Voices: Learning the Rules in 'Girls in Trucks'

Sarah Walters is a woman who has followed the rules her entire life, like most of us. Unlike most of us, her rules were passed down over generations of Camellias, women at the top-most rung of Charleston's social ladder. It's a public society that's anything but Democratic. Camellias are born, not made: If you're mother is one, then you are. For life. No matter what.

"'Never chase men or buses,' my mother told me. 'Another one will always come along,'" writes Sarah, whose struggles meeting expectations are what make this book by first-time novelist Katie Crouch so relatable and interesting.

With a slow start that follows Sarah and the three other Camellias her age, Bitsy, Charlotte and Annie, through middle-school Cotillion training, it's clear as the story develops why Crouch spent so much time developing the traditional South Carolina enclave of Sarah's youth.

Sarah as a heroine is a little bland and things happen to her, not with her or by her. She observes the increasingly bizarre sequence of experiences that happen when her domineering older sister moves to Yale, when she and wild-child Charlotte met country boys who lure them away from high-society duties and even when she goes away to a no-name Northern college.

The novel moves into familiar coming-of-age territory when Sarah moves to New York to work in journalism, joined by Charlotte, now in the fashion industry, and Bitsy. This is where she searches for love and where Crouch explores the frighteningly submissive personalities of her heroines. Sarah dates a man who changes her life and accepts, if not encourages, his violent sexual behavior. Bitsy marries a wealthy older man, who is later revealed to be selfish, uncaring and unfeeling. Annie dates men who don't love her. Charlotte, the most sensible, falls in love with mind-altering substances.

I wonder if these women are supposed to represent some aspect of femininity that exists in every woman because something, the fear of being alone or the fear of not being enough or the fear of being unloved, keeps all of them from searching for or choosing healthy relationships.

At one point Sarah remembers what her mother taught her about men, "that no mater what, there's always something. Fall in love and you'll find it. He will steal, or drink, or dress up in your clothes, or die on you at dinner. That's love, she says. That's what you sign up for."

Sarah is at her best when she is honest and feeling about the emotions that most of us only occasionally stumble upon. After almost screwing up her sister's wedding she tells her, "'There's a lot wrong with me,'" before continuing with, "I tell her I'm sorry again, which she waves off. I am sort of always sorry. I am sorry for being drunk on her wedding day and for not being good enough for Max and for not being smart enough for her friends and for breaking her toe with a hockey stick when I was twelve. God, I am sorry. I am sorry for so many things that I should go outside and swim to Cuba."

Emotionally numb, our heroine stumbles through the rest of the novel looking for electrifying love to shock her out of her numb funk. She finds it, in an unexpected place, and ends up right where she started: among the mama, baby and grandbaby Camellias of Charleston.

-- Whitney Teal

Voices: The Egalitarian Chick on 'Push' by Sapphire

We came across this review of Push by Sapphire, which is now a Golden Globe-nominated film. Check it out:

I love it when a book--any book--is hot property. This is certainly the case these days for Push, which I bought from a book vendor on 125th street. because the title was so popular the weekend Precious came out he had to summon another vendor who came sprinting down the street, book in hand.

So is Push any good, hype aside? Yes. It's a quick read, and a painful read--Sapphire doesn't pull any punches and her heroine suffers every kind of tribulation imaginable--but I found it incredibly worthwhile first as an example of experimental narrative, second as an incredibly real window into a place and time and a person's psyche.


Read the rest at The Egalitarian Bookworm.

--Whitney

Voices: Investigating 'In Cold Blood'

When the Clutter family was murdered in Holcomb, Kansas on November 15, 1959 with no trace of a suspect, chief investigator Alvin Dewey declared that in order to crack the case, his team had to “know the Clutters better than they ever knew themselves.”

Truman Capote adopted this goal for himself when he began to write his revolutionary non-fiction novel, In Cold Blood. The detail, the sensitivity to character and depth of setting, prove that he knew not only the Clutters, but their killers Dick Hickock and Perry Smith and the entire town of Holcomb better than they knew themselves. The detail of the portrait, the smoothness of all its edges, is really remarkable: the name of the movie Bobby Rupp and Nancy Clutter were planning to see on Sunday night, the direction the wind was blowing the night of the murder, Perry Smith’s dreams and Dick’s attitude toward Perry’s blood-shedding abilities. The book is so profoundly well-researched that it seems all to have sprung from the author’s mind.

It is both exhausting and mystifying to imagine the research that went into the book: how many hours of interviews, how many shoeboxes of cassette tapes, how many pages of letters, diaries, and newspaper clippings. And on top of the research time, there was also time spent getting to know Holcomb and gaining its trust. A down-to-earth, agricultural small town like Holcomb surely narrowed its eyes when Capote, a flamingly homosexual New York intellectual, waltzed in with hopes of writing about the recent tragedy that struck the community like lightning.

