Arundhati Roy's "The End of Imagination": Book Review

What happens when a novel from two decades ago remains an author's best-known work? Then, this writer demurs from producing another bestseller. She rallies on behalf of the poor and persecuted. Agitating for those marginalized in her native India, Arundhati Roy champions her controversial choice to pursue real-life rather than fictional conflicts. The End of Imagination collects journalism and talks between 1998-2004. Twenty-one selections drawn from five books allow a wider audience access to a woman bent on confronting the powerful, and challenging control by the "free" market.

The introduction summarizes present-day Indian politics. The Hindu-nationalist BJP in 2014 returns Narendra Modi to prominence as Prime Minister. 2015 finds him greeting Barack Obama while wearing a million-rupee suit with Modi's name woven into its pinstripes. The gap between that purported leader and hundreds of millions of his subjects symbolizes itself in this sartorial display.

Treating the outcast Dalits and "Other Backward Castes" belatedly elevated to grudging consideration for higher education, Roy contrasts state discrimination with the students' Communist cadres. These discontents join those supported in Roy's opposition campaigns. Adivasi villagers resist "Big Dams." Lands of indigenous peoples of the hilly northeast are "acquired'' for development funded by NGO's and international banks colluding with the wealthy in India and within scheming multinationals. Roy reports: "the forest is being cleared of all witnesses." Fears of a coup by the military, enforced flag worship, false-flag terrorist strikes and "limited war" with rival Pakistan cloud Roy's outlook in 2016.

The essays following progress along roughly thematic lines. The title entry addresses the nuclear showdown in 1998 between India and its neighboring nuclear foe. Another compares a Hindu India with pre-WWII Germany. A third considers the legacy of Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, given blacks who sought freedom encounter dire circumstances in the U.S and South Africa. Roy targets the Pentagon, decrying a disproportionate amount of recruits drawn from African Americans.

Critiques of war continue throughout this compilation. India and Pakistan's protracted skirmishes over Kashmir reveal the "dangerous crosscurrents of neoliberal capitalism and communal neo-fascism." Part two opens with Roy's confession of the "sheer greed" rather than compassion that spurred her to cover the fight by native tribes pushed out during Narmada Canal's construction. Maheshwar Dam privatizes the basic human necessity of water, epitomizing the imbalance of resources between classes and among the peoples of India and beyond. Too few others care, it seems.

In a lecture at Amherst, Roy's frustration grows."To be a writer--a supposedly 'famous' writer--in a country where 300 million people are illiterate is a dubious honor." Phrases like this show her at her best, pungent and passionate. But for long stretches, her determined research will bog down readers in details which may fail to fascinate the non-Indian adept, or those not seeking a granular depiction of Indian politics and economics during the era of George Bush, Jr. and the War on Terror. Therefore, this anthology will appeal to a few, similar to the diligent analyses of under-reported East Timor by her counterpart, Noam Chomsky. Both occupy themselves with well-documented, tendentious studies of policy. Roy agrees to follow the gadfly she nicknames "Chompsky" for his biting force, as he bores down into a machine creating conflicts enriching war-profiteers and enabling politicians.

Roy promotes herself as a journalist-activist. The God of Small Things earned her the Booker Prize in 1997. Back then, a cushy career beckoned for a chronicler of memory, political and psychological tension and coming of age in her newly independent nation, the middle of the last century. Yet, after a novel four years in the making, she postponed a follow-up. She vowed to fight the profit motive. "I'd say the only thing worth globalizing is dissent. It's India's best export," she tells that Amherst crowd.

The remaining essays tend to repeat issues. Roy ambles towards stridency in her prose and her snark can grate in print. Perhaps her delivery sharpens in person. In various presentations on post-9-11 reactions soon after the attacks, she provokes the West and those who ally with the superpower, Roy exposes Osama bin Laden as "America's family secret," invented for that superpower's greedy needs,"created by the CIA and wanted by the FBI." As Soviet Communism failed, so will market capitalism, she predicts. "Both are edifices created by human intelligence, undone by human nature."

Arundhati Roy, after all, knows both creations firsthand. Born two years after the first freely-elected Communist government in the world attained 1957 victory in her home state of Kerala, she warns audiences of the allure of any system appealing to our better instincts, yet demanding a people's submission. While The End of Imagination, like earlier releases of her work from Haymarket Press, needed a proper introduction for American readers as to its scope, and a delineation of the five texts from which these pieces were taken, this lack of editorial oversight may be balanced against a useful index. Furthermore, a short companion volume, Things That Can and Cannot Be Said, provides a furtive, oblique, if timely primer. Essays and conversations from Roy and John Cusack document their late-2014 meetings alongside Daniel Ellsberg, with Edward Snowden. That whistleblower displays bravery in uncovering disturbing truths at the risk of reputation and livelihood, from his asylum in Moscow. For these authors, as capital crushes liberty, protest spreads across borders.
(Spectrum Culture

Arundhati Roy + John Cusack's "Things that Can and Cannot Be Said": Book Review

The Indian writer Arundhati Roy's critiques of "what cannot be said" within the war on terror, the "Lifestyle Wars" that seek to perpetuate conflict for the benefit of the few and the coddled, the influence of NGOs and World Bank-types of organizations on taming activism, and the surveillance state are familiar to readers of her many essays. This little book can be read in a sitting, but it sums up many of her positions. The co-authorship with actor John Cusack comes from his proposal to visit Edward Snowden in Moscow. Daniel Ellsberg joins them, at the end of 2014, in Moscow.

