Where You’ll Find Me: Risk, Decisions, and the Last Climb of Kate Matrosova

This is a true story that caught the national media by storm. No pun intended! 

 I have diverged from my usual blog posts as Where You’ll Find Me: Risk, Decisions, and the Last Climb of Kate Matrosova is not a literary work. Ty Gagne is not a writer by profession. It is the story that is more intriguing than the writing. It is a gripping human interest story. It hits close to home in many ways and I needed to write about it to process my own emotions.

On the 15th of February, in the year 2015, 32 year old Kate Matrosova of NYC attempted a solo traverse of the summits of the White Mountains in New Hampshire. Her plan was to undertake a light and fast traverse through several peaks in the Presidential Range. In other words, she intended to pack lightly but move quickly on the trails and begin her descent back the same day instead of camping overnight. She had a satellite phone, a GPS device and a personal locator beacon. Her husband was going to pick her up that very evening on the other side of the range. Kate Matrosova was an experienced hiker and physically fit. She had previously summited four of the seven highest peaks on each continent and was targeting Mount Everest next. She would have successfully scaled the summits on any other day. It just so happened that she chose the worst possible day to hike. 

A Nor’easter storm veered off its predicted course making it an extremely dangerous day to hike. Kate was mentally prepared for setting off in cold weather. Perhaps she was seeking a day with frigid temperatures and snow to train herself for Mount Everest. But she was unaware that the storm in the forecast was going to hit sooner than predicted. She had checked the weather the evening before but had embarked on the hike in the pre-dawn hours before the morning forecast was issued by the Mount Washington Observatory on what turned out to be the worst winter blizzard day that season: 

In the clouds with snow and blowing snow. White out conditions. High temps dropping to -20F. Winds NE shifting NW 45-60mph rapidly increasing mid-morning to 80-100mph with gusts up to 125 mph. Wind chills 65-75 below zero.

The following day rescuers found her frozen body. She was blown off a peak by the wind and had died of exposure.

Where You’ll Find Me: Risk, Decisions, and the Last Climb of Kate Matrosova is a detailed account of the ill-fated winter hike written by Ty Gagne, a corporate risk management executive and a certified wilderness responder. With data retrieved from her GPS and with the aid of photos, maps and venn diagrams, he meticulously pieces together the events leading up to the discovery of her frozen body the following day. He retraces her route and imagines her thought processes. He also follows the trajectory of two other guided hiking groups that set off on that day and unlike Matrosova, decided to turn back. The second half of the book describes the rescue and ultimately the recovery operation by brave and dedicated individuals who were risking their lives too in the treacherous weather and who grappled with the same decisions that Kate Matrosova had to face.

Gagne explores the psychology of risk. What makes us take the decisions we do? Gagne uses Matrosova’s story to analyze risk in the workplace. He tries to understand what could have gone wrong in her decision making. He withholds judgement though he points out her errors. He starts the book by giving an example of a hike he went on where he himself made mistakes. 

Above is a map from the book of Kate Matrosova’s projected route through the White Mountains.

Kate was dropped off at the Appalachia parking lot in the wee hours of the morning by her husband, Charles Farhoodi. She started up the Valley Way Trail and got up above treeline in tough conditions taking more time than usually required. She took a left off the main trail to climb up to the top of Mount Madison and then descended back down to join the main path and took a left on to the Star Lake Trail to tackle the next summit. She was already far behind schedule. She was hiking against 85 miles per hour winds but instead of abandoning her hike and turning back, she started climbing Mount Adams.

But less than 150 feet from the summit, ‘An impenetrable wall of wind’ finally prompted her to turn back and abandon the rest of the hike. Unfortunately it was too late. She would have become hypothermic by that point and unable to keep up with the winds which by then were approaching over 90 miles an hour and the temperature with wind chills were reaching close to -100F. At some point, in desperation, she activated her personal locator beacon but to no avail. It seems like she was hurled off the peak by the strong winds and probably hurt or unable to walk any more. I can’t even imagine how panic-stricken she must have been while waiting for help!

As her PLB erroneously reported multiple locations, the initial rescue team went looking for her on the wrong side of Madison and returned at 3 a.m. with no luck. The search resumed on Monday morning with a larger rescue team including the New Hampshire Army National Guard Black Hawk helicopter and a civil Air Patrol Cessna airplane. The rescue teams on the planes had to call off the search because of poor visibility. Her body was finally found by a ground rescue team 150 feet downslope off the Star Lake trail, close to the location indicated by the first signal from the beacon. It is likely she would not have made it even if the initial coordinates had been correct.

Matrosova had a solid plan with ways to opt out if she needed as is apparent in the map above. But why did she go solo in the dead of winter? Why did she not have sufficient gear? She had no sleeping bag or bivy sack and not even snow shoes with her and though she carried crampons, she does not seem to have used them. And why did the weather forecast not deter her in the first place? But having set out, when there was a point where she could have decided to turn back, what made her continue to scale the next peak despite the deteriorating conditions? She had done a winter climb to Madison Col a month earlier with her husband and they had camped up overnight in the mountains but they had to abandon going on Mount Adams as her husband could not keep up with her. Could it be that she did not want to miss the summit a second time having come all the way? Gagne delves into all these questions as he tries to analyze Kate Matrosova’s mindset.

Although Gagne was not among the team of rescuers, he pieces together the events that led up to the tragedy to analyze if it could have been prevented if other choices had been made. I wasn’t very comfortable with the fact that he uses her personal story to discuss risk management in the workplace. Yet it was a very engaging read and I was on edge the entire time even though I knew how this would end. The last chapter has a different tone from the rest of the work which is more factual. On the anniversary of her death, Gagne goes on the same hike that Matrosova had attempted and feels her ghostly presence in the mountains.

Kate Matrosova’s story affected me deeply. I am from New Hampshire and I know these mountains. I’ve hiked on some of the trails albeit in more forgiving weather. A friend from out of town who has hiked to Everest base camp remarked that scaling Mount Washington was even more challenging. The trails look deceptively simple because the mountains are at a much lower altitude. You don’t have to deal with the oxygen shortage that you encounter on a Himalayan trek but the terrain is still treacherous because the weather patterns are unpredictable in these mountains.

Kate’s story made me think about the power of Mother Nature, a force so formidable that it is still beyond human control in spite of the technological advances we’ve made, and it also brought many questions to mind:

What causes people to pontificate and pass judgements on others without understanding or compassion? The story went viral and invited a lot of vitriol. People were making conjectures about Matrosova’s behavior and character accusing her of being stupid, overly ambitious, and even of suffering from hubris as if she were a character from a Greek tragedy. She is not here to defend herself. These mistakes could have been made by anyone. She probably underestimated the changing weather conditions in the mountains. And who knows if hypothermia had clouded her judgement?

When there are so many similar stories, why do some stand out and capture the world’s attention? There have been close to 200 known fatalities within the Presidential Range. Most recently on Jan 19, 2024, an experienced hiker died on a solo hike in brutal conditions succumbing to frigid temperatures and harsh winds. His story died down with him and with the storm. Kate Matrosova was an accomplished young immigrant from Siberia who lived the American dream by getting a great education and achieving corporate success. She was an investment banker in NYC who was not only rich but very pretty too. Are these the reasons that made her story more noteworthy? 

And last but not the least, how to do you balance risk versus reward? Do we not have to be willing to take some amount of risk in order to live our dreams? Where do we draw the line between living a fulfilling life and recognizing our limits? Kate Matrosova’s story haunted me from the beginning. I found myself thinking about her for weeks after reading the book. Would I have ventured out in those conditions? I am a cautious person by nature and even I know that all it takes is a split second decision for things to go awry. I view this incident as a cautionary tale and I would recommend this book to outdoor adventure enthusiasts.

Ty Gagne brings up important points like developing soft skills and knowing when to make alterations to your original plan to avert a tragedy of this nature. He also talks about the advantages and disadvantages of going with a group as opposed to going by yourself. Kate never had to think on her own before as her previous hikes were guided trips. All these lessons apply not only to decisions taken on adventures but also when you you are faced with quandaries in life wondering whether to turn right or left and risk it all or play it safe. Kate undoubtedly made mistakes but she was also unlucky. Don’t we all struggle with similar decisions from time to time which make us exclaim, ‘But for the grace of God go I”?

Isn’t there a bit of Kate Matrosova in all of us?

Istanbul: Memories and the City

I am continuing in the vein of my previous blog post and writing about a book I read in the place it was set. I picked up Orhan Pamuk’s memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, in anticipation of a trip to Istanbul and finished reading it while I was in the city. I haven’t read any of Pamuk’s novels and I thought this would be a good introduction to his writing. It didn’t turn out to be quite the book I was looking forward to reading during my stay. The city I visited was colorful and bustling, a far cry from the dismal picture painted by the writer. Although the book was published in 2005, Pamuk is describing the city of his childhood and young adulthood, the Istanbul of the fifties and the sixties. He depicts a city that no longer exists, a city in memory. The Istanbul I visited has been rebuilt for the most part and has a vibrancy and vitality that the memoir fails to capture. That being said, I am well aware that an outsider’s temporary experience of the city is remarkably different from that of a person born and brought up there.