Yet it is clear that Capote did gain Holcomb’s trust, as well as the murderers’ trust, for without it, he would not have been able to develop such nuanced, fully breathing characters. The character development is impeccable, and humanizes the characters—particularly Perry and Dick—as only a master could. The first time we meet Perry (on page 14 in the Vintage International edition), he seems like an eccentric (he obsesses over maps and has a habit of staring trance-like into mirrors, to name a few quirks) but probably unthreatening fellow. We know he is waiting for Dick, but we do not know how they know each other or what their ultimate goals are. It is not until page 22 that we learn that they had celled together at Kansas State Penitentiary. At this point, Capote begins inserting hints as to the plan, such as Dick saying “I didn’t want him to see me taking the gun out of the house” or reminding Perry that “anyone they encountered would not live to bear witness.” Thus, the development of the murder plot is slow, and by the time the reader really understands what is happening, these other details of these two characters’ lives and personalities (Perry’s love of interesting words, Dick’s two marriages, Perry’s recurring dream of a giant parrot grasping him with his talons and flying away) have been filled in enough that they come off as humans, not just as murderers.

The one discrepancy in the book, the one irreconcilable break from reality, is the absence of Capote himself from the narrative. He makes one or two veiled references to a writer from New York, but otherwise, he is invisible, whereas we know from the depth of research that he must have been, in fact, a weighty presence in the town. But of course, changing the non-fiction novel to a first person narrative would have irrevocably altered the texture. As it is, In Cold Blood is a chillingly omniscient and perceptive examination of small-town America, the legal system, the criminally insane, and human characters who committed a gruesome murder.

--Emmaline Silverman

Voices: 'Drinking Coffee Elsewhere' Satisfies

Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, the debut book of cub writer ZZ Packer, is heavily lauded. Novelist John Updike recommended the collection of short stories for "The Today Show" Book Club Pick; The New York Times named it one its Notable Books; newspapers like USA Today, The Baltimore Sun and The Seattle Times all heaped heavy one-worders on the prose: honest, poignant, and provocative among them.

But even as highly recommended as the eight stories in Coffee came, they still exceeded my expectations.

One reviewer called Packer’s characters, all of whom are African-Americans flirting, kissing or full-on sexing social annexation, “smart people surrounded by fools.” I am not sure if I agree that everyone else in the stories is unintelligent, but she certainly seems to have a knack for articulating society’s hypocrisies with above-it-all, other-worldy heroes.

Like Squirt, the Atlanta elementary school nerd who goes to stay-away camp with her Girl Scout troop in “Brownies.” Between the group’s queen bees, a grieving mother-chaperone, a special-needs rival white troop, and a reflective bus ride, Squirt matures and recognizes ugly realities before the story’s end.

In “Every Tongue Shall Confess,” “Speaking in Tongues,” and “Doris is Coming,” Packer takes on the morality of the Black church, pitting willful girls against the patriarchal leaders of the pulpit. But even treading those would-be stormy waters, the writer is careful not to pass judgment on the institution itself, but manages to show a particular opinion or practice as impractical, irrational or plain stupid.

“The Ant of the Self” explores a turbulent father-son relationship while “Geese,” one of the single most odd and magnificent stories ever, shows a woman in Japan that falls on hard times.

Most compelling is Packer’s ability to profile the maligned, misunderstood, sometimes downright pathetic without being overly sentimental or with pity. As suggested by the title, the people in the stories all seem to be passively wishing that they were going about life’s mundane tasks in another time or place.


--Whitney Teal

Voices: 'Potato Peel Pie Society' Enchants With Sweet Letters

I picked up Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society on a recommendation from my grandmother, a witty and well-read lady herself. “It’s an epistolary novel, so it’s written entirely in letter form,” she explained. “And it really is the loveliest novel I’ve read in a while. The thing is, it’s all about books—reading books, writing books, loving books.”

Naturally, I couldn’t resist this endorsement. The book truly is a tale of reading, friendship, and romance. It is set in a broken England, post-World War II, suffered more than the Channel Islands, including the Isle of Guernsey, the inhabitants of which were starved and occupied by German soldiers for years. When one of writer Juliet Ashton’s used books, Selected Essays of Elia by Charles Lamb, falls into the hands of a founding member of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, letters begin flying over the English Channel and life-altering friendships are written with the ink. These friendships initially are based on a love of books—Charles Lamb, Seneca, Jane Austen, and the sisters Brontë are among the Society’s most beloved authors—but go on to face even more powerful issues: loss, heartache, the horrors of wartime. It is touching to watch Juliet find such kindred spirits in Guernsey’s Society through a series of letters, and downright uplifting to learn how the Society found solace in each other and in literature during the hell that was the Occupation.

Juliet Ashton is a heroine of the best kind, a protagonist to fall in love with. She is brilliant, feisty, funny, loyal, and a truly kind friend. She is also prone to flashes of rage, such as throwing a teapot at a reporter who made uncouth insinuations about her dead fiancé. By no means is she perfect, but she’s the sort of woman I’d love to take out for coffee—or cocktails.

