A Prayer for Owen Meany is an examination of faith and fate set in an outlandish narrative. The Owen of the title has a high-pitched child's voice set in a childlike physique; he disdains the Catholic Church for refusing to believe in his virgin birth or in his being God's instrument; and he is obsessed with practising basketball shots with his best friend John.
Through John's narration, splicing past and present, we know that Owen dies exactly per his dream and in the course of being God's instrument, though tantalisingly - and necessarily, if there aren't to be plot spoilers halfway through the book - the dream doesn't provide the full-blown details of how his death comes about.
And we learn that in the fact of Owen's death - the fact of its occurring much as Owen has dreamt - the previously non-religious John turns to religion and offers up an unrelenting prayer for God to return Owen Meany to him.
The story of faith is made more palatable by the fact that it is intertwined with subsequent anti-war sentiment. Thus, Owen's role as instrument of God doesn't include lynching non-Whites, an interpretation of God's will that we are all too familiar with. No, Owen must save Vietnamese children (as well as John) from certain death at the hands of a man grieving for the loss of his brother during the Vietnam war, and brandishing a gun to help him quell his anger towards the "dinks".
Thus, Owen Meany the physically stunted virgin baby who must do God's will is transformed into a hero. His best friend owes his life to Owen - if not to his bravery, then at least to his acceptance and embracing of his own fate - and is disgusted with the American foreign policy that led to the war that forged Owen's fate. So much so, that John decamps to Canada and lives the rest of his life praying to God to return Owen Meany, a life of silent prayer that is punctuated only by his teaching English to schoolgirls.
Out of crazy and improbable scenarios are born the heroes of our time: that's the easiest thing to come to terms with in this novel, the glib summary that rolls off the tongue. More difficult to process is our thinking on issues of faith and fate, with a good measure of social justice thrown in. Would we be joining John in his prayers if Owen had died for a cause we despise? Would Owen have faced his fate with such conviction and enthusiasm if that fate had been to facilitate rather than prevent the Vietnamese childrens' death? Are we really ready to confront our "fate"? Do we even believe in "fate"?
Thursday 23 December 2010
Wednesday 22 December 2010
Germinal (Emile Zola)
Germinal is often cited as one of Zola's masterpieces. 13th in the twenty-novel Rougon-Macquart cycle, Germinal follows the thread of Zola's avowedly naturalist approach to themes of heredity and environment within a study of one family (two branches - one enjoying wealth and other poverty),
Germinal is a book that will stay with you forever. It is a seminal study of working class experience and struggle, and of a miners' strike in particular, forged in the mould of Zola's republicanism (in the sense of sharing the 179 ethos of liberty, equality and fraternity), positivism and realism.
Neither a political tract, nor a mirror on contemporary society, Germinal lacks the larger-than-life characters of a Pip or a Hamlet or an Emma. What it does, and successfully so, is to unwrap the quotidian realities - with sheer wealth of description - of a moment in time and experience, in a manner that rendered it enduring and significant some 100 years later when Britain's own miners were forced to strike.
Though Zola is said not to have embraced socialism until later in life and leftist - particularly Marxist - critiques of him supposedly abound, Germinal flirts with socialism and even anarchism in a fairly knowing and empathetic way. It's also a deeply, almost frighteningly, human book - by which I mean that you become so entangled in the lives and experiences and joys and horrors of the striking miners, so engrossed in feelings of outrage on their behalf, that are they rarely less than real to you.
Germinal, then, left me angry, frustrated and sad. I can only assume that Zola was being ironic in choosing the month of Germinal (March-April in the 1792 revolutionary calendar) - the month of hope and germination normally associated with springtime - as the title for this book. Then again, hopefulness is perhaps the fundamental sentiment driving the working-class struggle - hope that is continually thwarted by the reality of greedy, grasping natures but that nevertheless springs eternal.
Without doubt, Germinal ought to be part of the national reading curriculum. Not merely for the fact that it might inspire a generation of right-thinking individuals, but because it lights the torch of outrage against social injustice and is quite honestly a beautifully written book with wonderfully observed descriptions of life in all its quotidian mess.
What the Grapes of Wrath began - if, like me, you read that first - Germinal takes to another level altogether.
Germinal is a book that will stay with you forever. It is a seminal study of working class experience and struggle, and of a miners' strike in particular, forged in the mould of Zola's republicanism (in the sense of sharing the 179 ethos of liberty, equality and fraternity), positivism and realism.
