A triple whammy and a good read

 

Earlier this week I finished Young Stalin by Simon Sebag Montefiore. I seem to be on an unplanned (or semi-planned) Stalin-related reading-spree these days, with some more books on this theme on my TBR-pile and my current reading Tali, The Miracle of Chegem, also set in the Stalin-era.

Young Stalin is a biography of Josef Stalin from his birth in 1878 till the October Revolution in 1917. It covers his youth in the Caucasus republic of Georgia (at that time part of the Russian Empire) and his failed studies at the seminary in Tbilisi. Believe it or not, one of the greatest dictators of the twentieth century was on his way to become a priest when he got distracted by revolutionary activism and politics. The book goes on to describe Stalin’s road towards becoming one of the leaders of the October Revolution in Russia in 1917 besides Lenin and Trotsky. This is a history of violence, womanizing, fathering children out of wedlock, exile in far-away corners of Siberia and revolutionary activism. A very readable history, that is.

Parts of the book almost read as an action novel. One the one hand, this is a plus, but on the other hand I found it annoying at times, especially in the earlier parts of the book. After reading the Prologue (there’s an excerpt here) – which describes a bank robbery complete with bombs, dead and wounded in Tbilisi in 1907 that caused headlines worldwide – for a little bit I was even unsure whether I wanted to continue. My main problem was with some of the words used to describe people and events. I’ll give you one example. Three young women were members of Stalin’s revolutionary group (or criminal gang) in the early 1900s. They participated in the bank robbery as well and are mentioned a couple of times in the earlier parts of the book. Apparently, these girls knew how to shoot, they could handle guns. Every time they were mentioned, some adjective reminding us of their shooting-skills was used to describe them: the “shooting”, “gunwhielding” girls, you get the drift. I don’t think they were ever mentioned without some such adjective. There was also lots of “swashbuckling” going on in the book. At times it almost felt as if the author was glorifying the “bandits”, “gunslingers”, etc. This eventually started to get on my nerves, but I decided to just ignore it. In the end, after finishing the book, I even realized that despite this somewhat annoying use of language, I found the first part of the book set in Tbilisi and Baku, the most interesting.

Other than that, the book is, as I said, extremely readable. Sebag Montefiore obviously did extensive research in Russian and especially in Georgian archives, using many memoirs and documents that had never before been used to document Stalin’s life. I think that this is exactly where the strength of the biography lies and what makes the book an addition to existing literature about Stalin – the extensive use of newly discovered sources. Sebag Montefiore depicts Stalin convincingly as a self-obsessed man, prone to the use of violence from his early years on, increasingly paranoid. He shows clearly how events from Stalin’s earlier years influenced his way of leadership of the Soviet-Union in later years and especially the Great Terror he unleashed in the 1930s. Which is not to say that these events were exclusively the result of events in Stalin’s younger years, but they certainly formed his character and seemed to have influenced his reaction to certain people, behavior, and events.

I found it very interesting how the author would frequently mention in a footnote how certain parts of Stalin’s life were changed or entirely eliminated from his official biography while he was still alive. His active participation in robberies for example, or his role in the revolutionary year 1917 or the children he fathered when he was in exile in Siberia. Certain blemishes were obviously not permitted in the biography of the Great Leader and Revolutionary Stalin.

All in all, I enjoyed reading Young Stalin and I learned a lot about the man Stalin, who he was, where he came from, how he became who he was in later years. I certainly recommend this book to anyone interested in Russia and Russian history.

Oh yes, I forgot. So what’s the triple whammy about? Young Stalin counts towards the Russian Reading Challenge, the In Their Shoes Challenge and the Eponymous Reading Challenge. How about that for efficient reading? It’s the second of four books for all three challenges, so I am making good progress. Though I still need to finish some reviews for the first two challenges. I guess my review-writing is not so efficient yet….

This week’s reading plans and Wednesday’s Wishlist

Review posts are on their way! I finished Young Stalin last night and am working on a review. Together with that review I want to finish my review of The Whisperers, which I finished already in January. ***Blush! Blush!*** I am pretty sure that that book will end up in my top-reads of this year, so I really-really-really want to review The Whisperers! Besides, I have most of the review finished already and have had it finished for quite some time. I don’t know what is keeping me from getting back to the book and finish the review.

I will finish The First Sex this week as well, probably over the weekend. And I have two short stories to read, one by Jeffrey Eugenides that I took from The New Yorker’s site and Tali, The Miracle of Chegem by Fazil Iskander. Both to be duly reported on when finished.

