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?

The Bell Jar

Trigger Warning: Depression, Self-harm, Suicide, Suicide Ideation, Rape Attempt

I had been avoiding reading Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, although it has been lying on my book shelf at home for decades. Who wants to read about a young woman’s mental breakdown especially when you are aware of the heartbreaking outcome in the life of the author she parallels? I remember being intrigued enough to read reviews about the book but they only strengthened my resolve to avoid it. A reviewer on Goodreads wrote that she preferred childbirth to reading this novel. I don’t know what made me finally muster the courage to read it but I am glad I did for it spoke to me as a woman and also educated me about mental illness. Besides, it wasn’t all doom and gloom as I expected it to be. Apart from being an insight into mental illness, it is also a commentary peppered with humor and satire on the American society of the time.

The Bell Jar describes the slow unraveling of the mind of its narrator-protagonist. Unlike her friends who come from wealthy families, Esther Greenwood is a brilliant student from a modest background who excels in high school and college by winning several awards and scholarships. At the age of nineteen, she was one of twelve young women selected to intern for a month at a New York fashion magazine. One would think that she would be thrilled to party and live the glamorous life of the rich and famous but she feels a sense of disconnection with her peers and a general disenchantment with life .

Esther Greenwood has a non conformist attitude towards marriage and motherhood and is ahead of her time for a woman living in the 1950s. She is in a relationship with Buddy Willard, a young medical student, but hates that she is expected to be pure while he has had sex with a waitress. She finds the double standard revolting and is eager to lose her virginity which “weighed like a millstone” around her neck, partly out of curiosity but mostly to get even with her boyfriend. To achieve that goal, she goes to any length even putting herself in dangerous situations with men she barely knows.

She is expected to marry Buddy but that would mean she would have to relinquish her ambitions of being a poet. She hates the thought of being tied down to the drudgery of domestic duties which would surely be “a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A’s…” She wants to break free from these constraints and forge her own identity in a male dominated world. There are so many opportunities dangling in front of her but she is paralyzed by indecision for if she picks a path, she will have to forgo others.

“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”

More than sixty years later, the fig tree metaphor still resonates with women. It has struck a chord with Gen Z women who grapple with the same feelings of isolation and existential angst and cite the passage frequently on Tiktok. Although women have come a long way since Plath’s time and are able to pursue many options, they still struggle with their choices wondering if one decision will rule out other opportunities.

Esther’s behavior starts becoming erratic as she feels more and more alienated from Buddy and from her friends. She is rejected from a summer writing course which is a tremendous blow to her ego as she has always been an outstanding student with many academic laurels. She slowly stops eating and refuses to wash her hair and change her clothes. She has trouble reading for words seem to jump off the page. She takes sleeping pills as she is unable to fall sleep. She starts hearing her own voice. She has obsessive thoughts about suicide and before long is admitted to a psychiatric clinic. It is terrifying to see how quickly Esther spirals down and is pushed over the edge.

She is institutionalized in an asylum near Boston where she undergoes electric shock therapy without anesthesia and is given insulin injections for treatment. The book highlights the stigma attached to mental illness and the limited scientific understanding of the condition at the time. Her mother, although well meaning, thinks of her depression as a passing phase. Esther’s doctor is arrogant and condescending. It is only when the sponsor of Esther’s college scholarship pays for Esther to go to a private hospital that she starts receiving state of the art care under a more compassionate lady doctor.

 Esther constantly thinks about how to kill herself. She is almost rational and methodical in her approach thinking of different scenarios that would work. The bell jar is the metaphor for the depression that traps her. It also symbolizes the suffocation experienced by women restricted by patriarchal expectations. There is no doubt that Esther Greenwood is Sylvia’s alter ego and her life parallels Plath’s own struggles with mental illness and societal expectations. There is a scene where Esther decides to write a novel and states:

“My heroine would be myself, only in disguise. She would be called Elaine. Elaine. I counted the letters on my fingers. There were six letters in Esther, too. It seemed a lucky thing.”

Plath’s heroine Esther wants to write a book about a character who is modeled after her, and Esther, in turn, mirrors her author. Interestingly, the name Sylvia is also composed of six letters.

The Bell Jar is an eye-opening read about a certain time in American society raising interesting issues about feminism and mental illness and its treatment. Despite the feminist leanings, I have to point out that there are racist and sexist undertones which are problematic and which would be considered offensive today. There is a passage where the way Esther treats a black male attendant in the hospital made me quite uncomfortable. Of course Esther is a fictional character but I can’t shake the feeling that along with her mental illness, she shares some of the prejudices of her creator.

Sylvia Path was essentially a poet. The Bell Jar was the only novel written by her. In my opinion, she was a far superior poet to a novelist. The reason the work was groundbreaking and is still relevant today is for its raw and authentic description of a girl suffering from a depressive episode and for opening the door for a more open dialogue on mental health which was a taboo subject. Esther Greenwood is a woman who resembles her creator and who could very well be the same person except for this one little harrowing detail- she survived her suicide attempt while Plath succumbed to her demons.

And although Esther recovers in the end, you are still left with the doubt if she is going to be okay. The bell jar has lifted but is hovering above her and can still descend on her.  

“How did I know that someday―at college, in Europe, somewhere, anywhere―the bell jar, with its stifling distortions, wouldn’t descend again?” 

The first edition of The Bell Jar, published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas.

The Bell Jar was published in England on January 14, 1963, under a pseudonym and just a few months before Plath took her life. It would be published seven years later in the US under her own name. Sylvia Plath would have been 91 years old today had she still been alive. How much more would she have accomplished in the remaining years if only she hadn’t plucked herself out prematurely from the fig tree of her own life?

P.S. I am writing this blog post after a long hiatus; I have been under a sort of bell jar of my own though thankfully not of the serious kind suffered by the author. Hopefully the New Year will see me posting more frequently!

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.”

A House in Pondicherry

I enjoy reading books where they are set and look forward to picking a riveting read relevant to my travels. It gives me a better insight into the country or region I am visiting. The sights, sounds and smells come alive and I am just not living vicariously through the experience, I am immersed in it.

Colonial Legacy

A recent trip to India included a visit to Puducherry, a picturesque coastal town on the Coromandel Coast, formerly a French colony known as Pondicherry. When we think of colonial India, we automatically think of British rule. The British did have control over most of the subcontinent and were the most successful among the European colonizers. By contrast, French India comprised of only five geographically separate enclaves which, area wise, were the smallest of the possessions of European colonizers, but nevertheless left their own distinct legacy.

