on. South Seas are visited by an American notary from the new city of San Francisco as the Gold Rush erupts. Afflicted by a worm entering his brain carrying a mysterious malady, Adam falls into the care of one Dr. Henry Goose on the voyage on the Prophetess. The style flows easier than much of (the later) Melville: "As Henry & I ate supper, a blizzard of purplish moths seemed to issue from the cracks in the moon, smothering lanterns, faces, food & every surface in a twitching sheet of wings." (39) We later find a typically casual recurrence of an image in the central story on the Big Island of Hawai'i: "Papery moths blowed thru her shimm'rin' eyes'n'mouth too, to'n'fro, yay, to'n'fro." (264)

"Letters from Zehelgem" might have been penned by John Banville or Julian Barnes. It's the type of contemporary novel that's shortlisted for a Booker Prize--as Mitchell a two-time nominee may know well. In the early 1930s, composer Robert Frobisher flees Cambridge, debtors, and justice by presenting himself in Belgium as an amanuensis to his elderly counterpart, and soon rival of sorts, Vyvyan Ayrs. Frobisher's flight from apprehension to Calais sums up his spirit: "Dover an utter fright staffed by Bolsheviks, versified cliffs as Romantic as my arse and a similar hue." (46) 

The tattered book he finds in Ayrs' manse, or half of it, is Ewing's journal, published by his son. In turn, "'Half-Lives': the First Luisa Rey Mystery" continues the saga as the recipient of Frobisher's letters back to England, Rufus Sixsmith, returns at the age of 66. He's a successful nuclear physicist in the late 1970s in California. But he's restless in Buenas Yerbas (a reversal of an early placename for S.F., by the way.) "West, the Pacific eternity. East, our denuded, pernicious, enshrined, thirsty, beserking American continent." (89) His career and his stance on this energy does not please a sinister (naturally) Seabrook corporation. Out of this, one "Hilary V. Hush" generates a pulp thriller, full of chases and conspiracies.

"The Ghastly Ordeal of Timothy Cavendish" takes us to that middle-aged, put-upon middle man, in contemporary England, who runs a feeble "author partnership" press: in its slush pile lands the first Luisa Rey mystery. He deals with the aftermath of a cause celebre where the writer of Knuckle Sandwich meets sudden notoriety, and the attention generates fame and profits for Cavendish. Flush with the proceeds, all seems it will go well, until it doesn't.  Kingsley or Martin Amis might be at home here. Consider this look as Timothy must flee from London: "you sly toupeed quizmaster, you and your tenements of Somalians; viaducts of Kingdom Brunel; malls of casualized labor; strata of soot-blackened bricks and muddy bones of Doctors Dee, Crippen, et al.; hot glass buildings where the blooms of youth harden into aged cacti like my penny-pinching brother." (161) 

On his journey north, Cavendish raises a theme common to Mitchell's characters: "we cross, criscross, and recross our old tracks like figure skaters." (163) His story stops suddenly (as do others), and we leap into an indeterminate post-apocalyptic future where a Korean superstate dominates a blighted planet. "An Orison of Sonmi-451" in the fashion of Haruki Murakami or Philip K. Dick follows an engineered fabricant's entry into sentience. Escorted out of her climate controlled confines, she confides to her listener the strangeness of a natural reality: "Trees, their incremental gymnastics and noisy silence, yes, and their greenness, still mesmerize me." (202) In such phrasing, the beauty of Mitchell's observations freshen the familiar. 

"Sloosha's Crossin' an' Ev'rythin' After" occupies the core around which the other stories are mirrored in two, or tucked into. Zachry's telling recalls the altered language of Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, as well as the dialect and the quest of Huck Finn as one society's fragility is shattered by the arrival of tension, disruption, and unsettling values and ideas. These, filtered via Meronym from an enclave beyond the insular Valleymen, force Zachry to come of age in a brutal clash of cultures and enemies. The Valleymen are visited by Meronym, and Zachry learns why they have ventured so far across the ocean. What has happened after the demise of Nea So Corpros as the Korean hegemony is little understood; Meronym and a few Prescients guard a few factual or mythic gleanings against predators and plague that roil the globe and the miniscule remnants who've survived Earth's collapse.

The Old 'Uns have died off, and ignorance is their legacy to the stragglers who struggle after the meltdown. "Smart mastered sicks, miles, seeds an’ made miracles ord’nary, but it din’t master one thing, nay, a hunger in the hearts o’humans, yay, a hunger for more.” (272) Civilization vs. savagery tears apart the survivors: it's as if delayed gratification eliminated the consumers and capitalists, the warlords and the masses unable to wait and think before rushing to buy, spend, fight, grab, grasp. "Old 'Uns got the Smart o' gods but the savagery o' jackals an' that's what tripped the Fall." (303)

The novel then proceeds to wrap up Zachry's chronicle and propel us back the same way we came in. Although Cavendish sniffs: "As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.'s in postmodernism and chaos theory." (150) Of course, such devices long predate what was my own long slog through this at just this time in grad school and my own collegiate reading in and out of class. Mitchell applies these through such images as the moths cited earlier. It's not that difficult a novel to follow as some grousing readers and critics lamented; anyone who can read Calvino's tale can handle this. The second half, however, moves rapidly and feels often somewhat less engaging as the puzzle-pieces neatly snap together in turn. 