(Actually, as a side note, I believe that my fondness for Juliet is partly due to the resemblance she bears to a heroine I adored in my formative years, one Miss Betsy Ray of Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy books. Both are smart, fun-loving writers who thrive on friendship, write diligently to pen-pals, and have questionable culinary abilities.)

The epistolary quality of the novel both charmed and impressed me. Charmed, because I am an inveterate letter writer myself, and if I could, I would pen all my correspondences by hand on violet-scented stationery. And impressed, because I know it is not easy to write an epistolary novel well. So much of story-telling involves showing as opposed to telling (the mantra of creative writing teachers everywhere), and people tend to tell rather than show when they write letters. But somehow, Shaffer and Barrows’ novel is both vivid and genuine, with highly distinctive voices, seamless pacing, and masterful building of suspense. Not once did I feel as though I was reading an epistolary novel written by two women in 2008. The whole way through, I felt as though I was really reading a long series of correspondences, as though I was privileged enough to be let into the secrets of these people’s lives.

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society is a light, fast-paced, but still very fulfilling read. There are plenty of laughs and, for people like me who have an uncontrollable weeping reflex, maybe a tear or two as well. And be warned: Go buy some stationery before you read the book. If nothing else, it will make you hungry to write a lengthy and loving epistle to a dear old—or brand new—friend.

--Emmaline Silverman

Voices: Tasty Morsels of Joy Found in 'Garlic and Sapphires'

Eating out should be a joyous experience, in theory. However, the question alone of what to eat or which appetite to satisfy—the sweet or the tangy—can be daunting, even agonizing. Then of course there is the decision of where to eat: someplace fancy or someplace ordinary? Recommendations, especially those coming from someone as highly regarded as the newly hand-picked food critic for The New York Times, can take the pressure off. But it can also carry a lot of weight in the eyes of those willing to spend money at the most premier establishments in a tough city like New York. Such is the lot that Ruth Reichl has taken on in Garlic and Sapphires, and she does so with gusto and charm.

Being a notorious food critic in a city that thrives off of Page Six headliners presents challenges, and the means to combat them are paramount. In a series of humorous, light-hearted, and often times sad vignettes, Ruth Reichl recounts stories of how she disguised herself as six women while she ate in and reviewed New York City restaurants that would otherwise be sure to recognize her. In Sapphires, however, Reichl makes no attempt to placate any particular party: her employer the Times, the chefs at the restaurants she reviews, or the millions of New Yorkers whose mouths she presumably looks out for. Instead, over the course of six years Reichl unintentionally performs a social study on the varying degree of attention and respect one receives at well-regarded eating establishments based solely on one’s appearance.

In “Betty”, Reichl adapts the persona of a meek, almost invisible senior woman who she followed from the train one afternoon. The service Reichl receives as Betty while attending the Tavern on the Green is almost as deplorable as the meal itself. In fact, it is simply because she’s old and timid. In more humorous reflections, Reichl disguises herself as a stunning red head who “dumbs down” her knowledge of food by feigning ignorance during a meal with a man who has tentacles for hands and is as equally clueless and garrulous as he is wealthy.

Despite flowing in and out of characters and alter egos, Reichl's book delights as she stimulates the appetite with her luscious descriptions of everything from prosciutto to shrimp to cheese to duck, and the precise temperate at which each should be served. Readers join Reichl at the table while she digs into euphoric experiences with fresh eel, roasted lamb, rolled pasta or soup consommé. In some cases you can even imagine Reichl closing her eyes, tipping her right pinky in the air while holding a spoon, and raising her foot in glee over a robust meal. But even good meals come to an end.

For a short while, Sapphires rides on the strange irony of Reichl blithely reviewing food that she so clearly grew up being stimulated by. She doesn’t seem bothered by criticism from her editors or from angry letters and phone calls from the public calling for her resignation after slamming some the most preeminent restaurants in the city. But the reality for a critic is that critiquing can become stale and cumbersome, if you let it. At some point, even the critic needs to be reinvigorated again. Through exploring the restaurants of New York’s culinary landscape via her own alter-personas (and taking a food tour of NYC with another food critic colleague), Reichl comes to rediscover why she fell in love with food in the first place.

Sapphires is not solely about going along on the epicurean journeys of a renowned food critic for the New York Times. It reads like a personal journal you might expect a chef or a cook or even an everyday foodie to carry. It’s filled with personal recipes, newspaper-like-clippings of several Times restaurant reviews Reichl has written over the years, stories of secret food discoveries, as well as Reichl’s family and friends. The stories are also about the glory days of the economic boom during of the 1990s that the country was sailing on, and the restaurants that tried to board, and the few that fell off the proverbial economic gangplank. Reichl’s tender retrospective on the mom and pop cooks, bread makers, fish vendors, and candy sellers who were a disappearing breed in the changing culinary landscape of New York City become—excuse the pun—the bread and butter of Garlic and Sapphires. In “Missionary for the Delicious”, Reichl blows a long kiss to bread kneaders in Queens, candy makers in Brooklyn who, in vain, toil away at making candy by hand, and to the best little-known shop in Brooklyn that sells yogurt perfect enough for making Afghan dumplings. It’s one of the books more crowning achievements, and is a testament that true satisfaction in eating belongs to those with an appetite for it.