I have read tons of non-fiction recently (and enjoyed it immensely), but I feel that I am getting fed-up with that. It is time for some good novels. Lucky me, I have some exciting prospects, but they are all connected to the Orbis Terrarum Challenge. And that isn’t starting until April 1st. So I am reading some shorties and finishing up current reading to get ready.

And now for the most recent additions to my wishlist. From now on I plan to do a Wednesday Wishlist post every week or every other week. I just realized that all but one of the books have a Middle-Eastern and/or Muslim theme.

I have seen several reviews of The Night of the Mi’raj by Zoe Ferraris and I am getting intrigued. The Independent describes it as “[a] look at how Saudi Arabia’s Muslim mores and sharia laws affect gender relationships, wrapped up in a murder mystery”. Nayir is a Bedouin desert guide and a devout Muslim whose help is asked when a girl is found dead in the desert. “The search throws Nayir together with Katya Hijazi, a forensic pathologist [...], whose forthrightness and independence clash with Nayir’s traditionalist views of women. The guide quickly learns too, that the Islamic law he is devoted to prohibits serious investigation of crimes against women. As Katya and Nayir discover what really happened to Nouf, they find that the people and social structures they trust hide darker realities.” But at the same time it “is not a crime novel”: “The figure of Katya [a forensic pathologist] adds something approaching a police procedural touch, but the real focus lies on the way in which her investigations are hindered by her gender.”

The next one is Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East by Robin Wright, another book I have seen multiple reviews about. Wright is a long-time journalist based in the Middle-East.

As [Wright] puts it early in “Dreams and Shadows”: “This is a book about disparate experiments with empowerment in the world’s most troubled region. My goal was to probe deep inside societies of the Middle East for the emerging ideas and players that are changing the political environment in ways that will unfold for decades to come.”

Despite one apparent flaw, as signaled in the New York Times review, I am still interested in this book:

The spirit in the region that animated [Wright's] quest three years ago has been exposed as more illusory than real. This leaves her book somewhat off key. It was supposed to help understand the future, but ends up being a series of visits with some wonderful people who remain marginalized and powerless. Instead of helping readers to see how the Middle East is evolving, Ms. Wright offers a set of portraits of failed efforts.

In Continuum Philip Lewis tries to find an answer to this question:

There are moments when, by some strange osmosis, everyone wants answers to the same question. For the past few years, that question has been: why do young, British-born Muslims become radicalised to the point where some become suicide bombers?

From the review in the New Statesman:

What comes across is a vivid picture of young Muslims’ struggles to navigate the sometimes conflicting currents of school and work, family and mosque. The overall picture is grim (the statistics for educational underachievement and unemployment are by now well known) and Lewis fleshes out the consequences in stunted lives and what he terms a “communications crisis” across the generations. The communities he describes are still shaped by the cultural practices of rural Kashmir, from where so many of the first-generation immigrants originally came. Now, increasingly, young Muslim men and women no longer accept the authoritarian patriarchy that earlier generations took for granted.

The odd one out in this wishlist is Run by Ann Patchett, which I read about on Dovegreyreader Scribbles (she is coming up with way too many great books these days!):

Run is set in snowy Boston and as widower and ex-Mayor Bernard Doidge and his adopted sons Tip and Teddy leave a political rally and walk out into a blizzard, Tip’s life is saved when an apparent stranger pushes him out of the path of an oncoming car and falls under the wheels herself. Tennessee Moser is seriously injured but her young daughter Kenya mysteriously seems to know all there is to know about Family Doidge and Tip and Teddy in particular.
I’ve given the barest bones of plot and even if you think you’ve guessed a bit from that, think again, Ann Patchett makes it very tricky to second-guess.

March Bookworms Carnival

This month’s theme is Women in Literature. I am glad I extended the deadline, because I ended up receiving lots of interesting posts. I spend a good time reading them, finding new blogs, adding books to my wishlist. And I even got to expand my vocabulary thanks to Darcie!

Let’s start off with some classics. Eva at A Striped Armchair tells us here why Jane Austen’s Persuasion is one of her all-time favorite books. Melissa at Book Nut tells here how she was converted and actually liked Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey when she read it the second time.

John Mutford over at The Book Mine Set also reviews a classic, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mocking Bird. And no, John, you are not the last person on earth to have this book: I have never read it either, but I do want to!

At Becky’s Book Reviews, Becky shares with us a review of a classic that happens to be one of her all-time favorite books, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale-Hurston.

