A Cushion in the Road by Alice Walker

Alice Walker is an old radical. Just when you thought the U.S. government under Obama must indeed be “liberal” because the Republicans keep telling us so Walker comes along to say, no, Obama’s policies are a long way from liberal. Reading Walker, we can see what “liberal” really means.

It is refreshing to me to have someone thoughtful (but not a political consultant) give a considered opinion on anything these days. Walker surprises me with the range of her concerns and the vehemence with which she addresses them. She has so much generosity, respect, and righteous anger built in to her worldview that one wonders how such a person would govern. A Daoist, perhaps: “Let the forces rule.” But really, Walker is a spiritualist of every sort. She is animist, Buddhist, Christian, Muslim. She believes in the basic tenets common across religions: Be thoughtful. Be kind. Be generous. Enough is as good as a feast.

This is a book of essays, letters, articles she has written for publication, diary notes, or sometimes transcripts of lectures she has given. It gives us Walker’s thinking, the things she has struggled with, the things she struggles with still. More importantly, it gives us some idea of how to approach our own thinking about problems that plague us.

Take, for instance, the question of Pfc. Bradley Manning. Manning was the young man who allegedly gave government secrets to Julian Assange to publish. How should we deal with this question in an enlightened way? What is the best solution? I guarantee Walker will make you question again things you thought you’d already decided.

One of the pieces in the book that I liked best was “12 Questions: Korean Women’s Soul Questions.” South Korean women, confused about how to live fulfilled in the strict patriarchy of South Korean society, asked Walker and a prominent South Korean feminist, Hyun Kyung Chung for their opinions. Some of the questions are ones we have heard before, e.g., Can women and men be friends? and Should women change their bodies to interest men? But Walker’s responses are always interesting and get right to the heart of this old radical’s worldview, encompassing all her deepest themes. This is a woman who has studied oppression of one kind or another her entire life and knows whereof she speaks.

Anyway, Walker’s articles in this book are a short sharp shot of something strong and fiery. It goes right to the bloodstream and jumpstarts the brain. Of course, it can only be taken in small doses, but you may find you develop a taste for a woman with opinions, and crave to hear what a bright, thoughtful human might say on the state of our affairs. Her point of view adds depth and richness to the human response sent into the universe when negotiating the maelstrom that is life.

Mother Nature presents a very different kind of army than then ones we are used to fighting: the armies of poverty, colonization, weapons of all kinds, media doublespeak, that keeps us confused. In fact, what is so chilling about Mother Nature is how indifferent She can be to who should be punished for the crimes committed against her. We are all being punished. And this is because we have forgotten one of the most basic of the things that made us beautiful: that we must never fail to have respect for her. And we must cease, at once, taking more than she is willing to give.”

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Foal's Bread by Gillian Mears

"If there had ever been a time when she hadn't had the jumping dream she couldn't remember it..."

Gillian Mears’ searing novel of Australia, Foal’s Bread, was sixteen years in the making. It was published in late 2011 with the publishers Allen & Unwin, and then proceeded to win the 2012 Australian Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction and The Australian Literary Society’s 2012 Gold Medal while also winning or being shortlisted for eleven other Australian prizes. While apparently still not available in bookstores in the U.S., it is available new or used from mostly overseas sellers on Alibris, Amazon, or Barnes & Noble. It is worth seeking out. It is high on my list of “Best of” fiction reads for 2013.

This unforgettable saga of a horse woman and her family living in rural New South Wales begins in 1926 with motherless Noey on a pig drive with her pa, Cecil. Her father is proud of her: “wasn’t no horse too tricky that my daughter couldn’t git over a…ladies’ high jump.” So the two of them sign up for the Port Lake Show, one of many such country shows all around Australia in the late summer and fall. Noey is fourteen, and ”built small…she was like a pony come out of the scrub. The hair on it just like a sun-bleached flaxen mane.” At that show Noah meets her future husband, Roley, a consistent winner on the showjumping circuit.

Hard-hitting and psychologically complex, this fiction centers around a fully realized and unrepentantly sexual woman. She is both grasping and generous. She feels more than she expresses and bears as much as she is able. She is tender and terrible in jumping the hurdles in her life, bringing us the sense of a whole person. She is unable to keep her husband and all three children safe from harm, and this knowledge weighs on her.