Cusack mainly feeds Roy questions; she responds in her accustomed fashion. This as in her journalism can be strident, verbose, and stretch for effect, but her aims reveal her concern for the issues ignored by the mainstream press. She excoriates the current system, lamenting that it lacks a rival structure, and that those fighting it must be resigned to more guerrilla tactics, as Snowden and Ellsberg demonstrate, against the powers.

The brief chapters are mostly conversations. There's also a meeting with Julian Assange. Roy explains that it cannot be accounted for here. That adds to the odd sense of much of this book. You feel these are disembodied voices lamenting the lack of concerted resistance, as if partisans speaking in a trench on a chilly night. The continual fears of nuclear weapons, often glossed over now, comprise Ellsberg's comments, while Roy reminds us of the collusion between Silicon Valley and the Beltway as to data gathering, boding poorly for future liberty from algorithmic control. (Amazon US 11/12/16)

Donald S. Lopez, Jr.'s "Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol": Book Review

Look around an Eastern-themed gift shop or Asian-inspired garden and you may see a benevolent, rotund and inevitably smiling Buddha. Imported into Western culture, the familiar icon enters popular culture as a good luck symbol and a self-satisfied sage. What today's viewers of such images forget is that, less than two centuries ago, whatever was known or rumored about this wisdom teacher emanated more often from demonic or pagan connotations, rather than cheerful or chubby depictions.

This shift in representation has taken nearly two thousand years to spread, far from the homeland near the Himalayan foothills and Indian plains of the historical Buddha. An expert scholar on Buddhist culture at the University of Michigan provides readers with a compendium excerpting over eighty accounts of what the Buddha meant to the forebears of Christians (and, now and then, Muslims and Jews) who attempted to fit this acclaimed personage into their worldviews. Donald S. Lopez, Jr.'s {Strange Tales of an Oriental Idol: An Anthology of Early European Portrayals of the Buddha} takes up the conversion of the Buddha "from stone to flesh." That is, the statues and the portraits of this venerable personage filtered into the imagination of travelers and scholars. They might be mystified or terrified of what they heard or guessed about this fabled or feared entity, and they regarded him or it with "profound suspicion." Simply put, until 1801, the Buddha was not recognized as the founder of what the West invented as Buddhism. For previous tale-tellers, he was known only as an idol.

Lopez records over three hundred names for the Buddha between 200 and 1850. The litany stretches back to Clement of Alexandria around that first date. This Church Father distinguishes the Hindu Brahmin priests from non-Hindu followers of the "Boutta, whom, on account of his extraordinary sanctity, they have raised to divine honours." Not bad for the first attempt at defining the change from Gautama to Sakyamuni, from a pampered prince to a wise deity bestowing favors on his worshipers.

The professor's introduction sums up the intricate patterns of information about the Buddha as they were transmitted from the Indian subcontinent into the Middle East and across the many Christian and Islamic empires. Tellingly, for nearly a millennium, few reports of the Buddha found their way west. Marco Polo's celebrated chronicle ranks sixth among eighty-odd entries, for instance. After this report, however, versions multiplied along the trade routes set up by Christian missionaries and traders with China. Emissaries at the Great Khan's court linked with Armenian, Persian and papal contacts visiting Mongol rulers. These East-West ties tightened in the 1600s after the Reformation.

Among these, the Jesuit Matteo Ricci epitomizes the ambition of the Catholic Church to win over the Chinese. Fr. Ricci also speaks for the dismissal of the Buddhist teachings brought to China from India as a "disaster." Neither a "genuine record of the history of this religion" nor "any real principle upon which one can rely" exists within this faith. For it "lacks the arts of civilization and has no standards of moral conduct to bequeath to posterity." Ricci credits the lack of knowledge of Buddhism abroad with a rationale for denigrating its doctrines. The Jesuits may have adapted Chinese customs as their own to win over the rulers, but they persisted, as with Ippolito Desideri in Tibet, to oppose Buddhism

Other Westerners added their own reactions. These tended to be negative. They offered many adaptations of the Buddha, often without recognizing the true roots of the idol in a historical figure. Yet, Lopez cautions, no single Buddha biography is accepted across Asia. No canonical text exists.

Rather than posit a true Asian vs. false Western dichotomy, Lopez asks "whether the Buddha, then and now, here and there, is the product of a more complex and interesting process of influence." Therefore, Lopez allows many texts to nestle and jostle against each other, refusing to rate them. This approach fits into Lopez' career, spent producing learned works demystifying Buddhist tropes. While the collection of polyglot voices may daunt, he offers cogent introductions for each diverse inclusion.

For then as now, knowledge of languages varied. Motivations multiplied. Conversion of the "pagans" led to negative attitudes, such as Ricci articulates. Catholics encountering monasteries eerily like their own recoiled as if they walked into the haunts of devils. Gradually, spurred by archaeological, linguistic and military exponents, interest in what became defined as Buddhism supplanted a terror of its teachings. Ethnographic enthusiasm grew in the 1700s and 1800s. This anthology concludes, fittingly, with the 1844 monograph of Eugène Burnouf. This scholar of Old Persian and Sanskrit pioneered the presentation of a human Buddha, rather than a stone idol. And from that juncture, Western sympathy began for the founding figure of a world religion and/or an appealing philosophy.

