Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

.I did it. I finally finished Don Quixote. For the second part of the book I stuck to my one-chapter-per-day schedule which had worked so well for the first part. Often, I would read a chapter over breakfast. All in all, I enjoyed the second part better than the first part.

The second part was different from the first part in that it centered more on the actual adventures and wanderings of Don Quixote and his partner in crime Sancho Panza and less on those of other characters in the story. There were also hardly any (if any – I can’t recall any at least) of those long long speeches on knight errantry and similar topics that dragged the story from time to time in the first part.

For me, the most notable difference between the first and second parts was the role of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza in the second part of the book. This time, much if not most of the time the two were the butt of jokes and pranks by others. It did make me feel sorry for both men, who are basically genuinely kind-hearted and good people, if maybe not always the brightest lights in the room. The more the “fun” went on, the more I started to sympathize with the two heroes and the more annoyed I got at the actions of the people whose guests they were: the duke and the duchess, the people in Barcelona.

During the story, I took more to Sancho Panza with his sometimes surreal combination of wit, shrewdness and plain stupidity. Don Quixote still irritated me from time to time with his dimwittery, but all in all I found him more sympathetic. I guess his character had to grow on me. Or the reader has to suspend any believe about the believability of the main characters. In a certain way, they are both somewhat over the top.

Oh yes, in the second part as well, there were a couple of young women who insisted on getting married to the guys who had swooned them with sweet promises and then betrayed them. Hmpf!

I highly recommend Edith Grossman’s translation. It is a very good combination of reading a century’s old text with it’s different style on the one hand and a very readable and enjoyable text on the other. Also, Grossman added footnotes to explain references and wordplays which were hard or impossible to translate into English, putting the text in the perspective of the time in which it was written.

I don’t know if I will ever read Don Quixote again in its entirety, but I am certainly glad I read this masterpiece of world literature.

This is a rather short and somewhat incoherent post, but I find that much of what I want to say, I’ve already said in my post about the first part, which you can find here.

Besides, my parents are visiting me at the moment, so I didn’t really have time to write much of a post. Even though we are all three big readers, I don’t even have the rest to sit down and concentrate on a book. I am just leafing through magazines they brought. A picture of the books they brought me, will come soon.

If you have read and reviewed Don Quixote as well, leave a comment with the link or send me an email with the link (the address in the sidebar)

The Ministry of Special Cases by Nathan Englander

Ten years or so ago, I read Nathan Englander’s debut, the short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges. The only thing I remember is that I enjoyed that book a lot. Actually, I think I’ll put that book on my growing reread-list. One of the effects of my blogging about books and reading bookblogs is, that I started wanting to reread books. But that is the topic of another post, that I might write some time soon, as this blog’s first anniversary is coming up.

Back to the book at hand. When I heard Nathan Englander had a new book out, it went straight onto my wishlist. The Ministry of Special Cases is actually Englander’s second book, which had been ten years in the making.

The story is set in Buenos Aires, Argentina in 1976, the year in which the military took over in a coup and the so-called Dirty War started. Kaddish Poznan is a Jewish man earning his bread by chopping names off gravestones at the request of family member who don’t want to trace themselves back to disreputable ancestors. His wife Lillian works in insurance. Their marriage is mostly held together by their worries about and love for their son Pato, who is in his late teens. One evening, Pato is arrested for nothing really. He becomes one of the thousands of desaparecidos of the military regime. The story follows how Lillian and Kaddish each in their own way try to deal with their son’s arrest and how their marriage breaks down when the glue that kept it together has gone.

The book starts out bordering on the bizarre, with Kaddish’ job and a nose job gone bad. For me, the first part of the book was sort of amusing, but not the strongest part of the book. The book really took off with the arrest of Pato. The bizarre parts are gone and the focus is on Kaddish and Lillian each in their own way trying to get their son back. Looking back, the first part stands sort of separate from the rest of the book. On the other hand, when I thought about what should have been different in the first part, I also found that in a way that first part fits the story. The tone is different because the Poznan family’s life was different before Pato’s arrest. Also, it introduces secondary characters and story lines that are important to the rest of the story.

The Ministry of Special Cases ends with a more or less open ending, leaving the reader (or at least this particular reader) with questions: Is the marriage of Lillian and Poznan really over? Will Lillian change her attitude towards her son’s disappearance (I don’t want to give away spoilers, that’s why I put the question vague like that)? What will happen with Kaddish?