One device that audiences apparently needed a visual guide and a screenplay reboot for in the (unseen as yet by me) film version was the comet-shaped birthmark used by Mitchell to suggest reincarnations or rebirths of protagonists.  On pg. 85, Frobisher introduces his; Luisa finds this
and matches it to her own despite "I just don't believe in this crap" (120) and she tries to talk herself out of it as a coincidence. (122)  Zachry sees on Meronym her "whoahsome wyrd" one just below her shoulder blade in the light of Lady Moon (303); Cavendish reasons such an image "will have to go" if the Luisa Rey "young-hack-versus-corporate-corruption-thriller" will succeed on its potential. "Far too hippie-druggy-New Age"--a sentiment I've found echoed by some resenting the storyline as a novel or a film. (357)

Given as the UU World site and its counterpart study include this on a list of "Buddhist fiction," and granted the Cambridge-trained, now County Cork resident writer married to a Japanese woman and immersed via his fiction in Asian settings, there's no escaping placement of this novel into this niche. Yet, it rests there lightly. 

In "Orison," Sonmi hears from an Abbess (this rank continues among the Valleyman's cult of ancestor worship by icons in barrows on the Big Island) from the ranks of "recidivists" in a cave hidden as a safe house for her and other "tapeworms" who huddle off the corporacratic grid. For "fifteen centuries," nuns have persisted there. A stone figure (resembling of all people Cavendish) named Siddhartha "is a dead man a living ideal." (330) Little is known of the man; his "names" tellingly as well as his doctrine have been forgotten, after the Abbess's elder mentors had been eliminated when "non-consumer religions were criminalized." (The prediction made by the Buddha that after 2500 years his own message would gradually fade comes to mind; the rule of the Corporation-State forming around us may presage "Maitreya" ending the next span of five thousand years as the Buddha's successor. But such speculation lies outside the margins of Mitchell's ambitious narrative.) Sonmi manages to wish for reincarnation in the "colony" and on departure, the Abbess promises to relay her wish to Siddhartha. Later, Zachry will unlock an orison brought by Meronym that reveals Sonmi, whose cult will spread until she has been elevated to a goddess status by the Valleymen.

Progress, these shifts in belief and power, and earthly fate concern others in this novel. Earlier, Frobisher remarks on an aquatint of a Siamese temple. He compares its lore as it's relentlessly ornamented and improved: it will one day be equal to "its counterpart in the Pure Land" (81). Then, humanity's purpose fulfilled, Time will conclude. Frobisher offers an alternative analogy. Like Ayrs, the edifice rises upon the backs of ignorant and anonymous labor, and civilization claims its resplendence through those statesmen and artists who take the credit for themselves, as "architects, masons, and priests."

In the fittingly titled "'Half-Lives': the First Luisa Rey Mystery" Isaac Sachs contemplates the actual vs. a virtual past. The Nietzschean will-to-power enters Vyvyan and Robert's verbal sparring, and by this later section, the Sixsmith Report of Frobisher's correspondent stands for the threat to this humanist resistance against the machine men and women build (like that Siamese temple?). Sachs proposes a virtual past (as in the legacy in story of the Titanic outlasting the memories of its "real-time" survivors) and wonders how corporations and governments will co-opt this. 

Sachs continues to sum up the greater novel he's part of unwittingly. "One model of time: an infinite matryoshka doll of painted moments, each "shell" (the present) encased inside a nest of "shells" (previous presents) I call the actual past but which we perceive as the virtual future." (393) Naturally, comparison of this structure to a Buddhist (or post-modern) conception of impermanence and instability within the stories we tell and which we tell of ourselves opens this up to a neat critique***.

A few pages later, Luisa and a boy, Javier, discuss what if one could see the future. Javier asks: would you want to? Luisa hesitates, wanting to know if the future so seen could be changed or not. (401) She ruminates that acting now in the expectation of what the future holds may trigger that future scenario. "What happens in a minute's time is made by what you do." She leaves the conversation wondering inside her head about this "great imponderable." "Maybe the answer is not one of metaphysics but one, simply, of power."

Necessarily inconclusive, this novel of ideas in its last segment, a reprise of "The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing" deals with civilized incursions across the globe, and how power forces change and alters presents and futures. "Ships bring disease dust here," Mr. Wagstaff observes to Ewing as they land at a Christian settlement on Rataoia in the newly named Society Islands. The natives die off, slaves are imported from other islands, and the natives decline in fertility as religious fervor does not inspire fecundity. "To kill what you cherish & cure," Wagstaff smiles, "that seems to be the way of things." (486)

Countering the missionary endeavor and its social Darwinism with humanist reasoning, Adam denies any rules in history. He affirms only outcomes. "Vicious acts and virtuous acts" spur results. (507) These acts emerge from belief. To fight "the 'natural' order of things," confidence in human qualities beyond selfishness impel idealists such as Ewing. He vows to become an Abolitionist (we glimpse this cadre in Sonmi's fearful realm), and he vows to become a force for change, even if but "one drop in a limitless ocean." (509) With that promise, we place back the novel's last nestled doll, or its first. 

(Amazon US 3-5-13 in shorter, depersonalized, slightly rewritten version. ***I've expanded the Buddhist and post-Buddhist, Marxian and anarchistic associations spun out of the encounter between Sonmi and the Abbess about Siddhartha in comment #2 replying to "A Spectre Is Haunting Buddhism: Give Marx Some Credit," by Glenn Wallis at Speculative Non-Buddhism on 3-7-13. I extended that into more countercultural contexts on 3-9-13 in comment #11 and virtual realm applications on 3-8-13 in comment #6,)

David Mitchell's "Ghostwritten": Book Review

After enjoying Cloud Atlas (Amazon US 3-13-13; see an expanded reflection on my blog), I resolved to read David Mitchell's novels in order. I find the same strengths in his 1999 debut, and some of his slight weaknesses. The challenge Mitchell's fiction embeds is his genre. If it takes its energy and ideas from speculative styles, it also contains that genre's flaw. Ideas dominate, and compelling characters or plot coherence may lag, or flag as thriller elements and mass-market tropes (evil government, financial chaos, conspiracy, terror, thievery, struggling artists or writers, mythic messages, globalization) mingle with more elevated reflections from literary fiction (quantum physics, time and space loops, transmigration, and still more conspiracies and collusions). Mitchell's skill keeps him juggling the reiterating images, and it's fun to watch. Camphor trees, for some reason, prove to me the most enduring of these. You'll also find glimpses of characters/themes in his later work.

That aspect, for an author beginning his career, intrigued me: one reason why I am moving backwards in Mitchell's oeuvre to watch the dots connect. As many summations of these nine interlinked stories of Ghostwritten can be found, I will limit my review to  a favorite snippet from each that captures its essence. "My last defense is my ordinariness." (27) So confides a Japanese fugitive hiding on Okinawa, in a first chapter inspired by real events unleashed, where Mitchell was living in Hiroshima when this was published. We find people seemingly like us in this book, but of course, all hold some secret or are tied to a larger destiny, as elusive as the meaning of camphor trees.

Another Japanese man, barely out of his teens, falls in love. He's a jazz aficionado and sax player.. At the record store he clerks in, he finds his destiny in a comely customer. "The her that lived in her looked out through her eyes, through my eyes, and at the me that lives in me." (54). Satoru's account draws you in: a literate and thoughtful register that sets off the paranoid devotion of his countryman in the previous chapter effectively. You get the sensation as does he you as a reader are in a story written by another: a casual note that lingers in this novel.

Neil Brose, an Englishman in Hong Kong and a lawyer enmeshed in the markets sector, finds himself noticing what the title of the novel portends, in everyday terms. "Her coming was the coming of a fridge. A sound you grow accustomed to before you hear it." (80) His tale, also set in Asia, overlaps slightly with that of Saturo, as that one did with the man we know as Quasar in the opening.

Moving inward, more Chinese terrain is seen, if from the limited vantage point of an old woman who converses with her "Tree" on Holy Mountain, a site where Nationalists, warlords, brigands, Communist cadres, and finally PRC capitalists contend to control and despoil over the past century. "Nobody owns the land, so nobody made sure it was respected." (125) Cleaning up the messes men make, the anonymous tea shack guardian watches over a patch of the world trying to evade those who seek to cleanse it for greed, ideology, and power. She sees through all her persecutors. "Nothing often passes in men as wisdom."(128) So goes the folly of collectivism. Buddhism enters these tales at a tangent, as does the creation of entities and the apparent transfer of souls; Mitchell glances at these notions more than obsesses on them, and they're filtered by the culture and background and understanding of each of the protagonists.

This wobbles all over the next chapter, the unsteady center of the narrative. We appear to be told by the guiding spirit its origins with a Chinese brigand in Mongolia in the 1930s, and a Tibetan Yellow Hat monk seems to have played a role in its conception or generation. "Slowly I walked down the path trodden by all humans, from the mythic to the prosaic. Unlike humans, I remember the path." (155) Recalling for me (pp. 194-5) the bardo in the Tibetan Book of the Dead, this quest stays dim; this part follows the narrator as she travels from person to person trying to learn of her own creation.

A security guard at the Hermitage in St. Petersburg enters, cocky of her connivance. "As exquisite as being shot!" (204) So she savors a cigarette early in her chapter. The relentless struggle continued from Soviet Russia into capitalist thuggery gets its time on stage, in a section reminding me of pulp entertainment--the heist itself, I might add, as elsewhere in Mitchell, works on its own merits, too. They may be limited intentionally or by the conventions of the genre, but they keep you engaged.

Tim Cavendish will star in his own chapter (and Luisa Rey who appears in a later one) in Cloud Atlas, five years after this novel appeared, and they have cameos here. Tim meets with Marco, a drummer for a loose band The Music of Chance, and Marco conveys the downside of downscale Cool London from the late '90s effectively. He reflects tellingly (on pg. 283) on fate vs. chance. Fate is when your story is read by one on the outside, as in a novel. Chance is when you are in that novel, with no idea of how your story will conclude, or why it's yours at all. This begins with an episode tying this to chapter three, and from here on, characters will begin to enter each other's stories, if perhaps as extras or walk-ons, until the end of the novel. As Marco wonders about memories and actions: it's as if they're "pre-ghostwritten by forces around us." (287)

Mo Muntervary's predicament as forces unleashed precisely in the First Gulf War lead her to confront the security state as a physicist who rejects using knowledge for weapons of mass destruction. "Technology is repeatable miracles." (329) I liked how Mitchell delays the revelation of the teller's gender and of the spouse's condition, but I did not like two errors. "Seventeen counties of Ireland" (317) from a native of that Republic in recollection falls short of the mark, partition or not; also, wouldn't a scientist measure the time it takes the sun's radiated light to hit a retina on earth at eight rather than "twenty-six" (343) minutes? And, on Clear Island off Cork (Mitchell later moved to Clonakilty), inhabitants feel more as if from some Brigadoon in fake-Celtic details than as real.

I doubt anyone in Ireland inherited surnames such as Mrs. Cuchthulain (sic) or Tourmakeady. Also, Mo's surname, Muntervary, is a garbling of nearby Sheep's Head in the original Irish. Something's up, as Daibhi O Bruadair appears (he was a Gaelic poet centuries ago) and so does a dead Gabriel Fitzmaurice (a living Irish poet) as islanders. Given Mitchell's usual command of detail, this chapter feels awry. He left it in two errors, or he erred twice, Mo's chapter rests on unreliable facts, or Mitchell's parodying an "airport paperback" mass-market genre resting on flimsy or bad backstory.

With Mo's foes such as The Texan, Heinz Formaggio, and Mr. Stoltz on behalf of Homer Quancog, one suspects Pynchon territory by now. The penultimate chapter features d.j. Bat Segundo's Night Train call-in show for the New York graveyard shift. The Zookeeper warns listeners: "You are all lapdogs, believing your collars to be halos." (414) This proved engaging, but as another caller explains (?), "I'm speaking through an ingrown looped matrix, Zookeeper." (417) That caller may or may not be the teller of the final vignette, therefore.

Is this legerdemain or talent? Mitchell sets up the kind of postmodern circularity that his predecessors and influences pioneered, and which contemporaries pursue. Borges, Pynchon, De Lillo, or later Roberto Bolano (as the following decade after this novel appeared has brought him international acclaim) and naturally Haruki Murakami fit onto this same eclectic shelf. This slows at times and in the middle and the end you feel the attempts to make links either match or not, and this playfulness can get too sly; you sense a young writer straining to make his mark originally. He comes close, however, and it's a deserving if somewhat uneven entry into his lively imagination.
(Amazon US 8-18-13)

William T. Vollmann's "Poor People": Book Review

For an author as prolific as Vollmann, this is a short book on a vast topic. Chapters heighten the focus of his travels and interviews--often as he credits to interpreters, acknowledging the difficulty of getting to the nuanced or deflected truths told to him-- as he tries, living on $100 daily while his subjects must scrabble fractions of that, to figure out why a few are rich and most of the rest remain poor. They may blame karma, tuition, the rich, Allah, or themselves. Many claim they aren't poor compared to, well, what always seem to be people still worse off.

Vollmann admits his hubris, but here unlike his previous journalism, he steers clearer of the "drug addicts, street prostitutes, and criminals" to listen to more ordinary dwellers at the bottom rungs. He realizes he makes his living off of their stories, and he can grate or pose as if naive, but how else can we listen to those invariably so distanced from us? "Steinbeck did his homework. This is why The Grapes of Wrath is not only "universal," as any vague emotional overflow can be, but accurately particular." (xiii)

By particulars, Vollmann attempts to pin down the mindset of the poor within their own habitats. "People who are poor but not in imminent danger of perishing have more of a chance of catching their breath and actually conceptualizing their poverty." (xv) Do they respond well to his presence?

Given his interest in the Marxian "cash nexus" for gunrunners, migrants, and whores, Vollmann seems well-suited for this topic. He tries to elude the trap laid by patronizing or brutal intellectuals who try to raise the consciousness of those they claim to help. He defines in a prefatory dictionary a few terms, and the problem of how the poor themselves rank themselves as "normal" rather than poor leads to his frustration with "False Consciousness: A charge leveled against the perceptions and experiences of others whenever we wish to assert that we know their good better than they do." (xxi)

Vollmann maintains his slightly ironic authorial presence while stepping back and letting the interviewees have their say. He balances his editorial comments and his leading questions with their comments, or their gestures or refusals. "This deeply religious woman had never been inside the Cathedral of the Spilled Blood, since that would have cost money. But who knew its outside better than she?" (56) From 2005 Russia, this captures his eye for phrasing, and his own perspective, deftly.

Speaking of distancing, he wisely chooses to include his photos of those he talks to (and many staying silent, from his decades at the margins of the world) at the end of the volume, allowing us to "see" the people he interviews first by his verbal descriptions, rather than jump to conclusions or let our prejudices or sympathies interfere with what he wants us to focus on as he transcribes them. 

He emphasizes the agency that any humans possess; he will not condescend or place theory upon the reality. He dismisses the UN recommendation of "more aid, better directed," as admirable but of course, with a devil lurking in the details. He prefers to listen to the poor rather than speak for them. "Because I wish to respect poor people's perceptions and experiences, I refuse to say that I know their good better than they; accordingly, I further refuse to condescend to them with the pity that either pretends they have no choices at all, or else, worse yet, gilds their every choice with my benevolent approval. Once again I submit the obvious: Poor people deserve are no more and no less human than I; accordingly, they deserve to be judged and understood precisely as do I myself." (170) 

In 2002 Nan Ning, China, this sudden city confirms his interpreter Michelle's pride, and her dismissal of the excuses she has heard on Vollmann's behalf, for her own bargained salary daily. "Everything you should do by yourself, she replied sternly. You should not complain life is unfair to you. The history is the history!" The lack of quotation marks heightens Vollmann's ability to convey this tone.

Vollmann tells of his own workspace, an abandoned restaurant in Sacramento, and how the homeless surround him, to cajole or threaten, and how he and his daughter react to their presence. Echoes of earlier books endure, and readers of The Rifles (reviewed by me 2-2014) will recall his near-fatal encounter with a soggy sleeping bag in the Arctic when he muses: "Life is like an extended camping trip. With a leaky, inferior tent one runs no more risk of rain than anyone else; but if it does rain, the person in the cheap tent chances soaking his sleeping bag, and possibly dying of hypothermia." (137)

He conflates his travels with his residence, and he settles down to write behind a steel door at his stucco inner-city bunker. About the poor, "I shut my door on them, just as when we who are in first-class train compartments pull our glass doors shut to drown out the poorer sort in the corridors, who will be standing or leaning all the way across Romania; of course I'm doing them a favor." (276)

Chapters on Kazakh energy exploitation and Japanese "snakeheads" who smuggle from China girls for the sex trade feel imported from his journalism, and they lack the power of his more eclectically arranged sections. By contrast, "The Rider" although it too remains tangential to the theme, offers a gripping and lively look at a white man in the Philippines who ferries the take from jai alai betting.