Neither a political tract, nor a mirror on contemporary society, Germinal lacks the larger-than-life characters of a Pip or a Hamlet or an Emma. What it does, and successfully so, is to unwrap the quotidian realities - with sheer wealth of description - of a moment in time and experience, in a manner that rendered it enduring and significant some 100 years later when Britain's own miners were forced to strike.
Though Zola is said not to have embraced socialism until later in life and leftist - particularly Marxist - critiques of him supposedly abound, Germinal flirts with socialism and even anarchism in a fairly knowing and empathetic way. It's also a deeply, almost frighteningly, human book - by which I mean that you become so entangled in the lives and experiences and joys and horrors of the striking miners, so engrossed in feelings of outrage on their behalf, that are they rarely less than real to you.
Germinal, then, left me angry, frustrated and sad. I can only assume that Zola was being ironic in choosing the month of Germinal (March-April in the 1792 revolutionary calendar) - the month of hope and germination normally associated with springtime - as the title for this book. Then again, hopefulness is perhaps the fundamental sentiment driving the working-class struggle - hope that is continually thwarted by the reality of greedy, grasping natures but that nevertheless springs eternal.
Without doubt, Germinal ought to be part of the national reading curriculum. Not merely for the fact that it might inspire a generation of right-thinking individuals, but because it lights the torch of outrage against social injustice and is quite honestly a beautifully written book with wonderfully observed descriptions of life in all its quotidian mess.
What the Grapes of Wrath began - if, like me, you read that first - Germinal takes to another level altogether.
Tuesday 21 December 2010
We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families (Philip Gourevitch)
Gourevitch - a New Yorker staffer - is not afraid to take sides, pass judgement and pack a punch with his journalese-cum-ethnographic style. If, as happens with most humanitarian incidents/phases and atrocities, you feel that a sense of outrage is appropriate about the Rwandan genocide of the 1990s but are not exactly clear on the complexities of the case then this is the book for you.
Gourevitch offers - albeit perhaps unintentionally - a fantastic beginner's guide to understanding the situation in Rwanda. We're not talking dry facts: we are talking about hearing the crack of dead bodies underfoot, coming to terms with the unbearable truth of your neighbour turning on you with a machete, grasping the understated heroism that saves lives, clenching your teeth at the apathetic shrug of the shoulders by genocide criminals confronted by their actions and... asking why the UN exists when it is so criminally implicated in facilitating genocide.
Which is not to say that you should simply ascribe to the direction that Gourevitch's outrage takes; but you ought to be sustained by some sense of rage as a result of reading his offering. If the subjective, the emotional, the ideological is not for you - well, Gourevitch delivers on the opposite front too. Delving, necessarily, into issues of ethnicity, conflict and the nation there is enough ethnographic substance here to whet your intellectual appetite.
Indeed, Gourevitch's style may mark the beginning of a new way of writing ethnography that demonstrates how disciplines like anthropology can argue their relevance to the "real" world.
Having said all of the above, I found myself in a curious position of not being able to put the book down on one hand, and on the other hand feeling a need to disentangle my own responses and thoughts from what are - to the newcomer to Rwanda - overwhelming revelations and the sometimes overbearing judgement of the book's author.
Read this!
Gourevitch offers - albeit perhaps unintentionally - a fantastic beginner's guide to understanding the situation in Rwanda. We're not talking dry facts: we are talking about hearing the crack of dead bodies underfoot, coming to terms with the unbearable truth of your neighbour turning on you with a machete, grasping the understated heroism that saves lives, clenching your teeth at the apathetic shrug of the shoulders by genocide criminals confronted by their actions and... asking why the UN exists when it is so criminally implicated in facilitating genocide.
Which is not to say that you should simply ascribe to the direction that Gourevitch's outrage takes; but you ought to be sustained by some sense of rage as a result of reading his offering. If the subjective, the emotional, the ideological is not for you - well, Gourevitch delivers on the opposite front too. Delving, necessarily, into issues of ethnicity, conflict and the nation there is enough ethnographic substance here to whet your intellectual appetite.
Indeed, Gourevitch's style may mark the beginning of a new way of writing ethnography that demonstrates how disciplines like anthropology can argue their relevance to the "real" world.
Having said all of the above, I found myself in a curious position of not being able to put the book down on one hand, and on the other hand feeling a need to disentangle my own responses and thoughts from what are - to the newcomer to Rwanda - overwhelming revelations and the sometimes overbearing judgement of the book's author.
Read this!
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