Voices: Have Women Overcome 'Fear of Flying'?

It’s been 36 years since Erica Jong’s groundbreaking Fear of Flying flew off the shelves and into the limelight as a book that would change not just literature, but the lives of women.

Reading it now, it’s easy to appreciate it as a great read, but harder to see it in its original, revolutionary context. After all, what is so groundbreaking about a woman wanting (and having) sex? Or wanting (and gaining) success? We have a decade of "Sex and the City" under our belts and the lyrics of Beyonce’s “Single Ladies” ringing in our ears.

Could it be that in this era of the Jezebel woman, who is smart and a bit cynical and doesn’t feel a wit of guilt about jumping from bed to bed, or about not jumping from bed to bed, that we’ve outgrown Isadora Wing, FOF’s heroin? Or do Isadora’s fantasies and struggles and “Zipless Fucks” have as much relevance today as in 1973?

The plot of the novel is little more than a series of episodes in Isadora’s life. It begins with her flying over the Atlantic to a psychiatrists’ conference in Geneva with her shrink husband, stricken by the fear of flying. Upon arriving, she meets what she thinks will be her Zipless Fuck—the ultimate fantasy, the “platonic ideal” of a sexual affair, in which “zippers fell away like rose petals, underwear blew off in one breath like dandelion fluff.”

After a period of wrenching indecision, Isadora decides to take off with the ZF, a crass and narcissistic Brit named Adrian Lovegood, on an aimless road trip around Europe. She has no idea whether she will return to her strong, silent, and stone-cold husband Bennett.

The irony is that Adrian is terrible in bed. In fact, he is impotent most of the time. Clearly Isadora is not sure what she is really seeking, and if she is looking in the right places to find it.

It’s the kind of novel that any woman can read and proclaim “story of my life!” out loud at any number of points. Maybe we haven’t all married a psychopath—as Isadora does, fresh out of college, before getting hitched to Bennett as a kind of antidote—but haven’t we all sometimes wondered if we really want to marry and have children, and then felt guilty for wondering? Or hungered for success, and then cowered in its face? Or felt uncomfortable and painfully aware of being a woman alone?

The real achievement of the book is that it is the candid voice of a woman in all her complexity, honored in a way that it had not been previously. It is not a novel written by a woman about women’s things; the narrative middleman has been cut out. It’s nothing but the screaming, musing, crying voice of a woman—and a smart one— for 400-plus pages.

These are not just moments in the life of a fictional character or an author, but in the lives of all women, before 1973 and up to today. In writing such a text, Jong asserted that these moments deserve attention.

But the buck stops there. Fear of Flying may have started the trend of recognizing and validating the desires and struggles of women—we want sex! But also marriage! But also success! But maybe not!—but women still desire, still struggle. Not simply because they are of a certain gender, but also because they are individuals.

I read this text differently today than I would have as a young woman in 1973. I am not shocked by the easy, flippant use of the words “fuck”, “prick”, and “cunt”. I do not hear the repressed voice of womanhood, but rather that of a person and a writer, coming to her own and figuring out who she is and wishes to be. That is a struggle that will never be resolved in a feminist blog, in a pop song, or on a TV show. In this way, Fear of Flying will never be irrelevant.

--Allison Geller

Voices: Love and War in 'The Book of Night Women'

The Book of Night Women by Marlon James is a love story; don't let the jacket information, or any other reviews you read fool you. It's wrapped in a story of slavery, for sure, but the book seeks to answer questions about the human heart: Is there real love on a plantation? Or, more specifically, can love exist between master and slave, white and black?

On Montpelier Estate, where the half-Ashanti, half-white Lilith is born in 1785, love is hard to find. Born to a teenage slave and a heartless overseer, Lilith’s mother dies and she is given over to the barren, unfeeling slave Circe. Circe don't love Lilith, or anyone else for that matter, and the child grows up lonely. She's headstrong and smart and brave. All these things she needs to be, as she matures amidst the ongoing battle Jamaica's white planters wage against their slaves in the late 18th century.

The book is written entirely in Jamaican patois. Patois, or patwah, generally refers to a non-standard version of a language, and in James's Night Women it means upon becomes 'pon, and pronouns like "that" are cast aside. Reading it was like music. There is a beauty in the shape and relationship of the words, and it is made even clearer by the contrast it creates with the actual content. Here's the first paragraph of the book:



Caribbean sugar cane plantations were notoriously violent and cruel institutions. The island that James creates is no different. The violence is compounded by the complete lack of morals. Slaves are taught to lie for their masters, masters lie to themselves, overseers lie on slaves, and slaves lie on slaves. Black women are never women or girls, but always cunt, bitch, niggerwoman. Punishments are doled out unjustly, and not for discipline. Whippings, gang rapings, lynchings, and burnings are for spite, jealousy, blind rage on the part of an old woman that gets tired of her husband coming home smelling like female niggers.