There are several daring, disturbing, and thought-provoking themes running through this novel, one of which is sexual love for a much older partner. Mears has us wrestle with our feelings about this to some effect. We are unsure what to make of her characterization of the love between Noey and Uncle Nip, and this adds to the complicated feelings we experience while we read. It is quite thrilling to be once again unsure of oneself when presented with the power of her storytelling.

The story itself is rounded and full, holding all the complicated emotions, joys, and disappointments of real life. The language is strong and farm-style frank. We watch two generations on one family farm over a period of some eighty years. The baby George, born “special” and a little simple, makes his family’s lives more joyous than they might otherwise have been because he reflects their love back two-fold. Special, indeed. Roley, Noah’s showjumping husband, struggles with despair as a wasting disease hijacks his limbs. Noey charts his decay, and denied the comfort of her husband’s body, passes through every stage of grief. Suppression of her natural tenderness causes her personality to twist.

The passage of time is marked through the growth and seasonal change of a jacaranda tree, for under its spreading branches and purple blossoms major events are marked. The tree lives on through drought and flood, and just becomes more beautiful as it ages. I still wonder why Mears ended the book the way she did, for I didn’t think her ending was as inevitable as she made it feel, but I concede it does show once again the confusion and emotional distress tearing apart an older Noey.

After finishing this book, you are likely to be curious about the author, rural New South Wales, and the early days of showjumping when obstacles were stacked impossibly high and the country shows were exhilarating and extraordinary. Mears explains her research and her writing in this audio interview with the ABC Book Show host, Anita Barraud. Mears herself knows something about an unexplainable muscle-wasting disease, for she has struggled herself with Multiple Schlerosis for some years. The mystery and arbitrariness of that disease forces a furious frustration on all that come in contact with it.

And what is a foal’s bread? It is not exactly clear, but it appears to be a lump of tissue found within a foal’s placental birthing sac. Dark, hard, and heavy at the birth, it can be dried out, passing through stages until it is light colored and lightweight. It is a rare enough find to be considered a lucky event.


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Papadaddy's Book for New Fathers by Clyde Edgerton

"You will have no time to childproof the house (trust me) between the time the baby is born and the time it is old enough to aim and spray paint remover into its mouth."

There is a moment in every parent’s life when they wish they had someone to talk to about their child’s behavior—and their own response to it. They may not take the advice, but it’s nice to know what other, experienced folk do that seems to work well. Clyde Edgerton has a comfortable way of raising those pesky issues of childrearing and making us laugh about how we solve (or do not solve) them. He makes a great deal of sense, and makes us more comfortable with our sometimes creative solutions. Most of all, he makes us love children for being the baby humans they are—for mimicking, for coming out with the most amazing questions, for learning manipulation early.

This is a small book, the smallness of which any parent can appreciate. New parents quickly find that time is one thing they have less of with a new baby, and Edgerton’s advice on setting up the car seat early is wisely put in the front of the book: Getting Ready. The frustration of installing the seat prepares the new father for what will come…setting up the crib. He helpfully instructs the new father to put it together inside the room where it will be used, since it very likely will not fit through the door when it is finally put together.

Parenting can be hard, especially if we don’t learn early that consistency resolves many daily battles. It’s just figuring out what we want to hold as the standard that may be difficult. Edgerton speaks with the voice of the experienced Dad, one who has figured out many ways to be fair at the same time he is saying “no.” He writes as though he would be a great grandparent—he hasn’t lost the joy of a new baby, or a questioning toddler, or an experimenting teen. The love shows through, which is what each of us hopes for in our families. He is a Considerably Older Dad, or COD, and writes some advice for other CODs separate from the text in little boxes.

I especially loved the short section reminiscent of “Kids say the darndest things,” or Edgerton reminding us that sometimes kids seem to grow up when we aren’t looking. Suddenly one day they will point out, with an adult voice and a complete sentence, they have completely grasped something we thought was beyond them still. We feel foolish and proud and on the verge of laughing at ourselves at the same time.

His advice is sound, and I’m sure new fathers will find much in it to help them to relax into their new life as parent and to be creative in their own individual way: to think of new games, or stories to tell, or fun things to do with their child at the same time one sets reasonable limits and allows for diversity. Parenting is hard, but it can also be fun, and Edgerton helps us with one while reminding us of the other.

This is a book for new fathers, Edgerton points out several times, and so it is. But a mother could do worse than see what advice her husband is reading, to see if her child-rearing techniques mesh with his. Besides, it is much shorter than those for mothers, who have so much more to think about, since her body and the baby’s are so closely entwined. And she might take heart that Edgerton takes some time to tell new fathers to “look after mama.”