"The myriad idols coalesced into a single figure, who then became a historical figure, a founder of a religion, and a superstition became a philosophy." So Lopez sums up the transformation. Textually-based Buddhism remains dominant in the West, parallel to the quest in the 19th century for an historical Jesus. Whether such pursuits have resulted in reform or regression is left up to the adept. (Spectrum Culture 4/4/17; Amazon US with slight changes 4/20/17)

Arundhati Roy's "Capitalism: A Ghost Story": Book Review

While still best known internationally for her Booker Prize-winning 1997 novel The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy has taken another path in her native India. Delaying her progress on a novel about Gandhi, she's a journalist on a crusade, fighting corruption and supporting populist protesters.

Capitalism: A Ghost Story elucidates the spectral voices haunting the shadows of India's capitalist glow. A hundred people own assets equivalent to a fourth of India's GDP. Politicians are corrupt. Dams wash away indigenous homelands. Troops massacre tribes in an anti-Maoist campaign. Many of the hundreds of millions of poor live on less than two dollars a day. Globalization accelerates poverty rather than easing it, Roy contends, and these recent essays document these unjust situations.

In another collection republished this year by Haymarket Press as Field Notes on Democracy, Roy admits the limitations in her fight for equality. In trying to get the facts right, she confesses, she may be reducing the "tragic scale" of suffering. "But for now, it's all I have. Perhaps someday it will become the underpinning for poetry and for the feral howl." Roy admirably turned away from a lucrative career after earning worldwide fame as a novelist, but as a crusader, she has exposed herself to charges of being a dilettante. She castigates those more affluent, her critics charge, but is she not one of them, benefiting from their largess and patronage?

Roy acknowledges her opponents and points out the good works that come from corporate philanthropy. But she attacks the way these foundations churn money towards the increase of power. "What better way for usurers to use a minuscule percentage of their profits to run the world?" It's hard to argue with this.

As to Non-Government Organizations such as the World Bank, and the Rockefeller and the Ford Foundations, the author documents examples of how they mold activists into participants. She notes the '60s evolution of "Black Power into Black Capitalism," as well as the shift which lured Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress into a congenial embrace of capitalist values. These are stories rarely heard. Right-wing health organizations and the Ford Foundation now tame the outcast Dalits in India, she illustrates. Roy predicts that with capitalism in crisis, the solutions that rescued it in 2008 from destruction will not last. "War and Shopping," as President Bush urged citizens post-9/11, will fail. The risk we face globally is destroying our planet, let alone our economy.

Part One of this brief collection provides two articles. The first charts impacts of India's massive dams. The second, as some of her previous journalism has done, tracks anti-Maoist crackdowns. Part Two takes the reader along to contested Kashmir amid fears of a Pakistani nuclear showdown. She opens up these areas of tension, but how they influence readers beyond these battle zones seems uncertain. Many of her essays are uneven. Roy has a knack for lively phrases, but her rhetoric can fizzle into mixed or clumsy metaphors. She mingles her distance as a reporter with snatches of personal encounters. This jumbles her tone, and her prose can drag on for far too long.

Additionally, in Field Notes, Roy updated a collection of her journalism with an introduction setting the entries in context. End notes tied each piece to its dates and origins in Indian publications, helping to enlighten a wider audience unfamiliar with the context. Capitalism lacks this editorial frame. Notes point readers to sources, but the essays themselves lack introductions, and for the most part Roy fails to set her crusade in a context that makes sense to a Western spectator.

Roy finally addresses such readers at the anthology's end with her 2011 speech at Occupy Wall Street. "We want to put a lid on this system that manufactures inequality," concluding, "We want to put a cap on the unfettered accumulation of wealth and property by individuals as well as corporations." In her appeal to "cap-ists" and to "lid-ites," Arundhati Roy conjures up her own spirits to rally those who turn words into action. (Spectrum Culture 9-20-15; Amazon US 9-22-15)

Christopher Hitchens' "The Missionary Position": Book Review

Reading this on my Kindle, I was surprised it ended so suddenly. I wanted more. Subsequent events since this appeared in 1995 show that Mother Teresa is on the fast track to canonization after her 1997 death led to her 2003 beatification. In retrospect, the furor over Christopher Hitchens' little book reveals a more-carefully considered study of her media impact and the finagling of her financial empire behind a sort of calculated willful ignorance. He starts each section with apt and clever quotations from earlier skeptics and in tying the Albanian woman to cronies as far-flung and as dreadfully connected to filthy lucre such as Duvaliers in Haiti, Hitchens makes the case with wit but also sorrow that so many of us fell for this.

The money amassed by the millions, the donations to her by Charles Keating of some of the $250+ million he gained by fraud and deceit, and the destitution in which both the Sisters of her Missionaries of Charity and those whom they care for are skillfully narrated and analyzed by Hitchens. As in much of his journalism, he can show signs of too brisk or showy a dash over territory that requires slow navigation. The Albanian context examined late on saps the momentum of his earlier chapters, although his interest in the Balkans surely contributed to his decision to cover this.

His moral is simple. “The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.” We shift a guilty conscience to the admittedly devoted Missionaries of her Order, he suggests, and we let them and its idolized founder act in the name of an apostolate that, however well intended, manipulates the poor to score points against contraception and abortion but neglects any critique of overpopulation. Poverty rather than fought against is embraced. While the Sisters may accept this, their patients, Hitchens reasons, may not.

After all, as a noted atheist, Hitchens has the advantage of standing apart from such as Malcolm Muggeridge, a journalist predecessor who was taken in by her glow, attributing a miracle not to Kodak film stock but to Mother Teresa's intervention while she was alive to illuminate an interior. Against such shenanigans. a rationalist like Hitchens offers a counter-argument, lest the credulous trust too much in clerical leaders like her.

“It is often said, inside the Church and out of it, that there is something grotesque about lectures on the sexual life when delivered by those who have shunned it. Given the way that the Church forbids women to preach, this point is usually made about men. But given how much this Church allows the fanatical Mother Teresa to preach, it might be added that the call to go forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque when uttered by an elderly virgin whose chief claim to reverence is that she ministers to the inevitable losers in this very lottery.”

While some of this spirited polemic rushes by too rapidly, Hitchens provides a look at what is necessary. Believers in this mission may cringe or carp. But a service, however cattily aimed at generating controversy from the title on, is rendered. The faithful need to heed views of such skeptics. (8-7-15 to Amazon US.) P.S. After her planned canonization, in 2016, see Eamonn McCann in The Irish Times, and in Salon, George Gillett.
 

Flag Day

My mom would mark her birthday on June 14th. This is Flag Day in the U.S. But few ever flew the Stars and Stripes, I noticed. But she was tickled that her natal day coincided with what in her youth, I reckoned, must have been a far more celebrated commemoration of patriotism. It also must have been so back then, as she was born a few years after the end of WWI and was married the year America entered WWII, in which her only sibling, her beloved brother Jack and my namesake two decades later, died at Saipan.

I found recently a scarifying quote by the Indian anti-globalism activist-writer Arundhati Roy. “Flags are bits of colored cloth that governments use first to shrink-wrap people’s brains and then as ceremonial shrouds to bury the dead.”

I thought of this watching last week this video by Neil Halloran, "The Fallen of World War II." George Dvorsky comments on how the impact of Stalin on his own civilians, whom he let die so as to make his soldiers fight harder, and the immense amount of casualties the Soviet Union endured, remains eerily evident in these data. Halloran masterfully combines narration and charts, with simple sound effects, minimal pictures, and a clear argument, to show how since 1945, the richer nations have not warred with each other. Civil war declines as nationalism grows, and now, far fewer die. Roy blames death on nationalism; India and Pakistan's birth pangs attest to this slaughter, admittedly.

Halloran would admit that such barbarism in the past few years when it happens may loom as more disproportionate. While news fills our feeds with conflict, very low numbers of deaths register. This is not to minimize loss, but Halloran reminds us that there is a growing tendency from the hard  numbers to demonstrate a definite move away from armed conflict and terror as inflicted worldwide.

At the bottom of every mortal, bloody bar chart he shows, a small flag can be seen. For these, and for of course the ideologies each nation represented (or in some cases, was forced to uphold after invasion or capitulation), I was reminded of my ambivalence towards ritual rallies. In my cubicle, a souvenir (je me souviens) magnet of Québec aside, all I have hanging are mini- Tibetan prayer flags.

This may or may not uphold my principles. In kindergarten, I cherished a booklet of the world's flags; in stamps from colonies and countries, I loved learning geography. Kashmir's partition, Bhutan's frailty, the takeover of Sikkim by India, Maoist victory in Nepal, and the predicament of Tibet all speak to another rebel flag: "Don't Tread on Me." But as the Buddhist appeal in its lofty heartland tries to remind us if unsuccessfully given its own decimation under a red banner, that the ultimate reminder of our shared humanity points to pieces of cloth we hoist with not hate but humility.

Ian Mac Niven's "Lawrence Durrell: A Biography": Book Review

I read this immediately after another biography, also published in 1998, Gordon Bowker's "Through the Dark Labyrinth." Bowker, although constrained by Mac Niven's authorized version from quoting from Durrell's correspondence let alone his novels, nonetheless managed to provide insight into the troubled, determined talent who juggled a manic pace when creating intricate texts, a heavy work load earlier in his checkered career working for the British foreign service, and many, many women.

Starting with India as the key to Durrell's mentality, part of but apart from his British origins, searching for belonging beyond the usual borders, seeking hidden patterns in arcana, Mac Niven takes us through his years growing up in an Anglo-Indian, as Durrell preferred to label his downscale (by comparison at least with some British lording over the Jewel of the Crown) background, his schooling in London, his failure to summon up the effort to get into Cambridge, and his bohemianism. Already, via Hamlet's predicament, Durrell contemplated his "heraldic" theory, that two Hamlets existed, one bound in the here and now and another in a sort of Platonic (to me if not him) realm of forms and symbols. Henry Miller and Anais Nin encouraged him in this pursuit.

His arrival as a poet preceded his departure in 1938 with his first wife for Corfu, and his Greek ties grew strong. But his marital ones could slacken. His second wife, Eve or Yvette Cohen, daughter of a Tunisian Jewish father and a Ladino-Sephardic Turkish mother, with her ideal beauty, stimulated what would become Justine. Although he never thought he'd wind up in Egypt, a flight from the invading Nazis found him in first Cairo and then Alexandria. Mac Niven sums up its crossroads appeal well, while noting that Durrell's depiction of the port as a lascivious landscape takes much more from its WWII brothels than its pre-war, more Greek and Italian, sedate character for what was then a compact city of 750,000. Certainly, in the Alexandria Quartet the city turned its own symbolic terrain, brought to life, if a dusky and detached, aesthetic and literary, form of its own. Mac Niven emphasizes how this novel was written in the mid-1950s, on insurgent Cyprus (after diplomatic assignments to postwar Rhodes, Argentina, and Yugoslavia), while his marriage to Justine crumbled.