Street signs in Tamil and French

There are countless books written on the British Raj. I was looking specifically for a book set in Pondicherry which would give me a flavor of French colonial rule. My search took me to a book entitled A House in Pondicherry by Lee Langley. I had never heard of the author before but the summary of the book seemed to fit with what I was looking for. Lee Langley is a British author, born in Calcutta in the late thirties. She spent her childhood in India during the rule of the British. Later she moved to England and wrote a loose trilogy of novels set in India, A House in Pondicherry being the third in the series.

In the author statement, Langley writes:

Perhaps because I was born in India and spent my early childhood there, I grew up with a sense of loss, of being exiled from a place I loved. But for a writer, exile can be a sort of freedom: deprived of the comfort of belonging to one particular place or society, you can perhaps enter more easily the hearts and minds and skins of others.

Looking back over my books I see a preoccupation with outsiders – of enclaves of otherness within larger cultures. This sense of otherness, of not belonging, has always been there – sometimes without my realising it at the time – like a shadowy reef lying beneath the surface. The characters are often people who don’t fit in. 

Oriane de l’Esprit, the French protagonist of A House in Pondicherry, named after a Proust heroine, experiences this same sense of alienation. The novel traces her story from childhood to old age. Her parents are the proprietors of the Grand Hotel de France in Pondicherry. Her mother is constantly inviting eligible French bachelors to dinner hoping to make a suitable match for her daughter and send her off to France, a country she has not visited. She grows old and inherits the hotel but never marries and never visits the mother country. Her only connection to it is through the letters she receives from her Pondicherry lycée friend, Marie-Hélène, who moved back to France.

Meanwhile she develops a friendship with a Brahmin man named Guruvappa The two have intellectual conversations on every subject from politics to French literature and work together on translating ancient Tamil poems into French. There are undercurrents of romantic tension but their feelings remain unexpressed. Despite his education, he is bound by tradition and has an arranged marriage with a woman of his caste. They continue their friendship through the decades with all the unresolved emotions lurking beneath the surface. Their relationship epitomizes Oriane’s own relationship with India. Guru, in spite of the close connection they share, cannot belong to her completely just as this country can never belong to her wholly even though she was born and brought up here. Indian but not Indian, French but not French, she is not fully part of either community.

Parallel to Oriane’s fictional story is the story of the establishment of the Aurobindo Ashram and the experimental township of Auroville, a place for men and women of all nations to live together in peace and harmony. Sri Aurobindo was a yogi, a philosopher and an Indian nationalist who founded the Aurobindo Ashram in Pondicherry based on his yoga philosophy. He worked in collaboration with Mirra Alfassa, a French woman who came to be known as ‘The Mother’. Lang weaves in fiction with fact when she shows young Oriane deeply affected by Aurobindo’s trial in the courtroom at Alipore after he was arrested for treason. He had mystical and spiritual experiences in jail and on his release left politics for a spiritual life in Pondicherry at the same time that Oriane’s family undertook the journey by sea from Calcutta to Pondicherry.

Hugging Trees, Auroville

Auroville is a big part of the story as years later Marie-Hélène’s grandson Raymond who is an architect, comes to Pondicherry to help build the utopian township. He impregnates a fellow European he meets in the ashram. She returns to England on discovering that she is pregnant. Meanwhile he rescues a local woman who intends to die with her child and takes them into his home. Outwardly he is of an amiable and easy going nature but years later when his daughter visits from Europe, she says: “The smile lit up his face, offering warmth, intimacy. But she saw now that the smile, like a trompe-l’oeil doorway painted on a stone wall, led nowhere.” There is a sadness, at times unbearable, that permeates through the novel. Here is a man who nobly offers his home and heart to a poor local woman and her child but treats his biological daughter who is seeing him for the first time with a casualness bordering on cruelty. There is also the wistfulness of thwarted love. Oriane has repeatedly spurned the advances of an Englishman and continues to yearn for the unattainable. Years later when Guru and she have a chance to be together, it is almost too late.

As the years pass by, the Grand Hotel de France becomes more and more dilapidated and loses its charm. Similarly Oriane grows old and frail. She has witnessed the French clashing with the British over Pondicherry, World Wars 1 and 2, the Indian Independence movement and eventually Pondicherry’s independence. Pondicherry itself undergoes as much growth and change as any character does in a changing India that eventually casts off the imperial yoke.

There are many minor characters introduced towards the end of the novel and they are not well fleshed out. The plot is not that well developed either. Yet, A House in Pondicherry is an interesting book as it explores colonialism and postcolonialism, sexism, racism, class, caste and privilege. British or French, substitute one colonizer for the other, the experience is the same. I found the book to be a lush and dreamy read that beautifully evokes a certain time in history. Besides, I was literally transported to the setting of the book. Being in Pondicherry and taking a walk on the Promenade and passing the sights mentioned in the book, definitely enhanced the reading experience for me.

Does reading give you wanderlust? Has a book ever taken you places? Or has a place made you reach for a particular book? If you could vacation in a place where a book is set, where would you go and what would you read?

I’ll end the blog post with a long passage from the book, which, in my opinion, powerfully encapsulates the colonial perception, often erroneous, of the exotic:

Between the settlements and the coconut groves lay the villagers’ cashew plantations, the trees shimmering in the sunlight, bushy as hawthorn and starred with pink and yellow blossom. Their scent drifted across the fields, warm, spicy, exotic. ‘ Anarcadium Occidentale’, Arjuna informed Judith when he came upon her admiring the cashew blossom for the first time. ‘ Pretty, but do not attempt to pick the nuts off the tree, or you will regret the action.’

  She thought it must be some local custom. some taboo he was warning her off, but there was a simpler, more practical explanation: the shell of the fruit was hard; breaking it to reach the little kidney-shaped nut at the base, the village women got the juice on their hands, bitter black juice that burned like acid and went on burning. The cashew harvesters’ hands blistered and peeled, the skin shiny and horribly pink, like plastic gloves- or bright new scar tissue, which is what it was. Their hands were skinned, flayed by the cashew acid.

  ‘ Can nothing be done to avoid this?’Judith asked, horrified.

  ‘ Rubbing wood-ash over their hands would protect them, to an extent, but no one has the time, the fruit is waiting.’

  And later, when she thought back to Auroville, that was what Judith remembered most sharply: the scent of cashew blossom was the smell of Auroville. It combined the sweetness of first sight with the burning bitterness of experience.

View of Pondicherry from the Lighthouse- (Wikimedia Commons, Karthik Easvur)

P.S. I just got a notification from WordPress that this is my 100th blog post!

