Category Archives: Book Reviews!

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

The Woman Warrior, p. 13:
“The round moon cakes and round doorways, the round tables of graduated sizes that fit one roundness inside another, round windows and rice bowls—these talismans had lost their power to warn this family of the law: a family must be whole, faithfully keeping the descent line by having sons to feed the old and the dead, who in turn look after the family. The villagers were speeding up the circling of events because she was too shortsighted to see that her infidelity had already harmed the village, that waves of consequences would return unpredictably, sometimes in disguise, as now, to hurt her. This roundness had to be made coin-sized so that she would see its circumference: punish her at the birth of her baby. Awaken her to the inexorable. People who refused fatalism because they could invent small resources insisted on culpability. Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars.”
Kingston discusses the punishment the village exacted on her aunt in this passage. References to circles, to roundness cannot be ignored, as they are stacked one upon the other, upon the other, as in the phrase “round moon cakes”. The moon is round, the cakes are round, and in case you didn’t notice, they’re round. Coins, pregnant women, the circling of events, rice bowls, even windows (windows!) are round. The line, “Awaken her to the inexorable”, begins the articulation of Kingston’s message about this, the articulation of why now, after fifty years, she is writing about this unnamed aunt in her memoir. She tells us that she never asked for more detail than her mother gave her, never asked her name, certainly didn’t try to bring this ghost into the light, because the “waves of consequences” are too great when individual sins are not individual sins at all, but are crimes against the community and all it stands for. It’s significant that she refers to her aunt as “no name woman” because names signify our individuality and it was her aunt’s individuality (whether asked for or forced upon her) that pushed her outside of the circle of the village. In the last two sentences of this passage, Kingston muses on fate and free will, ideas crucial to her recurring theme of the individual pitted against the expectations of their society. Her aunt is a “ghost”, treated by her brother as if she never existed because of some accident. Whether it was through her own vanity or vulnerability, she certainly did not intend to get pregnant, the ironic roundness that pushed her out of the circle. And Kingston writes, “Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars”, suggesting that there is more to blame in those who judge strictly, mercilessly, than in those who make mistakes.

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Some past posts to keep you making time:
Adjust your pace accordingly.
It’s about the routine and how you shake up the routine
There are things you will have to give up
See it to achieve it
Washing the dishes
Write slowly
A celebration of the pause
Monday, a run through the driving rain
Zen accident
Get out of your comfort zone

Some short stories and a poem

“The Overcoat” by Gogol

I know Gogol was a realist, that he preferred to write about “dull and repulsive” characters, but there does seem to be an optimism there. However mundane Akaky’s work and life are, there is still this possibility that hovers beneath the surface of the story, telling the reader to choose creative work, that if one isn’t lucky enough to secure a life’s work doing something creative then it’s essential to have some kind of creative outlet. Also, this story demonstrates the tragedy that there are some people who work and work and work for so little material reward. Blah. Blah. Blah. The story just made me think how having creativity and love are what make life worth living. Akaky was dull and repulsive, but there was a hint that he could have been something more, and that is why we care about his sad fate, and why his story makes us reflect and take inventory of our own lives.

“A Company of Laughing Faces” by Nadine Gordimer

“She longed to break through the muffle of automatism with which she carried through the motions of pleasure. There remained in her a desperate anxiety to succeed in being young, to grasp, not merely fraudulently to do, what was expected of her.” This story is about loss of innocence and how society, its expectations and conventions, assault the individual. The “one truth and the one beauty” for Kathy is not just the sight of the dead boy, but also what he stood for: innocence, curiosity and awe.

“Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne

How easily our faith is shaken. Hawthorne’s naming of Goodman Browne’s wife was no accident. Evil exists. People are weak and flawed. You’ll be miserable if you let the knowledge of that shake you.

From “He is More Than a Hero” by Sappho

“If I meet you suddenly, I can’t speak—my tongue if broken; a thin flame runs under my skin, seeing nothing, hearing only my own ears drumming, I drip with sweat, trembling shakes my body and I turn paler than dry grass. At such time death isn’t far from me.”

In my experience, I’ve only felt this way about someone who is still what I imagine them to be, because I haven’t spent sufficient time with them to see them for who they really are. This kind of infatuation is more of a self-love—a worshipping of our own imagination. There are far deeper loves, though they are less showy, than that.

“Sweat” by Zora Neale Hurston

I admire authors who do dialect well. It’s something I’m not so confident in. Maybe I lack a refined sense of the sound of language. Maybe I’ve focused too much on word meanings. Anyway, Sykes got what he deserved and now Delia can live free. This story seems to be warning about how our sins come back to haunt us—snake and all.