Vollmann lags as the book goes on and fails to answer the question of why the poor are always with us. The book's brevity by his standards may betray how he can't offer any nostrums on how to solve what may persist as an endemic human flaw, the impulse to hoard, to compete, to fend off others with what we gather. "What can they do?" he asks of the poor. "Hope, accept, escape." (253) The shifting focus Vollmann prefers when speculating about poverty better captures the vagueness of this subject that entangles investigators: "money just goes to where it goes," shrugs a Japanese man in Vollmann's last pages, which seems to sum up this weary subject.  Not that there's not wit and irony to leaven the sour, sullen moods: see the first of Vollmann's many diligently documented end-sources: "Thoreau was interviewed by ouijah-board." (Amazon US 3-14-14)

William T. Vollmann's "Butterfly Stories: A Novel": Book Review

This short (for Vollmann) novel displays a mood both frenetic and dispirited. Taking place as much of his early 1990s fiction in the realm where bodies are traded and sex or love is pursued, it shows us within the musky humidity a familiar depiction for Vollmann of loneliness and obsession in a Thai and Cambodian setting. It's another man drawn to risky behavior and danger. But it expands, midway, to provide a bit of the Tenderloin's pre-gentrified milieu, when the streets were still dangerous, and another section drifting through the Canadian Arctic setting where The Rifles took place.

Drifting is appropriate. The third-person narration filters everything through a narrator introduced as the picked-on butterfly boy in school. Bullying and taunts stunt him. He becomes the boy who wanted to be a journalist, amidst restless youths, and then a journalist, paired up with a counterpart identified only as the photographer, on assignment in Southeast Asia to try to drum up a story as the Khmer Rouge apparently soldier on in terror, and as the Thai sex trade flourishes amidst the echoes of yet another war, when tourists seek out the company of girls and boys in desperate conditions. Vollmann does not moralize, refreshingly. He uses instead a focus on the journalist, a loose stand-in for himself as in much of his fiction, an observer who lacerates himself with criticism while attempting to make a practical and ethical contribution to better the lives of those exploited.

A typical comment: "interesting that the photographer, who wanted to break as many hearts as possible. and the journalist, who wanted to make as many happy as possible, accomplished the same results...! Does that prove that the journalist was lying to himself? (loc. 1283) "You boyfriend me, or you butterfly? If you butterfly, we finit." (loc. 1880) So asks a "sweet rice girl" of the caddish photographer, but this metamorphosis, for an author of Vollmann's broadly biological interests, stands of course for the flitting that the photographer prides himself in and that the journalist tries to evade.

The main plot becomes the mad search for one the journalist knows as Vanna, and she seems to have returned to Cambodia from when he met her in Thailand.  After all, in a painfully rendered treatment of the journalist's breakdown of his marriage back home in America, his (ex-)wife complains of his depression and predilections: "I'm normal. I'm tired of being married to a freak." She castigates his friends as more freaks. She cries as tears "were snailing their accustomed way down the furrows in her cheeks which all the other tears had made, so many others, and so many from him-- why not be conscientious and say that those creek-bed wrinkles were entirely his fault?" (loc. 2169) In such moments, Vollmann lets us look at disintegration and self-loathing. His protagonist will become consumed by a quest to find that other woman, and even as he laments his guilt silently, "he could hardly wait to tell the photographer what she'd said and listen to him laughing." There's truth here within the phantasms and fevers that consume the narrator as they did the similarly driven Vietnam vet and alcoholic Jimmy in the streets and dives of San Francisco. The novel ends as suddenly as did Whores for Gloria; like that companion, it tallies unsparingly the costs of desire. (Amazon 6-20-14)

William T. Vollmann's "An Afghanistan Picture Show": Book Review

Taking place in 1982 and published in its original form a decade later, this account of a hapless pilgrim's progress feels doomed from the start. Vollmann finds early in his career his penchant: a self-deprecating but idealistic and erudite narrator based on himself, a smart depiction of this blundering, determined fellow as he encounters far-flung or down-and-out people who while they lack his book-smarts gain in commonsense, endurance, and/or basic coping skills, a fascination with amassing historical facts and transcripts of interviews about his chosen milieu, and a refusal to organize this material into other than a bricolage of assembled pieces that go on exactly as long as he wants them to, despite the reader's or editor's wish for concision or less running commentary. This is part of Vollmann's presence, always.

With Afghanistan having surged back then, when the mujahadeen sought the aid of Reagan-era allies and long before the Taliban came to its own power, let alone the events since, the timeliness of this paperback edition as the U.S. prepares to draw back from another campaign in a difficult geopolitical terrain is enhanced by Vollmann's brief introduction, looking back on the stubborn young man who comes to Pakistan determined to cover the rebellion against the Soviets. His "picture show" of photos (not included) and his prose version as "slides" in short chapters, mostly taking place then, helps the reader visualize (a few drawings are included, and it's noteworthy that these appear to be more finely executed than many maps and self-drawn sketches in his other and later works) the harsh scenes.

Amidst these, he draws faces. He comes to admire those he meets, and he puts down his own resilience as he is far outmatched in the heat by the natives. He knows he plays a role, that of the American beseeched by many to get visas, to write appeals, to hand out money, to be the object of unrelenting attention (that latter irritation is particularly well narrated). He persists in his attempt to try to raise awareness, and later funds, to help, even as he knows the futility of his moral mission.

The pace of this, as this sums up its pages, can lag. As he nears the actual contact with the rebels (and this is blurred to protect those involved, and is deliberately smudged, to drain it of some of its impact), the inclusions of lengthy interviews with the dissidents (from two identically named but opposing factions for Islamic Unity, a foreshadowing of what will follow in that nation under warlords and fanaticism, perhaps) do slow the progression down markedly. The Young Man he is tries to uncover more about the situation, but neither The General whom he admires nor the Reliable Source whom he implores can fill him, naive and unimportant as he is, in on much. Vollmann weighs in to judge this as a weaker book. It has not appeared before in paperback so the delay may prove it...