Charlotte at Charlotte’s Web gives a glowing review of Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie’s novel Half of a Yellow Sun, a novel set in Africa during the Biafra war of 1967-70. She thinks this will one day become a classic.

One of the themes that came out of the submissions I received, was Italy. Eva at A Striped Armchair explains here why she loved Donna Leon’s Death at La Fenice, the first in a series of mysteries set in Italy with Inspector Brunetti as the leading character.

Another book set in Italy. Puss Reboots reviews Immortal by Traci L. Slatton about a man in Renaissance Italy who goes in search of the secret behind his eternal youth.

Ravenous Reader also takes us to Italy, where four women who don’t know each other spend a month together in a small castle on the Mediterranean. To find out what happens, read Ravenous Reader’s review of The Enchanted April by Elizabeth von Arnim.

From Italy we travel to Japan. In her review of The Budding Tree – Six Stories of Love in Edo by Aiko Kitahara, Diane at carp(e) libris reviews takes us into Japan’s past and gives us a glimpse in the lives of six women who did things their way instead of the socially accepted way.

Corinne at Littlest Bird takes us to India, as she reviews Sister of My Heart by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, a novel set in India about two sisters coming of age.

Our final stop on our quick around-the-world tour is in Ukraine. At The Indextrious Reader Melanie discusses The Spirit of the Times, a collection of stories by two female Ukrainian writers, Olena Pchilka and Nataliya Kobrynska.

Melanie also reviews another collection of short stories, The Gipsy’s Baby by Rosamond Lehmann. It is a collection of six stories centering around “the lives of young girls and of mature women, all struggling to make sense of a world of disappointment and struggle, both socially and romantically.”

Raych over at Books I Done Read gives us a critical review of Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad that made me laugh.

BookGal at Books, Memes, and Musings discusses Jodi Picoult’s My Sister’s Keeper, a novel about how the leukemia of one of the children affects the entire family. She discusses another book by a female writer as well, Looking for Salvation at the Dairy Queen by Susan Gregg Gilmore. This is a story about a girl who spends every Saturday at Dairy Queen planning how she will leave the small town where she lives as soon as she turns eighteen.

Scooter at Scooter Chronicles reviews Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald. After a colleague recommended the book to him, he was initially hesitant to pick it up, because it sounded a bit like chick-lit. But it turned out to be anything but. Instead a gripping and well-written tale kept him hooked.

Valentina at Valentina’s Room reviews A Gathering Light by Jennifer Donnelly, a YA novel about a girl trying to escape her life on a farm in the early 1900s intertwined with the story of the murder of another girl.

Darcie at Reading Derby reviewed Five Fortunes by Beth Gutcheon, a novel about five women who meet at a fatfarm. A fatfarm? This was the first time I heard that word, but I think I can guess the meaning. My Google and WordPress spelling control didn’t know the word either, but then again: they don’t recognize the word ‘blog’ either. Go figure for a blogging platform!

Viva la Feminista reviews Wendy Walker’s Four Wives about four housewives from Connecticut and their secrets. In another post she reviews The Baby Lottery by Kathryn Trueblood, a novel about the influence one woman’s abortion has on her circle of long-time friends.

On to non-review posts. Heather at Errant Dreams discusses how heroines in erotic romances have changed over the years and are more and more resembling real women (scroll down a bit for this part, or read the rest of Heather’s post as well – it makes an excellent point about cooking books!).

J.C. Montgomery at The Biblio Brat describes her favorite female character without actually naming any name in particular.

Litlove at Tales from the Reading Room discusses the work of poet Beth Janzen, who according to Litlove “is wonderful at mixing domestic and daily experience in with archetypal female figures.”

Bonus Links
There were a couple of entries that formally didn’t fit in this month’s topic, as it is women in literature, but I decided to mention them anyway, because they discuss such important issues or books that deserve attention or they were just plain good posts.

Gautamy at My Own Little Reading Room discusses The Last Single Woman in America, a collection of essays by Cindy Guidry about, you guessed it, being female and single in the US.

Over at Margaret’s Wanderings, Margaret writes about fear after reading A. Papatya Bucak’s I Cannot Explain My Fear. She also discusses a non-fiction book written by a home-care worker who assists people living with and dying of AIDS, The Gifts of the Body by Rebecca Brown.

The last link of this carnival goes to Dewey’s raving review of Body Drama by Nancy Amanda Redd over at The Hidden Side of a Leave. This is a book for teenage girls that discusses the female body in a down-to-earth way with lots of pictures of real women’s bodies, not of “airbrushed pseudo-people”.

Have fun reading!