Pamuk bemoans the decline of a city that was once a glorious Empire. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founding father of the Republic of Turkey and its first President introduced sweeping reforms in the twenties and thirties to westernize and secularize society within a short span of time. He got rid of the harems and the janissaries and the dress codes of the past. The Arabic alphabet was abandoned for a Romanized one. Old Pasha mansions along the Bosphorus burned down symbolic of a civilization going up in flames. The feeling of decay and loss affects the inhabitants who experience a melancholy, which, according to Pamuk is best described by the Turkish word ‘ huzun’: it is the collective melancholy that weighs on the city like a shroud when you see the evidence of the ruins around you:

“If I am to convey the intensity of the huzun that Istanbul caused me to feel as a child, I must describe the history of the city following the destruction of Ottoman Empire, and – even more important – the way this history is reflected in the city’s ‘beautiful’ landscape and its people. The huzun of Istanbul is not just the mood evoked by its music and its poetry, it is a way of looking at life that implicates us all, not only in a spiritual state, but a state of mind that is ultimately as life affirming as it is negating.”

“Still, the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to westernize and modernize may have been, the more desperate wish was probably to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire, rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloved’s clothes, possessions, and photographs. But as nothing, western or local, came to fill the void, the great drive to westernize amounted mostly to the erasure of the past.” 

This is a society in transition where the residents live literally and symbolically among the ruins of a great empire, Pamuk does not describe the famous touristic sites of the city. We get the perspective of a local flâneur who takes us to the back alleys and streets through decaying neighborhoods where stray dogs roam and wooden buildings burn down. Interspersed throughout the memoir are black and white photographs ( unfortunately without captions), captured mostly through the lens of the award winning photographer Ara Güler. The monochromatic photographs add to the wistful tone and convey the ‘huzun’ of the city shrouded in fog and soot.

Nightfall in the district of Zeyrek, Istanbul

The Suleiman Mosque in the winter seen from the Galata Bridge, 1955

The Ship on the Golden Horn

  And amid all the changes, the beautiful Bosphorus continues flowing while it has witnessed the ebb and flow of the tides of civilisation – the rise and fall of the Roman, Byzantine and Ottoman empires. The strait is the focal point of the city and dear to Pamuk. He would count the number of ferries passing through the Bosphorus from his window and witness the explosions of ships or the dramatic fires that would on occasion engulf the yalis (the houses of the pashas of the Ottoman era) lining its shores.

“If the city speaks of defeat, destruction, deprivation, melancholy and poverty, the Bosphorus sings of life, pleasure and happiness. Instanbul draws its strength from Bosphorus.”

He bemoans the lack of a literary tradition in Turkey. He describes the impressions of western writers like Nerval, Flaubert, Gautier and Apollinaire on the Istanbul of the 19th century. Among the few Turkish writers he admires are Yahya Kemal, Abdulhak Sinasi Hisar and Ahmed Hamdi Tanpinar but even these authors followed the footsteps of the French writers in evoking the ‘huzun’ of the city. How could they create a unique voice while still under the spell of European literary traditions?

He dwells at length on the unfinished “Istanbul Ansiklopedisi”, that was put together by Reşat Ekrem Koçu over many years and which recounts, between its pages, fascinating entries of the day to day life of Istanbullus, reflecting the spirit and atmosphere of the Ottoman period There is also a delightful chapter dedicated to humor in newspapers and journals-… ‘a random sampling of some of the …advice, warnings, pearls of wisdom, and invective… from Istanbul columnists… over the past 130 years.”

Along with describing the city that struggles to come on its own, the memoir recounts the coming of age story of the author. Just like the city, Pamuk grapples with his own identity. Once wealthy, the Pamuks are suffering business losses and the extended family is squabbling. Three generations live in one apartment building, each family on a different floor, His grandfather was wealthy but his father and uncle were not financially savvy.  Besides, his parents are unhappy in the marriage. The dwindling fortunes of his family and the philandering nature of his father made them move several times. A sensitive soul, he found refuge in a world of make believe and games. He had strange morbid dreams and a vivid imagination so much so that he conjured up his own double living somewhere in the city. 

The memoir also describes his experiences of sibling rivalry with his brother, the adolescent angst of first love and his struggle with career decisions. He goes to architecture school but would rather be an artist, a profession frowned upon in Turkey. He is interested in painting but eventually decides to take up writing as a career.

Just as Istanbul is caught between two worlds, so is the author. His family is westernized and are not practicing Muslims. In fact they frown upon religion believing that fasting for Ramadan was something that only backward people would do. The lack of spirituality leaves a void in the family and similarly the city with its increasing modernization has no anchor. Of course, the pendulum has swung the other way in Erdogan’s present day Turkey and this sentiment of the author has no longer the same relevance. I also found it interesting that whenever Pamuk talks about God, he imagines her as a woman which is something completely contrary to his faith.

Pamuk is not as popular in Turkey as he is in the West because of his westernized depictions and his observations from his privileged ivory tower. This book was a mixed bag for me. The structure is rambling and not well organized. His candor is extreme and unnecessary. For instance, his masturbatory inclinations and sadistic thoughts are completely irrelevant to the narrative. I also felt that he describes the melancholy of the place instead of capturing it. He distances himself from his subject matter and has an almost clinical approach. But I do have a better understanding of the city, of all its shades monochromatic and otherwise, and of all its states, happiness and ‘huzun’, through the distorted foggy lens of memory. It is important to understand that this is not a love letter to a city but a bittersweet and complex relationship with Istanbul that like the author is caught between the east and west, between tradition and modernity, and which makes him cry out in frustration:”I’ve never wholly belonged to this city, and maybe that’s been a problem all along.”

Crying in H Mart

Crying in H Mart is a raw and brutal account about salvaging a relationship with your dying mother and grappling with your mixed race identity with food bridging the gap to help you both cope with your loss and and straddle two cultures. Michelle Zauner is an indie rock musician of a band called Japanese Breakfast and this searing memoir is an extended version of an essay she wrote for The New Yorker in August 2018.

Michelle was brought up in Eugene, Oregon by her Korean mother and white American father. She had a troubled relationship with her mother Chongmi and it only became worse during her teenage years of rebellion. Everything changes when Chongmi is diagnosed, when she is fifty six years old, with stage IV squamous-cell carcinoma in her stomach. Michelle, who is twenty five at the time, realizes how much her mother means to her and suddenly the roles are reversed. She is her mother’s caretaker and through all the pain and suffering, she finds comfort in Korean cooking and bonds with her mother through food.

I recently lost my mother and I could relate to Michelle’s loss. I could see myself in Michelle- in the eagerness to please and also in the pain of seeing someone wilt before your eyes. She feels guilty about not appreciating her mother until it is almost too late. She tries to be more Korean than ever to make amends and to assuage the guilt, for a connection to her Korean heritage is by extension a connection to her mother.

Chongmi was far from perfect. She was critical, a perfectionist, a shallow woman who only cared about appearances. But yet when Michelle learns that her mother is dying, she transforms overnight from a rebellious youngster into a dutiful and loving daughter. She finds healing through food and specifically by exploring her Korean heritage through food. H Mart is a Korean grocery store chain. The book starts with her breaking down in the store as the aisles remind her of her mother’s cooking.  

“Food was how my mother expressed her love. No matter how critical or cruel she could seem—constantly pushing me to meet her intractable expectations—I could always feel her affection radiating from the lunches she packed and the meals she prepared for me just the way I liked them.” 

She wants to make it up to her mother before it is too late. I found it heartbreaking to see this young woman try so hard to win her mother’s approval. Interestingly, I discussed this book at a book club where there were many women of Asian origin. We were from China, Taiwan and India and we could all relate to the mother-daughter relationship. And all of us women unanimously declared that our emotionally distant mothers showed their love through cooking and feeding us. It seemed like there was some common cultural conditioning that resulted in our mothers’ attitudes and behaviors.

There are such vivid descriptions of Korean food in the book that if you are someone who enjoys the cuisine, it will leave you salivating. I think this memoir would have been perfect as a cookbook with personal anecdotes and stories accompanying each recipe instead of just an outpouring of grief. The writing is lyrical on the whole. One passage where Michelle Zauner compares the process of fermentation to stored memories, stood out in particular to me:

“I had thought fermentation was controlled death. Left alone, a head of cabbage molds and decomposes. It becomes rotten, inedible. But when brined and stored, the course of its decay is altered. Sugars are broken down to produce lactic acid, which protects it from spoiling. Carbon dioxide is released and the brine acidifies. It ages. Its color and texture transmute. Its flavor becomes tarter, more pungent. It exists in time and transforms. So it is not quite controlled death, because it enjoys a new life altogether.
The memories I had stored, I could not let fester. Could not let trauma infiltrate and spread, to spoil and render them useless. They were moments to be tended. The culture we shared was active, effervescent in my gut and in my genes, and I had to seize it, foster it so it did not die in me. So that I could pass it on someday. The lessons she imparted, the proof of her life lived on in me, in my every move and deed. I was what she left behind. If I could not be with my mother, I would be her.” 