Leaving Time- The Pain and Pangs of People and Pachyderms

“I think grief is like a really ugly couch. It never goes away. You can decorate around it; you can slap a doily on top of it; you can push it to the corner of the room – but eventually, you learn to live with it.“

I live in New Hampshire and Leaving Time is the first book I’ve read by Jodi Picoult, a prolific author from our state. Interestingly, my brother who lives in India has read each and every book written by her. I read the book with my book club and my brother warned me that it is not the book you choose to introduce yourself to her work. And of course, he turned out to be right! 

 The ending which took me by complete surprise ruined the story for me. Picoult is famous for her unpredictable twist endings. This book too had a twist ending but it seemed far fetched to me. It called for a total suspension of disbelief. I actually found the story gripping; I couldn’t put it down. And that’s why I felt cheated after being hooked for so long. I almost threw the book across the room in exasperation.

Thirteen year old Jenna is on a quest to find her mother who disappeared under mysterious circumstances when she was only three. Her parents Alice and Thomas Metcalf were research scientists who ran an elephant sanctuary in gasp …NH of all places! (According to the book, elephants can survive cold temperatures, although keeping elephants in the cold is a subject of heated debate in current times.) Alice was last seen at the elephant sanctuary on the day her co-worker Nevvie was found dead. No one knows if Nevvie was trampled by an elephant or if she was murdered. Alice is found injured and unconscious not too far away from Nevvie’s body and taken to the hospital but she runs away from there on regaining consciousness. She does not contact Jenna and a missing person report has never been filed for her.

As Jenna grows up, she is curious to find out what happened to her mother and to reunite with her. She is on the internet trying to get any information she can and studies her mother’s research journals hoping to find some clue there. She does not believe her mother has abandoned her. Her grandmother is quiet about the whole affair and her father has been confined to a psychiatric hospital since the incident took place. She is on her own and ends up enlisting help from two dubious characters; Serenity who was once a celebrity psychic with the ability to talk to spirits but whose skills are rusty now as her two spirit guides seem to have have forsaken her, and Virgil Stanhope, an ex-cop turned private investigator who was on her mother’s case but missed some of the clues and who is now a miserable alcoholic on account of the botched investigation.

The book is narrated in the first person from the four alternating perspectives of Jenna, Serenity,Virgil and Alice and switches back and forth between the past and the present. The transitions were seamless but it could be because I felt that the voice of the four characters was practically the same. Alice details events that led up to the fatal day. She was a scientist who was doing field work at a reserve in Botswana to study grief among elephants and met Thomas Metcalf on his brief visit there. A romantic tryst and an unexpected pregnancy forces her to leave Africa and to marry Thomas and move to an elephant sanctuary in New Hampshire where he works. It does not take her long to discover that her husband is severely mentally ill. Meanwhile she develops a closeness with a co-worker Gideon who is married to Grace, daughter of Nevvie. Oh the tangled web we weave!

Alice was a research scientist who studied the behavior of elephants. As someone who adores elephants, I loved reading about them. I was moved by their capacity to love and grieve. The term given to the way members of elephant herds take care of each other’s offspring is ‘allomothering’. Elephants are intelligent, sensitive and compassionate creatures who never forget. Some of the research information on the pachyderms could seem too factual but Picoult inserts fact with fiction to raise awareness about the plight of elephants worldwide in captivity who experience great psychological trauma when separated from their babies. She also wants to illustrate the parallel between elephant behavior towards their calves and Alice’s relationship with Jenna. I wasn’t too moved by this analogy as in spite of being a caring mother, Alice was also careless and irresponsible in some ways.

A herd of wild Asian elephants in Bandipur National Park, India

At first I was confused by the title of the book which didn’t seem relevant to the plot. It refers to how Jenna felt when her mother Alice would put her down for a nap. It was literally ‘leaving time’ as her mother was temporarily leaving her. The duration of the nap is also when Jenna left time from existence. So if we have left time when asleep, couldn’t the same be said for when we are dead? To avoid spoilers, I will not elaborate further on this theme but the book does raise interesting questions about the concept of time.

Alice remarks that ninety-eight percent of science is quantifiable but there still remains that two percent of behavior or phenomena that cannot be explained by science. The issue I had with the book is that Picoult allows the two percent to dominate the narrative making the ending seem ridiculous. Is Alice dead or alive? Was she responsible for Nevvie’s death? Will mother and daughter reunite? All the answers come together in an absurd ending that I didn’t see coming.

How did I miss the elephant in the room?

Have you read Jodi Picoult? Which book of hers would you recommend I read next?

  

 

Precious Bane

Recently I read a beautifully written book that is unfortunately underrated possibly because it is not well known. Published in 1924, but set over a hundred years before, at the time of the Napoleonic wars, Precious Bane by Mary Webb is the story of the trials and tribulations of rural folk in Shropshire, England, near the Welsh border. Usually when I read a book, I am at least subliminally aware that I am reading a made up story, however moved I might be by the characters and their issues. I was so immersed in this story that I almost forgot it was fiction. I was shaken to the core by a tragedy that befalls on the family and my husband was surprised to see me affected this deeply and had to remind me that it was just a story. If this is not the mark of a truly gifted writer, I don’t know what is.

I think one of the reasons the novel is not that popular is that the language is hard to get into as it is old fashioned with archaic words and employs dialect distinctive to the area. ‘Mon’ is the word used for man, ‘tuthree’ is a word to refer to two or three, ‘clemmed’ is a term for hungry, ‘bostin’ means wonderful and ‘ow bist’ is the expression for how are you and ‘durst’ for do you? But soon you will get the hang of it and you will know that ‘inna’ means isn’t, ‘canna’ can’t and ‘dunna’ don’t. I had to read with a dictionary next to me which annoyed me in the beginning but eventually I started savoring the language. My advice would be to persevere as it is worth it. The language adds authenticity. It is needed to evoke the rural atmosphere of the place and to transport us to another world where you can see the fields of sweet barley rustling in the wind and hear the thin notes of the willow wrens across the mere. Before you know it you will swept in the enchantment and will soak in the local color.

Precious Bane is the story of of a young girl, Prue, who is ‘hare shotten’- born with a hare lip disfigurement and for that reason she is believed to be a witch by her rural community. She has a desire for knowledge and learns to read and write from her neighbor Beguildy who dabbles in potions and is considered to be a wizard. When her father passes away, her brother Gideon takes over the farm. He is ambitious with his only purpose in life to become rich and acquire a house in town. He is in love with Jancis, the wizard’s daughter but money is his first motivation. He prevails upon Prue to pledge herself into a life of servitude on the farm with the promise that one day he will pay for an operation to mend her lip. They work very hard, depriving themselves of little pleasures. Then one day love walks into Prue’s life in the form of Kester Woodseaves, the weaver. But is she resigned to the life of a ‘spinster’ because of her deformity? Or will Gideon meet with success and liberate them from a life of poverty and hardship?