The next Bookworms Carnival will be hosted by Reading in the Louvre. The theme is authors and literature from Latin-America. The deadline for your submissions is April 13. You can send them to admin [at] inthelouvre [dot] org.

Finally, a word of “thanks”. This carnival was written with the “help” of my (male) cat Archy, who loves to stand on my keyboard and prefers to lie on it, rather than next to it. Any remaining typos resembling no known language (hjwuryblBGLArtttttt for example) are his doing.

My wishlist, part 2

[Updated March 20 to fix an incorrect link]

I’m not going to lose much time on an introduction. Instead, I’ll get straight to the rest of books I have recently found through blogs or reviews that are now firmly on my wishlist. The first part can be found here.

In the third issue of The Short Review there were two reviews of collections of short stories that I was absolutely drooling over. The first is ID Crimes of Identity, an anthology of the Crime Writers Association edited by Martin Edwards. None of the writers in the collection are familiar to me, but the review I read piqued my interest. I used to read a lot more crime novels than I do now, but I still like good crime fiction.

The other book reviewed that got my particular interest should not come as much of a surprise for those who know me even a little bit. It’s title needs no additional explanation: The Third Shore: Women’s Fiction From East Central Europe edited by Agata Schwartz and Luise Von Flotow. 25 Authors from 18 countries are represented in the book. Some of the countries the authors come from are Ukraine, Poland, the Czech Republic, Romania, Slovenia, Latvia, Estonia, Croatia, Albania and former East-Germany. Unfortunately, the review doesn’t give any names of the authors, but a search came up with….

When I first started hearing about People of the Book, the latest novel by Geraldine Brooks, I just let it pass by without much interest. The more I heard about the book, the more I did become interested. By now it has stormed up to somewhere at the top of my wishlist. Technically, though, this book is no longer on my wishlist, as I know that I will receive it some time later this year. Here is a blurb from The New Yorker:

When an Australian rare-book conservator named Hanna Heath finds a butterfly wing, a salt crystal, a white hair, and bloodstains in the recently rediscovered Sarajevo Haggadah, a late-medieval illuminated codex of uncertain provenance, she sets out to solve the mystery of the book’s origins. To her disappointment, analysis of the specimens reveals little. “It’s too bad,” an organic chemist tells her. “Blood is potentially so dramatic.” Brooks, beginning where science leaves off, uses Hanna’s finds as entry points to richly imagined historical landscapes peopled by the Haggadah’s creators, protectors, and would-be destroyers—a female Muslim slave in Convivencia Spain, a Jewish doctor in fin-de-siecle Vienna, an alcoholic priest in seventeenth-century Venice. Their narratives alternate with Hanna’s own, and the final, multilayered effect is complex and moving.

Lynne at Dovegreyreader Scribbles is reading around the world. She has made a lengthy stop in Israel and read several novels by contemporary Israeli writers that I’d love to read as well. One of them is Edges: O Israel, O Palestine by Leora Skolkin-Smith. From DGR:

Centre stage, fourteen year old Liana Bialik who along with her mother and sister Ivy and following the suicide of her father, is returning to Jerusalem in 1963, thus interrupting a life growing up in the US. This is her mother’s homeland and as Ivy descends the steps from the plane sporting her badge declaring loudly PUFF THE MAGIC DRAGON IS A DRUG ADDICT it’s clear a clash of cultures is inevitable. Except it wasn’t as I anticipated, because in fact it’s the Israeli culture that proves the more extrovert as their mother Ada quickly discards all inhibitions and throws herself back into the life she once knew. This is her homeland, physical, mental and spiritual, this is where her first family are and where she ultimately belongs and it takes her but a nano-second to roll down her stockings and start dancing. Ada’s exuberance of course a complete surprise and cringe-makingly embarrassing to her adolescent daughters. Liana has to find her own place in this troubled and divided land both as a daughter and a woman but also as a stranger, and set against a backdrop of rising military tensions and increasing danger this is never going to be simple.

The other Israeli novels Lynne discussed, were also unknown to me and do seem very good as well: The Flying Camel and the Golden Hump by Aharon Megged; Ten Thousand Lovers by Edeet Ravel and If You Awaken Love by Emuna Elon.

In January, Ted at Bookeywookey read Ryszard Kapuscinski’s Imperium and wrote four posts that completely whetted my appetite. Ted calls the book “part memoir, part travelogue, part political critique” and a “splendid, wild ride – a mixture of history, psychology, world politics, geography.” When I add that it’s all about the former Soviet Union, are you surprised I put in on my wishlist?