Michelle captures the challenges of being a bi-racial kid who desperately wants to fit in with her American peers. She is the only Korean -American in her small rural town. One can sense the internalized self-loathing and shame about her race that she experiences during her teen years. She does not speak Korean well and is removed from her culture other than the annual summer trips to Korea where she spends time with her relatives. She moves to the East Coast for college and as a struggling musician in NYC blends in with her white peers and has a white boyfriend. Immigrants and their children know this feeling only too well- of belonging and yet not fully belonging.

“I had spent my adolescence trying to blend in with my peers in suburban America, and had come of age feeling like my belonging was something to prove. Something that was always in the hands of other people to be given and never my own to take, to decide which side I was on, whom I was allowed to align with. I could never be of both worlds, only half in and half out, waiting to be ejected at will by someone with greater claim than me. Someone whole.”   

With her mother’s impending death, it dawns on her that she risks losing the tenuous link she has to her culture. She scrambles to learn the language and learns to cook following a YouTube blogger.

Michelle had a lot of resentment and anger towards her mother but now that she is dying, she sweeps everything under the rug and is filled with love and tenderness for her. I have to wonder what would have happened if she hadn’t suffered from cancer! It was painful for me to see her experience her grief but it was even more painful for me to see her idealize a mother who was flawed in many ways. To make her mother happy, she even guilt- trips her boyfriend into marrying her just because she wants her mother to attend her wedding before she dies. She even admits in the acknowledgements that she tricked her husband into marrying her.

Writing a memoir is tricky. It requires vulnerability, honesty and courage. And sometimes that means that you cannot refrain from airing your dirty laundry in public. I couldn’t help feeling that Michelle treated her father unfairly. He was an alcoholic and had many shortcomings but he had some redeeming traits too – he was the sole provider of the family who took care of their financial needs and he nursed his wife during her illness and loved her in his own broken way. Michelle reveals that her father had an affair and it makes me wonder if her mother would have liked this in the open. The dead are not there to defend themselves. And not unsurprisingly, she is now estranged from her father.

The book hit close to home for me. It appealed to me as I could relate to the perspectives of both the mother and the daughter. I could identify with Michelle’s grief and the realization that our mothers love us in their own imperfect ways and with Chongmi’s situation as an immigrant parent raising first generation American children caught between two cultures. Making peace with your parents is a wonderful thing but if only Michelle had acknowledged her mother’s flaws and recognized the emotional abuse and yet felt compassion for the woman withering before her, it would have been a much more introspective and nuanced perspective of their relationship!

World of Wonders

World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments was Barnes and Noble’s Book of the Year 2020 and poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s first book in prose. One could call it poetry in prose as the poet’s touch is very evident in the collection of essays. In each essay or rather vignette, the author focuses on a specific natural wonder from the plant or animal kingdom and connects it to a personal experience in her life. The stunning cover and the gorgeous illustrations that accompany almost every vignette by artist Fumi Nakamura pair beautifully with the writing.

As an half Indian and half Filipino person of color living in the US, Aimee felt quite out of place in school and took refuge in the natural world around her. Her parents were educated professionals who moved around quite a bit within the US. It was nature that helped Aimee get through a lonely childhood whether in Arizona or Western New York, Kansas, Ohio or Mississippi. Life was difficult as a bi-racial first generation American and she recounts how her family was subjected to comments that ranged all the way from ignorant remarks and micro-aggressions to blatant racism.

Aimee makes her way through this hateful world with the help of nature. A tall catalpa tree with its giant heart-shaped leaves and long extending branches served as a green umbrella to provide shade to her and her sister from the sun in western Kansas and also to shelter them from unblinking eyes who were not used to brown-skinned people. The leaves could cover her face entirely if she needed anonymity. The distinctive smile of an axolotl which extends from one end of its face to the other is similar to her sheepish or rather salamander- like smile when a white girl at school tells her what make up she can wear and not wear on her brown skin.

In one of the chapters she describes how in an animal drawing contest at elementary school, she picked the peacock as her subject, inspired by the beautiful peacocks with their iridescent turquoise and jade feathers she came across in her father’s hometown in India. Her teacher told her sternly that she was supposed to draw only American animals as they live in ‘Ah-mer-i-kah’ and she had to abandon her animal of choice and pick another one. She drew a bald eagle perched on a cliff and added an American flag to the picture as well. She ended up winning first prize but the incident scarred her and she writes:

This is the story of how I learned to ignore anything from India….. But what the peacock can do is remind you of a home you will run away from and run back to all your life.

As an Indian-American, it pained me to see that a teacher caused her to reject her beautiful and rich cultural background. I would have rushed to set up a conference with the principal if my children had to deal with such a prejudiced teacher. But I understand that she grew up in the eighties in a small town and the only way to survive in those days was to ignore and fit in completely to be accepted. Eventually as she grows up, she learns to love what she pushed away with embarrassment during her childhood and on her wedding day chooses a peacock- hued saree as her outfit. The sarees on the dance floor worn by her and her guests flash in the light in reds, violets, teal and turquoise reminding her of a bird of paradise.

The essays are mostly in chronological order tracing the trajectory of her life as she completes her education and settles into a career, falls in love and marries, has children and finds a place she can call ‘home’. She has a strong bond with her family. It is the world outside that is hostile and frightening. Just like the red-spotted newt that spends years wandering the forest floor before it decides which spot to settle in, she wandered from state to state before putting her roots down in Mississippi.

For the most part, the author seamlessly weaves the natural world into her personal stories but sometimes the connections she makes between the exterior world and her interior state of mind are tenuous and facile. A corpse flower with its stinking smell reminds her how to clear out the weeds of the dating world or the touch-me-not plant teaches her to fend off predators by folding inward and shutting down. Her son opens his wee mouth in amazement and wonder and she is reminded of the ribbon eel drawing water over its gills to help it breathe. 

The first few essays were wonderful and informative. My interest was piqued when she referred to obscure flora and fauna. For instance, the colorful glass bangles that she got as a gift from her grandmother in India remind her of a comb jelly which flashes mini rainbows in the darkest oceans. I immediately googled the creature as I wanted to find out more about it. But unfortunately some of the later chapters had almost an encyclopedic feel to them and I felt I was reading a Wikipedia entry.

She also keeps hammering the point that she is brown-skinned. I can understand the trauma she must have endured as a child but why have a chapter entitled “Questions while Searching for Birds with my half- white sons…”? She has already told us she is married to a white guy. Is there any need to keep reinforcing the color of skin when there is no relevance? Also the writing evoked mixed reactions in me. It vacillates from lush and lyrical paragraphs describing succulent cara cara oranges or the chattering of bonnet macaques to clumsy phrases like “…after an especially plus amount of warm rain.” I am also nitpicky about grammar and some chapters have typos and errors like ‘another boatmen came up’ or ‘they busted out laughing.’ The book would have benefited from more fastidious proofreading and editing.

In spite of these annoying features, it is a gentle and meditative book that reminds us to savor the world around us. It is also a call for conservation entreating us to save our fragile planet. The author brings up the fascinating but sobering fact that fourteen new species of dancing frogs were discovered in Kerala, in southern India, only to be endangered almost as soon as they were discovered, due to erratic monsoon patterns. There are thousands of unnamed extinctions in the natural world when species become extinct even before they have had a chance to be discovered. She bemoans the fact that children have lost touch with nature and are glued to their phones or games. I was surprised when she mentioned that out of 22 students in her poetry class, 17 said that they had never seen a firefly although they lived in a town where fireflies were common. Aimee Nezhukumatathil asks us to slow down and look for fireflies:

I know I will search for fireflies all the rest of my days, even though they dwindle a little bit more each year. I can’t help it. They blink on and off, a lime glow to the summer night air, as if to say: I am still here, you are still here, I am still here, you are still here, I am, you are, over and over again. 

World of Wonders is a paean to nature and its amazing diversity as reflected in the millions of species that make up life on earth. If only we would also embrace this diversity within our own species!