Still, for admirers of Vollmann's fiction and non-fiction, this has its moments. The episode of learning to cross the rivers of Alaska with his friend Erica holds power, and shows the sustained interest Vollmann has had in both the icy and the dusty barren landscape. Considered loosely as part of a trilogy that began with his debut novel You Bright and Risen Angels and furthered into his study of justifications for violence, Rising Up and Rising Down, this book addresses congruent themes. When does one fight an unjust system? How far can one go in compromise of integrity to advance policy for practical gain? What cost does the individual suffer as part of a collective effort?
(Amazon US 5-2-14)

William T. Vollmann's "13 Stories & 13 Epitaphs"" Book Review

This collection's title, as Vollmann "explains" in an author's note, reverses itself. "These stories are all epitaphs; these epitaphs are all stories. (A good story is only a hearse to carry you to the ending where the epitaph waits." Clever even if the meaning eludes me a bit. I find it noteworthy that over two decades later, he returned to title his giant story anthology "Last Stories and Other Stories," all about the blurred lines between graves and tales told beyond them which hover back over all of us. 

Fittingly, this ends with a Poe-homage, "The Grave of Lost Stories," and it begins with one titled by a phrase Poe might have used well, "The Ghost of Magnetism." These two bookend familiar concerns of Vollmann: prostitution in Southeast Asia and San Francisco, the Afghan-Russian war, and life among the down-and-out not only in S.F. but among those a bit more well-heeled but also filled with sorrow and doubt. "Ghost" shows how the narrator, in an "On the Road"-type of stream-of-consciousness reverie, goes in each compass direction, so you get glimpses of the frozen North, the desert, and Asia along with Hawai'i (not a locale explored in other works I can recall to date), Belize and Central America, Sacramento and Las Vegas (two places he returns to with "The Royal Family"). We glimpse Elaine Suicide, to whom we return in "The Handcuff Manual." That didn't grab me as much as I anticipated, but Abraham's immersion into the subway of "Gun City" may reflect Vollmann's own residence in New York City as this section captures its grit and noise and tension. 

The story "My Portrait, My Love, My Wife" as in "Royal" conveys one of Vollmann's strengths. He characterizes unfaithful men sympathetically and the lonely women they court if in vain movingly. As the wandering protagonist in "Ghost" is told by the omniscient narrator" "everything was nice only because you beguiled yourself into standing, so to speak, on one leg, with the idiotic self-confidence of the flamingo, who will 'not' realize that any passerby could kick the remaining leg out from under him". (24-25)  When the narrator of "My Portrait" confesses "My happiness was as green as English apple juice," we can relate, but we also sense as in many stories here a short-lived joy. Vollmann's concerns in 1991 consistently play out in his work before and since, if with caution.
(Amazon 7-18-14)

Bernard Fauré's "The Red Thread": Book Review

From this French post-modernist professor, it's no surprise that this collection of essays (more than a seamlessly argued or tightly assembled study) roams over not only the map but the territory into his "own private" excursions and byways. Bernard Fauré warns as he introduces "The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality" that it's not systematic, and that he favors Japanese sources for their own historiographical contexts over those of India and China, unlike many Buddhist or Asian scholars who try to cover this ideological and cultural realm. The result, as he promises, is more his "own private" record of what he finds, often in the nooks and crannies of monastic proscriptions, tall tales of mystics, and transgressive parables by Zen masters (male, at least).

This does drift into engaging moments. The "two truths" theory that ultimate revelation may necessarily override fidelity to the here-and-now conventions allows wiggle room for monks (for better or worse, this book focuses on male and monastic contexts as these tend to survive down to our times as obsessing most over violations of the precepts, sacred and profane). This underlying direction--it bobs up and down, submerged by hundreds of notes which appear to have been built into a chain of associated examples more than a tight thesis--does not prevent Fauré from digressions. These may be underwhelming--much more on Bhutan's Drukpa Kinley appears to be relevant to Fauré's study than the snippet he sums up meagerly. Or, as in the Japanese poet Ikkyu, emotion emerges as we read spare verse to share his bold vision.

Ultimately, after chapters on homosexual behavior in Japanese monasteries, and tales that promote a subversive (or maybe not) male archetype, Fauré's accounts end with more a whimper than a bang. Dutiful research offers few surprises: the yin/yang oscillates as do the Two Truths. Marginal nods to Martin Luther, Alison Lurie, Borges, the classics, and clerical casuists from the Catholic tradition demonstrate his broad learning as fun or sly asides.

However, his "Afterthoughts" allude if in haste to his most intriguing interpretations. He rejects any "'pure,' atemporal, and changeless doctrine." Flexibility rules. As he anticipated in his denial of the easy trope of anticlericalism and decadent monasteries as a reliable genre for East or West, he later opens up for scrutiny a preconception of a normative Buddhism. Given the Middle Way's path between desire and non-desire, interdiction and transgression, Fauré tracks it as itself "double tracked and double edged: maintaining in principle a precarious balance between the the two extremes, yet constantly torn in practice between these two centrifugal tendencies." (279)

Feminists offer a bold alternative. Instead of awakening "as a rupture, a reversal, a social drama" as in hagiographical treatments, feminine practices "tend to insist on the progressive, nondramatic, intimate character of their religious experience." (282) He promises a follow-up volume on this subject.

Finally, what of another direction? Earlier he quotes Georges Bataille's "Eroticism" (1947, p. 42; cited p. 98): "The knowledge of eroticism, or of religion, requires a personal experience equal and contradictory, of taboo and transgression." He muses perhaps both aspects may remain in a fuller consideration of religious impact upon the realms of the red thread which connects us all by blood. (Amazon US 4-7-13)

Tim Ward's "Arousing the Goddess": Book Review

Certainly this memoir reads as if a novel. A Canadian writer reminiscing on his adventures a decade earlier--erotic and emotional, spiritual and travel--this tale of "sex and love in the Buddhist ruins of India" from the mid-80s recounts in appropriately graphic detail Ward's initiation into what he accounts for as "tantric" experiences. These enter his physical relationship with Sabina, an alluring honey-blonde Indologist from Austria who's researching the earth-touching gesture made by the Buddha to reject the alluring daughters of Mara and his own temptations, the night he found enlightenment under the mythic bodhi tree.