One of my favorite bookbloggers out there, Eva at A Striped Armchair, recently mentioned another non-fiction book on Eastern Europe that sounds like a must-read to me: Bury Me Standing by Isabel Fonseca about the Roma living in East- and Central-Europe. From Eva’s blog:

Fonseca looks at the plight of the gypsies, mostly in the present, but with some historical digressions. This book is difficult to categorise; parts of it feel like a travel memoir, as Fonseca runs around central Europe, parts of it feel like a call to arms, other parts feel like history lessons. Oh, and there are black-and-white photos sprinkled liberally throughout. Fonseca manages to mix all of this together into a compelling book that brings readers, if not quite into the gypsy’s world, at least into the outskirts of it.
[...]
Fonseca alternates sections on general info about gypsies with personal profiles. She also travels around, looking at how gypsies are treated in various countries. The historical digressions, with the exception of the gypsies’ origins, focus on the twentieth century. There are long section on how various Communist regimes mistreated the gypsies and, in the second-to-last-chapter, Fonseca goes into great detail about the Nazis’ view of gypsies and the resulting genocide. Fonseca, Jewish herself, argues that the gypsies have been unforgivably over-looked, even by Jews intent on ensuring the Holocaust is never forgotten. Within both this and the final chapter, Fonseca becomes more overtly political, but the reader can hardly blame her as one atrocity after another is documented.

Dani at A Work in Progress also wrote multiple posts about a completely different book, that sounds equally fascinating: Singled Out by Virginia Nicholson. The book discusses the “surplus” of women in post-World War I England. So many men had died on the battlefields that women who had lost their husbands and boyfriends during the war and other women of marriageable age who didn’t have a partner yet, where destined to remain unmarried simply because there were not enough men to get married to. At that time, being an unmarried woman, a “spinster” was not looked upon very favorably and roles for women in society were very limited anyway. What happened to these women once the war was over, how did they fill their lives, make their lives meaningful (or not), how did they manage to support themselves if there were only limited possibilities of acceptable jobs?

I had first seen a review of this book at Dovegreyreader Scribbles. It seemed interesting then already, but I kind of let it pass. Then, while I was in Holland in January, I read another review in one of the Dutch newspapers. And then Dani wrote three raving posts about the book. I can no longer let it pass!

The last book I want to mention is another non-fiction book: Jasmine and Stars by Fatemeh Keshavarz. I have just read Reading Lolita in Tehran for the In Their Shoes challenge (for which I still need to write a review. Shame on me!), which is why the review of this book at The Complete Review caught my attention even though the review is not unequivocally positive:

Fatemeh Keshavarz’s Jasmine and Stars promises Reading More Than Lolita in Tehran [the book's subtitle], but it doesn’t deliver nearly as much as one might hope. Keshavarz’s book is meant to be a corrective and response to Azar Nafisi’s bestselling and ubiquitous Reading Lolita in Tehran, but Keshavarz tries to go about it in too many different ways, diluting the valid and important points she makes. She tries to convey that contemporary Iran is a more complex place than Nafisi and her ilk (‘the New Orientalists’, as she calls them) allow for, but in all this mix of very personal memoir and literary essay (which includes a close reading of a recent Iranian novel and a critical dissection of Nafisi’s book ) that message ultimately isn’t as convincing as it should be.

I seem to be riding a non-fiction wave recently, both reading mostly non-fiction and adding more non-fiction than fiction to my wishlist and TBR-mountain. Going over this post and part one of my wishlist and looking at my TBR-mountain, it seems that this wave is not going to end anytime soon. Do I think that’s a problem? Noooooo, not really as I have some excellent non-fiction reading ahead of me.

There we go. Again…

I have given in once again. With this post I will sign up for the Orbis Terrarum Challenge hosted by Brad and Bethany over at B&b Ex Libris. For at least a week I’ve been fretting over this: join one more challenge or not? But even before I started fretting, I had already made a list of books from my stacks. Actually I made a deal with myself. I was also thinking about joining Joy’s Non-Fiction Five Challenge, but I decided against that one: I don’t need a challenge at the moment to get to reading non-fiction as I have been reading more non-fic than fiction for the last couple of months and all the books I would read for this challenge would double for another one anyway. Instead, I allowed myself to join the Orbis Terrarum Challenge. Sometimes a woman has to be kind to herself….

These are the rules of the challenge:

- The challenge runs from April 1 through December 20, 2008;
- Choose 9 books
- Each book must be by an author from a different country.

Easy, no?