The Innocents Or Not So Innocent Abroad

Click on the link below to access a hypertext map that traces the route of The Quaker City excursion: https://twain.lib.virginia.edu/innocent/iamaphp.html

I recently read The Innocents Abroad, a travelogue of a journey by ship to Europe and the Holy Land, undertaken by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pseudonym Mark Twain. When you hear the name Mark Twain, you immediately think of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Not many people know that he was a prolific travel writer well before he published his two famous novels. In 1867, he embarked on a pleasure excursion with a group of fellow Americans from New York aboard Quaker City, a retired Civil War ship, for a five and a half month long trip around the Mediterranean. At the time he was a travel correspondent for the San Francisco newspaper, “The Alta California” and sent dispatches about his travels to them and to “The New York Tribune” and “The New York Herald” too. The Innocents Abroad was published two years later, in 1869. It was a perfect pick for the pandemic as it let me indulge in some armchair travel! It made me reminisce nostalgically about the places I have already visited and compare notes with his experiences and also made me dream of places I have yet to visit.

Mark Twain’s incomparable humor sets this book apart from the countless run of the mill travel guides. I laughed out aloud innumerable times while reading and at times I was practically in stitches. I would say Mark Twain is right up there with Oscar Wilde as one of the wittiest writers I have ever read! Whether the group is traversing through the countryside of the Middle East on recalcitrant donkeys or horses, looking in desperation for soap anywhere in Europe, having a disappointing shaving experience in France, being dragged up the Pyramids by ‘draggers’ asking for ‘baksheesh’, sneaking into the Parthenon at night and stealing grapes along the way, having a private rendezvous with the Czar of Russia or playing pranks on the tourist guides by acting dumb, every experience is recounted with caustic humor.

The group’s language troubles with the French provides a good example of a humorous quip:

“In Paris they just simply opened their eyes and stared when we spoke to them in French! We never did succeed in making those idiots understand their own language. One of our passengers said to a shopkeeper, in reference to a proposed return to buy a pair of gloves, “Allong restay trankeel—may be ve coom Moonday;” and would you believe it, that shopkeeper, a born Frenchman, had to ask what it was that had been said. Sometimes it seems to me, somehow, that there must be a difference between Parisian French and Quaker City French.”

I fell over the floor laughing when I read his description of the famed Turkish bath. Turkey was a country that had conjured up visions of the Arabian Nights for him. He had imagined the voluptuousness of the perfumes of Araby, the richness of the silks and carpets and the sensuousness of a luxuriating bath but instead he was in a dark, dingy and slippery corner from where he was taken to a place that resembled a chicken coop and served a Turkish drink which turned out to be the most execrable coffee:

“He took me back and flooded me with hot water, then turbaned my head, swathed me with dry table-cloths, and conducted me to a latticed chicken-coop in one of the galleries, and pointed to one of those Arkansas beds. I mounted it, and vaguely expected the odors of Araby again. They did not come.The blank, unornamented coop had nothing about it of that oriental voluptuousness one reads of so much. It was more suggestive of the county hospital than any thing else. The skinny servitor brought a narghili, and I got him to take it out again without wasting any time about it. Then he brought the world-renowned Turkish coffee that poets have sung so rapturously for many generations, and I seized upon it as the last hope that was left of my old dreams of Eastern luxury. It was another fraud. Of all the unchristian beverages that ever passed my lips, Turkish coffee is the worst. “

I have only picked a handful of examples from the book of his scintillating wit. Practically every page is full of bantering remarks and railleries. Unfortunately, some of the humor degenerates into appallingly racist and xenophobic comments. At first I gave him the benefit of the doubt for living in a different time when people were not politically correct and when there was no concept of cultural relativity. But as I continued reading, I felt that some of the racist diatribes were offensive. He is disgusted by the poverty around him in Bashan, Syria and describes the crippled, the lepers, the vermin infested children with eye sores and beggars distressed with hunger in very unflattering terms :“They sat in silence, and with tireless patience watched our every motion with that vile, uncomplaining impoliteness which is so truly Indian, and which makes a white man so nervous and uncomfortable and savage that he wants to exterminate the whole tribe.”

Some of his remarks are downright misogynistic. “She was the only Syrian female we have seen yet who was not so sinfully ugly that she couldn’t smile after ten o’clock Saturday night without breaking the Sabbath.” He comes across a ‘monster headed dwarf’ and a ‘mustached woman’ inside a railway car leaving Milan. He makes it clear that they were not show people for “Alas, deformity and female beards are too common in Italy to attract attention.” Along with the misogyny and racism, there is animal cruelty thrown in for good measure. His ingenious and refreshing wit and the fact that he did not spare anyone- not even himself or his fellow Americans made me forgive him for some of the over top comments. Maybe the book is a product of its time but it is as infuriating as it is funny.

He cracked me up with the descriptions of all the artwork he comes across in Europe. He was not that moved by the famous paintings and sculptures of the Old masters. According to him, it is difficult to admire them when the place is full of them from ceiling to walls. He does not think much of the Hagia Sophia either and calls it “the rustiest old barn in heathendom”. He ridicules the inflated tales of travel writers as reality does not meet the expectations you have after reading their accounts. He is scathing in his criticisms about the Catholic Church and their penchant for obsessively collecting relics including skulls many of which are of dubious origin. It is amusing how a part of the original crown of thorns shows up in every church.

The book inadvertently highlights the stereotype of the ugly American abroad. Every tour guide is called Ferguson and every place Jackson because they can’t be bothered learning new names. There are many examples of American ethnocentrism throughout the book. Twain feels the beautiful Lake Como and the Sea of Galilee pale in comparison to Lake Tahoe. I was shocked that the American ‘pilgrims’ chipped away pieces of monuments and ruins to bring back home as souvenirs! What a different time! We even hesitate to pick a seashell from a beach these days. Twain mocks their behavior but suggests that the reverse would never be tolerated. “Suppose a party of armed foreigners were to enter a village church in America and break ornaments from altar railings for curiosities, and climb and walk upon the Bible and pulpit cushions? However, the cases are different. One is the profanation of a temple of our faith — the other only the profanation of a pagan one.”How preposterous is that statement! The ‘innocents abroad’ even shamelessly flouted quarantine rules. It was interesting that some countries did not allow them to disembark because of cholera or the plague. Living through the pandemic right now made that detail more meaningful to me. Twain makes self deprecating jokes too and lampoons Americans who behave badly abroad: “The gentle reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad.” 

Twain’s prose is rich and lyrical too along with being humorous. Here’s a poetic description of the Sphinx in Egypt:

“The great face was so sad, so earnest, so longing, so patient. There was a dignity not of earth in its mien, and in its countenance a benignity such as never any thing human wore. It was stone, but it seemed sentient. If ever image of stone thought, it was thinking. It was looking toward the verge of the landscape, yet looking at nothing—nothing but distance and vacancy. It was looking over and beyond every thing of the present, and far into the past. It was gazing out over the ocean of Time—over lines of century-waves which, further and further receding, closed nearer and nearer together, and blended at last into one unbroken tide, away toward the horizon of remote antiquity. It was thinking of the wars of departed ages; of the empires it had seen created and destroyed; of the nations whose birth it had witnessed, whose progress it had watched, whose annihilation it had noted; of the joy and sorrow, the life and death, the grandeur and decay, of five thousand slow revolving years. It was the type of an attribute of man—of a faculty of his heart and brain. It was MEMORY—RETROSPECTION—wrought into visible, tangible form…….The Sphynx is grand in its loneliness; it is imposing in its magnitude; it is impressive in the mystery that hangs over its story. And there is that in the overshadowing majesty of this eternal figure of stone, with its accusing memory of the deeds of all ages, which reveals to one something of what he shall feel when he shall stand at last in the awful presence of God.”

I noticed that Twain and his fellow travelers mellowed down towards the end of the journey. They experienced travel fatigue from having traveled so long and extensively. In fact Twain does not linger over his descriptions of Spain or the places they visit on the way back. The book ends with these oft quoted lines: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” Over time, the memory of disagreeable incidents faded away and Twain states that he would happily undertake the same journey if given a chance again.

I highly recommend this satirically humorous account of Twain’s travels. Make sure you are reading an edition with illustrations by True Williams which are as amusing as the text. This is a long book and I took my time to read it. It is informative and illuminating and Twain digresses at times to regale the readers with interesting legends and stories. Although I found the sojourns in Italy and France to be the most humorous, I enjoyed the parts about the Middle East as I haven’t been there. It was fascinating to journey through Syria and Palestine and see all the Biblical places and people come alive. I interrupted the reading to google some of the information and returned to the page lingering over every detail. At one point in the book, he describes Venetians enjoying granita ( a distant cousin of Italian ice) on a lazy Sunday afternoon and I felt reading this book was like slowing down to savor every bite of the delicious granita offered by Mark Twain.