But slaves are not blameless. On James' Montpelier, skinfolk ain't your kinfolk, and can't be trusted anymore than the bosses. Field Negroes hate house Negroes, house Negroes hate master. A slap on the slave's cheek might earn the master or mistress a steady stream of piss in her next bowl of soup, or dog poo-poo in place of molasses in a sweet meal. The ruthlessness that the masters use against the slaves is turned around on them, unknowingly. But a lump of Negro spit in a cup of tea isn't near enough atonement for the misery the Wilson family inflicts on its hundreds of slaves. So, whether they be strong Ashanti that come straight from "the Africa," yellow-skinned mulattoes all tracing their lineage back to one raping overseer, or colony-born Negroes that don't know of a world not surrounded by the stalk of the sugar cane, everyone agrees that life in Jamaica on a sugar plantation is hell incarnate.

Lilith is born into all of this, a dark-skinned, green-eyed mulatto raised by Circe and Tantalus the mad nigger. Ever since Tantalus showed her the picture of the white girl sleeping with the white prince standing over her and staring at her with love, that is what Lilith wants. And damn if her "spiritedness" doesn't earn her some love, but it comes in a form that she doesn't expect. The man's white all right, but not the white she was expecting. Lilith and he love all right, but not the way she was expecting. And Lilith’s heart is hard, an unexpected side effect of her short, tormented life. The last few chapters find her having to make some hard decisions and ask herself some difficult questions. Their relationship, built on the mutual distrust and lies that slave and master share, grows but is stunted. She is haunted by her past, by her allegiance to the Night Women, and by the blood on her hands.

The book's namesake refers to a league of women, all connected in a way that only plantation Negroes can be, who meet at night with the plot to be like Saint-Domingue and form a free black community. Their leader is Homer, an old, battle-worn, austere house slave that runs the roost at the Estate's great house. She saves Lilith from death and harm whenever she can, and appreciates the girl's bullheaded qualities. But Lilith and Homer are slaves and so their bonds can only be so strong; it's nothing for one to snap on the other or watch the other head to a horrible fate.

At 432 pages, the hardcover edition is a surprisingly fast read. The book is vulgar, yet beautiful with plenty of look-away, flinch-worthy chapters that beg you to keep reading. James is an exceptionally gifted storyteller with an ear for the voices that make a character come to life. He's been compared to everyone from Toni Morrison to Zadie Smith, but his novel stands on its own two Negro feet.


-- Whitney Teal

Voices: Candide by Voltaire

Voltaire’s short novel, Candide synthesizes the main conflicts that brewed and erupted during the Enlightenment of the 18th Century: reason vs. rationalization.

Born François Marie Arouet in 1694, Voltaire’s formative years were spent in Paris, where he contributed to what would become the city’s long-standing reputation for protesting government and church doctrine. Francois Marie Arouet often expressed his detest of the French government’s lack of willingness to act on behalf of the poor. He worked as an assistant to a lawyer in Paris, was appointed as a secretary to the French ambassador in the Netherlands, kicked out for presumably trying to elope with a French refugee woman named Catherine Olympe Dunoyer, and thrown in and out of jail and exile by the French government—all before his mid twenties! It is after his incarceration inside the Bastille in 1717 that Francoise Marie Arouet assumed the pen name, Voltaire. Historians and writers have attributed the adopted name to many aspects of Voltaire’s early life, including its semblance to the name of his family’s boat “Airvault”. However, most feel the pen name speaks to “voltage” and "speed", and Voltaire’s penchant for quick wit and sharp retorts. He developed a taste for satire, and this interest—coupled with a growing anger over the lack of equality amongst men during 18th Century France—made Voltaire a key player and dangerous threat to challenging traditional thoughts.

At a time when the religious authorities had much more involvement in political policy, much of the leading thought was that everything happens in a rationalized way—for the good of all things. Enlightenment thinkers—Voltaire in particular—saw fault with this idea for a number of reasons. For one, rationalization was used as an enabler for church and aristocratic despotism. The aristocracy used the idea of rationalization to promote ongoing chains in noble rule. Church doctrine condoned prejudice and fear tactics by having witch hunts and public persecutions against persons with different religious ideologies. With this, there was a sort of blissful optimism that French society co-signed with because the church and the aristocracy wrote these acts off as being necessary. It is that sentiment exactly that Voltaire satirizes in Candide (optimism) through his blissful protagonist of the same name. At a time when science and theoretical ideas were developing, many Enlightenment champions found scientific evidence of why there were natural disasters, or why people died, to be more reasonable than simply saying they were means working toward the same good ending.