Here is my list:

- Penelope by Goar Markosyan-Kasper from Armenia (doubles for the Eponymous Reading Challenge);
- The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini from Afghanistan (doubles for the Eponymous Reading Challenge);
- The Gathering by Anne Enright from Ireland;
- My Father’s Suitcase and two other essays by Orhan Pamuk from Turkey;
- Eine Hand voller Sterne (A Hand full of Stars) by Rafik Schami from Syria;
- The Waves by Virginia Woolf from England / the UK;
- Don’t Call it Night by Amos Oz from Israel;
- Ararat by Frank Westerman from The Netherlands;
- Generations of Winter by Vassily Aksyonov from Russia (doubles for the Russian Reading Challenge).

I’m back at the Sunday Salon

It’s been months since I last participated in the Sunday Salon, but I am back and plan to be there a lot more often from now on. I have been reading on Sundays and I have been following everyone else’s Sunday reading activities.

I just finished reading my chapter for today from Helen Fisher’s The First Sex. On my days off (basically Fri, Sat and Sun) I am reading one chapter each day and taking notes. During the week, after coming back from work, I prefer to read lazily curled up on the couch or in bed, which is not particularly inducive to note-taking. But I really wanted to take notes from this book. So, that’s where my reading plan came in. I started the first chapter some weeks ago, then left the book lying around. Then last weekend I actually started my reading-and-notes-taking plan.

The First Sex discusses how women’s special skills and abilities are becoming more and more in demand in the coming years and how this will lead to an increase of women’s influence on decision making and the way we see things. In itself it is an interesting book, but the structure is getting a bit stale after five chapters (I hope this will change, though). Each chapter so far follows the same structure and Fisher doesn’t bring her message in a very subtle way. You can leave the repeat-button alone now, Helen! Despite that, I am rather enjoying the book.

Today I read chapter 5 about changes in thinking about medicine and health care that will work to women’s advantage. I will share some of my notes (but leaving out a lot – I don’t want to summarize the chapter). Fisher says that women bring three special ‘talents’ or abilities to the medical field, or more broadly, to the healing professions (not just strictly the medical professions). The first is women’s ability to show empathy towards others and to express compassion. The second is patience: women are in general more patient than men. The third is women’s skill at manipulating small objects.

Like she did in previous chapters, Fisher explains that these differences are part nurture, but mostly a result of the differences in the brains of men and women. I will spare you the details about the differences between the prefrontal cortex, the amigdala (hi dad!) and the connections between the left and right halves of the brain that exist in the male and female brains. Oh, and then hormones also play their part in all this.

Fisher then goes on to explain (as she also did in previous chapters) how these differences find their origins in the first humans, or even before that, when the main task of the males was hunting and the main task of the females was raising the young. After this more general expose, Fisher goes back to the medical professions and expands on how these female traits will have their impact on women in the medical sphere.

(Small break: I have to remove my cat Archy from my notes where he made himself very comfy.
Okay we’re back. But now Archy lies stretched out partially covering the keyboard, making typing a bit, shall we say, complicated…)

Men will continue to play a big part in medicine:

Because men are so technically proficient and so concerned with rank [as Fisher explained in a previous chapter], male doctors tend to seek the top-level jobs in the most prestigious medical specialties.[...] I think men will continue to maintain their presence in these financially lucrative positions throughout the many fields of medicine.

But there is a major shift going on towards a more holistic view of illness and recovery: there is more attention for psychological and social factors that may contribute to illness. There is also more attention for alternative medicine or healing. Now this is where women factor in, says Fisher, with their more contextual view, their tendency to see a patient as a whole, in the context of their surroundings.

Something is bugging me about this book, and it is also bugging me in this chapter. But I haven’t really put my finger on what it is exactly. Yes, the emphasis Fisher puts on “everything hails back to when we were just climbing out of the trees” is one aspect, but there is something else. I guess I am sensing something inconsistent in her arguments, but I haven’t figured out what exactly. Though this particular chapter gave me more ‘grip’ on what is bothering me.

One thing that did bug me, for example, is that Fisher stated that women bring their talent for precision movement and handling small objects to the medical field. She doesn’t expand on that, but just mentions it this once. She doesn’t mention how women will use this talent in the medical field. A couple of pages later, though, Fisher is basically saying that men will keep the upper hand in surgery. There are more loose threads like this in the book.

These are just some unfinished thoughts I have almost halfway through the book. I will get back to the book once I finished it (or maybe in the next Sunday Salon).

Now I will spend the rest of the evening on the couch reading the biography on Stalin that I started on Friday. Besides, I am getting annoyed looks from Archy because my arms are moving too much while typing.