The search for "shakti," the life-force transmitted by a thunderbolt jolt he feels as he makes love to his fiery girlfriend in India, impels the middle of this narrative. It starts in Ladakh with Lama Philippe, who's rather improbably lecturing about recondite Kaliyuga lore at the top of the knife-edged summit they share where they try to plant prayer flags in the harsh wind.  Ward throughout this spirited tale interweaves what seem fictional interludes, or improbably detailed conversations a decade later reported (he does keep a journal, I admit), so I am unsure as to the precise veracity of his recollections. However, allowing for this literary conceit, the results tend to be as exciting as fiction and as engaging as a spiritual and erotic quest can become in talented hands and a thoughtful, and considerably honest and relentless, mind.

As the narrative progresses and his visa circumstances, complicated by the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the resultant tightening of an already recalcitrant bureaucracy towards foreigners, Ward must choose his predetermined itinerary and wish to travel about as a bhikku (wandering monkish sort) in his eagerness to try out the mendicant life amidst his recent fascination with Buddhism and Indian thought. This separates him in more ways than one from Sabina. The tension increases.

With the growing unease, Ward chooses to drift into reverie or nightmare to convey some of his inner turmoil. A Nepali woman in a red vest at a millstone grinding rice, a crammed train, a slaughterhouse by the Calcutta tracks, a visit to a hospice run by Mother Teresa's sisterhood, or a riotously risque retelling of the Mara's challenge to the one who will be the Buddha enliven this direction. "You quit your job. You deserted your wife. You're a deadbeat dad, and you're a welfare bum dependent on handouts." (210)

It may depart from conventional truth for a first-person account, but it enriches it with verve. It may not please purists, and it may draw into suspicion other parts of the narrative, perhaps, as much of this story with Sabina feels very dramatized. But she's quite a force of nature, evidently, and intellect; her emotions are as mercurial as his. Their mutual need for comfort deepens their "tantric" engagement, and complicates their alliance.

She confronts him, but indirectly, as in this internally dramatized passage, via Tim's Belgian lama: "You come to live like a monk but won't give up desire; you pursue Sabina, but turn back because you think God speaks to you." (115) Similarly, when a horrid encounter with an armless boy bound by a leash to his begging elder (grandmother?) haunts him, he ponders: "Pity in Calcutta could only be a means to alleviating one's own suffering: the suffering of the rich, come so unpleasantly face to face with human misery, mass-produced in the squalid streets." (151)

Such predicaments deepen the impact of what begins as a (delayed) coming-of-age story for a Canadian abroad looking for enlightenment. I encourage any reader put off or bewildered by the tone to continue, for Ward knows when to tell all and when to hold back. He also ends it realistically yet gracefully. No easy feat for what appears a tough story to relive and set down on paper years later. (author's website; Amazon US 4-13-13)

Jason Siff's "Seeking Nibbana in Sri Lanka": Book Review

This California meditation teacher draws upon his experiences as a monk abroad as inspiration for this 2008 novel of ideas and insights pursued by Buddhist seekers. These recollected concepts, developed further if in factual format as Unlearning Meditation, circle around the difficulty of pinning down the elusive "nibbana" (nirvana in Pali spelling via Theravadin tradition of Southeast Asia). Its practitioners puzzle out if the ineffable but presumably unconditioned realm of transcendence may be if not grasped then, by a meditator, glimpsed.

Jason Siff draws you in as monks, or "bhikkhus," convene at a forest hermitage in Sri Lanka. Its long civil war recedes into the distance, as Aggachitta's renown as a meditation instructor attracts Sumana, a San Diegan come to find himself as a monk near a far different, less balmy coast. There, he finds Rahula, a "temple boy" appointed to feed the monks and care for the simple hermitage; myriad rules prohibit its monks, for instance, from even dishing out food to their confreres. This rule-bound monasticism, as we see it through newcomer Sumana, gains neither romanticized nor cynical depiction in Siff's narrative. He gives an indirect first person, largely unadorned editorial perspective, allowing each main character time to reflect and filter what transpires (much of it over only a few frenetic days, it seems) as the group grows despite itself.

Sumana rushes into his next stage: "He is certain that he wants to make an end to this round of rebirths right now, before he turns thirty, and then he can face anything in life with calm equanimity," with an unshakeable peace of mind. (4)  The monk's way of life certainly has benefits. The layfolk wait until the monks have finished praying, as the merits then accumulated for these donors of food will increase. Such calculation, with enumeration of attainments doled out by masters to students, and steps up towards heightened ranks of enlightenment, demonstrates what Theravada has become.

Aggachitta wonders, sparked by Sumana's request to learn meditation and the teacher's simple if bold response to "just sit" and then report on whatever happens, threatens to upend the system. Rather than adding up what a meditator appears to have reached on a five faculties, five-point scale, Aggachitta counters that this venerable accounting may be "nothing more than an intellectual model made up by some brilliant bhikkhu ages ago as a way to measure and assess meditative experiences without resorting to theories of divine intervention, psychic powers, or mystical revelations." (70) Although the characters here report sometimes their own lively visions and vivid sensations, they don't appear to receive them as if from above, and Siff subtly integrates his own recollective awareness process which he has developed to demonstrate the relevance of realizing the impetus for such "revelations."