If there is going to be a new father in your family, don't wait until the baby is born to share this wonderful little book. It covers preparing for fatherhood, something I am certain is on the minds of fathers-to-be.

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Coyote Lost at Sea by Julia Plant

”People say you go out there to beat the ocean, like some macho thing. You don’t beat anything, you just live with it. It’s a rhythm.”

Mike Plant died crossing the Atlantic in November of 1992 on a new racing yacht commissioned to compete in the Vendée Globe Challenge, a race of solo circumnavigation of the world. The race was a relatively new one in which the participants leave from France and essentially circle Antarctica, no stops allowed. Plant had done it before, in 1989-90, but this time he’d intended to win. He was a fierce competitor and a man who presented a face of unshakeable, and perhaps unwarranted, confidence to the world. But he answered to the "the sun, the rain, and the wind."

The story of prior races and the creation of Coyote, the 60-foot single-hulled sailing vessel Plant commissioned for speed is riveting and revealing. Despite our imagining the sometimes grim realities of solo sailing around the world in the cold weather of the southern seas, we are not likely to be prepared for the difficulties of designing and building a completely new-style racing vessel in a matter of months. In cringe-producing detail Julia Plant describes and underscores these difficulties and shows us how it might be possible for a new racing ship to break apart in heavy seas.

Undaunted by the difficulties of attempting to design a completely new racing vessel from scratch with little funding, Mike Plant went with his instincts. He wanted to beat the French, who were leaders in this type of sailing, and who designed ships that often sacrificed safety for speed. The only requirement was that the boat be 60 feet or less in length and monohull. Coyote had an 85 foot mast and 250 lbs of sail, described here by sailing journalist Herb McCormick:

Coyote was an extreme design with exaggerated dimensions. At 60 feet overall, she sported a plumb bow, a startling-looking 19-foot beam, and twin rudders. Her hull was a broad, Airex-cored, shallow dish with a displacement of only 21,500 pounds—5,000 pounds lighter than Duracell [an earlier boat].With upwind and downwind sail areas of 2,600 and 4,700 square feet respectively, she carried an impressive power plant…It was a ton of sail even for an experienced solo sailor.”

This was the thing: Mike Plant wasn’t all that experienced a solo sailor, at least at distances like these. The only way to get experience at solo circumnavigation, however, is to do it. He’d done it a three times before, but really, he was just confident of his ability to troubleshoot his way out of difficulties. And he usually succeeded.

Mike Plant grew up in Minnesota along the banks of Lake Minnetonka, near Minneapolis. He was competitive and physically gifted from an early age, leading him to accept challenges good sense might have rejected. Julia Plant characterizes her older brother Mike as special in many ways, but especially in his outsized appetite for adventures of his own making. He was considered a troublemaker early on and battled alcohol addiction his whole life. But he seemed to find his passion in battling the elements on the ocean, where in his thirties he took to ocean racing, specifically solo circumnavigation.

His career was short. Five years later, he was dead.

Julia Plant takes some time at the beginning of this book to share her early reminiscences of Mike, three years her senior. In retrospect this section is helpful to give one a fuller picture of the man, and how his decision-making process worked. No one could possibly dispute his courage and drive, considering his willingness to take on such an adventure. We might question his preparedness. None of us can know everything, and certainly hindsight gives us insights Mike couldn’t possibly have had. In the end, we must simply take the man for what he dared to do.

“It’s [solo circumnavigation] sort of like driving around Canada in the winter for 30,000 miles naked. If your car stops, you freeze to death.”

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Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra

“Time became more important the closer to death one was, so an extra few hours to make peace with the world were worth more than years.”

This is Marra’s debut novel, and in it we see his queerly outsized talent and deep knowledge of human motivation and possibility. Where did he get the knowledge from which he created this book, and how did he come to know it? In what he calls his Bibliography, Marra credits Anna Politkovskaya’s A Small Corner of Hell: Dispatches from Chechnya, Åsne Seierstad’s The Angel of Grozny: Orphans of a Forgotten War, and Allah's Mountains: The Battle for Chechnya, New Edition by Sebastian Smith for giving him much of the background he needed to imagine this place, in this time, a ten–year period between 1994 and 2003.

Constellation immerses one in the East—at no time does one image oneself to be anywhere but in that place east of Europe and west of the Caspian. I suppose everyone will have familiarized themselves with Chechnya now, after the 2013 Boston Marathon, but it is north of the Caucasus Mountain Range that separates Russia and its “rind of former republics” from what westerners term The Middle East. It has been the site of grim partisan wars, by hand and in person, back when one actually had to show up to kill another.