 

Caste: The Origins of our Discontents

As another year comes to a close, I reflect on the books that had the greatest impact on me in 2020. In the genre of non fiction, Caste by Isabel Wilkerson is the most powerful book I have read this year. The title itself piqued my interest. The premise of the book is that ‘caste’, a term traditionally associated with India, is a better word to describe racism in the US. As someone who has grown up in India, caste is not just a term I am familiar with, but something that has seeped into every aspect of my existence, knowingly or unknowingly. It is so deeply ingrained in the psyche that often people are not even aware of how they are perpetuating the caste system even if they openly and truly condemn it. In that aspect, caste is very similar to white supremacy and Wilkerson posits that African Americans in the United States are at the lowest rung in a hierarchy analogous to both the caste system in India and the Nazi rule in Germany. She claims that “Race, in the United States, is the visible agent of the unseen force of caste…. Caste is the bones, race the skin.”

One might wonder if these cross cultural comparisons have any merit for how do we compare 400 years of American history with 12 years of Nazi rule and 3000 years of a complex system of social stratification in India? The three share basic methods of subjugation and the underlying feeling of dehumanization is the same. So caste and not race is the lens though which we should view America, according to Wilkerson. It is not just a matter of semantics but a better framework to understand and analyze the inequities. Wilkerson says that Nazi Germany was inspired by American segregation laws and believe it or not, they thought the American system was too extreme. I have often wondered why people are only shocked by Nazis and their brutality when what African Americans endured as slaves was no less. Even the Nazis thought that determining the percentage of blood that made you black to be too harsh. It is only on reading this book I realized that there was no basis to the one drop of blood rule ( which even black people have come to believe- so deep is the brainwashing or rather whitewashing) and that theory was touted just to keep black people in their place.

Wilkerson delineates 8 pillars of caste that are common across the three societies and gives examples from each category to illustrate her point. Endomagy is one of the pillars of caste I found fascinating as a comparison. She equates the past ban on interracial marriages in the US to the control of marriage and mating in India where traditionally people married into their own caste. Alabama was the last state in the union to overturn the ban on interracial marriage in 2000, 33 years after the Supreme Court ruled in Loving vs Virginia that such laws were unconstitutional in all states. And yet, more than 40% of Alabamians voted against overturning it. Now, in the US and in India, legally you are allowed to marry any one you want. But only 10% of the population in India marries outside its caste and only 15% of marriages in the US are interracial. This number includes Hispanics and Asians as well. The percentage would be a lot lower if it were only blacks. Sadly, the figures speak for themselves.

Another pillar of caste that I found striking to compare is the emphasis on pollution and purity. Black people were considered impure and dirty just as Dalits who belong to the lowest echelons of the caste system in India and whose very shadows were once considered polluting and who often eat and drink from separate containers to this day. It was no different for black people till a few decades ago when they drank water from separate fountains and were not allowed to use swimming pools frequented by white people. Wilkerson cites the example of Al Bright, the only black child on the Little League Team in the town of Youngston, Ohio who was banned from using a swimming pool when his team went on a celebration outing. When parents and coaches protested, he was allowed to float on a raft without his feet touching the water, towed around the pool by the manager only after all the white kids had vacated the pool. This incident took place in 1951.   

The book traces the history of enslavement in the South from 1619 when the first Africans were brought to Virginia to the Civil War and subsequent period when the caste system was perpetuated through the Jim Crow South. Even after the abolition of slavery, the country found ways to keep black people subjugated. Wilkerson describes in detail discriminatory housing policies, unethical medical experiments and horrific lynchings where the white community would come to view the spectacle, collect body parts as souvenirs and send postcards of the event to family and friends. This was an astounding revelation to me for as a recent immigrant, I didn’t fully know or understand the extent of the horrors African Americans were subjected to in the past. I had always viewed America as the leader of the free world. But what a paradox then that the country that espouses the values of liberty and justice for all fails many of its citizens on just those counts? For unless the racism inherent in society is acknowledged and addressed, any claim to be the beacon of democracy rings hollow.

“Americans are loathe to talk about enslavement in part because what little we know about it goes against our perception of our country as a just and enlightened nation, a beacon of democracy for the world. Slavery is commonly dismissed as a “sad, dark chapter” in the country’s history, It is as if the greater the distance we can create between slavery and ourselves, the better to stave off the guilt or shame it induces.”  

We are loathe to talk about past horrors but events that happened long ago still color our thinking. The book depicts current realities too with the backlash to Obama’s election and the rise of Trump and Trumpism. Wilkerson believes that white voters vote against their own self interest when the power they hold is threatened for the reality is that in a few decades, they will no longer be the majority of the population. She goes on to ask this uncomfortable question: ”..if people were given the choice between democracy and whiteness, how many would choose whiteness?” In the US, there is controversy over the removal of Confederate monuments whereas Germany has no statues or memorials to Nazi officers and looks back upon the Third Reich as a shameful part of its history. Americans not willing to dismantle monuments is emblematic of the larger unwillingness to dismantle the system.

Wilkerson lays bare some stark and painful truths about race relations with scholarly research and compelling personal anecdotes. She describes how she was viewed with suspicion while traveling business class. She was followed in the airport and questioned by agents on a car rental company’s shuttle bus and not one passenger came to her defense. Throughout the book she employs striking metaphors to drive home her point. She likens caste variously to the foundation of an old house, to a computer operating system, and to a staged performance. “Caste is the wordless usher in a darkened theater, flashlight cast down in the aisles, guiding us to our assigned seats for a performance.”

There are some gaps in the arguments Wilkerson puts forth. She tends to view caste as a binary and has omitted the plight of Native Americans and other minorities and does not dwell much on how class operates within caste- for instance how do we explain the success of Asian immigrants in the US who are not white? Some of the comparisons of the treatment of African American to Jews seem tenuous too. The Nazis wanted to eliminate Jews and not dominate them while black people in the US and Dalits in India were needed by the dominant class for economic exploitation. 

In addressing the caste system in India, Wilkerson focuses mainly on Brahmins and Dalits but caste is far from a two tier system in India. It is an extremely complex dynamic whose definition is broader and more nuanced. There are four main castes or ‘varna’. Interestingly, the Sanskrit word varna itself means color indicating that originally skin color was used to determine place in a hierarchy. The four castes are Brahmin, Kshatriya,Vaishya and Shudra or the priestly, the warrior, the merchant and the laborer respectively and each caste is further divided into sub castes. Dalits once known as ‘ untouchables’ and whose work involves removal of garbage and animal carcasses, cleaning toilets and sewers, are the most oppressed group. They are even excluded from the traditional classification and form a fifth caste.

There could be more than 5000 castes and sub castes in India and often a subjugated group also subjugates in turn, those they perceive to be lower on the rung. Besides the caste system is not restricted to Hindus but is practiced in some form or other by Muslims and Christians too. Caste is not the exclusive domain of religion but has insidiously seeped into Indian culture. Wilkerson cites sociological research and discusses the activism of Dalit scholar B. R. Ambedkar but does not take into account current realities in India where the government has implemented affirmative action initiatives for the marginalized and where we witness the evolution of a rapidly growing Dalit political movement to fight caste hegemony and Hindu nationalism as they continue to be targets of lynching and rape.

Despite these shortcomings, the book is illuminating. It inspired me to do some soul searching about my own heritage and my complicity in keeping the machinery going. Call it unconscious or silent bias, in the end the discrimination whether in the US or in India is part of an underlying unspoken system of hierarchy. We have accepted this system and adapted to it. I naively believed that caste was not something that was all that prevalent in urban India where I grew up and was mostly confined to rural pockets of the country. I didn’t care what castes my friends belonged to or what last names they went by. Yet, I was guilty of not protesting when the domestic helpers drank water from separate glasses or were not allowed to use the bathrooms at home. Often in a high rise I would come across separate lifts- one for the residents of the building and one ‘ for servants and dogs’. I remember being shocked and angered by it but not enough to do anything about it. Not only do we need to have empathy but ‘radical empathy’, to borrow Wilkerson’s words, to bring about social change.

Caste is an eye opening book especially for those born into privilege who need to shoulder the responsibility for the inequities in society and work to eradicate the deeply entrenched social malady but the sad part is that not everyone is willing to open their eyes to the truth. Although the book ends on a note of hope, it is a long and tortuous road ahead. And there was a part of me that wondered despondently if it is truly possible to live in a world without any implicit hierarchy of race, caste or class!

A Rose By Many Other Names

Zéphirine Drouhin- Antique Bourbon Rose

I’m taking a slightly different turn on my blog today. I had submitted an article a few years ago for a contest on a gardening website where we had to write an essay based on the famous lines from Romeo and Juliet about a rose by any other name smelling just as sweet. Unfortunately the contest was called off as they didn’t have enough participants. Roses will be blooming soon in my garden. They are already awakening from their winter slumber and putting out new shoots and leaves. I thought it would be timely to post the essay I had submitted pertaining to gardening but inspired by literary lines.

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet;

So Romeo would, were he not Romeo call’d,

Retain that dear perfection which he owes

Without that title. Romeo, doff thy name,

And for that name which is no part of thee

Take all myself.