But, Mac Niven offers very little coverage of the novels themselves that made his fame, or their critical reception. His details about the writer provide the data, and this data, as said before, can answer probably many questions readers have, but still this book, aiming not at a critique of his texts but a presentation of their author, serves its purpose, leaving explication and reader reception to others. We do get nods to the four-dimensional quality and its purported application of relativity, its time-based and space-based novel arrangement, and its ties to letting go of the ego and welcoming death. This facet, a turn from Christian-based or earlier European fiction, may portend the drift, in his later Avignon Quintet, to a more Buddhist-based approach, where characters appear and revive, freer of chronological convention or indeed, verisimilitude. This enchanted some and maddened other readers. Durrell tried to leap past material limitations in his work, but it seems to stay blurred and off-kilter. While Mac Niven does not take on the issue of if his novels will last, he looks at Durrell's travel writing and poems, and provides at least an overview of the works, if again, no real analyses.

Mac Niven provides about five times, it often seems, the information on any incident discussed by Bowker. For instance, Durrell's teaching stint at Caltech gains by a description of where he stayed, what he lectured upon, and what car he even drove on Los Angeles' freeways. Some may, however, wonder if such depth is necessary for a reader curious but not determined to find out every detail. Such biographies, full of documentation, as Mac Niven offers serve a scholarly purpose, as the go-to work to be consulted by students of his subject. But for general readers, Bowker, at a few hundred fewer pages, with his own array of sources, may suffice. The value of both works, to me, is evident.

The issue of his conflicted daughter, Sappho, her claims of incest by her father, and her eventual suicide, receives a judgment of relying on the discredited "recovered memories" treatment once in vogue, in Mac Niven's estimation. He shows in a poignant scene his own day spent looking at photos of her in the company of the grieving father, and he laments his failure to help his daughter more.

Durrell, in conclusion, does wonder as an aside if his work will endure. Late in his life, he seems to wonder, in his South of France retreat, if any one will listen to his admonitions that appeal in his final works to "selflessness and non-possession" and with this, one closes this in-depth study of this author.
(Amazon US 5-14-14)

Gordon Bowker's "Through the Dark Labyrinth": Book Review

Having finished this biographer's 2012 study of James Joyce, I was curious if Lawrence Durrell, less heralded now than half a century ago, certainly, merited the same steady if detailed life survey Bowker applied to the Irish innovator. Durrell's contribution, as attempting to integrate an Einstein-derived, relativistic series of levels from which to examine what, in the start of his most famous novel, Justine, Freud avers are the four people present when a couple couples, seems to me at a distance rather musty, and The Alexandria Quartet appears more of series of hothouse flowers, in characters and sultry ambiance. Arguably, the author's wanderings, writings, and self-importance make him a worthwhile subject for Bowker's scrutiny.

Hobbled as Ian Mac Niven's even longer authorized biography then in the making prevented Bowker from citing from Durrell's correspondence let alone his works, Through the Dark Labyrinth--similar to his Joyce take--breaks little new ground. But Bowker despite his handicap tackles the remarkably self-involved Durrell with sympathy if not forgiveness, although the biographer to me remains largely polite and well-behaved when describing the affairs, abandonments, and amours of this dedicated lothario. His preference, given if not romanticized "Tibetan" origins given some general proximity to the Himalayas from his Indian birthplace to an English father and Irish-descended mother, for the warmer climes and the less restrictive mores they supposedly engender, is clear. "Pudding Island" as his ancestral homeland and the place where he is sent for school as a boy remains detested, although he repaired there often over his career. A bohemian, he failed to master the math to get him into Cambridge. He chose to hang out in London, befriend Henry Miller, and cultivate connections, as a poet and then novelist, in the 1930s. As war loomed, Greece appealed, and it was off to Corfu.

The Nazi invasion barely avoided, he fled to Alexandria, to cobble together a career as a sort-of spy, information officer, propagandist, and British diplomatic such-and-such, there and in postwar Greece and Cyprus. In the latter, he found himself entangled as the colonial power Britain exerted weakened under the pressure for ties to Greece, and Durrell had to flee, again, as violence over land broke out.

Bowker shows how Alexandria provided, as well as Durrell's beloved and adopted Greek nation, the setting that inspired him. Then more Greek-British-Jewish and much smaller than today's Egyptian sprawl, the city served as a natural crossroads and an erotic cauldron. Modernism meets Freud, as spirals rather than linear narrative arrive to plunge a reader into breakdown--the one aspect Durrell complained to T.S. Eliot that he wished he'd have experienced (as he had with his first if lesser success, The Black Book) to add verisimilitude. But his failed second marriage to Eve Cohen, the Sephardic beauty who provoked the novel, provided his own anxieties, although never for long. He seems selfish, letting go as he outgrows his wives and a little daughter, she twice set aside. Bowker does not editorialize much, but he mentions how Henry Miller saw women as an "aperture" and later alludes to Durrell's take on women as less than persons and more general laws or biological urges.

The Atlantic complained how his "characters embraced with the cool click of algebraic equations." The haste in which he wrote the three installments to come shows he worked out his Quartet as he went, rather than starting in the first novel with a solid structure. Balthazar in six weeks, finds Durrell "feeling his way forward." Mountolive took two months, Clea eight weeks, he attested. This looseness may however have worked to his favor, for what Bowker sums up in the insighful, valedictory, final chapter of this biography as an achievement where we care less about the fates of the characters (his friend Diana Gould Mehunin complained of their coldness even and especially when sex was asserted as the main energy in these novels, and his others, after all) but we learn about the role destiny plays, and how we may reinvent ourselves, remaking our reality and our perceptions.