Bookworms Carnival Deadline

Today is the deadline for the Bookworms Carnival, but since I haven’t received very many submissions yet, I am extending the deadline till the end of the weekend. The theme is Women in Literature. If you have written any posts on this theme in it’s broadest sense recently, feel free to nominate it by sending an email with the link to your post to me at armenianodar [at] yahoo [dot] com. I have seen lots of good and relevant posts out there recently that I would certainly add to the carnival. If only they were submitted… So, what are YOU waiting for?

Upcoming Bookworms Carnival

I am hosting the coming Bookworms Carnival. The theme is Women in Literature. If you have written any posts on this theme in it’s broadest sense recently, feel free to nominate it by sending an email with the link to your post to me at armenianodar [at] yahoo [dot] com.The deadline is March 14, which is actually a lot sooner than I thought!

It can be a review of a book by a female author, a review of a book in which the main character is female, it can be a non-review type post in which you discuss a topic relevant to the theme, a post with your favorite female authors or book-characters. Or something completely different. There are plenty of ways your blogpost can fall under this theme, so don’t be shy and nominate your post!

Ali and Nino by Kurban Said

Reading Ali and Nino was like sinking into a warm bath for me. It reads a bit as a fairytale set in a distant world, but at the same time there is something familiar about the story. I suppose that is because the book is set in my part of the world, mostly in Baku (the capital of Azerbaijan) with excursions into Karabagh, Tehran and Tbilisi. The book has plenty of the old Caucasus traditions of blood feuds, bride kidnapping and things like that. The culture and the mix of modern and traditional feels very familiar for me, though life in modern day Armenia is nothing like life in early 20th century Baku.

The book tells the love story of Nino, a Georgian girl who has been raised in a modern, Western way, and Ali, the son of an old Azeri Muslim family. The story is set against the backdrop of World War I and the brief independence of Azerbaijan following that war. At first these worldly events are far away and don’t really seem to influence life in Baku. As the war progresses, though, so does the influence of these events on the lives of Ali and Nino and their friends and family.

Nino is a fairly modern and independent girl, who refuses to give in to some of the old customs. Ali has more traditional ideas about marriage and the role of men and women in society. At first, his ideas about women irritated me, but I soon let that go because that’s the way he was and the way his society thought at that time. Besides, Ali is not an unlikable character. Somehow Ali and Nino make things work and they deal with each other’s different views. Nino discovers she might not be as modern in some respects as she thinks, but in the end it is Ali who is more torn between the old and the new and who changes the most. The book is told from his perspective, with lots of subtle humor. The story made me smile more than once. I would love to share some passages here, but I read the book in Dutch, so there is not much point.

I would love to read this story told from Nino’s perspective and to read the story of what happens to her after this book ends.

The history of the novel is at least as interesting as the novel itself. Ali and Nino was first published in 1937, then forgotten and rediscovered quite recently. Nowadays, Ali and Nino counts as one of the classics of the region and is often recommended to get acquainted with the region.

Upon its first publication Ali and Nino created quite a stir because of the love story transcending etnical boundaries. Not only that, but also was the real identity of the author unknown. Only in the late 1990s research showed that behind the pseudonym of Kurban Said hid the Baku-born Russian Jew Lev Nussimbaum, who turned out to have been a character in his own right. During the 1930s he moved around freely in Nazist Viennese and Berlin’s high society pretending to be a Caucasian prince and later living in Mussolini’s Italy.

Recently, Tom Reiss published The Orientalist, a biography of Kurban Said / Lev Nussimbaum, which I would love to read. He seems to have been a fascinating character! There is an excerpt from The Orientalist here (you have to click through a bit, because there is no direct link).

This is the first book I read for the Eponymous Reading Challenge.

Free Radicals by Alice Munro

This week was a turbulent one in more than respect: My bedroom was painted and last weekend protests turned violent in town (not entirely unexpected and resulting in a media-blackout and a state of emergency). I spent the last couple of days either at work, or at home helping with the painting, cleaning the mess afterwards or on the internet searching for info that is a bit more trustworthy than what official and pro-government tv-channels serve us (which is getting more ridiculous day by day). All this has left me with little time to read, but I did manage to read a bit at least – one short story to be precise.