The oxymoronic title of the story is taken from lines in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (Book I, lines 690-692):

Let none admire
That riches grow in Hell; that soyle may best
Deserve the precious bane.

It refers to the love of money which is disastrous. Gideon’s story is tragic. He puts money above everything – above his dependent mother, his devoted sister and his loyal fiancée- which not only leads him to ruin their lives but also descend on a path to self-destruction. The title can also refer to Prue’s deformity which is a source of great strength and makes her the person she is. In the portrayal of the two siblings, we witness human nature at its best and worst. What Gideon believes to be precious becomes his bane and Prue’s bane ends up being precious!  

Prue is an unconventional protagonist because of her disability, but has become one of my favorite literary characters. She is such a breath of fresh air. The first person narrative makes it easy to relate with her. Not only was I rooting for this gentle and beautiful soul who deserved happiness, I found her personality to be very inspiring. She is kind, hardworking, cheerful and loving. She has reserves of strength and resilience in the face of misfortunes. She helps everyone around her even those who are mean and cold-hearted. She is surrounded by evil but she views the world around her with a child like innocence. She is a strong but kind female character who enjoys a spiritual communion with nature and often feels a mystical presence when alone in the attic, where she writes in her journal:

“I cannot tell whence, a most powerful sweetness that had never come to me afore. It was not religious, like the goodness of a text heard at preaching. It was beyond that. It was as if some creature made all of light had come on a sudden from a great way off, and nestled in my bosom…I cared not to ask what it was.”

Mary Webb evokes the countryside poetically whether she is describing dragonflies breaking out of their larval bodies and drying out their iridescent wings, or the changing reflections on the mere with its outer ring of bulrushes and inner ring of waterlilies. There are Biblical allusions throughout the book yet pagan symbols abound. Nature and the elements- the earth, water and fire play a pivotal role in the unraveling of the plot. There are whispers of witchcraft and wizardry among the local folk. Felena, the shepherdess dances naked by moonlight in a ring of cattle and sheep. Webb magically recreates a world of superstitions and small town gossip. I enjoyed learning about rural customs like ‘love spinning’ which is a gathering at which local women spin the wool that will be woven into the wedding fabric of the couple, the concept of ‘sin eating’ when a person takes over the sins of a deceased person for a fee, and the tradition of ‘telling the bees ‘when bees would be told of important events like birth and death in their keeper’s lives.

The book is filled with pearls of wisdom from the pen of Prue who is true to her name ( Prudence). Here are two quotes among many that struck my fancy:

For if you stop to be kind, you must swerve often from your path. So when folk tell me of this great man and that great man, I think to myself, Who was stinted of joy for his glory? How many old folk and children did his coach wheels go over? What bridal lacked his song, and what mourner his tears, that he found time to climb so high?”

I got together all the pails and buckets, and thought it seemed a pitiful thing that with all that great mere (lake) full of water we could only slake our fire with as much as we could get into our little buckets. And I’ve thought since that when folk grumble about this and that and be not happy, it is not the fault of creation, that is like a vast mere full of good, but it is the fault of their bucket’s smallness.

I enjoyed reading about a now lost way of life, a time when rural communities were isolated and on the cusp of change. Mary Webb’s writing is reminiscent of the works of Thomas Hardy and George Eliot though sadly she did not achieve their fame. The story is dark and heartbreaking for the most part but there is also a ray of hope in the form of a love story with a Cinderella touch. I was so moved by this sweet romance. If only Mary Webb had devoted more of the plot to it!

Precious Bane is a book that deserves a place in my own personal library. It is one of the finest books I have read. I’d lief read it again a tuthree times! 

Interior Chinatown

There has been a spate of violent attacks targeted against Asians and Asian- Americans in recent times. However Anti-Asian harassment is not new. Although exacerbated during the pandemic, the prejudice is rooted in a long history of discrimination towards Asian-Americans since the earliest Asian immigrants came to the US centuries ago. Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, which won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2020, is a satirical novel on the Chinese-American immigrant experience. The most unique feature of the novel is its unconventional format.

The characters of the book are part of a procedural cop show called ‘Black and White’ and the book itself is written in the form of a screenplay for a TV show. It is divided into seven acts with scene headings and even presented in the Courier font used in scripts. ‘Black and White'(ostensibly a spoof of ‘Law and Order’) has a charismatic black man and a beautiful white woman in the lead roles of detectives. Willis Wu, a Taiwanese- American has the role of ‘Background Oriental Male’. He is relegated to the background as all Asian-Americans are in the formulaic world of Hollywood. They only get bit parts and are sometimes reduced to playing props and corpses.

Willis Wu mostly gets to play Generic Asian Man. If he is lucky, sometimes he gets to be Background Oriental Making a Weird Face or even Disgraced Son. For now he is a bit player: but he dreams that one day he will be offered the most coveted role someone who looks like him might aspire to: Kung Fu Guy.

The Golden Palace restaurant in Chinatown serves as the set for the television show. Willis Wu, his friends and parents live in SRO ( Single Room Occupancy) apartments directly above the restaurant and are all Asian American extras. Their highest aspiration is to become ‘ Kung Fu Guy’ emulating an ‘older brother’, one of their gang who has made it. To land the coveted role of ‘Kung- Fu Guy’, Willis Wu practices martial arts and perfects his fake accent. In other words, he tries to fit his stereotype. He eventually makes his way up to ‘Special Guest Star’. Even Willis’ father’ Sifu’ was once ‘Kung Fu Guy’ but is now ‘Old Asian Man’ and his mother has been demoted from ‘Seductress’ to ‘Old Asian Woman’. These immigrants with their dreams and struggles are trapped in Chinatown just as they are trapped in these roles. The real world is only an extension of the entertainment world.

An elegant paifang or archway marks the official entrance to Chinatown in most cities. It is symbolic as an entryway for immigrants settling there. But the book cover design shows vertical bars that resemble a prison under the pagoda-like structure. The title Interior Chinatown is the description of the setting written on the script and could also refer to the claustrophobic lives of the residents living in humble conditions eking out a hand to mouth existence. They live in a physical and mental prison. And a metaphorical one too for they are also trapped in prisons of prejudice and stereotypes.

While reading the book there are times when you don’t know where the reel life ends and the real life begins. The boundaries are blurred between the two for Hollywood is nothing but the microcosm of the macrocosm. White people raise their voices and speak slowly to Asian people as if they won’t be able to understand anything they are saying. Asia is seen as a monolith. Every Asian is believed to be from mainland China. They are all lumped together just as all five of Willis Wu’s housemates are lumped together.

