Recent Reading

Burma Sahib by Paul Theroux (published in February, 2024) is a novel based on the true experiences of a man named Eric Blair in Burma approximately 100 years ago. The story begins when Blair is 19 years old, recently graduated from the famed prep school Eton, where he was not at all happy. He has gone to Burma to become a policeman and an officer of the British Empire. This is in stark contrast to most of the other Eton graduates who would have enrolled at Oxford or gone on to something else very upper class, but Blair wasn’t upper class. His father had been a rather lowly civil servant in charge of a minor aspect of the British-state-run opium business in a nearby part of the empire. 

Theroux selects wonderful detail about life in colonial Burma. For example, I really enjoyed his descriptions of the occasional native meals that Blair tried, as well as very British food that the Indian cooks prepared: food that they wouldn’t eat themselves because they were vegetarians. For example, a lunch of “boiled fowl, mashed potatoes, and a slimy vegetable no one could name.” (p. 33).

Food often contrasts to the political environment in which Blair exists; consider this:

“And the other memory was of an occurrence at the end of the meal (veal chop, mash, brown gravy, bottled peas). The boat that had brought the arresting officers had also brought provisions: crates of wine, potted meat, packets of water biscuits, tins of salmon, and a chest of cheeses.   

 

“Wearing gloves, the khidmatgar placed a cheese board on the dining table next to Oliphant. Grasping a cheese knife, Oliphant tapped it on a large wedge of Stilton, lowering his head so that his slicked-down hair gleamed in the lamplight, scrutinizing the Stilton. All the cheeses on the board were sweating slightly, a moist double Gloucester, a damp cheddar, a softening brie…. 

 

“There were more shouts, a yelping from one person, a woman’s shrieks, and Oliphant paused. … And that was the moment Blair heard the ruckus—yells from the precincts of the pagoda, the frantic jangling of bells, hoarse shouted orders from the arresting officers. Oliphant did not look up but instead studied the cheese.” (p. 144) 

Basically, being a policeman does not suit Blair at all; he finds that he doesn’t fit in at all with the colonial society and its repressive racist greed. He also doesn’t fit in with any of the various Asian people he gets to know, though unlike most of his fellow policemen, he learns the local language and has a lot of sympathy for the people. In fact, he is stymied by the rampant prejudices, the cruelty, and the pettiness that he finds all around him. 

Blair wants to write poetry, but is never satisfied with his efforts, and begins to write stories about his experiences. I loved reading about this five-year period in Blair’s life. His growing awareness of people and relationships, as well as his many frustrations and humiliations, are portrayed in a very fascinating and effectively dramatic way — much of this due to the imagination and inventiveness of the novelist. As you may know, Eric Blair was a very real person who did in fact become a writer. His nom de plume was George Orwell.

The Soul of an Octopus (published 2016) is the third book by Sy Montgomery that I have read. The others were about turtles and dolphins. But in fact all of them are really about Sy Montgomery. In The Soul of an Octopus, of course, you can learn a lot about the lives of octopuses that the author encountered — especially a few of them that live in a large aquarium in Boston. You can learn a bit about natural history, about scuba diving to see more of these creatures, about the dedicated caretakers who work in the aquarium, and about scientists who study the sea. But most of all, you learn about the author. I wasn’t as conscious of this in the earlier books of hers that I read but in retrospect I think it was the same. Not that it’s bad, that’s just the way it is.

I expected to enjoy The Seventh Veil of Salome by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (published August, 2024). I was very disappointed. It’s a soppy story about Hollywood. Unlike Moreno-Garcia’s other novels that I’ve read and liked, this one didn’t have any magical realism at all. Not recommended!

I’m also rereading Moby-Dick, in the aftermath of my trip to the Galapagos.

Reviews © 2024 mae sander

Shared with Sunday Salon at Readerbuzz.

 

Louise Erdrich: "Future Home of the Living God"

Nothing is happy in Louise Erdrich's recent book Future Home of the Living God. It might be one of the most depressing books I have ever read. I don't want to talk about it much, but here are a few thoughts.

Minnesota, and maybe the rest of the USA, has become a desperate dystopia in this novel. The decent Minnesota people in the novel don't have a chance to live the decent life they've always experienced. For most of the novel the narrator and many others are trying to escape a newly created Orwellian government, including surveillance of everybody all the time. Computers -- even when not attached to any internet -- suddenly start showing images of "Mother," who seems to be a version of Big Brother in Orwell's 1984. Cell phones report everything to the mysterious police state, so most people have destroyed theirs. Fear reigns.

The whole world until just before the start of the novel was evidently pretty much as we know it ourselves in 2018 America. It's in the near future, with just a bit more climate change. Even fairly young characters remember when there used to be a Minnesota winter, though that was lost by the time the novel opens. Suddenly, as the inhabitants of this sad future see it, evolution has started running backwards. Maybe the explanation is that suddenly mutations are causing abnormal throwback-seeming creatures and plants to be generated instead of what's expected. No one understands exactly what's going on, and mass communication has essentially ceased. Darkness has descended. Everything that was predictable disappears -- accountable government, reliable news sources, trustworthy neighbors, and so on.