This hard-hitting novel shows us the broken families littering the landscape there, some forced into unseemly alliances with enemies, and the nearly limitless capacity of humans to inflict pain. But still there are some among the legion who are broken, who retain a measure of humor, dignity, and goodness that they share with other good souls. They recognize one another, these folks who hold themselves aloof from the cruelty, and it is because of them that we can even dream of a day when the sun shines on a peaceful patch of land where they can grow the food they need, play chess in the shade of a large tree, make music and make love and laugh without fear.

Marra gives us all this—what is there and what is not yet there—through the depth and strength of his writing of a people, place and time. His descriptions linger in the memory and stop the eye on the page. The Russian doctor, Sonja, was “a riddle wrapped inside a mystery inside a set of unattractive but very white scrubs.” She returned to Chechnya from a safe place in London to find her beloved sister Natasha. “Though she was the elder, Sonja was always thought of as Natasha’s sister, the object rather than the subject of any sentence the two shared.”

She met Akmed, a better portraitist than he was a doctor, who helped her in the hospital and in life. In the midst of the betrayals and the shortening life horizon, for a brief moment “the circumference of the world tightened to what their arms encompassed.” But that moment passed and Havaa, beloved daughter of Dokka, remained, the daughter upon whom everyone’s hopes were pinned.

The “Constellation of Vital Phenomena”, gotten from an ancient medical text, is a term to describe life and in this definition consists of “organization, irritability, movement, growth, reproduction, and adaptation.” Couldn’t the very same words be used to describe any work of art in the process of construction, like for instance, a novel?

This is an extraordinary piece of work, especially for a newcomer. I challenge you to forget this book, and your first up-close glimpse of that place called Chechnya. It distinguishes itself by its subject and the incisiveness of the writing. Despite the horror, or perhaps because of it, one wishes to see the place, to care and bear witness for the folks that stood up for their most basic rights—to live in peace, if not happiness.

“Not knowing what to do, [Kassan] walked back and forth [in the snow], urging the dogs to do so likewise, turning the snow into a riddle no one could solve.”

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How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia by Mohsin Hamid

”…when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood or, increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters and events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It’s in being read that a book becomes a book…”

One feels a part of this story, the way Mohsin Hamid tells it. There is an immediacy and directness to his second-person narrative that entirely works in involving the reader. This book began to get widespread attention before it was even published, but not one of the reviews and interviews gave me a sense of the exhilaration I felt while reading. For one thing, I had the sense that the author threw out more than he put in—it is not a big book in terms of words. But the author’s daring use of language, structure, second-person narrative, character and plot involved the reader to a great extent, and we are complicit in outcomes. We recognize and validate the characters.

Spare and propulsive, this is the story of a young man growing up in a large South Asian city:

”Your city is enormous, home to more people than half the countries in the world, to whom every few weeks is added a population equivalent to that of a small, sandy-beached tropical island republic…A limited access road is under construction around the place, forming a belt past which its urban belly is already beginning to bulge…Your bus barrels along in the shadow of these monuments, dusty new arteries feeding this city, which despite its immensity is only one among many such organs quivering in the torso of rising Asia.”

The young man in our narrative has the wild uninhibited entrepreneurial energy that is forced upon bright young things struggling to find a way to live in a place of too many with too little. Innovate, or die.

“You have used the contacts with retailers you forged during your years as a non-expired-labeled expired-goods salesman to enter the bottled-water trade. Your city’s neglected pipes are cracking, the contents of underground water mains and sewers mingling, with the result that taps in locales rich and poor alike disgorge liquids that, while for the most part clear and often odorless, reliably contain trace levels of feces and microorganisms capable of causing diarrhea, hepatitis, dysentery, and typhoid. Those less well-off among the citizenry harden their immune systems by drinking freely, sometimes suffering losses in the process, especially of their young and their frail. Those more well-off have switched to bottled water, which you and your two employees are eager to provide.”

We watch as our entrepreneur grows his business, losing members of his family along the way, all the while we are keenly aware of the language that carries a lilt even in its exquisite fluency: “…emotionally you stagger about this new reality like a sailor returned to land after decades at sea.”