For all his indulgences as an intellectual, Durrell appears rather lightweight, preferring the effusions of what the nascent counterculture might cotton onto as gurus, seers, New Age exponents, or what some call today life coaches, for his nebulous or scattered musings. Granted, his main diversions in these years were sex and sunbathing, but he did manage fourteen-hour days often, parallel to careers on and off, working away on the next book. Certainly his knack for Greek, his fluency in French, his ability for sussing out the natives around the Mediterranean, speak to his skill at depicting his setting.

This setting shifted to Languedoc, after the success of the Quartet brought him fame and many more women to woo. The nature of his relationship with his troubled daughter Sappho, and her claims (Bowker weighing them decides innocent until proven guilty on Durrell's behalf) of incest clouded his later years; she eventually hanged herself. His third marriage appeared his happiest; his fourth demonstrated his brutality. Bowker alludes to Durrell's admiration for Sade (whom he refers to as de Sade; he also misspells MacNiven's name and makes a few minor errors throughout in proper nouns), and the appeal Durrell exerted over women up to his death in 1990 must prove the triumph of a certain charm, given his short stature, increasing portliness, and large nose. He turned his friends into fiction, and many complained. The women he seduced rarely returned for more. He tends to be a cad.

However, he softened as yoga and Buddhism--when a Tibetan monastery was established near his rural retreat--taught him the value of patience. He avers how reincarnation made more sense, living a life over and over until it was perfect, and the monks claim he has been reborn as a vineyard keeper in Burgundy. Bowker, in spite of the limits under which this was written, provides a thoughtful overview of Durrell. It can bog down in minutiae even as some parts skim; for instance, he goes to Israel and visits a kibbutz, but that's all we learn, while other times we find out what he had for dinner with such-and-such, time and time again. This may be due to the archival access he was granted, and in the end, Bowker does the best he can, digging into many sources, interviewing many, about Durrell
(Amazon US 5-13-14)

Yangzom Brauen's "Across Many Mountains": Book Review

Probably the first Swiss-Tibetan ever, at least as a writer, actress, and activist, this granddaughter of a Buddhist nun who fled the Chinese invasion of her homeland, with her little child in tow, tells her family's story over three generations. Efficiently conveyed, without sentiment or romantic reverie, Brauen narrates how Kunsang, her grandmother, married in the Nyingma order, which tolerated if not encouraged such liaisons, her father, a monk. This period, of course, takes place in the pre-Chinese decades, when Tibet remained remote and its class structure and traditions firmly endured. Even now, Brauen admits, her "mola" affirms many of the old ways, despite a life which has pulled her away, first to refugee camp in India, then asylum in Switzerland, and now visiting her daughter, Yangzom's "amala," who resides as an artist in New York City's affluent enclave of cosmopolitan Chelsea.

The author compares herself to the bottom of a sandwich; between the tsampa dough of her grandmother and Sonam, her mother's "juicy filling" partaking of both ends but remaining intact and flavorful, Yangzom represents wholesome wheat bread. She tells the saga of half a century and more directly. Her highly educated grandparents did not feel, she insists, part of a backward society, nor did those under them feel that they resented the traditional ways. All was seen in thrall to a higher order. People did not question their place in a stratified and long-settled society.

With the Chinese refusing to let Tibet, then or now, develop in its own way and time to reform and modernity, it's sobering to find that Lhasa has been reduced to a garish, polluted Chinese city, and that the ancestral settlement of Pang, visited in a poignant journey back home, survives but part in ruins, as the monks resist the spies planted in such places by the PRC to ensure conformity. Brauen as an activist has been arrested for her part in demonstrating in Moscow against this regime when it held the 2008 Summer Olympics, and her path, from Bern to Berlin to Los Angeles, all bear symbolic territory, she observes, reveals her steadfast commitment to gaining if not independence then autonomy for her familial homeland. Since her birth in Switzerland in 1970, she has a unique p-o-v.

She reveals small tidbits which enrich her tale. I've read a few Tibetan accounts, but hers stands out for its natural and welcome portrayal of a rare combination of monastic and lay outlooks on Buddhism and Tibetan society within the same living lineage, its focus on women, and its European and American perspectives from one rarely and well-placed to make such a perspective come alive. For instance, we learn that meat was divided up among eaters as widely as possible to diffuse the negative karmic impact of its consumption in a harsh land; the wheel was known to Tibetans, but rather than revealing them as primitive for not using it, they preferred to keep it holy by not putting it into action. The result was that beasts of burden, animal and human, had to labor instead at raw toil.

Brauen presents fairly Tibet as it was, and she does not sensationalize or preach. Still, we see in Sonam's coming of age as a refugee and then immigrant to Swiss Germany the considerable challenge she and her mother faced, let alone the determination of her "pala," her father from another distinguished family, descended from an earlier religious exile, John Calvin. Martin Brauen's work as an ethnographer, sparked by youthful encounters with the first Tibetans who settled in 1961, led to his embrace of the culture, and his own curatorial career and friendship with the Dalai Lama. (See my review of his fascinating study into Western and Tibetan depictions of this land, Dreamworld Tibet.)

Translated from German in 2011 by Katy Derbyshire, this reads as if it originated in English, and flows. Brauen is not a fancy writer, and it's not often that we get such passages as simply describing the setting of the labor camp where Tibetans had to toil breaking boulders into gravel for roads: "The endless rains transformed the paths into raging torrents, the forest floor into a damp sponge, and the grand roads into washed-out, impassable tracks." But choosing to downplay the prose may be wise. The calm precision of her language and its modest focus prevent this from digressing, even if the pace and tone remain largely muted after the Tibetan sections, with naturally more drama and tension.