According to a witness, as the first man hit Allen in the temple, knocking him to the ground, they said, “This is for Pearl Harbor.” Young Wu thinks: it could have been him. Nakamoto says: it should have been him. All of the housemates realize: it was them. All of them. That was the point. They are all the same. All the same to the people who struck Allen in the head until his eyes swelled shut. All the same as they filled a large sack with batteries and stones, and hit Allen in the stomach with it until blood came up from his throat. Allen was Wu and Park and Kim and Nakamoto, and they were all Allen. Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea, Vietnam. Whatever. Anywhere over there. Slope. Jap. Nip. Chink. Towelhead. Whatever. All of them in the house, after that, they should become closer. But they don’t. They don’t sit around the table anymore, comparing names. because now they know what they are. Will always be. Asian Man.

Willis falls in love with Karen, a mixed race actress who used to play the role of ‘Ethnically Ambiguous girl’. They get married and have a daughter together. She receives an offer for a show of her own with a part included for Willis but he refuses to get out of Chinatown and give up on his ‘Kung Fu Guy’ dream. They get divorced and she moves to the suburbs with their daughter. When Willis eventually gets the coveted role of ‘Kung Fu Guy’, he wonders why he even wanted it. He will only be perpetuating the stereotype. How much of the racism has he internalized? In order to be accepted, you have to live according to the script. You live to fit into the stereotype and it then becomes a self -fulfilling prophecy. In his quest for the fake role of ‘Kung Fu Guy’, he has lost the real life role of family man. He leaves Chinatown to rejoin Karen and his daughter and is tried in court in the ‘Case of the Missing Man’ for running away from the role assigned to him with who else but his successful ‘older brother’ as his defense lawyer. The unusual court case culminating in the denouement is a brilliant tour de force by the author.

  The script format is occasionally interspersed with disturbing facts about the history of anti-immigration laws in the US and narration in the second person when Willis reflects on his life and on his parents’ lives. The use of the second person creates instant empathy in the reader. There is a moving passage where Willis’ father sings at the local karaoke bar. As an immigrant myself, I could relate to that feeling that even if you have left the country, it never leaves you.

If you don’t believe it, go down to your local karaoke bar on a busy night. Wait until the third hour, when the drunk frat boys and gastropub waitresses with headshots are all done with Backstreet Boys and Alicia Keys and locate the slightly older Asian businessman standing patiently in line for his turn, his face warmly rouged on Crown or Japanese lager, and when he steps up and starts slaying “Country Roads,” try not to laugh, or wink knowingly or clap a little too hard, because by the time he gets to “West Virginia, mountain mama,” you’re going to be singing along, and by the time he’s done, you might understand why a seventy-seven-year-old guy from a tiny island in the Taiwan Strait who’s been in a foreign country for two-thirds of his life can nail a song, note perfect, about wanting to go home.” 

Yu ingeniously exposes the marginalization of Asian Americans through the lens of ‘Black and White’, the clever title revealing how we view the world with no nuance, no shades in between. There were two things that bothered me slightly about the book; the first the implication that black people are more visible than Asians and are treated the same as white actors, and, the second, the focus on just the working class diaspora without any mention of the more successful Asian immigrants like the author himself. The only accomplished immigrant we come across is this mystical ‘older brother’ who seems to represent an ideal. In this aspect, the book seems a little dated in its depiction. Is the author guilty of the same kind of ‘Generic Asian Man’ portrayal that he is criticizing? Or was that deliberate to reinforce the premise of the book? Nevertheless, it is an ambitious and brilliant book both thematically and stylistically that makes us think more deeply about race, identity and assimilation.

The Three Theban Plays

“Laius,” she cried, and called her husband dead
Long, long ago; her thought was of that child
By him begot, the son by whom the sire
Was murdered and the mother left to breed
With her own seed, a monstrous progeny.
Then she bewailed the marriage bed whereon
Poor wretch, she had conceived a double brood,
Husband by husband, children by her child.” 

Oedipus Rex, Sophocles ( trans. Robert Fagles)

Note: There are spoilers in my post as I assume that even if people have not read the texts, they would know that all three plays being Greek tragedies, would end on a tragic note.

Thanks to Freud, everyone knows about the Oedipus complex which can be traced back to the myth of Oedipus, an age old tale about incest and patricide. I was always curious about the original story from where Freud got his inspiration to form his theory of psychoanalysis. Over the holidays, I read the three tragedies of Sophocles –Oedipus Rex ( also known as Oedipus Tyrannus and Oedipus The King), Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone- written in the 400s bce and referred to collectively as the Theban plays as they are all set in the city-state of Thebes and form a single storyline in spite of being written as three distinct plays. During my college years, I had studied Antigone in an English translation and I had also read the French adaptation by Jean Anouilh. I read the other two for the first time.

Though the plays are about the same characters, they were written at different times and were not intended to be a trilogy. In terms of their chronology, Oedipus Rex is the first, followed by Oedipus at Colonus and Antigone. But Sophocles did not write them in that order. I am glad I read them not just for their importance in the western literary canon but also for the realization that the mythological Oedipus did not suffer from the complex named after him.

Oedipus Rex- The Oracle of Delphi reveals to the King Laius of Thebes that he will have a child who will kill him and sleep with his wife Jocasta, in effect his own mother. Fearing the prophecy, the King and Queen abandon their newborn son on a mountainside to die. A shepherd finds the baby and takes him to  King Polybus and Queen Merope of Corinth who raise him as their own. When as a young man, Oedipus learns from an oracle that he is destined to kill his father and marry his mother, he leaves his home in Corinth to avert the prophecy. He kills Laius in a scuffle on the crossroads not knowing that it was his father. Ironically he returns to the very place he was driven away from during his infancy. He is offered the city’s crown and queen after he solves the Sphinx’s riddle and liberates the people of Thebes from its hold.

When a plague ravages Thebes, the only solution to bring an end to it, according to the oracle, is to bring the murderer of Thebes’ last king, Laius, to justice. Oedipus resolves to find the killer only to discover that he himself is the unfortunate man. The unbearable truth leads to the suicide of his wife-mother and as for Oedipus, overcome by guilt, he gouges out his own eyes in desperation.

Oedipus’ story is tragic as he was not aware of what he was doing. He, in fact, did the right thing by running away from his city and parents to escape the prophecies of the oracle but his destiny caught up with him. So if the prophesies were intended to come true, was Oedipus responsible for his actions? If it was ordained from the moment of his birth itself that he would to kill his father and marry his mother, was there any way he could have escaped his fate?