Published in 1759, Candide is about satirizing blissful optimism (or blissful ignorance as Voltaire might describe it) and hypocrisy. It is not wholeheartedly about one person, though Candide is the protagonist, but rather a cross section of groups that Voltaire wishes to criticize. Each character represents a different part of that cross section. Candide is the Every Man. Voltaire paints a portrait of a kind-hearted and naïve young man living in a castle with little to no worries. He has an equally naïve mentor named Pangloss who is well versed in “metaphysico-theologo-cosmolo-nigology” who schools Candide in the belief that everything is the “best of all possible worlds.” According to Pangloss, there can be no better world than the one we are in. If there were, we would be living there. It is evident that Voltaire is comparing Pangloss to and taking jabs at the famous philosopher Leibniz, who believed that God created the world, and thus created the best world possible for humans to live. The Grand Inquisitor that Candide encounters plays the role of the hypocritical church. Other characters like Martin leverage the philosophical rationalizations by interjecting more realistic viewpoints of the world.

With Candide, Voltaire essentially creates a tape recorder without a stop or pause button. Characters who are otherwise innocent endure terrible misfortune after misfortune. Voltaire’s delivery is stark and unyielding until the very last page. He in no way tends to mollify the plight of his characters. When they are mutilated, burned, tortured, raped, subjected to cannibalism, and all together left for dead Voltaire takes three paragraphs to allow you to collect your nerves before moving on to the next blunder. It’s not because he does not not care about or want a better outcome for his troupe; Voltaire is simply taking jabs at philosophical doctrine that waves its hand over human atrocities and says, “But it’s for the good of all things”.

In viewing Voltaire’s work and whether or not one agrees with his stance on rationalization over reason, the answer seems relevant. In reading any type of history on people, it is important to understand the context or the time frame in which the events occurred. The way most people view optimism in the 21st Century is not the same view of optimism—wayward or not—that Voltaire was lashing out against during the 18th Century. On the whole, churches in the modern Western world are not burning heretics at the stake for the public good. There is a larger divide between religion and politics, and knowledge across all fields is much more expansive.

The pace of Candide is steady, and Voltaire keeps your eyes wide and mind racing with every page. He strips back layers of society and removes comfort bubbles, and lays everything bare. Landscapes that started out lush eventually become barren battlefields. Even though Voltaire approaches the misfortunes of his characters in a raw manner, there are still pockets of soul and sympathy. When Candide, beaten down and near exhaustion, happens upon a dying Negro slave he feels the most empathy because he recognizes a man who is essentially helpless and innocent, and that despite being so he is not immune to the horrors of the world.

Despite satirizing optimism, Voltiare is not against it, as is evidenced by the book's ending. Candide stands in a garden reminiscent of the Garden of Eden and says to his surviving troupe, “Let us cultivate our garden.” To borrow a quote from Dr. George Hahn, Professor of British Literature Studies at Towson University, “And the book's final work is in a garden—where Candide now keeps his feet on the ground, unlike Pangloss, whose head is in the clouds. Thus, Voltaire affirms reason over rationalization.”

Voices: Silver Lining: A Letter to You

Thankfully, in the middle of our feeling disturbed or bothered or anxious or stagnant there is a silver lining to every situation that will bring all things into clarity. Recently, when my mind felt like it was being scattered to the four winds, I found the silver lining in one of the "happiest places on Earth": the bookstore.

I went to Barnes & Noble after work one Friday and gathered as many books as I could hold. Books I've wanted to read for a long time but never got around to. Books I've fingered and thumbed through over and over just because of their pretty covers. I had collected Jhumpa Lahiri's Unaccustomed Earth, Andrea Levy's Fruit of the Lemon, and lastly, Maya Angelou's Letter to My Daughter. It is this book that dug a little hole in my mind and nestled itself in the crevices of my thoughts and whispered a secret: you are human and you are free to live with wonder in your eye, courage in your spirit, and unabashed love in your heart. All of which are virtues that sometimes take longer to manifest themselves, but are nevertheless always present.

With her trademark sense of cool, Maya Angelou reveals her own life lessons with a soft yet unshakable voice. She's incredibly candid with her personal stories of being beaten by a lover, having a child out of wedlock at a young age, knowing her mother's unconditional love, and learning that being a philanthropist does not always equal being charitable.

My personal favorite was a short anecdote about how Angelou experienced her own shortcomings in humility. In a chapter entitled "Senegal", Angelou speaks of how she ventured to Senegal to visit a couple who operated in the upper echelon of the artistic and intellectual circles. She was the guest of honor in their home during a dinner party they had arranged. Angelou talks of how she walked among the dinner guests and made her way into a room that had a decadent carpet on the floor. Her mind flashed back to a woman she had known in previous years who would not allow her maids to walk on her good carpets, declaring that if anyone is going to wear down her good carpet it will be her family and friends. Angelou commences to walk across this beautiful carpet belonging to her Senegalese friends, showing that a carpet is meant to be stepped on. The guests look at her and offer hospitable smiles. Angelou finally steps away from the carpet after her attempts did not encourage more people to join her. The maids come in and roll up the carpet she had walked on, but they replace it with another--one more beautiful this time. The maids then begin placing silverware and plates and decadent dinner entrees onto the carpet, and Ms. Angelou begins to feel her face and neck burning with embarrassment realizing she has just walked across the dinner table. She offers this timeless piece of advice to women and girls everywhere:

"The epitome of utter sophistication is simplicity. In an unfamiliar culture it is wise to offer no innovations, no suggestions, or lessons."

Letters to My Daughter offers poetry and prose from one of the most giving and candid literary figures to stir up the richness inside every woman. She treats your ills with laughter, stimulates your mind with questions, and fills your heart with joy knowing that you are armed with a slightly stronger arsenal to keep you encouraged in the world. It is, among other things, a book about values and about knowing when to fight for yourself. It is also about about being daring in the face of adversity, lessons in judging others and measuring ourselves against pillars we were not meant to.

The following is a picture of a video clip that Amazon.com has provided of Maya Angelou introducing her book. If you click the following picture, you'll be directed to the video.

Voices: Decide to Live as Veronika Decides to Die

I read this book because a lady, Gemma Bulos, on the Echoing Green website had it on her books to read about making the best of your life. Because I’m always trying to see what the world changers are up to, I read it. The author of the best-seller, The Alchemist magically weaves this tale about life, purpose, meaning and death.

From the first page (and the title) you know what the protagonist is thinking. One day she simply decides to die.

As the book continues, you understand why she chose to end her life or monotony and quiet desperation. For all those bored with the simplicity of their lives, take a cue from Veronika, a young, Slovenian girl who realizes too late all she wants is the one thing she was willing to throw away. Given one week to live she begins to live without the debilitating fear of judgment that ruled her life, she remembers the things, hobbies and places that had once brought her joy. I enjoyed this book though it was a little slow after Veronika’s initial decision to kill herself, because I could see the transformation from a person sleep walking through like to one with such a passion for it I almost forgot she was going to die.

Most of the book takes place inside an insane asylum where Veronika is sent after her attempt and the other patients represent the full spectrum from schizophrenics to healthy adults who enjoy the carefree, regimented shelter of the insane asylum life. The book has even more meaning as Coelho, having spent time in an Argentinian asylum himself, has hinted to it being loosely based on his life.

And to top it all off, drumroll please…its being made into a movie! I would definitely recommend reading this book first, but Buffy is to star as Veronika in the movie of the same name in early 2009! Jonathan Tucker, David Thewlis and Melissa Leo round out the cast. I’ll be back with the comparison as soon as it hits the big screen.

--Melissa Johnson

Voices: 'Love in the Time of Cholera'...and Melodramatic Movies

In keeping with the theme of great books and great movies, I recently watched the 2007 film adaptation of Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, soon after completing the novel. Let's start with the novel: beautiful, enchanting, compelling. I loved reading about the intense love triangle between the beautiful middle-class Fermina Daza, the awkward, poor Florentino Ariza and the confident, rich Dr. Juvenal Urbino.

The version that I read, translated from Spanish by Edith Grossman, featured lush details and memorable scenes and characters as it weaved the tale of Daza and Ariza's young love, courtship and engagement that is hindered by Daza's father's quest for his only child to marry a wealthy and important man. Dr. Urbino, a European-educated Cholera expert, is perfect and begins to hunt Daza endlessly until she gives in to his proposal. The story then follows Daza and Urbino's peaceful, if not exactly passionate, 50+ year marriage and Ariza's 50+ year pursuit of the woman he loves.


The film, to its credit, is painstakingly true to the book. However, the two mediums are so different and even with Marquez's brilliant scenes and dialogue, the adaptation falls flat. The characters, so complex and three-dimensional in print, become caricatures of themselves on screen, with Lorenzo Daza, Fermina's brash and curiously wealthy father, becomes a foot-stomping, cigar-chomping joke on-screen, played by John Leguizamo. Fermina, so fierce and smart and thoughtful in the book, becomes something of an annoying damsel in the film.

To his credit, the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, does Florentino Ariza (who kind of annoyed me in the book) a lot of beautiful, romantic justice. But one great performance does not a good movie make. There is a reason why Mr. Marquez protested to having his books made into movies...he knew they'd suck.

The book is wonderful, 5 stars. The movie, not so much. The entire time I kept feeling as if I was watching a really long Mexican soap opera, complete with overly expressive glances and long, drawn out gestures. But read the book and watch the movie to draw your own conclusions!

--Whitney Teal

Voices: Come Full Circle With Everything Is Illuminated

Jonathan Safran Foer writes a refreshingly rich and complex love letter to his ancestors and the people of the Ukraine in Everything Is Illuminated.

In short, Everything Is Illuminated is the story of a young Jewish American in search of his family’s history. Armed with a beguiling translator named Alexander Perchov, his grandfather and their dog Sammy Davis Junior Junior, Jonathan Safran Foer embarks on a journey through the Ukraine looking for Augustine, the woman in the photograph he carries who he believes helped save his grandfather during WWII. The novel seems to be broken up into three parts: the actual events of the family’s history from 1791-1942, Safran Foer’s reconstruction of these events in his unpublished novel, and the letters that he and Alexander share in 1997.