Juliet declares these impassioned lines in Act 11, Scene 11 of Romeo and Juliet. There is a feud between the noble families of Capulet and Montague but for Juliet, Romeo would still be perfection incarnate with a different family name and she would still love him wholeheartedly. But would a rose by any other name smell as sweet?

Fragrance is not exclusive to roses. We just have to smell a jasmine or a hyacinth or get a whiff of a lilac or a sweet autumn clematis to know that there are other alluring scents in the world of flowers. Besides, the scent factor varies a lot among roses. A rose can be virtually scent- free or it could have the most intense and intoxicating perfume on earth. Take a look at any rose catalog and you would think they were describing the aroma of an old wine. A rose could have a spicy fragrance with hints of cedarwood and vanilla or a deliciously fruity fragrance reminiscent of raspberries.

Fragrance is not the only quality of roses. Color, form and habit are equally important to the gardener. Nowadays we can’t really say that a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose. The name rose has become generic. There are thousands of roses in mind-boggling varieties: hybrid tea roses, grandiflora, floribunda, miniature, climbing, antique and rugosa to name just a few. How do we distinguish between the different varieties of roses? By their names of course. The names are often majestic and meaningful and reveal their outstanding characteristics.

I must confess that many a time I’ve bought a rose solely for its fancy name ignoring all its other attributes like disease resistance and hardiness. Who can resist the allure of a romantic name like ‘Moondance’ or ‘ Sweet Intoxication’? Or roses that transport us to faraway places like ‘April in Paris’ or ‘Tahitian Sunset’? ‘Mister Lincoln’ and ‘John F. Kennedy’ named after famous Presidents would appeal to history buffs. A religious person might be inclined to buy ‘ Pope John Paul II’ or ‘Our Lady of Guadalupe’. I once bought ‘Queen Nefertiti’ from the David Austin Roses catalog only because the rose sounded regal and exotic. Her Majesty has certainly lived up to her name, rewarding me every year with exquisitely scented apricot blooms.

 

David Austin English Rose – Queen Nefertiti

I also have a predilection for roses named after famous authors and literary characters and again, it is the David Austin collection that fulfills my fantasies. ‘Jude the Obscure’ and ‘Tess of the D’urbervilles’ fit the bill perfectly as I am a big fan of Thomas Hardy. There is ‘Gentle Hermione’ from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, ‘The Lady of Shalott’ named after Tennyson’s poem and ‘The Pilgrim’ from The Canterbury Tales of Chaucer. Then there is the crimson rose ‘William Shakespeare’ named after the Bard himself.

David Austin English Rose- Tess of the D’urbervilles

However the sweetest smelling rose in my garden is ‘Zéphirine Drouhin’, a fuchsia pink antique French rose. It puts on a spectacular show every June in my zone 5b garden and continues blooming sporadically through the summer into the fall. The most remarkable characteristic of ‘Zéphirine’ is that it is virtually thorn- free and can grow in semi-shade unlike most roses which require full sun. The only drawback is that it is susceptible to black spot and powdery mildew. The very name Bourbon for this class of climbing roses conjures up images of powerful monarchs. 

Zephirine Drouhin- Antique Climbing Rose

‘Zéphirine’ itself is quite a rare and unusual name. The word ‘zephyr’ could refer to a light breeze or remind us of ‘Zephyrus’ the Greek God of the west wind. This rose is also known by other names like ‘ Mme. Charles Bonnet’ and ‘La Belle Dijonnaise’ ( the beautiful lady from Dijon). ‘Zéphirine’ has the quintessential old rose fragrance. It is the distinctive scent of ‘attar’ or the essential oil extracted from the petals of a rose. I have my own pet name for ‘Zéphirine’. Madame Zeffy as we lovingly call her at home can be quite temperamental and moody. There are days when her perfume is elusive. She needs the perfect warmth and humidity to release her captivating fragrance.

I know that ‘Zéphirine’ will have an enchanting fragrance with any other name but it is her name that makes her sound ethereal. Despite Juliet’s fervent declaration, it is on account of their names that the story ends disastrously for the star-crossed lovers. A rose will always be known for its beauty and redolence but the short and sweet one-syllable name enhances the charm of a rose and imbues it with character. Could you imagine a rose being called a thistle? Somehow it doesn’t have the same effect.

~ Jayshree

My Life in Middlemarch: A Bibliomemoir or Biography?

There are books that remain with us throughout our lives-books we return to time and again for solace and guidance. But wouldn’t it be hard if you were asked to pick a single favorite? I could name 10 or 12 titles that I love and that have touched me deeply. But it would be impossible for me to narrow down my list to one choice. That’s why they say that asking a bookworm to pick a favorite book is like asking a mother to pick a favorite child. Not for Rebecca Mead, a staff member of the New Yorker who has no trouble in professing a preference. For her it was just one book that had such a lasting impact on her- the nineteenth century novel, Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life, written by the English author George Eliot. She has been fascinated with the book her whole life, has re-read it many times and has written a bibliomemoir entitled My Life in Middlemarch detailing her journey with the novel, her affinity with the author and how she can relate to the characters and experiences delineated. In the beginning of her book, Mead makes this profound observation about reading:

Reading is sometimes thought of as a form of escapism, and it’s a common turn of phrase to speak of getting lost in a book. But a book can also be where one finds oneself; and when a reader is grasped and held by a book, reading does not feel like an escape from life so much as it feels like an urgent, crucial dimension of life itself. There are books that seem to comprehend us just as much as we understand them, or even more. There are books that grow with the reader as the reader grows, like a graft to a tree.

Mead’s perception of Middlemarch changed with age and maturity as the book helped shape her life through its various stages. But the book is not a primer on Middlemarch. Read it only after you’ve read the novel otherwise you’d be lost. I read it as a companion piece to Middlemarch right after I finished reading the mammoth novel.

I have to admit that I trudged through the first few chapters of Eliot’s sprawling novel numbering almost 900 pages and divided into eight books. I was familiar with George Eliot’s Silas Marner and The Mill on the Floss from school days. I’m not one to be daunted by the size of a book. I’ve read the likes of Proust and Tolstoy. It wasn’t the size but the tedium of the first few chapters. There were too many characters and plots and an omniscient narrator with a didactic authorial voice with moral asides and digressions. But I was determined to persist as Middlemarch is widely believed to be among the 100 best novels of all time and I’m glad I did. The first three books were ponderous but once I started Book 4, I couldn’t put it down.

Eliot understands life in all its complexity- what we have on display is the full panorama of provincial life in Victorian England with piercing insights into human nature. Eliot highlights the preoccupations of the middle class- marriage, money and morals and skillfully captures the frailties and foibles of her characters. It is a vast canvas and a study of manners in the 19th century in the manner of Balzac’s La Comédie Humaine which also served as an inspiration to Eliot.

Virginia Woolf made the astute observation that Middlemarch is “…The magnificent book, which with all its imperfections, is one of the few English books written for grown-up people.” While a Jane Austen plot commences with a romance and courtship and ends with a marriage and a happily ever after, Middlemarch starts off with the idealistic Dorothea Brooke’s disastrous marriage to the scholarly and much older Edward Casaubon and continues with the equally idealistic Dr. Tertius Lydgate’s troubled romance and subsequent disappointment in marriage. Eliot dauntlessly subverts the commonplace tropes of Victorian novels. There are no characters that are inherently good or evil ; they are all flawed and human and therein lies the beauty of the novel. Each and every character evokes the empathy of the reader. I can understand how the book influenced the way Mead viewed life and how each reading left her with a new perspective. I am determined to revisit the book this year itself as it is the bicentennial of its publication and to re-read it slowly to savor the exquisite writing and reflect on the psychological insights.

Mead’s book is part memoir, part biography and part literary criticism. She dwells on George Eliot’s unconventional life and loves, her break with orthodox Christianity, how her writing developed and how she was perceived by her contemporaries. She was shunned by family and friends for her scandalous relationship with George Henry Lewes who was married to another woman and had a family. The book also details her emotional attachment to Herbert Spencer, the philosopher who believed in ‘meliorism’ and her marriage to John Cross, a man twenty years her junior who on their honeymoon in Venice jumped from the hotel window falling into the Grand Canal.

The book is replete with interesting details about Eliot’s personal life.  Eliot was renowned for her uncomely appearance lacking in feminine charm. In a letter to his father, Henry James described her thus : “She is magnificently ugly — deliciously hideous. She has a low forehead, a dull grey eye, a vast pendulous nose, a huge mouth full of uneven teeth, and a chin and jaw bone qui n’en finissent pas (never-ending)… But there was

Portrait of George Eliot by Samuel Lawrence, circa 1860

something disarming about her intellectual radiance for he continues to say,  “Now in this vast ugliness resides a most powerful beauty which, in a few very minutes steals forth and charms the mind, so that you end, as I ended, in falling in love with her. Yes behold me literally in love with this great horse-faced blue-stocking.” The most fascinating tidbit for me was learning about Eliot’s epistolary relationship with a Scottish fan, Alexander Main, who had a stalkerish obsession with her and even wrote a book entitled Wise, Witty and Tender Sayings of George Eliot reducing her literary lines into pithy aphorisms. Eliot seemed to have been flattered by his idolization and even encouraged the relationship.

