Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail

#778
Title: Stolen Lives: Twenty Years in a Desert Jail
Author: Malika Oufkir and Michele Fitoussi
Publisher: Hyperion
Year: 2002
294 pages

Brought up in privilege, Malika, her mother, and her younger siblings were disappeared after their father's failed coup against King Hassan II (also Malika's adoptive father). They spent many years in squalid desert prisons and, after a successful escape that allowed them to contact foreign governments and press, a number of years of house arrest and surveillance. It's quite the amazing survival story.

Owls Do Cry

#777
Title: Owls Do Cry
Author: Janet Frame
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1958/2007
299 pages

Audiobook.

A well-written novel that makes much use of stream of consciousness, interior monologue, and multiple points of view. Fiction on an autobiographical base, Owls Do Cry focuses symbolically on finding self-defined and personally-recognized treasures in the rubbish. Psychologically realistic and deeply sad, it is always engaging and frequently moving.

This audio edition, which appears to be the 50th anniversary publication, includes several brief essays on Frame's life and work as well.

HIV/AIDS in Rural Botswana - Poverty, Gender Inequality, Marginalization, and Stigma

#776
Title: HIV/AIDS in Rural Botswana - Poverty, Gender Inequality, Marginalization, and Stigma
Author: Seiko Watanabe
Publisher: VDM Verlag
Year: 2008
92 pages

A fine monograph on HIV/AIDS in Northern Botswana. Specifically, the author gives background for and reports on the results of her qualitative study of HIV knowledge, cultural knowledge, and other factors amon the San and other indigenous minority groups of the Okavango Panhandle. She conveys her findings clearly, raises broader questions about poverty and gender inequality, and situates herself within her discourse. A refreshing piece of work.

Chronic City

#775
Title: Chronic City
Author: Jonathan Lethem
Publisher: Doubleday
Year: 2009
467 pages

Audiobook.

I've used the British cover because it's cooler.

This was fine, ranging from excellent to okay. At best, it's a manic, word-choked, Philip K. Dick-invoking search for meaning, love, and the grail, strewn with the mines of Lacanian desires that cannot be fulfilled. Chase Insteadman, naive ex-child star, pines (or doesn't) for his lostronaut fiancee, trapped in space, and with his friends, searches for a truth that will endure. At its worst, it's pages and pages of your stoned friends' uninteresting discussion about drugs and their revelatory power, though the revelation is often that marijuana affects their perspective on reality, if reality exists. 

Wonderstruck

#774
Title: Wonderstruck
Author: Brian Selznick
Publisher: Scholastic
Year: 2011
640 pages

What a lovely, engaging book! I found myself clustering my associations as I read ("The Gray Wolf Throne--also has ambiguous wolf visions"; "Seeing Voices/Hands of My Father--deaf education"; "Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder/Cornell boxes?"), not least of which was, of course, From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E. Frankweiler.

The book functions much like a dream despite its realism, relying on both determinism and over-determination to lead Ben to a virtually inevitable encounter. The big reveal is wonderfully accomplished through the use of the story's media. Even if you are pretty sure what's going on, the way the information is shared with the reader is very clever [highlight to read]: We switch from Ben's sentences to Rose's images, which identifies the old woman at the wolf diorama as Rose, whom we have known thus far only in 1927.

As with The Invention of Hugo Cabret, the illustrations are reminiscent of Garth Williams:


Williams


Selznick


One minor plot problem [highlight to read]: Jaime follows Ben, but doesn't know he's with Rose? This seems unlikely.

In Sorcery's Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger

#773
Title: In Sorcery's Shadow: A Memoir of Apprenticeship among the Songhay of Niger
Author: Paul Stoller & Cheryl Olkes
Publisher: University of Chicago
Year: 1989
Country: Niger
252 pages

This memoir/ethnography was better than I anticipated. Stoller, an anthropologist-in-training, returns to Niger (where he was previously in the Peace Corps) to conduct field work. He winds up being mentored by a series of sorcerers. What I particularly enjoyed was his own coming of age as an anthropoloist as he struggled to identify his own anthropological style, ethics, and ways of being with a community as well as observing it. While this wasn't Stoller's only focus, it was the one that most resonates for me in relation to questions of how to bridge cultures professionally and ethically.

Norwegian Wood

#772
Title: Norwegian Wood
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Vintage
Year: 1987/2003
389 pages

One of the most tiresome books I've ever read, which is especially surprising from Murakami. I suppose I would need to be more familiar with the cultural context of Japan in the mid-1980s to understand why this was such a huge bestseller.

I read this as an audiobook; the narrator rendered the female voices in unappetizing squawks. I looked it up in print. Less intrusive voicing, but it was fundamentally still offputting. "Hey," she said. "Hey," I answered. Do I really need to know every step of opening a jar? The level of pointless detail and meaningless conversation is astounding, and doesn't seem to serve much purpose.

In my own life, I've tried not to spend time with people who are tedious or pretentious. This was 12-13 hours stuck with those people, leavened only by the unintentional hilarity of their praise for themselves for calling other people pretentious, hypocritical, or mindless. I've also tried to spend time with people with whom the relationship is easy, by which I don't mean simple, but that everyone has good intentions. This novel of brooding, lying, sulking, manipulative, game-playing adolescents illustrates everything you don't want to experience on a date. Oh--except for all the blow jobs and booze. I disliked the characters so much that the sex was quite repulsive. (view spoiler) As for the narrator, though we never learn how he got from the end of the book to the opening framing story, he appears to wind up as something like a salaryman--at least, just some nostalgic guy on a plane--like the people he feels superior to throughout. This point isn't made by the novel, but I certainly noticed it.

An emotionally small novel with none of what makes Murakami sparkle, which is the underlying conviction that weird stuff may be happening, and it will remain somewhat inexplicable to the characters and reader, but it matters to the wellness world. This is a novel about things that don't matter outside a tiny bubble of tortured, brittle college students.