Moments of business success are punctuated with reminders of its mixed blessings: “As you drive off under a beautiful, orange, polluted sky, riding high in your SUV above lesser hatchbacks and motorcycles, you start to hum…Below your feet is the ever-dropping aquifer, punctured by thousands upon thousands of greedily sipping machine-powered steel straws.”

This book thrilled and energized me, and gives me infinite hope for the future while at the same time giving pause:

“…Meeting with a keen young repairman arrived to fix your telephone connection, or speaking with a knowledgeable young woman behind the counter of a pharmacy, you are pricked by a lingering optimism, and you marvel at the resilience and potential of those around you, particularly of the youth in this city, in this, the era of cities, bound by its airport and fiber-optic cables to every great metropolis, collectively forming, even if tenuously, a change-scented urban archipelago spanning not just rising Asia but the entire planet…But what you [also] sense, what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth afforded by ubiquitous television, and partly the change in mentality that results from the outward shift in the supply curve for firearms.”

I really loved this book. I loved its humanity and I loved its involving me in the human drama unfolding, for I am involved, I am responsible, this is my world, too, and Hamid made me feel these are people just like me who live elsewhere in different conditions. I thank the author for bringing this home with such sophistication and style.

“As you create this story and I create this story, I would like to ask you how things were. I would like to ask you about the person who held your hand when dust entered your eye or ran with you from the rain. I would like to tarry here awhile with you, or if tarrying is impossible, to transcend my here, with your permission, in your creation, so tantalizing to me, and so unknown. That I can do this doesn’t stop me from imagining it. And how strange that when I imagine, I feel. The capacity for empathy is a funny thing.”

A word must really be said about the hardcover production of this book by Riverhead Publishing, a division of Penguin: it is a very beautiful book. I wonder if, in this age of digital publishing, publishers are taking more time to create exquisite paper objects or if I am just noticing now after a few years of wrangling with digital readers. But I submit that some books are more gorgeous than others, and this particular hardcover has clear type with plenty of white space marching over creamy pages. It is a Rolls Royce reading experience. Thanks to Riverhead for showing me that there really is a difference in print copies.


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The Golden Scales by Parker Bilal

"The light sand swirled across the bare tarmac like smoke, as if the wind were intent on swallowing up the road, wiping away man’s futile endeavors to tame nature and return this place to the wilderness it was meant to be.”

This quote comes in Chapter 33, but in some way it carries with it the sense of the whole novel. “Off to their right was evidence of what the future held in store for the city as it expanded, growing like some unsightly tumor into the unblemished desert. Clusters of buildings scattered along the roadside provided housing for workers employed in the isolated industrial complexes build by the government to relieve pressure on the capital. Eventually all these dots would be joined up into one big sprawl…the warm desert air blew through the open windows, bringing with it the scent of lost kingdoms…”

A luxury housing complex was being built in the desert, meant to be self-sufficient with golf courses, and swimming pools, surrounded by perimeter fences and security guards, but “The wind had picked up and sand had built into drifts that covered the road almost completely in places...the ochre landscape featured windblown and withered palms with fronds snapping in the air like switches, and the barbed wire hummed in the air as if charged with electricity.” Sounds a little like the uncompleted basement tombs that crater previously undeveloped Irish seaside vistas described by Tana French in Broken Harbor. Overbuilding and underthinking: two common characteristics of unreasonably optimistic real estate financiers around the world in the last decades, even in Cairo.

This is a politically astute, perceptive, and atmospheric thriller police procedural mystery set in Cairo. One actually wants to shade one’s eyes from the sun, and spit the sand from one’s tongue. The mystery is bi-fold and the two pieces appear connected. A British woman is tortured and murdered, and a famous soccer star goes missing. Various moneyed factions are warring for turf, the Islamists are seeking control over the more secular police force, and the foreigner is the daughter of a member of Britain’s House of Lords. Bilal uses a big canvas and paints Cairo as the international city it is. Asking around yields tiny clues that finally add up.

If I had any complaint, it would be that there were too many words. But I like the view we get of modern Egypt and its stressors, the food, the desert. I look forward to more of Parker Bilal. He writes with sophistication, assurance, and deep sense about living on earth.

Parker Bilal, pseudonym for Britain-born Jamal Mahjoub, has written several novels before this popular series, among them Travelling with Djinns ( Viajando con djinns) and The Drift Latitudes as well as historical novels about major moments in political or scientific upheaval. He is not a lightweight. There is depth in his portrayal of a Sudanese national in Egypt as the key character for this series. This is the first of a series, so you may want to start here, or try one of his stand-alone novels.