I enjoyed the book very much, it was a well-written and well-paced read, that kept me interested in the characters throughout. I was not wild about it, but do I have to rave about every single book I read? I will certainly seek out Nathan Englander’s next book (hopefully that won’t take another decade or so) and reread his short stories.

You can read the beginning of the book here.

Gulag: A History by Anne Applebaum

Here’s another one: another book that will definitely end up high on my list of favorite books of this year. I have read some very, very good books this year and this is one of them. A book that will stay with you long after you’ve read the last page, a book that will make you think, a book that will leave you wondering about human cruelty and human resilience. Despite its subject, which made my stomach turn at times (I don’t particularly recommend eating while reading this book) and made me swallow hard, I couldn’t put the book down.

I had my eye on Gulag ever since it was published some years ago, so when I found a paperback copy some time last year, I had to buy it. Since then it had been eyeing me on my TBR-shelf, and I really wanted to pick it up, but somehow couldn’t. Do you have that as well, having books on your TBR-pile that you are very much looking forward to reading, but somehow can’t start yet, as if the time is not right? I very much felt like that with this book. Until two weeks ago. But then I couldn’t put it down and tried to sneak in a few pages whenever I could.

Gulag: A History is exactly that: a history of the Gulag, the system of forced labor camps in the Soviet Union, from 1917 till the early nineties when the last few remaining camps were closed. It is actually the first comprehensive history of the Gulag ever written. Anne Applebaum did lots of research in archives in Russia and elsewhere, interviews with survivors and former camp guards and camp administrators and uses lots of quotes from the many, many memoirs that have been published about life in the Gulag-camps. She focuses mostly on the camps in Siberia and northern Russia, which is indeed where most of the forced labor camps were, though there were large complexes in Kazakhstan as well.

The largest part of the book is dedicated to the Stalinist era, when the camps reached their top, both in amount of camps and inhabitants and in “perfecting” its organisation. Gulag is divided into three parts. The first chronologically narrates the development of the Gulag-system from its beginning in 1917 until 1939. The second part describes life in the camps: each chapter has a theme, for example arrest and arrival in the camps; work; guards; the division between political prisoners and criminal prisoners; women and children; escape and rebellion; dying in the camps etc. I found especially the second part about life in the camps haunting, despite knowing what to expect. This is not the first book I have read about the Gulag, most notably I read Varlam Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales a few years ago, which is another book that hits you straight in the face with its darkness, cruelty and rawness.

The third part is again told in chronological order from the start of the Second World War till the break-up of the Soviet Union. She points out how the post-war inhabitants of the camps were different from the pre-war ones and how this changed the rules in the camps, how the relationship between the political and the criminal prisoners changed because of this and how this eventually led to rebellion in the camps. Applebaum pays special attention to the many foreigners who inhabited the Gulag-camps from the Second World War on, the Baltic people, Poles, but also some of the Americans who ended up in the Gulag. Actually, I recently read a review of a newly published book especially about the Americans in the Gulag-camps, The Forsaken: From the Great Depression to the Gulags by Tim Tzouliadis.

Why do I keep reading these books about the Soviet Union, about Stalinism? Apart from having had a deep interest in Eastern-Europe for years (I ended up with an MA in Russian Studies) and in history and human rights, I don’t know. I think the closest I can get to an answer is that in my experience, so much of peoples’ mindset in the current independent countries that used to be part of the Soviet Union, so much of their way of thinking about themselves, society, the state, their role in it etc. has its roots in that era. Of course, things have changed since then, people don’t think the way they did back then, people don’t live in the fear of those times anymore, that is all gone. But the way some people long back to the Soviet era, because there was work, health care etc was free (note how they only remember the good things!); the way they think that protesting is useless because nothing will change anyway; the way they keep their own house spotlessly clean, but don’t give a sh** about what happens outside their doorstep; I think that somehow all these attitudes (and these are just a few examples) go back to “those days” and to the Soviet period in general.

One of my pet peeves about living in Armenia, is exactly that: that people don’t really care about what goes on beyond their own doorstep and that they are complaining about anything and everything, but don’t seem to understand that it is possible to change things starting with yourself. If one person starts putting the trash in the trashcan, for example, instead of throwing it on the street or leaving it behind at the picnic site, that is something. I am a firm believer that one person can make a change and that small changes are worth a lot, that that is where the big changes start. Am I an idealist? Yes, probably. But a pragmatic one who has her feet planted firmly on the earth and doesn’t keep her head in the clouds.

These two paragraphs are way too short to deal with this topic, and yes, I realize I am generalizing a lot, and that things aren’t nearly as simple as what I just wrote down. But I think these are topics for an entire different post or series of posts.

Back You can read the Introduction of Gulag: A History here.

Don’t Call it Night by Amos Oz

About ten years ago I first read some of Amos Oz‘ works, among them Don’t Call it Night, and I had a hard time with them. At the time I left it at two or three of his books. Then, two years ago, I read A Tale of Love and Darkness and I loved it, literally from page one. In fact, I even know exactly which paragraph made me fall in love with Oz’ writing, the third paragraph of A Tale of Love and Darkness on the very first page when Oz describes his childhood home:

It was actually a basement flat, as the ground floor of the building had been hollowed out of the rocky hillside. This hill was our next-door neighbour, a heavy, introverted, silent neighbour, an old, sad hill with the regular habits of a bachelor, a drowsy, wintry hill, that never scraped the furniture or entertained guests, never made a noise or disturbed us, but through the party walls there seeped constantly toward us, like a faint yet persistent musty smell, the cold, dark silence and clampness of this melancholy neighbour of ours.

I love this description of the hill as the silent, unintruding but ever-present neighbor. When I read this passage for the first time, I knew I was going to change my opinion on Amos Oz and that I was going to reread his books. Next time I was in Holland, I dug out the two books I had bought and read years before and took them with me to Armenia. One, Panther in the Basement, I reread before I started blogging and I did enjoy it so much more than before, possibly because the subject matter is related to that of A Tale of Love and Darkness: a young boy growing up in Israel in the late forties, right before and around the time it became independent.

Don’t Call it Night, which I reread over the weekend (in Dutch translation, called Noem het nog geen nacht), is set in a very different time and has very different characters. It remains by far the least favorite of what I have read of Amos Oz. In fact, reading it reminded me a bit of reading Anne Enright’s The Gathering: in both books it was most of all the writing that took me in, and less the story itself. In both books, it was the writing that kept me turning the pages; both times, it was the writing, rather than the plot that left me with a feeling of satisfaction after turning the last page. But I found Don’t Call it Night a far less rocky read than The Gathering.

Don’t Call it Night is set in the early nineties in the small town of Tel Kedar in the Israeli Negev Desert. After one of her students died in a drugs-related incident, Noa Dubnov, a 45 year old literature teacher is asked by the student’s father to start looking into the possibilities of setting up a rehabilitation center for young drug addicts in the town in memory of Immanuel, the deceased boy. Noa takes up the task with a certain enthusiasm. I got the impression that she sees it as an opportunity to somehow change things in her life, though what exactly and how remains unclear. I am not sure even if Noa has any idea of that herself, it is never clearly expressed in the book, and I certainly didn’t get the feeling it was very radical. I suppose she wants to stir up her usual routine of teaching, living a calm, uneventful life filled with habits with her partner Theo, who is fifteen years older than she is. The chapters are alternately told in first person from the perspective of Noa and that of Theo with the odd chapter thrown in told in omniscient third person perspective.

Not unexpectedly of course, the plan for the rehab center meets with oppositions from other townspeople, who don’t really appreciate the idea of junkies, “the filth of the country”, used needles, bad influence on local youth, and increased crime spreading over the town if the center were to be built. In short, the usual list of counter-arguments against this type of plans.

Don’t Call it Night is very much a character driven book, but the problem for me was that I found neither of the two main characters really likable. Theo came across as rather paternalistic, looking down on Noa as “his little girl” and on her initial enthusiasm for the project as “her little toy thing” of which she has no idea what she is getting into. Noa remained a bit flat, unremarkable in a way. Also, I am not sure I understood her diminishing interest in the project in the latter part of the book. The reasons behind that change of mind and behind her taking up a sudden interest in one of her students remained rather unclear to me.

For me there was actually a third and in a way much more interesting main character in the book: the town of Tel Kedar, its surroundings and the other inhabitants of the town. Oz draws the small sleepy desert town and it stark surroundings of sand and rocks in beautiful, evocative writing. Looking back, I think these parts were the strongest of the book. While reading I didn’t form a mental image of Noa and Theo, who I found fairly non-descript in a way, but I could imagine the dusty town, its main square with the shoeshop, the cafe and the movietheater, and some of the quirkier secondary characters in the story: Batsheva Dinur, the town’s mayor who lives with her old mother in one of the villas; Muki Peleg, the town’s broker, who always has sex and affairs with women on his mind.

Don’t Call it Night is definitely my least favorite of his works, but I will certainly pick up more of Amos Oz’ books. If you have never read anything by Amos Oz, I highly recommend A Tale of Love and Darkness to start with.

What I do when I am not reading…

I told you last week that I would go out of town for a few days. I decided to tell you a bit of where I go and what I do when I don’t read and when I go out of Yerevan. As usual, I spent my days off with my closest friend in the town of Spitak. Spitak is a small town of about 15.000 inhabitants in northern Armenia. Now I live in Yerevan because that is where the jobs are in this country, but really my heart lies in Spitak. The first time I came to this country was in the summer of 2000 to work as a volunteer in a children’s summer camp. I made many friends there and have returned many times since, to do volunteerwork or simply to visit friends. Now I go there every so often for a weekend or a couple of days, mostly to relax and catch up with friends. Most often I stay with my best friend and her family, that is her parents, her brother, his wife and their two sons of 11 and 12 years old. Her family all joke that I am their fourth child (besides my friend and her brother, they have another daughter who lives elsewhere in Spitak with her husband and two children – they are also good friends). For the two boys I am like an aunt, and they call me that. I always spend quite a big part of my time there with the kids, playing basketball or volleyball or other games and now that they are learning English in school, I help them with that as well.

But I am also involved in some other things there that hopefully will bear fruit in the near future. My closest group of friends, some of which I have known since I first came to Spitak, runs a computertrainingcenter plus stationary- and print-shop in Spitak. Very long story very short, they used to be connected with an NGO but cut off all ties personal and legal with that NGO after the director turned out to be corrupt. They are now in the process of setting up their own NGO and securing a building for it. It will offer computer-classes for children and disabled people, organize other projects and courses for children and disabled people such as environmental awareness, leadership development, vocational skills and there will be a resource center and a small library with books in foreign languages (this is where at some point in the future I will try to get you guys out there reading this blog somehow involved) and quality children’s books in Russian and Armenian and reading events (book discussions, reading books with and for small children and their mothers, etc). These are all things which are relatively rare but very needed outside the capital. I am working with my friends to make this a reality.

Another thing I am involved in in Spitak is a NGO that was formed out of a friendship-connection between Spitak and the small Dutch town of Limmen. Together with our sister-association in Limmen we are working on projects in the social and healthcare sphere in Spitak. About to start in the very near future is a pilot project which aims to set up a system in Spitak in which women will be able to have free checkups on cervical cancer every five years. This is something that the state should provide but doesn’t, because of lack of money and lack of priority. Something else we are working on is providing diabetes-patients (of which there are relatively many in Armenia), familydoctors and polyclinics with bloodsugar-meters (of which there are not nearly enough in Armenia) and equipment to better treat and check for diabetes. These are fairly small-scale, but needed projects, filling up “holes” that the state should take care of, but currently can’t or won’t because of lack of money.

Two years ago a group of people from the association in Limmen visited Spitak and since a good friend of mine in Spitak was already involved in this, he invited me to join the group. One idea that came up at that time, was organizing a bicycle-tour through Armenia. One member of the Spitak-Limmen is an active cyclist and he gathered a small group of enthusiast amateur-sportsmen (and one woman) that started training. This summer, they came to Armenia. They are currently touring the country on their bikes for ten days. The start of their trip in Yerevan was even shown on national tv. None of us in Spitak knew about that, so when we caught that on tv we were very surprised!

Now I am going to be a major tease and ask you to go here for the rest of the story and pictures.

If you are too lazy to read , there are more pictures at my Flickr-page here.

Also, I am set to spent some more days with the cyclists until they fly back to Holland over the weekend, so this will likely be the only post this week.

Days off

I’m off for a couple of days out of town. Yerevan is too hot right now (40 degrees Celsius = 100+ degrees Fahrenheit), so I will head out to visit some of my best friends and hang out with them. No posting here until at least next Wednesday. I plan to write some posts and finish some reviews while I’m gone, and when I come back I will also deal with some awards I received already last week and with a challenge or two that I finished (and one that I did not).

See you all next week!