Is his suffering self inflicted? Was his downfall due to hubris in wishing to subvert the will of the Gods? He was a noble king who wanted to help his people and remove the curse of the plague. His ‘hamartia’ or fatal error to borrow a term from Aristotle’s Poetics is his desire for knowledge and it is this quest for the truth that ends up being self destructive. The prophet Tiresias and the shepherd who saved him as a baby want him to abandon his quest for they know the truth already and know that it will have disastrous consequences. If he hadn’t urged the shepherd boy to answer his questions, and if he had listened to Jocasta’s pleas to drop his search for the truth, he would have perhaps lived in blissful ignorance. Or perhaps not. His fate would have caught up with him one way or the other.

As you can see, the mythological Oedipus did not suffer from the complex named after him. Jacques Lacan, the French psychoanalyst, believed that the Oedipus complex was ‘Freud’s dream’. Freud believed that infantile impulses of desire for the opposite gender parent and jealousy towards the same gender parent remain active in our unconscious. However Oedipus was abandoned as as infant and consequently did not form an attachment with his mother during the phallic stage. Queen Merope is the woman who raised him during his childhood. Whether Freud’s theory in general is valid or not is a matter for another discussion, but it certainly does not hold water in the case of the character who inspired it as Oedipus was not a mama’s boy, but a mere marionette in the hands of fate.

Fresco depicting Oedipus killing his father Laius, dating back to the second century A.D, the Roman dynasty. At The Egyptian Museum of Cairo

Oedipus at Colonus– The least well known play in the trilogy has a calmer and more meditative tone. The exiled and blind Oedipus is reduced to a life of wandering with his daughter Antigone by his side. They arrive at the town of Colonus, close to Athens and are at first viewed with distrust by the citizens and the members comprising the Chorus who know about Oedipus’ past but King Theseus offers them his unconditional support. The oracles had also prophesied that Oedipus would die in a place sacred to the Furies.

Meanwhile his daughter Ismene arrives and informs him that his two sons are fighting for control of Thebes. Polynices has been banished by his younger brother Eteocles but has raised an army in Argos and is preparing to attack Thebes. In a dramatic twist of fate, the leaders of Thebes want Oedipus back because they believe his presence would bless the city. Spurned in the past, he is sought after now. Oedipus refuses as he is still upset with his sons for not having prevented his exile. Creon, his brother -in-law and the King of Thebes, forcibly tries to take Antigone and Ismene as hostages but King Thesus comes to their rescue. Oedipus dies and is buried at Colonus and his tomb protects the people of Athens and brings them good fortune thereafter as predicted by the Oracle.

This play is Important as it is Oedipus’ chance to defend himself and restore his tarnished reputation. He is finally granted dignity in death. Oedipus knows he killed his father unknowingly in self-defense and that he unwittingly slept with his mother. Whereas he was consumed with guilt and shame before, he feels indignation now at the way he was unfairly treated. He is despondent but refrains from self- flagellation. He has forgiven himself and is forgiven by others. He has become a more humble person and the relationship between the old feeble man and his devoted daughters is very touching. When Oedipus had his sight, he was in the dark because he didn’t know the truth about his life. Interestingly, when Oedipus becomes blind, his vision opens up and he finally acquires wisdom.

Jean-Antoine-Theodore Giroust, Oedipus at Colonus (1788)

Antigone- Both Eteocles and Polyneices are dead. The former gets a proper burial but the latter is considered a traitor by Creon and is refused a burial. Antigone tries to convince her sister to help her defy Creon’s edict and bury the body. Ismene agrees with her sister’s views but cannot muster up the courage to act and remains passive. Antigone is now completely on her own but still as steadfastly dedicated to her cause and gives her brother the burial he deserves. Creon and Antigone resemble each other in that they are both headstrong and unflinchingly devoted to their principles. After all they have the same blood coursing through their veins. She is imprisoned and sentenced to be buried alive but the Chorus, Teiresias and Creon’s son Haemon who is Antigone’s fiancé, plead with Creon to release her. He eventually has a change of heart but it is too late. Antigone has hanged herself and her heartbroken fiancé follows her in death which results in his mother Eurydice taking her life too, leaving Creon bereft and defeated. The ending though heartbreaking is befitting of a Greek tragedy. What else could we expect for the entire accursed bloodline of Oedipus?

Antigone giving burial to Polynices, Sébastien Louis Guillaume Norblin de la Gourdaine, 19th century, Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris

Antigone is my favorite play of the trilogy for two reasons. Firstly, it raises questions that are still relevant today in depicting the conflict between the individual and the state. She commits an act of civil disobedience in defying the edict of the King, analogous to the clash between authoritarianism and democracy we encounter in current times. The second reason I liked the play is that it is way ahead of its time in its feminist undertones. In refusing to kowtow to the wishes of an unjust man, Antigone rejects the traditional role of women. Ancient Greece was a patriarchal society where women were considered inferior and not consulted in matters of law or politics. Antigone stands up against tyranny in support of her moral obligations. No doubt her act is motivated by her filial love and loyalty to the men of the family, but by refusing to let herself be dominated by a man, she challenges the gender power dynamic. Interestingly, the play is named after her and not after Creon, the King.

 The main theme underlying all three plays is that of destiny and how we have to succumb to its inexorable ways. Even if you attempt to avoid the prophecies, your actions end up causing them to come about and they become what we refer to as self-fulfilling prophecies. So then we have to ask ourselves if everything is preordained, can we be fully responsible for our actions? And what is even the point of life and living if you pay a heavy price for exercising your free will?

I think the purpose of the plays was to emphasize that life is full of suffering and grief over which we have no control and all we can do is to cope with the cards dealt to us. You cannot control your fate but you can control how you respond to it. The plays were performed at the spring festival In Dionysus and were intended to be cathartic – to be a collective experience of shared grief which fostered compassion in the audience and enabled the release of their own emotions from the safe distance of their seats. The effect is the same on modern readers. The plays enhance our understanding of the human condition and of human nature and evoke the quality of empathy.

If ever we have a bad day, all we have to do is to think about poor ill-fated Oedipus and thank our stars!

 

Letter From Peking

I love diving into lesser known works of famous authors; you never know what pearls you might come up with. Letter from Peking is one such pearl of a book written by the legendary Pearl S. Buck. She is most famous for The Good Earth, a novel about rural pre-revolutionary China that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932. She went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1938, earning the distinction of being the first American woman to be honored with the award. I may be one of the rare readers who preferred Letter From Peking to her popular and award winning novels. Letter From Peking, published in 1957, has an unusual plot and a sad and haunting tone. I was moved to tears several times while reading.