This long-solo adept starts to feel crowded. The arrival of mercurial, unstable fellow "white-skinned" bhikkhu Palaparuchi, Sumana and then Rahula and his erstwhile suitor Devi fills the hermitage, along with Aggachitta's colleague Maggaphala, who tends not to be the intellectual Aggachitta, a Ph.D. before he donned his robes, strives to be, after decades in the forest pursuing a less worldly vocation. Siff introduces each of these antagonists or protagonists and we see, for instance, in the careful details afforded to the act of bathing (a repeated motif), Maggaphala's incorporation of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Romeo and Juliet, and Rahula and Devi's attempts to sort out their relationship relevant scenes from a surprisingly varied array of contexts which play off deeper concerns of the characters.

While these could provide another review's worth of content, for a short entry, I will stick to Aggachitta's quest. He leaves for a town monastery to work out, in some snatches of quiet, what troubles him about what he has taught Sumana and discussed with Maggaphala. This novel will be challenging for a reader lacking familiarity with Buddhist philosophy, but I suspect those opening these 360 pages will know the basic material already. Aggachitta grapples with detaching from a view that conventionally sees the twelve-link chain of causation leading from delusions to ignorance to liberation from constraints as a forward momentum; he proposes that delusions (in the plural) and ignorance interplay. This takes close attention, but he develops a theory that dependent arising can be observed in one's life "without taking up either the belief in rebirth or in an imperceptible rapidly changing reality" that leads to consciousness envisioned as a white thin flat panel of infinity, lacking  any support from above, no strings attached, suspended in space, "emanating from itself." (180)

Quite a challenge to convey in an accessible work of fiction. Nibbana then might be hinted at as not constructed but wordless, for how if the mind's truly empty can nibbana be built up in one's own suppositions as if present? (184) Aggachitta tries to meditate on this conundrum, to see if his idea of emptiness might match that attributed to the Buddha. "He does not know what to call it. Words can't survive here, and meanings seem to be as empty as their evanescent shells." (196) Ultimately, before he falls asleep, Aggachitta feels that he again lives and knows nibbana without any desire or derivation of it. (Maybe as elusive as trying, for Shakespeare's lovers, to truly speak of love.)

The "gap" concept of "nirodha" may help, what is glimpsed between links in the chain as they emerge and then fade, but Aggachitta figures this better conceived as a "clear space of knowing the act of knowing." (252) This is not sophistry. It's a fleeting hold on what may be permanent. "Nibbana is the path to its attainment." (263) Although unelaborated by Siff's characters (who must reflect their own cultural backgrounds and denominational affinities, after all), I've come across this phrasing before, but probably from Zen rather than in the Vipassana tradition by which they were trained and taught.

Meanwhile, it's not all speculation. We see how, in a couple of apposite chapters, various meditators undergoing their own reporting of what they ponder, and this helps show the process Siff favors in action, within the student and the master in the aftermath of recollection and recital of what's happened. This dramatizes and humanizes the material in his follow-up book which offers a non-fictional analysis of the same procedure. For, Siff keeps the story moving well, and he packs a lot of character development in a short span. Sumana finds his own interest in fellow former San Diegan Gotami, a blonde (or is it reddish-brown as a few pages apart in his own imagined or unreliably fevered recollection?) if now shaven young nun looking for her own teacher, and finding the same in Aggachitta. Palaparuchi and Maggaphala square off as age-old archetypes appear to return. Rahula and Devi must battle with their own families and their own fulfillment, and we also see how men and women in this traditional society encounter different opportunities, given long-held proprieties.

Aggachitta has the last word. A penultimate chapter wraps it up in a sylvan ending that Shakespeare himself might have liked, but the restless drive of the meditation teacher keeps the plot pushing on, even as the other characters relax and enjoy their hard-won peace. Still, I understand the riposte of Suriya, Aggachitta's brother and Rahula's father, who wonders as we may in the East or the West if his son is there only to learn another lesson: "How to get everything you need given to you?" (272)

I also append the warning of Maggaphala to Sumana and Gotami, all perhaps familiar with such gurus: "Ask those who write the books on meditation and teach to crowds, who have big centers and wealthy organizations, who do missionary work under the guise of giving people the true teaching of the Buddha, and who make a mockery of the noble path by granting attainments to practically every student who comes their way." (219) I waited for more self-criticism, or awareness such as this. A hermitage, relying on the goodness of donors, a place where men seem not to be able to treat women with full equality, and a place that prevents monks from even feeding each other directly, represents in a war-torn society a rather complex haven; like Shakespeare's retreats, one reflects on its ideals.

What perhaps Siff's own method conveys as a remedy might be how insight may be open to all of us. I was lent this by a teacher (a student of Siff's) after I responded with interest to his suggestion that liberation itself may be a construct. This always made intuitive sense to me. Lately, as an instructor in Comparative Religions, I've found that, without hints, some students have asked the same question.

The teacher Aggachitta may not go this far in his quest for meaning, for he concludes: "It is faith in something that is possible for one to attain because someone once, long ago, attained it." (311) This trust that if one man did it, so may his followers, persists. "Sati," we are told, is not the platitude or buzzword of  'mindfulness," but what's created in meditation and recollection as an imperative to break out of "samsara," the ordered world of mindfulness where all is in place, the "dana" of food and goods is delivered by laity on time, and all know their place. This subversion never overthrows the hermitage, but I wonder if a follow-up novel might do that. Although I was pleased that his characters after a hectic week wound up relieved, I ended this novel with this curiously subversive expectation.

To order or sample chapters: Seeking Nibbana. This review 10-18-23 as a bit altered to Amazon US.

Unlearning Meditation (author's website); I reviewed this 2010 study on Amazon US (7-18-10) and in different form at the New York Journal of Books (8-12-10). For more: Skillful Meditation Project