Everything is Illuminated introduces itself like a comfortable acquaintance, a foreigner you might meet by happenstance on a train who gladly shares the events of his/her life through slightly butchered English and deep, sad eyes. The most unmistakable element of this novel is its humor. Safran Foer encourages you to laugh at Alexander and his idolization of America and how he uses elevated words to express simple phrases. (I.e. “Amid Grandfather and I was a silence you could cut with a scimitar” or “I feel oblongated to again eat a slice of humble pie (my stomach is becoming chock-full)”. However, by book’s end you almost feel ashamed of laughing if for no other reason than your understanding of Alexander as a hopeful young man whose dreams have been deferred.

Safran Foer has an amazing command of language and literary techniques. His novel incorporates several of them, even becoming so bold as to create a few new ones by writing statements that seem to bleed into one another and comprise one streaming sentence, not to be confused with a run-on. I’ve highlighted several passages written with imaginative metaphors such as, “He left the oven door open, and would sit for hours and watch her, as one might watch a loaf of bread rise” or “He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.”

The most difficult part about reading Everything Is Illuminated would have to be the complexity of the relationships and their overlapping. Staying cognizant of the chronology of events that happened in 1790-1942 and those happening in present day was no easy feat, either. Safran Foer has created a story within a story and a letter within a letter, revisiting the lives and trials of his great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother and grandfather. This, coupled with secret (and not-so secret affairs), makes the story’s plot even more involved and at times confusing, but nevertheless significant.

Through this effort to retrace his family’s history, Safran Foer illuminates the ills of human society as it relates to hideous hate crimes (particularly the Holocaust where Jews were pitted against Jews in the name of survival). What is also illuminated is the power of love to ripple through time and penetrate even the bleakest circumstances. Safran Foer does a lovely job of reflecting on forbidden love, unrequited love, and even the first fruits of love. The characters in this novel suffer through an overwhelming sense of yearning. They yearn for closeness, they yearn to forget or bury the tragedies of the past, and then there is yearning from Jonathan Safran Foer himself, as well as Alexander, for clarity and understanding all the secrets of their family’s past.

Everything is Illuminated is a mixed bag of all that is great about reading literature: history, love, tragedy, irony, exuberance, extreme sadness, imagination, humor, a distinctive style. If you are looking for familial story filled with humor, honesty, and an unconventional approach to a very conventional theme—trying to discover one’s family roots—I strongly recommend Everything is Illuminated.

--Nicole Crowder

Voices: A Very Snobby Awakening: 'A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man'

This you must know before I tell you about my reading of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by James Joyce: I'm a bit of a snob. I like snobby drinks, snobby restaurants, and, as evidenced by this blog, snobby books. I like the challenge of reading books that are difficult, full of hard to ascertain themes. I love the big words that I gleam from reading these books and the intimate knowledge of places that I've never been. But this book, that is ALL about the spiritual + intellectual awakening of Stephen Dedalus, is snobby, even for my taste. As one character puts it in chapter 5, "You're a born sneerer, Stevie," meaning, Stephen's as snobby as the day is long.

I'm a big fan of coming-of-age stories (see The Wonder Spot and The Bell Jar, two of my favs), but a coming-of-age story that, in my opinion, lacks any real connection to the main character is a hard pill to swallow.

Here's a re-cap: the book's hero, Stephen, is a smart, sensitive young Irishman. We find him first as the youngest student at an all-boys boarding school, being bullied and literally thrown into a cesspool by his peers. We follow him to another boarding school, where his heroism is evidenced by his willingness to stand up to the religious clergy that run the school for unfair treatment. He then attends yet another school and finally a University before making a decision to leave Ireland. In the midst of this we learn that his father is not well-off and kind of a traitor to the Roman Catholic church. Stephen is deeply conflicted (and deeply conflicted in a very academic, boring way, mind you) about religion, his sexual relationship with a young woman that he believes will send him straight to hell (and there's nearly an entire chapter devoted to the hellishness of hell) and about his country, which at the time is deeply conflicted about its relationship with Britain.

I am a lover of James Joyce's short stories (I read many from Dubliners as an English minor in school), but I don't love the lack of a real story in this book. I never felt like I was rooting for Stephen, nor that I really knew him. Consequently, the "portrait," that I was promised was more like a lightly sketched drawing...in black and white. You know how movies based on Shakespeare's plays are always translated into modern language? I'd love to see that happen with this book. I feel, unfortunately, that so much of the beauty is lost on my modern mind. As one in A Portrait said: "Even in literature, the highest and most spiritual art, the forms are often confused."

Join us as we four read through the undeniable classics of the Collegeboard's 101 Great Books List. We'll also be reading contemporary classics and writing our own list of Uptown Literatti Contemporary Great Books.

Our next book will be something more recent, so stay tuned!

With bibliophilic love,
Whitney