The story is about long distance love and a family caught between two countries, two continents and two cultures. The setting is Vermont and the novel is written in the form of a dateless diary with a lot of flashback to Peking. Elizabeth has been separated from her beloved husband for five years and has been raising their son alone on her family’s farm in Vermont. While studying at Radcliffe College, she had met Gerald MacLeod, a half-Chinese half-American doctoral student at Harvard. They got married and returned to Peking where they spent many happy years together until the rise of the Communist regime when it was no longer safe for Elizabeth and her son to stay there. Gerald is the President of the University in Peking and it is not clear if and when he will return to the US to join his family.

Elizabeth leads a quiet life in Vermont managing her farm and devoting her days to her son Rennie and Gerald’s father, Baba, a Scotsman from Virginia whom she is looking after in his old age. The caretaker of the farm and his wife, the single doctor who takes a romantic interest in Elizabeth and summer residents are among the few people who revolve in their orbit. She pines for her husband and reminisces about the beautiful love they shared. In fact, they were each other’s first love. “The first run of maple syrup, John Burroughs says, is like first love, “always the best, always the fullest, always the sweetest, while there is a purity and delicacy of flavor about the sugar that far surpasses any subsequent yield.”

Now she lives on the strength of her memories and on the hope that they will be reunited again which seems like a dim prospect in the political climate of the time. She reassures herself:“Gerald has not deserted me nor I him. We are divided by history, past and present.” Letters are the only form of communication between them. They have to be sent clandestinely as communication with westerners is banned by the Communists. At first fairly frequent, they start dwindling in number until a final one comes along. The contents of the last letter are not revealed till the end.

Although not a widow, the sad reality is that Elizabeth is one in many ways. I felt a lot of sympathy and compassion for her. Can you imagine not seeing your spouse for years and living life without knowing if you’ll ever meet again? There is so much uncertainty coupled with the loneliness but yet Eve as Gerald used to call his beloved Elizabeth, takes it all in stride with so much grace. There are men vying for her attention but she fends off their advances staying loyal to her husband. I think what appealed to me in the book was the gentleness in the tone despite the sadness. There is something very moving about Elizabeth’s serene acceptance of her situation and resignation to her fate. Her loneliness is described with poignancy:

Oh, the awful silence of the valley at night! No one comes near me and I am as alone as though I lived solitary upon a planet. Here and there in the distance a light burns. It means a house, a home, two people, perhaps children. The oil lamp burns yellow in Matt’s little house, and far down at the end of the valley the bright single light is the naked electric bulb that never goes out above the office door of Bruce Spaulden. I know, too, the intermittent flares of summer folk. None of them burns for me. Sometimes I light every lamp in my empty house and a stranger passing by could believe the house is full of guests. But I have no guests.”

I loved the Vermont setting and its juxtaposition with Peking; the grandeur of Chinese civilization offers an interesting contrast to the gentle beauty of Vermont and captures the essence of the novel. Elizabeth cherishes her husband’s Chinese heritage and wants her son to appreciate it too and wants him to have a life partner who would accept and understand it too. Baba lives in the past and still wears Chinese silk robes and reads Chinese books. As Elizabeth says, he still lives in the world of Confucius and Chinese emperors. I think that’s an important distinction- there is the grand old China- one of the oldest civilizations of the world and the new Communist regime which is entirely different. Her father-in-law is the only link to her husband and it is interesting that though Baba and Elizabeth are not Chinese by blood, they are proud to be linked to the rich culture.

Being quarter Chinese, Rennie, on the other hand, wrestles with his identity. Which country do you claim as your own when you can’t embrace both? It was a period of Sino-American geo-political tensions and there was a real fear of China and suspicion of anyone favorable to it and a similar distrust on the part of the authoritarian Chinese government towards Americans. Besides, in those days mixed families were not as common. Rennie has to choose between America and China and sadly between his mother and father. Unlike his mother, it is not so easy for him to forgive his father and it is safer for him to reject his heritage.

He falls in love with a girl in the neighborhood named Allegra and he is worried that revealing his Chinese identity will keep her from liking him. Elizabeth is harsh and judgmental about his relationship with the white girl. She wonders how Rennie could love a girl whose heart can “only hold one cup”. Pearl S. Buck beautifully depicts the complicated mother-son relationship.“Yet no mother can save her son. She can only watch and wait and wring her hands.” I thought her feelings arose from her loneliness. Her son was the only constant person in her life and she seemed jealous like any over protective mother. But later on I realized that maybe she was on to something as she seemed to readily accept his relationship with Mary, a girl she thought to be better suited to him and who would understand and embrace his Chinese heritage.

Gerald and Elizabeth’s relationship is tender and sweet no doubt, but I felt that she could have been idealizing it at times. Time and distance can make you lose perspective. When a person is absent, we tend to focus on their positive qualities and overlook their flaws. We only remember the good times. The bitter truth is that Gerald chose his country over her. Gerald’s patriotism and love for China prevented him from leaving his country. He had the opportunity to return to the US with her but didn’t and then it became too late. Even her son points it out to her but she is in some kind of denial mode. She continues to be fiercely protective of him.

I was struck by the dignity and poise Elizabeth had in the face of suffering but I do think she had a slight ‘holier than thou‘ attitude- she felt that no relationship could compare to this sublime love of theirs and she is steadfast in her belief that this true perfect love can withstand barriers of time, distance, race and culture. Her attitude seems like a coping mechanism. She needed something to cling on to, to give her hope to continue waiting.

In spite of some annoying traits, Elizabeth is on the whole a sympathetic character and I think it is because she is a lot like a modern day single mom who is self-reliant and has to raise her son singlehandedly. She is an independent woman who lives alone, works hard and makes her own money by managing a big farm by herself. She interacts mostly with men and like a single woman sometimes has to deal with their romantic interest in her. She also takes care of her father-in- law like a lot of women who end up taking the responsibility of caregiving. I am not going to reveal what happens in the end; what the final letter disclosed and whether Elizabeth is reunited with her husband. I hope I have piqued your curiosity enough to want to read the book.

When Pearl S. Buck died in 1973, former President Richard Nixon called her “a human bridge between the civilizations of the East and the West.”Though there are critics who believe that she perpetuated stereotypes about the Chinese, there is no doubt that she was instrumental in making China and the Chinese real and relevant to many people. This ‘pearl’ of a novel is more than a story about interracial conflict. It is a story about the love a woman is capable of- a love in its myriad complex forms-the undying love that she has for an absent husband, the protective love she has for her son, the filial duty and affection for her in-laws and most of all the love for a country that she has no ties of blood to but has embraced with her heart and soul. Imagine all this tumult of emotion soaked up in the quiet and gentle beauty of Vermont!