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The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd

I just finished reading The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd. The main character has a bit of an identity crisis spurred on by her daughter’s leaving for college and her mother’s emotional breakdown. She paints these images of mermaids (herself) diving deeper and deeper and shredding all symbols of her old self: wedding rings, spatulas, etc. In the end, I felt that the main character never dove that deep, because throughout the novel she maintains this analysis of self that is mostly right on and, in the end, left no mystery in her transformation. It’s made more believable by her psychiatrist husband and her own self-awareness, but still I couldn’t help feeling like it is all just a little too easy for her, just some motions she needed to go through to find her true self. I was never afraid that she would lose herself entirely. So, while I could relate to much of what she was going through, I was jealous of how easy it was for her. She had her affair with a monk, took mud baths in her childhood stomping ground and danced when no one was watching, and in the end came back to her old life with a new sense of self and an independence that only served to strengthen her marriage of some twenty plus years. I enjoyed the book, maybe even enjoyed how cleanly the emotional lives of all are tied up because it offers me some kind of hope for my own sanity, for the sanity of people in general. However, there is this part of me that thinks–nah–they were (the characters) all just a little too sane to be real.
Here are some lines that I underlined as I read:

“The wind is spiked with the smell of my childhood, and the water is ultramarine blue, shining like taffeta.” (1)
Comment: Lovely image. There are places in my home town that make me feel this way when I go there.

“I should go inside, but I stood on the porch for a few minutes in a breeze that had chilled and darkened and smelled of the marsh, finishing whatever had come over me earlier–that little baptism of sadness.” (45)
Comment: Love that phrase–“baptism of sadness”

“The medic who’d responded to the accident told him over and over that she had gone quickly, as if her leaving sooner would console him.” (49)
Comment: Captures the depth of grief.

“He couldn’t remember precisely when it had first occurred to him to come here, but it had been around a year after her death. He’d sent his baptism and confirmation records, recommendations from two priest, and a long, carefully constructed letter. And still everyone, including the abbot, has said he was running away from his grief. They’d had no idea what they were talking about. He’d cradled his grief almost to the point of loving it. For so long he’d refused to give it up, because leaving it behind was like leaving her.” (49)
Comment: Love the metaphor. Grief as a child? Ironic, but true.

“Despite this, he felt God the same way arthritic monks felt the rain coming in their joints. He felt only the hint of him.” (52)
Comment: Love the comparison.

“I think we could have lit the tip of her finger and let it burn like a taper and the moment wouldn’t have seemed any stranger to me.” (65)
Comment: Yes, that is a strange image. Works.

“Soul. The word redounded to me, and I wondered, as I often had, what it was exactly. People talked about it all the time, but did anybody actually know? Sometimes I’d pictured it like a pilot light burning inside a person–a drop of fire from the invisible inferno people called God. Or a squashy substance, like a piece of clay or dental mold, which collected the sum of a person’s experiences–a million indentations of happiness, desperation, fear, all the small piercings of beauty we’ve ever known.” (111)
Comment: The soul a piece of clay? A dental mold? Love this comparison.

“I did believe that women only had so much libido, and when it was used up, it was used up…Now I saw I’d had it all wrong. There were no tanks, small or otherwise, just faucets. All of them connected to a bottomless erotic sea. Perhaps I’d let my faucet rust shut, or something had clogged it up. I didn’t know.” (125)
Comment: Like this metaphor.

“For days after that, I’d been deflated by my own shrunken world. When had my fear of broken plates gotten so grandiose? My desire for extravagant moments so small? After that, I’d made room for the china in one of the kitchen cabinets and used it indiscriminately. Because it was Wednesday. Because someone had purchased one of my art boxes. Because it appeared that on Cheers Sam was finally going to marry Diane. It hadn’t gone much beyond the china, though, that good impulse toward largeness.” (127)
Comment: Love her ironically trivial attempt “toward largeness”.

“I was an accomplished practitioner of delayed gratification. Hugh once said that people who could delay gratification were highly mature. I could put off happiness for days, months, years. That’s how ‘mature’ I was.” (141)
Comment: Powerful sarcasm.

“I felt as though we’d passed through the eye of a tiny needle into a place that was out of time.” (146)
Comment: Love the image.

“You can’t stop your heart from loving, really–it’s like standing out there in the ocean yelling at the waves to stop.” (179)
Comment: Powerful comparison.

“It felt cruel and astonishing to realize that our relationship had never belonged out there in the world, in a real house where you wash socks and slice onions. It belonged in the shadow linings of the soul.” (315)
Comment: Like the phrase “shadow linings of the soul”.