Mead first read the book when she was seventeen. She grew up in a provincial setting not too different from the fictional Middlemarch and like Dorothea yearned to pursue her ambitions and make sense of her life.  And like the heroine of Middlemarch, she has a relationship with an older scholarly man. She compares her parents’ stable marriage to that of Fred Vincy and Mary Garth’s loyal relationship. Not only does she find parallels with the characters but also with Eliot and her life. Eliot thinks of Lewes’ three sons as her own and Mead herself marries a man who has three sons whom she adores. I felt this was the weak part of the memoir. Some of the links she establishes with her own life seem tenuous and although she provides us with juicy details about Eliot’s life, she doesn’t disclose much about her own which seems so lackluster compared to that of the author she reveres. I would say that a memoir is somewhat of a misnomer for this book and it would fit better under the genre of biography.

What I did enjoy was discovering a kindred spirit- an avid reader whose love of the written word shines through every page. She frequents libraries and book stores poring through manuscripts- she delights in reading lines changed later by Eliot and analyzes how they would have altered the import of the plot. She spends hours looking through Eliot’s notebook in the rare book collection of the New York Public Library and embarks on literary pilgrimages to Nuneaton and Coventry to inhabit the world of her idol. I also found Mead’s excessive admiration of Eliot endearing when she jumps to her defence for all the criticism she faced from her contemporaries for both her personal and professional life.

Mead’s book illuminates her own life along with Eliot’s and shows us how the fictional world collides with the real world. Life imitates art just as art imitates life. It added a new dimension to my understanding of George Eliot and Middlemarch.  I thought about my own favorite books and what they mean to me. What a beautiful feeling it is to connect with a writer from another time and space and equally beautiful it is to connect with a fellow bibliophile from another time and space!

 

 

 

Becoming: A Memoir by Michelle Obama

Becoming, a memoir by Michelle Obama has become one of the bestselling books not just of the past year but possibly of the decade. Before reading the book, I looked up the reviews online and I mostly saw extreme reactions- either the book got five stars or just one star. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that the reviews were partisan reflecting the deep divide within our country right now. It’s unfortunate that we can’t read a book objectively without thinking about political allegiance. It’s hard to keep politics completely out of the equation when analyzing a book by a First lady but it’s still disheartening to see the unhinged hatred in the reviews.

I enjoyed reading this riveting memoir about the respective trajectories of the careers of the former President and the First Lady, how they came together as a couple and lived a remarkable life in the White House in spite of the haters and the naysayers. The book is divided into three sections reflecting the three important phases in Michelle Obama’s life.

Becoming Me–  This section describes how Michelle Obama worked her way up from the humble beginnings of her childhood to a stellar education that paved her way to a successful career as a lawyer. She was from a working class neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago but from a stable and loving family. The public school she attended deteriorated over time and eventually white people started fleeing the neighborhood. Luckily for her she was put in a class for overachievers and went to a magnet high school where she excelled.

I was struck by her drive and ambition to succeed even before starting elementary school. When she was in kindergarten, she got one word wrong on a quiz and the next day she insisted on a do-over in order to get a gold star along with the two other top students in the class. From childhood days itself she comes across as an assertive and confident person determined to succeed. And succeed she did! She got into Princeton despite the school guidance counselor discouraging her from applying as according to her she wasn’t Princeton material.

At Princeton racism reared its ugly head in both covert and overt ways. She met with the scorn of those who thought she was there only through affirmative action. She was put in a room with two other white girls one of whom left their suite midway through the semester. It was only years later that she found out that the mother of the roommate didn’t want her daughter rooming with a black girl and had requested the university authorities for a room change. From Princeton she went to Harvard and eventually became a lawyer working in a prestigious law firm in a skyscraper- the same building she used to pass on her ride to school in a school bus, a world so removed from her own at the time but which she eventually made hers through sheer grit, hard work and perseverance.

She is very frank and reveals that she got accepted from the waitlist at Harvard and that she even failed the bar exam on her first attempt. In spite of her academic accomplishments, there was always this question niggling in the back of her mind: “ Am I good enough? ” There is something charming about her candor which we see more of in the next two parts of the memoir. It was while she was living her dream in this law office that she met Barack Obama who worked there as an intern for the summer.

Becoming Us-  Barack Obama made a dazzling entrance into her office and her life. He was a charismatic, cerebal and calm individual with an exotic background who charmed everyone around him. They were friends for a while before they became romantically involved.  She did marry the love of her life but marriage was far from a bed of roses. Two people fiercely devoted to their respective careers would inevitably meet with challenges. A few weeks into the marriage, Barack Obama left for Indonesia to write a book in solitude. On his return, they grapple with miscarriage and infertility and eventually start IVF treatments before giving birth to their beautiful daughters, Malia and Sasha.

Barack Obama had a lot of commitments which kept him away from the family Monday through Thursday prompting them to seek marriage counseling. She had a full time demanding job herself but the onus fell on her to take care of the kids. She doesn’t gloss over any of the unpleasant moments in their relationship. They are like any other regular couple who juggle bills, debts, careers and parenting responsibilities. As his political ambitions become grander- from a community organizer to being involved with politics along with practicing law, teaching and writing books, she even speaks of a dent in her soul and a dent in her marriage. I was struck by a passage where she describes her frustration with her husband’s unpunctuality and how she and the girls would wait past their bedtime for him to join them for dinner until one day she decides that enough is enough and that they wouldn’t mess with their ironclad routine:

For me, this made so much more sense than holding off dinner or having the girls wait up sleepily for a hug. It went back to my wishes for them to grow up strong and centered and also unaccommodating to any form of old-school patriarchy: I didn’t want them to ever believe that life began when the man of the house arrived home. We didn’t wait for dad. It was his job now to catch up with us.”

But the Obamas survive the stresses as they love and respect each other a lot. She realizes that her own career would be swallowed up whole by his and she is an extremely intelligent, accomplished and ambitious woman in her own right. By then she has realized that she is not cut out for law and pursues a career in public service instead. Eventually as Barack Obama’s political ambitions grow and as he meets with success and popularity and announces his presidential bid, she has no choice but to scale back on her work and ambitions and starts campaigning for him and puts her heart and soul into it. She understands that it is his calling and that he has a vision to fight inequities and bring about change and she doesn’t want to hold him back although she was initially reluctant about his entry into politics.

Like countless other people, I looked up to the Obamas as a model couple I wished to emulate. Yes, they have a wonderful and strong marriage but they have to work on it. Michelle Obama’s candor in this regard is refreshing especially since every word she utters is dissected to the core. To make herself so vulnerable to the public reveals a lot of courage on her part. It also gives permission to other couples to acknowledge that there is no shame in experiencing infertility or marital problems and to seek help when needed. This section of the memoir also captures the excitement of the days leading to the election, the victory and the inauguration day. It was a pivotal moment in American history representing hope, optimism and change when a country with a brutal history of slavery elected its first black President. And there definitely was a supportive wife who was instrumental in making this happen.

Becoming More: Politics is a dirty business and your life is like an xray where every action is transparent and scrutinized endlessly. Not only do you have to adjust to the fame and the admiration but also the criticism that comes along in its wake. It didn’t take long for the image of Michelle Obama as an angry woman to take root when a speech she made was taken out of context. And of course this vitriol made her angry but she would have to curb her anger for if she didn’t, wouldn’t she be fulfilling the prophecy of her haters?

When she declared that her main role was to be mom-in -chief in the White House, she was castigated for not being a strident feminist. You can’t please everyone and you are constantly in the spotlight being analyzed to pieces even for superficial details like the size of your arms or the length of your dress. The White house is a gilded cage as privacy becomes a thing of the past.  The Obamas venture out for a dinner date one evening and that outing becomes a big production as they have to be accompanied by motorcades and secret service agents disrupting traffic and inconveniencing the public. It’s the same for attending school events of the girls. There is a protocol to be followed for every move and the Secret Service has to be even alerted for them to step out on the Truman Balcony.

Among Michelle Obama’s accomplishments as a First lady was the cultivation of a patch of vegetables which grew in size and symbolically to become a cause dear to her- combating childhood obesity and encouraging good nutrition. She worked for the empowerment of girls and implemented programs around the world to help them have access to education and she championed to persuade businesses to hire or train military veterans and their spouses.

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the Presidency was the sheer bigotry and repugnant vitriol targeted against them which had nothing to do with policies. Obama’s opponents blocked bills only because they wanted him to fail. It all started with Trump’s hateful birther campaign and revealed a side of the country that most people thought was outmoded as they had visions of a post racial America. Yet the President got elected for a second term and was able to implement a few of the policies important to him some of which are being revoked by the current administration. It’s a testament to the fine character of the Obamas that they comported themselves with utmost grace and dignity for two terms in office without a major scandal and in spite of the vicious mud-slinging, lies and hatred waged against them. As Michelle Obama wisely said : “ When they go low, we go high.”

Michelle Obama believes that she is “ …an ordinary person who found herself on an extraordinary journey.” The word ‘becoming’ means developing or blossoming into the best version of something and that’s what she intended the title of the memoir to mean. But ‘becoming’ can also mean suitable, appropriate or something that gives a pleasing effect. And all those meanings too apply to this compelling memoir of brave revelations.  It is a book inspiring women and especially women of color to pursue their dreams in spite of weaknesses, doubts and struggles and especially in spite of the question, “Am I good enough?”

 

 

 

 

Femme Lisant: My Year In Reading!

Femme Lisant ( Woman Reading)-1869   Painting by Jean-Baptiste-Camille-Corot

As the year comes to a close, it’s time to take stock of my reading habits and achievements. My goal for 2018 was to read a book a week which would add up to 52 books a year. I’m pleased to say that I managed to stick to this resolution but unfortunately I have not kept track of the exact number. I would venture to guess that I read somewhere between 60 and 70 books. For next year, I vow to track my progress on Good Reads to help me better accomplish my goals. But even without keeping a log, it’s been a fruitful year of reading. I tend to gravitate towards fiction and I’m pleased to note that this year I included more non-fiction in my reading.

So here, in no particular order, are 12 books I read this year that had an impact on me :

Fiction:

The Handmaid’s Tale- Sometimes even the most voracious reader overlooks a popular book. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, published in 1985 was one of those books that would stare at me for years from bookstore displays and which for some inexplicable reason and much to my embarrassment, I hadn’t read. I finally got my hands on it and I just couldn’t put it down. It’s a dystopian tale which transports us to the fictitious Republic of Gilead, an oppressive regime characterized by religious extremism and misogyny. It’s a strictly hierarchical world where a woman’s main function is to bear children. The most chilling aspect of the story to me was is that it could be considered prescient given the political climate we are living in and may just not remain speculative fiction.

Pachinko by Min Jin Lee is a sprawling family saga of the Korean diaspora in Japan spanning four generations and almost a century in time. I had enjoyed reading The Calligrapher’s Daughter, a story based in early twentieth century Korea during the Japanese occupation. Pachinko, too, transports us to that time but it is mainly an eye-opening account of the discrimination of Koreans living in Japan and their struggles to survive in that hostile environment where they were essentially stateless. The game of pachinko is an apt metaphor for the lives and fates of the characters. The novel is not without its flaws. There are far too many characters and those we connect with in the beginning fade into the background as the plot thickens. Yet, it resonated with me on a personal level as this is an immigrant story about learning to adapt in an adopted country.

The Accusation-The book from the Korean peninsula that moved me the most was this collection of poignant short stories by a dissident writer who goes by the pseudonym Bandi and still lives in North Korea. The short story is my favorite genre and one of my resolutions this year was to read more translations. This book translated by Deborah Smith fit the bill perfectly. The stories are set between 1989 and 1995 during the repressive regimes of Kim- Il Sung and Kim-Jong- Il. Each story is about an unjust accusation and delineates the plight of the citizens who are under the constant watchful eye of the state and of their fellow citizens. I have already written a blog post about this book with my detailed thoughts: https://literarygitane.wordpress.com/2018/03/05/forbidden-stories-from-north-korea/

I enjoy reading classics and often reach out to the tried and tested. This year instead of re- reading Jane Eyre for the umpteenth time, I decided to read The Professor and Villette, two novels of Charlotte Brontë that I hadn’t read before. As both books are based upon Brontë’s own experiences as a teacher in Brussels, I read them as companion books. Villette is considered to be a more polished re-working of The Professor and enjoyed more critical acclaim. Despite the moralistic, judgmental and occasionally xenophobic narrators, I enjoyed reading both novels for depicting the challenges, disappointments and rewards in a teacher’s life. The Professor is written from the perspective of William Crimsworth, a male protagonist and is a very sweet and realistic love story which ends with a happily ever after. The fascinating aspect of this Victorian novel is the portrayal of a strong woman who is interested in being financially independent even after marriage. Villette, on the other hand, a love story written from the point of view of Lucy Snowe, a female teacher in the fictitious French town of Villette, ends on a depressing and ambiguous note. It is interesting for the passionate lyricism with which it lets us glimpse into the complex inner world of an unreliable narrator.

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, is the story of Cora, a slave in a plantation in Georgia who attempts to escape with Caesar, a fellow slave who has a connection to the underground railroad.  The underground railroad was a network of safe houses and routes used by slaves to escape to free states with the help of abolitionists and other well-wishers but in this story the author makes it a literal train network with stations, tunnels and locomotives that transport slaves. The story depicts antebellum life on a plantation and the atrocities black people had to endure in a sad era in American history.

Orphan Train by Christina Baker Kline was another historical fiction that enlightened  me about a dark and relatively obscure part of US history.  Between 1854 and 1929, orphaned and homeless children were picked up from the streets of New York in an ostensibly humanitarian gesture and boarded on railroad trains headed for the farmlands of the American West to be adopted by families. Often the children ended up in worse circumstances as unpaid household or farm help. Vivian Daly was one such child who now is a 91 year old woman who lives a secluded life in coastal Maine. Molly is a 17 year old girl in the modern foster care system. Their stories intersect at a point and what follows is an emotional recollection of the past along with the blossoming of a new and tender friendship.

Elinor Oliphant Is Completely Fine- As someone who likes both Brit lit and chick lit, I enjoyed reading this heartbreaking but yet heartwarming debut novel by Gail Honeyman about Elinor Oliphant, a socially awkward and brutally frank loner who strikes up a friendship with a co-worker and gradually comes to terms with her distressing past and starts healing. The book reminded me a little of A Man called Ove. It was refreshing to have a quirky and out of the box character as the main protagonist.

Non Fiction

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot- A black woman’s cancerous cells were multiplied and distributed around the world enabling a new era of cellular research and resulting in incredible advances in medicine and technology including cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization and finding a polio vaccine but raising ethical questions about using someone’s cells without informed consent. It is the story of Henrietta and her descendants who had no idea that their relative was being used for scientific research. People and companies and corporations made millions out of the Hela cells but her own family couldn’t afford health insurance. I just couldn’t put this book down! It is an illuminating account of racial injustice and unethical practices all in the name of science.

Educated by Tara Westover is a memoir of a girl raised in isolation in rural Idaho by a survivalist Mormon family. She and her six siblings are kept out of school, denied medical treatments and subjected to all kinds of abuse. She studies for the ACT exam on her own, teaching herself math, grammar and science and gets admitted to BYU and eventually gets a PhD from Cambridge University. She rises above her birth and childhood but yet her past and her family still have a hold on her. It is a moving story of grit and resilience in the face of extenuating but excruciating circumstances.

The Library Book by Susan Orlean is the story of the 1986 fire in the Los Angeles Public Library suspected to be caused by an arsonist which resulted in almost a million books being either destroyed or damaged beyond repair. Ouch!. As someone who is an avid reader and who also loves frequenting libraries, I reveled in this paean to libraries. Libraries are not just repositories of knowledge but are living entities too as they also serve as important cultural institutions and community centers.

I’m currently reading Becoming by Michelle Obama and I have included it in the list. This is a compelling memoir in three parts entitled Becoming Me, Becoming Us and Becoming More which takes us from Michelle Obama’s childhood on the South side of Chicago in a working class family and her years at Princeton and Harvard to marriage and motherhood and life in the White House. It is written with candor and gives us a glimpse into the human side of the former First lady. Her struggles, whether it was balancing family and professional life, dealing with infertility, seeking marriage counseling or encountering racism and sexism are issues that strike a chord with most women.

Whether the books I read in 2017 have literary merit or not is subjective, but they did cater to my eclectic literary taste. As Francis Bacon famously said, “ Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.” But I did savor them all in some way or the other as each and every one of them provided its own unique flavor to my varied palette.

I’m going to start the New Year with Middlemarch, the Victorian behemoth by George Eliot and the Pulitzer Prize winning book Evicted by Matthew Desmond. I’m also looking forward to new publications in 2019 including The Testaments by Margaret Atwood, a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism by Harold Bloom, The Source of Self Regard by Toni Morrison and The City of Girls by Elizabeth Gilbert.

How was your year in reading and what are your most anticipated reads for 2019?

Happy New Year and Happy Reading!