Alice Munro is one of the authors I had never heard about before I started reading bookblogs. As I kept coming across her name, I became more and more interested in her and added her to my list of authors I wanted to read. Then, a couple of weeks ago, The New Yorker published one of her short stories online, Free Radicals. I completely missed this, even though I have The New Yorker’s fiction feed in my feedreader. I must have overlooked Munro’s story and just marked it ‘read’. Fortunately Erin came to the rescue by mentioning the link in one of her posts. I printed the story and took it home, where as usual, it disappeared in the pile of TBR-prints. I picked it up again last week. Short verdict: I loved it and am ready for some more Alice Munro!

The main character is Nita, whose husband Rich suddenly died a few months before and who is now trying to deal with this. I found Nita a likable character, with her directness and her refusal to adjust to ‘the way other people thought she ought to be’. I love how the following paragraphs sort of matter-of-factly describe Rich’s death and how this at the same time says at least as much about Nita’s own character:

Rich had told her that he was going to the village, to the hardware store. It was around ten o’clock in the morning, and he had just started to paint the railing of the deck. That is, he’d been scraping it to prepare for the painting, and the old scraper had come apart in his hand.

She hadn’t had time to wonder about his being late. He’d died bent over the sidewalk sign that stood in front of the hardware store offering a discount on lawnmowers. He hadn’t even managed to get into the store. He’d been eighty-one years old and in fine health, aside from some deafness in his right ear. His doctor had checked him over only the week before. Nita was to learn that the recent checkup, the clean bill of health, cropped up in a surprising number of the sudden-death stories she was now presented with. “You’d almost think that such visits ought to be avoided,” she’d said.

She should have spoken like this only to her close and fellow bad-mouthing friends, Virgie and Carol, women around her own age, which was sixty-two. Her younger friends found this sort of talk unseemly and evasive.

At the same time Nita has to deal with her own cancer, which “was at present in remission – whatever that actually meant. It did not mean gone. Not for good, anyway.” With her cancer, Nita was the one who was ’supposed ‘ to die first, not Rich who had been in very good health even though he was twenty years older than she was. When Nita had been diagnosed with cancer about a year before, she and Rich had inquired about funerals, but as Nita says after his death: “How was I to know he’d steal my thunder?”

Nita mostly deals with Rich’ death by keeping to herself, avoiding other people and isolating herself in their home which lies secluded some way outside a village. She spends her days not doing a lot, just eating, sleeping and thinking. And missing Rich:

She thought carefully, every morning when she first took her seat, of the places where Rich was not. He was not in the smaller bathroom, where his shaving things still were, along with the prescription pills for various troublesome but not serious ailments which he’d refused to throw out. Nor was he in the bedroom, which she had just tidied and left. Not in the larger bathroom, which he had entered only to take tub baths. Or in the kitchen, which had become mostly his domain in the last year. He was of course not out on the half-scraped deck, ready to peer jokingly in the window – through which she might, in earlier days, have pretended to be alarmed at the sight of a peeping tom.

Or in the study. That was where, of all places, his absence had to be most often verified. At first, she had found it necessary to go to the door and open it and stand there, surveying the piles of paper, the moribund computer, the overflowing files, the books lying open or face down, as well as crowded on the shelves. Now she could manage just by picturing these things.

Nita lives quietly like this, until one morning, a young man suddenly shows up on Nita’s doorstep. He says he has come to look at her fuse box, which soon turns out to be an excuse. But what does he want from her? A story with twists and turns follows, mainly in the form of a dialogue between Nita and the man.

What we find out about this man, we find out through what he tells Nita (and us). The way he speaks, uses words are what create this character. Just like, in fact, what Nita thinks and says are essential in painting her character. We don’t learn much about these two people through descriptions of what they do or look like, but we do get to know them through what they say and, in Nita’s case, think.

I liked Munro’s writing. At first it seems very accessible, very easy to read (which it is, actually), but that is deceiving: I found myself taking up the story and rereading parts of it and each time finding new details that made the story and the characters richer. In the end, it was really the details that made this story for me. I will certainly be looking for more Alice Munro in the future; I’d love to read more of her works. If anyone can recommend where to start, please leave a comment.

I will end this review with one more quote, one that made me smile. You see, Nita was a reader:

She had always been such a reader – that was one reason, Rich had said, that she was the right woman for him; she could sit and let him alone[...]. She hadn’t been just a once-through reader, either. “The Brothers Karamazov”,”The Mill on the Floss”, “The Wings of the Dove”, “The Magic Mountain”, over and over. She would pick one up, planning to read that one special passage, and find herself unable to stop until the whole thing was redigested. She read modern fiction, too. Always fiction. She hated to hear the word “escape” used about fiction. She once might have argued, not just playfully, that it was real life that was the escape.