The thing is, the characters are incredibly vivid in their distress especially the young woman who is recording the narrative in real time, while it's happening to her and her family. Some of the main characters in her narrative are Native Americans living on a reservation and some are urban residents of Minneapolis. Everything about them seems so real it's scary. Good people help each other, bad ones turn each other in to the evil authorities, and it's hard for the sympathetic characters at the center of the plot to know who is who. I'm not going to try to do a plot summary, just to say that the most real thing is the horrendous fear they experience in trying to escape from the totalitarian society that has inexplicably and suddenly emerged.

Food becomes a kind of indicator of the circumstances. Early on, food made by family can make the bad times seem more normal. But conditions are deteriorating and hoarders begin to buy all the food, booze, and cigarettes from supermarkets. When the narrator is imprisoned, bad institutional food underscores the horrors of her experiences. She writes:

• "I must stay ready for the sign, remain alert, prepare myself, stay strong. So I drink the powdered OJ and eat the rancid eggs, the strange bread, the curdled milk, and the coffee-type beverage so acidic it brings tears to my eyes. I eat the bean paste and slimy orange slices, the wads of wet Kleenex that are supposed to be mashed potatoes, and I walk up and down the one corridor, observing the routine, looking for a hole in the day." (p. 133)
• "We eat every bite -- a mushy spaghetti with indeterminate meat in the sauce. Powdered milk. Congealed cornstarch pudding, butterscotch or maybe just scorched." (p. 158)

Comfort food after an escape and attempt to flee, creates a moment of peace, but not for long:

• "Shawn stalks over to the stove, uses a can opener to neatly remove the top from a can of baked beans. He puts the can on top of the woodstove with a pair of tongs.... I can smell the rich sauce and the little white gobs of pork before the stuff is even warm. ... The beans heating in their tin bean can exude a summery hot-dog fragrance. Shawn spoons out half a can each of bubbling and hissing beans, into steel bowls." (p. 167-168)
• "... sandwiches -- real bread, real sliced turkey, even mayo. And canned milk heated up with cinnamon and chocolate. ... 'So tasty I could cry.'" (p. 171)

A very very sad book. Unredeemed sadness, I think. Unredeemed by the narrator's efforts to find hope in religion, unredeemed by any other hope.

The Worst Kitchen in Literature

There must have been dozens of paperbacks of
Down and Out in Paris and London

Last night my literary book club discussed Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London. My culinary book club, a different group of people, discussed it a couple of years ago.

What a dark book! Orwell's Hotel X in Paris, where he worked 17 hours a day as a dishwasher and a servant of the lowest other employees, must be the filthiest, most inhumane, and least appetizing kitchen workplace depicted in all the books I've read. It was awful despite a sense of honor among the workers and despite being among the dozen most expensive such establishments in the city. We talked about this and many other issues.

The sheer misery of working in the extreme heat and abusive atmosphere was the part that Orwell really wanted to convey. He had to walk and run 15 miles a day and was under terrible pressure to complete many tasks quickly -- he calls it order in chaos. Workers with slightly more authority routinely cursed and abused their inferiors, though outside of work they may have been friendly or even helpful. Jobs were terribly scarce, so one had to perform accordingly.

Orwell's intention clearly was also to reveal the enormous gap in conditions between the front and back of the house. In the dining room, patrons ate in luxury and assumed their food was of the highest quality, while in the kitchens, clean-up areas, pantries, and cold storage Orwell knew filth, vermin, and extreme carelessness, and "fearful noise and disorder during the rush hours." (p.75)

Orwell distinguishes between the boulot -- obligation to duty felt by the workers -- and the way they did nothing extra:

"The dirt in the Hotel X ... was revolting. Our cafeterie had year-old filth in all the dark corners, and the bread-bin was infested with cockroaches.... The others laughed when I wanted to wash my hands before touching the butter. Yet we were clean where we recognized cleanliness as part of the boulot. We scrubbed the tables and polished the brasswork regularly, because we had orders to do that; but we had no orders to be genuinely clean, and in any case we had no time for it." (p. 79)

He embellishes the story with anecdotes from other high-end Paris restaurants of that era, around 1928. Bugs. Rats. Roast chickens dropped on garbage-strewn floors, but still to be served by formally dressed waiters. Horrible odors. Inspectors who dip their unwashed fingers in the sauce, clean the rim of the plate with spit, etc.

The second half of the book is about real destitution in and near London, where Orwell had no job and lived in terrible conditions, much worse than his Paris life. In sum it's a fascinating account of poverty and desperation, a huge contrast to the usual stories of that era in Paris.