Have you read this novel or any other novel by Pearl S. Buck? And have you enjoyed reading any lesser known works of popular authors?

 

Whereabouts

Jhumpa Lahiri’s early novels and short stories explored the theme of displacement and alienation in the context of the Indian- American immigrant experience. In 2012, Lahiri moved to Italy and adopted the country and its culture. Not only did she learn Italian and become fluent in the language, she made the startling decision to give up writing in English. She wrote her first work in Italian in 2015, a non-fiction piece entitled In altre parole which was translated into English as In Other Words by Ann Goldstein. ( You can read my blog post on the book here: https://literarygitane.wordpress.com/2016/12/07/in-other-words-a-love-affair-with-a-language/ )

Dove mi trovo ( Where I Find Myself) is her second book in Italian and this time she has translated it herself into English as Whereabouts. She has also moved back to the US, coming out a little, if not wholly, out of her self-imposed linguistic exile. Though Whereabouts does not address the immigrant experience, the anxiety of dislocation–that feeling of being neither here nor there- is still the prevailing theme.

In a series of vignettes set over a year and spanning the seasons, Whereabouts chronicles the daily life of a middle aged single woman in an unnamed city, presumably Rome in Italy. The structure is fragmentary and there is no plot as such-in fact nothing much happens. The short chapters read like diary entries. From the few crumbs of details thrown at the reader, we guess that she is a professor at a university and has never been married or had children. She is aloof with her colleagues and her relationship with her parents is fraught. She describes herself as “Disoriented, lost, at sea, at odds, astray, adrift, bewildered, confused, uprooted, turned around...” She may have some regrets in life but she seems content with her lifestyle despite her loneliness. She derives comfort from her mundane routine and rituals.

She wanders through the city and frequents its haunts as she goes about her day. You can find her on the sidewalk, at the trattoria, in the piazza, in the bookstore or at the museum. In fact these locations are also chapter titles. Sometimes the titles refer to the weather or the season (‘In spring’, ‘In the Sun’, ‘In August’). There’s one chapter titled ‘In My Head’ and another one called ‘Nowhere’. She moves in and out of these different urban spaces forming tacit and fleeting connections with the people she encounters.The specificity of the location is juxtaposed with the meanderings of the narrator’s mind which jumps between the past and the present. At times on the street, she runs into people she knows. But often she is only an eavesdropper, intrigued by strangers. She follows a couple having an argument and builds up a whole narrative in her head about their personal life based on the few words she hears them speak. She is a voyeur and so are the readers, privy to her innermost thoughts. She takes comfort in crowds but is a solitary woman who prefers being alone. “I eat alone, next to others eating alone”, she muses at a restaurant. She feels less alone in the company of people. She craves for connection but not of the close kind:

This evening as I read in bed I hear the roar of cars that speed down the road beneath my apartment. And the fact of their passing makes me aware of my own stillness. I can only fall asleep when I hear them. And when I wake up in the middle of the night, always at the same time, it’s the absolute silence that interrupts my sleep. That’s the hour when there’s not a car on the road, when no one needs to get anywhere. My sleep grows lighter and lighter and then it abandons me entirely. I wait until someone, anyone, turns up on the road. The thoughts that come to roost in my head in those moments are always the gloomiest, also the most precise. That silence, combined with the black sky, takes hold over me until the first light returns and dispels those thoughts, until I hear the presence of lives passing by along the road below me.

As she goes about her day, she reflects on her life and her relationships. She has had her share of men including married men and a two timing boyfriend. There is also her friend’s husband to whom she is drawn and he seems to be attracted to her as well but they never act on their feelings. She discovers that over time, this hypothetical affair, “which never took hold to begin with, loses its hold over me.” The narrator is prone to anxiety and suffers from tics, headaches, odd afflictions and mysterious pains arising out of the blue. Her mother who was codependent while married, is now a lonely woman who lives alone. Her father’s untimely death has left her bereft but she is not able to forgive him for not protecting her from her mother’s rages and cries out near his crypt: “ …but that magma never touched you, you’d already built yourself an enclosure that was taller and thicker than the marble that encases you now.” She was supposed to go on a trip with him to see a play but he died before that could happen. Her buried anger erupts : “I refused to unpack my suitcase for a month. I mourned those wasted tickets, and that trip never taken, more than I mourned for you.“

The unnamed narrator who vacillates between the need to stay and to leave, to connect and to disconnect is a sort of an ‘everywoman’. It is easy for any city woman to identify with her. She is a flâneuse somewhat like her literary predecessor, Mrs. Dalloway, who ambles around the city, both part of the crowd and separate from it. I thought of how, like the narrator, we crave anonymity and blend in with the crowd but yet we shrink from total solitude. We are happy to sip our coffee alone with a book or our smartphone in a café but we derive a sense of security from the people around us. Even the narrator sees her double, a woman who looks like her and whom she follows and loses in the crowd. “ My double, seen from behind, explains something to me: that I’m me and also someone else, that I’m leaving and also staying.”“Did I imagine her? No, I’m certain I saw her. A variation of myself with a sprightly step, determined to get somewhere, just up ahead.” Variations of the narrator exist everywhere, caught in the hustle and bustle of urban loneliness.

The quiet story has a dreamlike quality and shifts between shadow and light, absence and presence, stillness and movement, till the narrator makes a momentous decision. When she was a little girl, she was afraid to jump from one tree stump to the other while playing with other children at school, but she finally takes a giant leap of faith. And like her protagonist narrator, Jhumpa Lahiri also reinvents herself by leaving her comfort zone to try something different. I appreciate her devotion and dedication to another language. It resonates with me personally, as much like Lahiri, I grew up exposed to many languages and was most fluent in English, which was not my mother tongue, but a ‘stepmother’, to borrow her analogy from In Other Words. I went on to embrace French, a totally different language I could consider my foster mother. I understand her relationship to Italian as I share her passion for living and breathing a foreign language. Yet I am left with ambivalent feelings on reading this book.

Does she have to give up one narrative style to find a new voice in her writing? Does she have to abandon one language to adopt another? I did not quite have the same intense and intimate experience with her Italian books as I did with her immigrant writing. There are a few poetic prose passages I savored, but on the whole I felt that some of her linguistic brilliance, so evident in English, is missing here as she is still in the process of perfecting Italian. I was mostly left with this agonizing question: Will we never get to read another Interpreter of Maladies or Unaccustomed Earth?