What she seeks is noteworthy. "I am determined never to stop standing up for human rights and far-reaching autonomy, so that my people do not face the same destiny as the Native Americans or the Australian Aborigines--leading a tragic life as dying races of insignificant and landless folklore performers." Given my own study of how Bhutan has faced its own pressures, caught in its own Buddhist redoubt between Indian expansion, Nepalese incursion, and Tibetan-PRC threat, and my own identity as a "native Irish" student of its ancestral language and cultural remnants, I can relate.

J. Jeffrey Franklin's "The Lotus and the Lion": Book Review

How did writers in Victorian Britain react to the discovery of Buddhism, and how did that impact cause a "cultural counter-invasion" as concepts of karma, nirvana, reincarnation, non-theism, and compassion entered into British depictions of all this, in novels, Theosophy, and lives of the Buddha?

J. Jeffrey Franklin's The Lotus and the Lion (2008) examines these topics in a straightforward and accessible fashion. He navigates through what for me have been conventionally eye-glazing subjects when Theosophy is concerned, and he adroitly shows how this theme took up the appearance if not the substance of scholarship, and how it tried to adapt an "esoteric Buddhism" more amenable to British tastes, which had been schooled by Christianity into preferring the Buddha as if preaching a more proto-Protestant reform of castes and cults to advance a humanistic, merciful, yet just recompense for human failings. Franklin shows this various methods of "textual appropriation": a Buddha life by Richard Phillips contrasted with The Light of Asia by Sir Edwin Arnold, two adventures of Rider Haggard and two bestsellers of Marie Corelli, and finally after Theosophy the natural case study of Kipling's Kim  how Victorians understood Buddhism. Some coupled it with social Darwinism and feared its power; others feared it as nihilistic and negative, deploying it as a scapegoat on which to lay the sins of materialism and capital within an Empire that ignored Christian critics of these same depredations.

Franklin imagines a map drawn by Theosophists eager to bring Oriental wisdom into a milieu where Spiritualism found a ready audience among Britons uneasy about the modernist debunking of faith: there, India would loom large. He explains the gradual role Buddhism came to play as by about mid-century its teachings began to be appreciated apart from Hinduism, and how its holy places and historical traces had begun to be found. Crediting Charles Allan's The Search for the Buddha: The Men Who Discovered India's Lost Religion, Franklin agrees that this part of colonialism, on behalf of European scholars, may have appropriated its relics and statues, but that at least a civilizing mission on Britain's behalf advanced textual and cultural understandings of the Buddhist origins on their own terms. He triangulates what Victorians knew with what modern scholars and practitioners do, and he uses this as a corrective in turn for the distortions in the texts he studies from the later nineteenth century. He applies this structure most appealingly to study Kim as a exemplar of the dharma.

He urges critics to read Kipling's novel as neither the facile reduction to a celebration of imperialism's Great Game or a post-colonial condemnation of its protagonist's complicity to support the Empire. Instead, as a Buddhist interpretation, he avoids a dichotomy and shows Kim O'Hara as embodying the Middle Way. Despite Kipling's inevitable bias, within an author who appears to have fallen far from the esteem lauded him a century ago,  Franklin argues that Kipling realized with more insight than he has been granted by harsh contemporary critics the predicament of his character, caught between his Anglo-Irish parentage and his Indian, and in turn Muslim-Buddhist-and so on (Franklin charts five or six intersections with other identities and belief systems in the novel which Kim takes on or considers) allegiances. This portrayal steps aside from an either-or decision, and Kim acts out in Buddhist terms the refusal to define himself by imperialist, conquest-and-conflict oriented standards.

Rather, Kim conquers his self by evading these binary distinctions. As the Lama teaches him, he subtly models what Franklin's afterword considers as it looks at nirvana in later Victorian and early twentieth-century British literature. That is, Buddhism offers a model of eschewing dualistic thinking, and in an interdependent manner, it critiques the ecological and economically devastating capitalism that elevates the pursuit of individual freedom regardless of collective harm and moral sustainability.

This could have sparked another book in turn, and I hope that Victorianist Professor Franklin returns to this subject to track it into more contemporary evocations in literary culture. The consideration of nirvana opens up an inviting vantage point from which to look at nihilism and existentialism, as well as philosophical and political pursuits in recent times, and it deserves more space than provided as a closing section here. Despite a few typos, this book conveys his thesis clearly and it can enrich any reader curious about this fresh topic, one of increasing relevance today. (4-23-14 to.Amazon US )

Bruce Wagner's "The Empty Chair": Book Review

These paired novellas explore a triple significance of this titular piece of furniture. They convey, in casual, yet learned while often blunt language, the lessons learned by those who grapple with sudden departures by loved ones. Their despair, mingling with a typically Westernized, upscale variety of spiritual quest, flows through these two monologues from Americans now in their fifties, told to what we assume is a fictionalized Bruce Wagner, who claims to have "redacted" them in "the summer of 2013".

Known for scabrous satire about Hollywood's addled or addicted insiders, Mr Wagner's here explores what may be a natural if less-known milieu for him and his affluent, privileged, and erudite storytellers. His fictional narrators look to "diet Buddhism" and New Age teachings for guidance; the author himself has been a devotee of Carlos Castaneda. Therefore, he knows this type of set and setting well.

Told by a "First Guru", the unnamed narrator of the first entry over a hundred pages relates his identity as a gay man. Molested by priests in his teens, married to Kelly, who does not discriminate between men and women in her own romantic liaisons, he lives now, in a furnished van shelved with his favorite books, in Big Sur. At the time of this story's telling, in 2010, he parks himself at a Catholic hermitage. At nearby Esalen, he meets "Bruce" in a hot tub. There, he commences what will be a back-story including Ryder, the son he and Kelly created.

A self-described "motor-mouth", the narrator worships the Beats and Thomas Merton, as well as medieval mystics Julian of Norwich and Hildegard of Bingen. He shares their search, while divesting himself of Catholicism to pursue Buddhism, along with Kelly. Yet, she surpasses her husband on the road to find, in her borrowed phrase, that "impermanence rocks". For, she markets the dharma to Marin County schoolchildren by her trademarked campaign to rouse "Armies of Awareness".

Mr. Wagner as expected sends up this sort of ambition. Kelly lands a $20,000 advance from Chronicle Books "for a memoir about being a menopausal, bisexual, Berkeley-bodhisattva". The glib catch-phrases she peddles will haunt her; loss forces the couple to confront their own heartache.

"To save herself from the unbearable anguish of the present--present imperfect tense--present impermanent--Kelly had to take up residence in the future--future perfect permanent. The present, once venerated while she was an ecstatic, card-carrying member of the All-We-Have-Is-This-This-Moment! cult, had been stuffed in the recycle bin along with its jealous, immutable, implacable shadow, the past."

The narrator longs for a "teachable moment of" one's "own death: the lesson of impermanence". This may arrive, but may not come until one's last breath. This story segues, after a second introduction by Mr. Wagner, into one told to "Bruce" five years earlier, in the New Mexico desert. There, a similarly affluent and formidably confident narrator, who nicknames herself as Queenie, lives also a nomadic if even more coddled existence. She travels about "in an imposing black bus with a full staff". Sporting kohl-lined eyes, she dons gypsy dresses, "half-Zaha Hadid, half-Stevie Nicks".

Her story stretches back to 1968, when she was sixteen. She, who seems more to boast than regret having "three kinds of VD" by the age of thirteen, grows from "wild child" to "Earth Mother" as a countercultural Eloise, rootless from normal residence, brought up allowed to roam her domain. However, as with "First Guru" as designated by the one who takes down on tape their stories to transcribe, "Second Guru" cannot escape the reminders of transience despite her own charmed life.

"Think of yourself as a spelunker--join me in my nightmare, won't you?" So she invites "Bruce" in, early on, and what follows in an extended cave-diving metaphor takes up five pages. This type of expansion, characterizing both garrulous tellers, may weary those less enchanted. As Mr. Wagner warns at the start: "The 'authors' here are vessels, not virtuosos." That is, they do yammer on and on.

Such verisimilitude--even as the transcriber assures us he has edited and streamlined their revelations--can drag down the pace of both novellas, even if it convinces us that "real" people told them. This type of craft, subtle in its insistence that these stories truly happened, displays the "real" Bruce Wagner's skill in a naggingly truthful manner, masking itself as what we find around us footnoted for our consumption as increasingly "inspired by true events" or "based on a real story".

Queenie possesses awareness of her own "inspired pastiche"; portions of this as tellers fold into each other layer four times over. No wonder she compares herself, on "silly tangents", to Scheherazade. 

One difficulty for believing these stories as genuine emerges in the similar tone of both novellas, and the manner in which long-ago monologues gain precise re-creation by considerably retentive hearers. Ryder's father admits of the aftermath of the discovery he and Kelly must deal with: "O we had mourning sickness (mourning with a 'u') for sure!" Despite the "fact" that narratives by Queenie, Kura (an African-born Francophile), an Indian "Great Guru", his wife, and the Guru's successor, "The American" all elaborate the second installment, these five international and multilingual tellers do manage to sound not much different (despite what we are told is the wife's "comically fractured syntax") in diction or content. For instance, Kura laments of the wife: "O, she cast her meretricious net far and wide, tarnishing all the fishies in the sea!" These tellers regale themselves with like wit.

Mr. Wagner may be indulging in his own reminder of truth-telling and fact-checking, as he too inserts himself into the two sections as listener and editor. However, both tales do, by revealing their protagonists' dogged efforts to break free of surety, manage to sustain interest, for those possessing a compatible interest in spiritual journeys told by affable, if coddled, guides who have been there and done that. Summoned thirty years after their first meeting to reunite with Kura, Queenie's hesitation proves recognizable to any reader. She sums up herself in 1997: "A depressed, childless, perimenopausal woman, unlucky in love, with a shelf life of self-esteem long past its expiration date, I presumed I would throw off a medley of scents: potpourri of moribund pheromones, burnt adrenals and brokenheartedness."

Near the end, the significance of the title Mr. Wagner offers deepens. He began by referring to the gestalt practice where his therapist set up an empty chair for the analysand to talk to, as that space allowed a place for the patient to make more concrete his absent focus, the invisible person from the past whom he or she wanted to confront or appease. Queenie reports, in one layered conversation, how her long-sought holy man asserts "it is only the second guru that allows you to make sense of the first". Another analogy then blends the two stories, and the two gurus, in patterns that reverberate.

Mr. Wagner wisely structures the two stories to draw out the maximum potential of his metaphors. While their pace may slow, for better or worse to make it appear as if we too are listening to hours of one confessing or chortling over past triumphs and present humblings, The Empty Chair succeeds in presenting the often-caricatured or sometimes smug searches undertaken by those able to afford such quests and it convinces the patient reader that revelation may lie within the reach of the lonely pilgrim, in the pages of the devotional text, or in the conversations of the fictional characters he tells us are real. (12-26-13 to New York Journal of Books)