“I felt amazed at the choosing one had to do, over and over, a million times a daily–choosing love, then choosing it again, how loving and being in love could be so different.” (322)
Comment: Expresses a truth about how often even in a single day, new possibilities reveal themselves in our lives. We are never stuck.

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Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison

Song of Solomon is required reading for my junior IB class. I was happy to see it on the list, since it’s a book I’ve had on my shelf for years, ever since I read Beloved in my Women’s Literature course in college and started buying every used Morrison book I came across. It goes without saying that the novel is complex that the strands of thought and theme are too numerous to consider all at once, must be considered over time and conversations and compositions such as this. For this first read, this first year (I will teach it again next year) my own written reflection will settle on one theme, the most universal of all themes: love. Even in this I find myself bouncing about in my own mind trying to tie together this and this and this to come up with some statement of meaning. In doing this over the last few weeks, I’ve come to this conclusion about Morrison’s message about love in Song of Solomon: Love is not a good in and of itself. Love, to be good and beautiful, must be without exclusion, conditions, boundaries, or claims. A love like that takes strength.
Morrison chose her title from the famous love song from the bible, a lyric the reminds me of the hardbound little book containing the song and illustrations that my love-mad mother gave me as a gift some years ago. My mother is love mad and so am I by degrees, which, for me, is a constant source of struggle. Love madness is common, pervasive and older than Shakespeare’s Romeo. Hagar is the character in Morrison’s novel who represents what I mean by love madness.
Hagar, in the disturbing scene after she sees herself in the mirror and begins her frantic mission to look good for Milkman who has rejected her, is asked by Pilate, who is desperate to cure her niece of her illness that is her broken heart, “What you need?” to which Hagar replies, “I need everything.” This line demonstrates the tragic source of her madness. Woman like Hagar, and for that matter Solomon’s wife Ryna, and Milkman’s mother, Ruth, who depend entirely on the love of one man for their own sense of purpose are left to a loveless life pining after love. A woman who “needs everything” is doomed. A woman has to be able to depend on herself and has to be able to have enough to distribute to all who love her. Pilate, though she is isolated, had enough to distribute as is indicated in her near last words, “I would of loved ‘em all.”
Pilate brings her broad-reaching mother love into Ruth and Macon’s home and eventually is turned away for it by her brother, who is ruled by his notions of wealth and power. Paranoia, jealousy, greed, and notions of family and class structure cut Macon off from love. He might have loved Ruth if he could have stood her loving anyone but him, and she might have loved him if she were capable of loving without exclusion. But, he couldn’t stand her blind devotion to her father, and she was so hungry for father love that she saved nothing for herself or anyone else. She tries to love her children, but her hunger turns them off. This is what makes the image of her nursing the boy Milkman well passed the age to wean ironic. She is the hungry one, destroyed by her inability to feed herself with good love. Her love dies with her father, because he had all her love. She seeks love from her children, her husband, but continues to give her love to her dead father whose grave she takes long trips by train to visit. It’s not her fault though. She’s been cut off from love by the intense patriarchy she was raised in. She lived isolated with her father, isolated by her class and her father’s lovelessness. Then, she is married to another man who feels superior to the people in his community and keeps his family under his control. She is never free to love and shows some slight, too late development in her silent demand for money for Hagar’s funeral from Macon that mostly indicates that women instinctually love well, so long as they are not bound by love for or control by their father’s and lovers, perhaps indicative of the potential for matriarchy to save us from the dangers of love gone bad.
Milkman breaks the bounds of love that he has learned from his family. He’s always wanted to, at least since he started visiting and fell in love with his outcast Aunt, Pilate. He loves Guitar, even though Guitar tries to kill him. When he frees himself to love without limits, his life is full, “He almost broke her door down. ‘I want to swim!’…”I’m dirty and I want waaaaater!” Water symbolizes the vitality for life that Milkman “Dead” now has. In his revelation he tells Sweet that he is a son of Solomon, like so many in those parts, and when she teases, “You belong to that tribe of niggers?” he replies, “Yeah, that tribe. That flyin motherfuckin tribe.” One can be freed by love like Milkman and Pilate or destroyed by it like Hagar, Ruth, and Guitar. Love is not a good in and of itself. Love has been the justification for the worst crimes against humanity and destroys good men and women through hungry addiction all the time. I don’t know…probably three wrecked lives every three seconds or something.

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Make Time.

Liz Shine: Author, Editor.

Category Archives: Book Reviews!

The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston

More short stories and Donne

Some short stories and a poem

The Mermaid Chair by Sue Monk Kidd

Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison