FICTION – Page 3 – REVIEWS AND VIEWS OF LIFE

GOTHIC TALE

The climax of “Modern Gothic” is where myth enters Moreno-Carcia’s story. The fundamental truths of colonization are revealed in her creative story while its denouement is an entertaining explosion of imagination.

Books of Interest
Website: chetyarbrough.blog

Mexican Gothic

Author: Silvia Moreno-Garcia

Narrated By: Frankie Corzo

Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Author, Mexican/Canadian novelist, editor and publisher.)

Moreno-Garcia’s “Mexican Gothic” is a chilling story of colonization, eugenics, ecological contamination, mystical beliefs, and control of society by men. The author chooses the name of Doyle as an English family that exploits the Mexico’ silver mining industry in earlier centuries. A dynasty is created by generations of Doyle’s. They created a colonial manor called “High Place” from which to rule a crumbling empire. As colonizers they capitalize on Mexico’s silver deposits by exploiting native Mexicans’ land and labor to grow their mining operation. The wealth of local citizens is lost to the English foreigners who keep wages low to increase the wealth of the Doyle family.

**Over generations, the Doyle men married local women that were related to each other. A common practice of royalty before the twentieth century.**

They wished to maintain the genetic purity of the Doyle bloodline by having future Doyles marry genetic descendants of Mexican women that had been their wives. This is not greatly different than the experience of royal marriages in European cultures. The consequence of that marriage tradition is that recessive genetic mutations become more prominent in offspring. Children were more susceptible to diseases like cystic fibrosis and had higher incidents of developmental and cognitive disorders. This is one of many threads of meaning in “Mexican Gothic” because one of these descendants becomes a murderer of Doyle family members and the current Doyle generation seems socially dysfunctional. Added to that dysfunction is the Doyle family’s diminishing wealth.

An arranged marriage is a lynch pin to the story.

The heroine, Noemi, is the daughter of a wealthy Mexican family. She is sent to investigate a letter that was received by her father from a young woman that marries a Doyle. She is a cousin of Noemi’s. The marriage is arranged in part because of her father, and he feels something is wrong and wants Noemi to visit the Doyle family to find what the mysterious letter means. Soon after Noemi arrives, she begins to have hallucinatory dreams. Listener/readers find the hallucinations are because of spores that are in the bedroom of the deteriorating Doyle house. A clever thread of meaning in Moreno-Garcia’s story is ecological contamination that comes from colonization. As one nation colonizes another, it inevitably brings different plants and animals that are not indigenous to the country they are colonizing. The author notes a fungus is growing in the Doyle household that may have come from the original colonizers.

The penultimate theme in “Modern Gothic” is the creation of myths that compound the horrific events that occur in the Doyle house.

From the history of murders in the Doyle household, to hallucinatory dreams, to incestuous relationships, to the gloom and doom of the story, to a myth about the age of the Doyle patriarch, Moreno-Garcia offers a climax to her story that vivifies reader/listener’s imagination. The climax of “Modern Gothic” is where myth enters Moreno-Carcia’s story. The fundamental truths of colonization are revealed in her creative story while its denouement is an entertaining explosion of imagination.

OLD SCHOOL INDIAN

“Old School Indian” is returned without being completed. It would have been interesting to know more about what it is like to be raised in America as a descendant of a Mohawk Indian Tribe but experimenting with gender identity are steps too far for this reader/listener.

Books of Interest
Website: chetyarbrough.blog

Old School Indian (Novel)

Author: Aaron John Curtis

Narrated By: Jason Grasi

Aaron John Curtis (Author, essayist, member of the Akwesasne Kanienkehaka, a Mohawk tribe.)

Curtis begins a rye, mordant, and witty novel that gives one an idea of how an Indian descendant might view themselves as a part of American society. Curtis’s main character is Abe Jacobs; raised in an Indian family deeply rooted in their Mohawk culture. He grows to attend college at Syracuse University in New York with an ambition to become a writer. He becomes concerned about skin sores that develop on his skin that itch, suppurate, appear, and disappear.

Abe is a handsome young man in Curtis’s story. He is troubled by skin sores and anxious to find out what causes them and how they can be treated and cured. He meets his future wife while going to college. She is a free spirited, attractive woman who is drawn to Abe because of his good looks which become more attractive when she finds he is a descendant of a Mohawk tribe. They become lovers on the day they meet. As their relationship grows, life goes on. They have times when they are apart, living life on their own terms but staying in touch by phone and recurrent rendezvouses.

The seriousness of Abe’s disease is finally diagnosed. The symptoms can cause artery inflammation leading to organ failure and dementia at an early age. This fictional disease (though there is a true similar disease) prepares readers for a story about what it is like to be in the prime of one’s life to face a disease that can disfigure your appearance and shorten your life. Aside from the point of having a potentially deadly disease, a listener/reader wonders what it is like to be a descendent of an Indian tribe in America.

As the book progresses, the story of Abe and his girlfriend are shown to have been raised in families struggling with poverty. Abe and his soon to be wife begin revealing the hardship of their lives. Poverty diminishes life in so many ways that the author’s clever beginning is not enough for this critic to complete his story. His hero tries to commit suicide at 12 years of age. Abe’s poverty is something many generations have experienced but being drawn to suicide and willingness to experiment with gender identity are steps too far for this critic.

RIGHT & WRONG

The story of “…Belle Lettres…” inelegantly reminds one of the effects of Trump on America’s reputation.

Books of Interest
Website: chetyarbrough.blog

The Belles Lettres Papers (A Novel)

By: Charles Simmons

Narrated By: Alex Hyde-White

Charles Paul Simmons (1924-2017, Author and former American editor for The New York Times Book Review, graduate of Columbia University in 1948.)

“The Belles Lettres Papers” is a fictional account about the destruction of an American book review company. Written by a person who worked as the editor for the NY Times Book Review gives credibility to its author. One wonders how the nationally famous paper felt about his book. Simmons writes a story of a magazine company that exclusively reviews new books that become literary successes, sometimes bestsellers, or dead or dying dust gatherers.

To this book critic, Simmons certainly seems to know what he is writing about but “The Belles Lettres Papers” falls into a dust gatherer category of books.

Book reading or listening is an educational, sometimes entertaining, experience. There are so many books written that it is impossible to know what to read or listen to without someone’s review of what has been newly or recently published. Of course, there are genres that a reader/listener will choose that influences their book choices. Even when one limits themselves to a genre, there are too many choices that require a way of limiting one’s choice.

Experience reveals “best seller” is not a consistently reliable way of choosing a book, but it is one of the most commonly used methods of selection.

What “…Belles Lettres…” reveals is the potential corruption that can inflate a books placement on a best seller list. Book review publications, like all business enterprises, have owners and employees that have various levels of honesty, capability, and ethical standards. What Simmons shows is how every business owner and employee is subject to the influence of money and power.

The potential weaknesses of humanity play out in every organization that provides service or material to the public.

Simmons shows how a fictional book review company has employees who are corrupted by the power of their positions and the money they make. The fictional company has a male business manager who thinks his female secretary wishes to have sex with him because of natural attraction. Ethically, no employee reporting to a manager they work for should have sexual relations with a direct report. This is particularly egregious in Simmon’s story because of sexual inequality that permeates society. As Lord Acton’s observation about power (power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely), a person who has power over another is always at risk of self-delusion.

Simmons goes on to explain how undercompensating employees can corrupt an organization by incentivizing theft and other ways of undermining a company’s integrity.

Simmons addresses the incentive of owners or those in power of an organization to cut personnel employment to save money at the cost of product quality or service. America is experiencing that today with the actions of the Trump Administration in arbitrarily firing federal employees, regardless of what they do for American citizens.

In a last chapter, Simmons addresses the revisions that can occur in a company that decides on a wholesale turnover in employees.

The integrity of a company’s mission can be sorely challenged. In the case of “…Belle Lettres…” a decision for publication of salacious books replaces the company’s former studied reviews of good writers. The organization loses its reputation as a reviewer of high-quality publications.

Trump’s assessment of immigration.

The story of “…Belle Lettres…” inelegantly reminds one of the effects of Trump on America’s reputation as a supporter of western society by reducing foreign aid, undermining university independence, denying global warming, arbitrarily firing government employees, and expelling American immigrants.

SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY

The author makes a point in “The Dream Hotel”, but her book is a tedious repetition of the risk of human digitization that is a growing concern in this 21st century world.

Books of Interest
Website: chetyarbrough.blog

The Dream Hotel (A Novel)

By: Laila Lalami

Narrated By: Frankie Corzo, Barton Caplan

Laila Lalami (Moroccan-American novelist, essayist, and professor, earned a PhD in linguistics, finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for “The Moor’s Account”.)

Laila Lalami imagines a “Brave New World” in which algorithms predict probabilities of lethal criminal behavior. She creates a nation-state with a human behavior monitoring and detention system for every human that might commit a lethal crime. The growing collection of data about human thought and action suggests a level of truth and possibility.

Lalami creates a state that monitors, collates, and creates probability algorithms for human behavior.

To a degree, that state already exists. The difference is that the algorithms are to get people to buy things in capitalist countries and jail or murder people in authoritarian countries. One might argue America and most western countries are in the first category while Russia, and North Korea are in the second.

Lalami’s description of the detention system, like many bureaucratic organizations, is inefficient and bound by rules that defeat their ideal purpose.

A young mother named Hussein is coming back from a business trip. She is detained because of data collected on her about where she has been, what she did on her business trip, her foreign sounding name, and the kind of relationship she has with her husband and twin children. An algorithm has been created based on a profile of her life. It flags the young woman so that she has a number slightly over a probability threshold of someone who might kill their husband. Of course, this is ridiculous on its face. Whether she murders her husband or not is based on innate errors of behavioral prediction and bureaucratic confusion.

Every organization or bureaucracy staffed by human beings has a level of confusion and inefficiency that is compounded by information inaccuracy.

That does not make the organization bad or good, but it does mean, like today’s American government’s bad decisions on foreign aid or FDA bureaucracy throws the baby out with the bath water. Lalami’s point is that detention because of one’s name, family relationship, and presumed prediction for murder, based on a digitized life, is absurd. Algorithms cannot predict or explain human behavior. At best, an algorithm has a level of predictability, but life is too complex to be measured by a fictive number created by an algorithm.

The author makes a point in “The Dream Hotel”, but her book is a tedious repetition of the risk of human digitization that is a growing concern in this 21st century world.

PSYCHOSIS

The imagination of Han Kang gives reader/listener’s an explanation of how a human being can become psychotic. Kang’s characters show how psychosis comes from many sources, a major one of which is family relationship.

Books of Interest
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The Vegetarian

By: Han Kang

Narrated by: Deborah Smith, Janet Song, Stephen Park

Han Kang (Author, South Korean writer, awarded the International Booker Prize for fiction in 2016 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.)

A listener/reader may be tempted to put this book aside with the thought that it is a titillating pornographic tale that is not worthy of one’s time. However, after an hour or two, one realizes this is a journey for something difficult to describe.

In Kang’s fictional story, two sisters are raised by the same parents. One is the older of the two and becomes a successful small business owner with a video artist husband; the other is a housewife who lives with a husband that seems to neither love nor respect her. Both marriages fail but for different but interlocking reasons.

The younger sister becomes a vegetarian later in her married life. She explains her vegetarianism is based on a dream she has about something that is not clearly defined. One gathers the dream has something to do with the source of meat that involves the killing of animals while vegetarian food comes from nature’s abundance. The husband reluctantly goes along with the change but becomes more and more unhappy in his life with the younger sister. The unhappiness grows to something greater when his wife begins to complain about how her meat-eating husband’ smells. The breaking point comes when the husband asks his wife’s mother, father, and sister-in-law to convince his wife to abandon vegetarianism and begin adding meat to her diet. At dinner in their house, the father forcefully demands his daughter to eat meat. She refuses and the conflict becomes violent. Her father pries her mouth open and shoves meat into her mouth. The daughter rebels and cuts her wrist with a knife in an act of defiance. Her brother-in-law grasps the younger daughter who is profusely bleeding and rushes her to the hospital.

The brother-in-law that rushed to save the vegetarian is a video artist.

The main characters of the story and the substance of their conflict is now made clear to the listener/reader. The next portentous development is the older sister’s husband (a video artist) begins to fantasize about the younger sister whom he had rushed to the hospital. His fantasy grows to the point of asking the younger daughter to pose nude for an art video he wishes to create. She agrees. A listener/reader begins to understand the younger sister is slipping into a psychosis. Her brother-in-law paints her nude body with flowers that make her feel that she is becoming part of nature, i.e., something growing like the vegetarian diet upon which she relies. The brother-in-law’s sexual desire becomes more aroused by the video and his relationship with the younger sister.

The deepening psychosis of the younger daughter grows when the brother-in-law hires a nude male model to be a part of a new video.

The male model resists but agrees to pose with her but refuses to go beyond allowing flowers being painted on his nude body and a video of the two without clothes but with painted bodies. The brother-in-law’s sexual fantasy grows from this experience but is disappointed in the male actor who refuses to have sex with the sister-in-law while the video is being filmed. The male actor did not want to be viewed as a porn star.

The brother-in-law’s fantasy leads to the sister-in-law’s agreement to have sex with him on film as long as he allows her to paint flowers on his body that are similar to what he had painted on her body. They become sexually entwined at the sister-in-law’s house. The older sister discovers them in their sexual rendezvous where the video is being produced.

The younger sister has crossed a barrier between sanity and insanity. It is not a matter of remorse for the sexual relationship but from a reinforcement of her obsessive need for being a vegetarian as an integral part of nature. She refuses her humanity. She has crossed the Rubicon between sanity and insanity. She refuses to eat anything and only wishes to drink water to feed her growth as a plant. Both her husband and the husband of the older sister-in-law essentially drop out of Kang’s story. The older sister’s husband does not forgive her husband for his sexual transgression and the younger sister’s husband never loved the vegetarian in the first place.

**This amazing book, “The Vegetarian”, offers a vivid portrayal of a human beings’ descent into psychosis.**

HUMAN NATURE

Murakami is one of the great writers of modern times. In “after the quake”, Murakami reduces the great and horrid loss of the many to the feelings of the “one”

Books of Interest
Website: chetyarbrough.blog

“after the quake”

By: Haruki Murakami

Narrated By: Rupert Degas, Teresa Gallagher, Adam Sims

The Kobe, Japan earthquake struck on January 17, 1995, at 5:46 AM. It killed 6,400 people and injured more than 40,000. Approximately 300,000 residents were displaced with over 240,000 homes, buildings, highways, and rail lines damaged with estimated repair cost of $200 billion in 1995. (The Kobe earthquake was actually less damaging than Japan’s 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and subsequent tsunami that killed over 18,000 people. Over 123,000 homes were destroyed. The estimated cost of that disaster was $220 billion dollars.)

Haruki Murakami offers a series of short stories in “after the quake” that remind one of the frailties of human beings. Humans lie, steal, cheat and war against each in ways that exceed natural disasters. Murakami’s short stories are funny, sad, and insightful views of humanity that show we often foment our own disasters.

Each short story revolves around the social implications of the Kobe’ earthquake. Murakami cleverly weaves his stories to reflect on events that change one’s direction in life. The events can be as great as an earthquake, a war, or a singular lost love. The first is nature’s way; the second and third are humans’ way.

Human relationships are as unpredictable and destructive as natural disasters. The human’ Lushan rebellion in 8th century China is estimated to have killed 13 million people, the Mongol invasion in the 13th and 14th century 20 to 60 million, the Taiping rebellion in mid-19th century China 20-30 million, and two world wars in the 20th century at 83-107 million. This is without noting China’s famine that killed millions because of Mao’s mistakes in the Great Leap Forward, Stalin’s repression in Russia, and today’s wars in Ukraine and Gaza. Natural disasters are horrendous events, but human nature has murdered more than earthquakes, floods, volcanoes, and other natural disasters.

The cataclysmic events of nature affect the many, but Murakami shows scale means nothing in respect to the effect it has on the “one”. He cleverly shows how singular events can overwhelm one relationship as portentously as natural or man-made disasters can overwhelm all relationships.

Murakami is one of the great writers of modern times. In “after the quake”, Murakami reduces the great and horrid loss of the many to the feelings of the “one”. His stories show that a personal loss of an imaginary friend or a real love is as catastrophic to the one as a natural disaster or war is to the many.

BLACK & WHITE

One wonders if Abdulrazak Gurnah is proffering an opinion about race relations in the world or just leaving a lifeline for those disappointed by relationship failures.

Books of Interest
Website: chetyarbrough.blog

Admiring Silence

By: Abdulerazak Gurnah

Narrated By: Unnamed person from Zanzibar

Abdulerazak Gurnah (Author, Tanzanian-born British novelist and academic, moved to the UK in 1960.)

A little context for “Admiring Silence” will help understand Abdulerazak Gurnah’s interesting and troubling story. Gurnah received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021. “Admiring Silence” is the latest book published by Gurnah in 2020. He had written four earlier books: Memory of Departure (1987), Paradise (1994), By the Sea (2001), and Desertion (2005).

“Admiring Silence” is not a biography but an interesting story about a long-term relationship of a Black emigrant and a white woman who meet in Zanzibar (an island archipelago off the coast of Tanzania) and move to London. The two had met in a Zanzibar’ restaurant where they both worked. The Black emigrant leaves his native country with his restaurant mate.

Gurnah describes the two as lovers who are struggling restaurant workers who wish to improve their lives through higher education. An opportunity to attend a university leads the two to decide to emigrate to London because of their similar academic ambition. The two are enrolled at a university and both become teachers in England. Gurnah sets a table for understanding what life is like for an unwed mixed-race couple in mid-twentieth century England.

Their life together is complicated by the birth of a daughter and the father’s decision to visit his homeland when he is in his forties.

No one in Zanzibar knows he has a teenage daughter with an unmarried white woman he lives with in England. His mother wishes to fix him up with a future Black Muslim wife. The interest one has grows with the circumstances of Gurnah’s imaginative story.

What is it like to be in a racially mixed marriage in 1960s England?
How does a mixed-race child feel about her life in a predominantly white country?
What does a Black family think about their son having a mixed-race family?
Having lived together for 20 years and had a child, why haven’t they married?
How does the relationship between different races affect the feelings of a couple that chooses not to marry but have a child born to them?
Is Gurnah’s story representative enough to give one the answers?

The first question is largely unanswered. The last question is impossible to answer but the other four imply Gurnah’s opinion. Marriage is always a work in progress whether it is of a mixed-race couple or not. However, there is a distinction based on race when it comes to a man’s and woman’s personal relationship because of the dimension of racism. Every couple chooses to work through differences and become more or less committed to staying together but two people of different races face discrimination associated with racism, unequal treatment, and economic inequality existing in a country’s dominant racial profile.

Gurnah does not address how a mixed-race child deals with life in a predominantly white country, but one can imagine it depends in part on how distinctive a difference is in the color of their skin in relation to the dominate racial profile.

In terms of the daughter’s relationship with her parents, one presumes it is likely the same parent/child conflicts of all families. Some fathers are more distant than others just as some mothers range from helicopter to equally distant parents.

That these two lovers who have been together for so long without getting married, after their daughter is born, seems like a flashing yellow light, a cautionary notice of something is about to change.

When the father’s mother writes from Zanzibar to have him visit after being away for so long, flashes a yellow light that eventually turns red. He returns for a visit to Zanzibar at the encouragement of his partner. The partner’s encouragement seems disingenuous, i.e. more like a desire for a relationship break than a supportive gesture. The last chapters confirm that suspicion. A break-up occurs soon after the father returns. There is a brief father/daughter reconciliation, but the daughter also decides to separate from her father.

An interesting point is made by Gurnah about a Muslim Black person leaving a poverty-stricken country of his birth to a country of wealth and a different culture.

It is the wish of his Zanzibar’ family for the father to return to help with the disarray and economic disparity of his home country; as well as marry a local Black Muslim girl who wishes to become a doctor. The presumption is that if one leaves their poor country to become prosperous in a wealthy country, they have some magical power to help their poverty-stricken home-countries. It is of little concern to the family about his committed relationship to another but more about what his life is like in his newly adopted country and what he can offer to his homeland from what he has learned. The Muslim girl the mother wishes him to marry is twenty years old. Her son is in his 40s. Tt appears the primary reason for such a marriage is to help the young woman become a doctor. In the end, the son recognizes this is not practical but clearly understandable considering the poverty in Zanzibar.

Gurnah cleverly injects a conversation with a Nigerian Muslim woman on his plane ride back to London before his white lover’s rejection of their relationship.

The Nigerian woman has been divorced from her English husband for several years. It was an emotionally difficult divorce for her. A mix-up on a missing passport allows the father to find contact information for the divorcee. One wonders if Gurnah is proffering an opinion about race relations in the world or just leaving a lifeline for those disappointed by relationship failures.

MICHELANGELO

The story of Michelangelo ends with the return of the Medicis to power. It is for Michelangelo–a journey of “…Agony and Ecstasy”–of love for his work, the daughter of a Medici, and the tumult of his time.

Books of Interest
Website: chetyarbrough.

The Agony and the Ecstasy (The Biographical Novel of Michelangelo)

By: Irving Stone

Irving Stone (1903-1989, died at the age of 86, American writer of biographical novels about artists, politicians and intellectuals.)

Irving Stone’s novel is an entertaining book and an historically supported story of the famous artist, Michelangelo. Michelangelo was a Florentine born in Florence, an influential city at the heart of the Italian Renaissance. The Medici family was in control of Florence’s political and cultural life in Michelangelo’s youth.

Two of the most famous artists of all time, Leonardo Da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti created two of the most famous art works of the world in Florence, i.e. da Vinci’s “Adoration of the Magi” and Michelangelo’s “David”. However, their personal relationship began roughly in their brief contact in Florence. In 1504. Leonardo da Vinci was 52 years old. Michelangelo was 29.

They had both been contacted to paint murals in the Hall of Five Hundred in the Palazzo Vecchio. Leonardo had already made his reputation as a master painter, polymath, and diverse genius. Michelangelo was considered a sculptor more than a painter. However, in a casual conversation da Vinci alludes to sculpture as a less prestigious form of art. The younger Michelangelo is offended and is alleged to have said harsh words to da Vinci with a challenge to paint a competing fresco in the Palazzo Vecchio. Neither completed their planned paintings but their preparatory works were preserved and considered important developments of the High Renaissance. Irving Stone suggests they meet later in life and Leonardo apologizes for what he felt was a misinterpretation of his words about the art of sculpture.

Stone suggests Michelangelo is more of an ascetic than da Vinci. Leonardo as noted by other authors, had many interests beyond art. Michelangelo prefers sculpture to any other form of art and when he is contracted for his artistic genius, he grudgingly takes commissions for his skill as a painter. “The Agony and the Ecstasy” is a title that captures Michelangelo’s artistic conflict.

Stone shows Michelangelo pursues human dissection, just as Leonardo is said to have, to more fully understand the construction of the human body for an artist to make painting or sculpture appear more real. Human dissection is not legal in Michelangelo’s time in Florence, so he secretly works at night when no one is around to see what he is doing.

Stone addresses the political turmoil of the time and how Michelangelo is hired by the Medici family when he is a young man. This is before the Borgias replace the Medici family in Italy. Michelangelo remains close to the Medicis even in their exile but is attracted to Rome in 1496 by Cardinal Raffaele Riario, a relative of Pope Sixtus IV. In Rome, Michelangelo creates “Bacchus”, the god of Wine.

Michelangelo’s Bacchus, the Roman god of agriculture, wine, and fertility.

After creating “Bacchus, a French cardinal commissions the “Pieta” for St. Peters Basilica. Michelangelo gains the reputation of being a master sculptor.

Michelangelo’s Pieta depicting Mary holding the body of Christ.

Stone suggests the Pope asks why Mary appears so young and Michelangelo explains it is because she is the mother of a divine.

After the Pieta, Michelangelo is commissioned by overseers of the Office of Works of the Cathedral of Florence. This is not clear in “The Agony and the Ecstasy” but it reinforces Irving Stone’s recognition of Michelangelo’s deep connection to Florence. He returns to Rome, but his heart is in Florence. Much of Michelangelo’s time in Rome is uncomfortable and does not calm down for him until the Medicis return to power.

The warrior Pope, Pope Julius II heads the church from 1503-1513. Irving Stone explains; this Pope demands Michelangelo paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel at the Vatican in Rome. Of course, Michelangelo resists because he wishes to be remembered for sculpture, not painting, because it is an art that gives him joy. The forceful Pope insists, and Michelangelo makes a false start that changes into a history of the birth of the world on the ceiling of the Chapel. He works on the ceiling of the Chapel from 1508 to 1512.

Sistine Chapel painting by Michelangelo between 1508 and 1512.

COLOMBIA

Márquez offers a vivid picture of Colombia’s twentieth century culture in “One Hundred Years of Solitude” but to this reviewer his failure to address Colombia’s lucrative cultural and world’ damaging drug industry is disappointing.

Books of Interest
Website: chetyarbrough.blog

One Hundred Years of Solitude

By: Gabriel García Márquez

Narrated By: John Lee

Gabriel García Márquez, (Author, Colombian writer and journalist.)

“One Hundred Years of Solitude” is a fictional representation of the early history and 20th century modernization of Colombia. Those who are not particularly interested in Colombia’s history will listen/read Gabriel García Márquez’s story because of the author’s skillful storytelling and the intimacies of Colombian culture, its political turmoil, violence during a civil war, and its consequent growth as a modern nation. In some ways it is like the story of America.

Márquez begins his book with the founding of Macondo, a fictional name for a village during the colonial period when the Spanish settled Colombia. Beginning as a small town, Macondo grows to become a city. Macondo represents the journey from isolation as a small town to a city that becomes a part of a vibrant South American country.

Macondo, a fictional village in Colombia.

The modernization of Colombia is addressed with the arrival of the railroad in Macondo that illustrates industrialization and the advance of Colombia’s economy. Macondo becomes a banana producing community that wrestles with the consequences of a civil war, unionization, and a growing economy. The brutality of industrialization is exemplified by the Colombian army’s killing of striking banana plantation workers in 1928. Of course, this is not unlike America’s 1932 Detroit’ Ford manufacturing plant killing of four workers by security guards and the Michigan police.

Colombia’s 50-year long civil war.

Colombia’s growth as a nation evolves with a mid-twentieth century civil war between liberals and conservatives. Márquez creates characters representing both sides of the civil war and their personal, as well as military lives. As is true of all wars, many innocents, as well as participant citizens, are indiscriminately and violently killed. Undoubtedly, a part of what makes the author’s story appealing to listener/readers is the sexuality of his characters. Sex in the novel ranges from close relatives’ intimacy to older women seductions of young men and young men’s seductions of both older and younger women, some of which are incestuous.

Colombian drug cartels are not addressed in Márquez’s story.

On the other hand, what author would want to take the risk of reporting on an industry noted for murdering those who expose its workings?

AUTHORITARIANISM

Whether an idealist or humanist, the historical truth is that rising authoritarians believe power is all that matters. Today, the world seems at the threshold of authoritarianism.

Books of Interest
Website: chetyarbrough.blog

Bronshtein in the Bronx

By: Robert Littell

Narrated By: Adam Grupper

Robert Littell (American author, former journalist in France.)

Robert Littell researches and imagines the 10 days of Leon Trotsky’s visit to New York City in 1917, just before the Russian revolution. His story offers humanizing and demeaning aspects of Trotsky’s personal and political life as a revolutionary.

Lev Davidovich Bronstein aka Leon Trotsky (1879-1940, Russian revolutionary, politician, political theorist, revolutionary military leader.)

Littell explains Trotsky travels with his two young sons and a female companion (the mother of their two boys) to New York. His first wife is exiled in Siberia for helping him spread leaflets about terrible factory conditions in Czarist Russia. Trotsky escaped to England while leaving his first wife and their two young girls in Siberia. (Trotsky divorces his first wife and marries the woman that Littel calls his airplane companion, either before or after the trip to New York. This is not made clear in Littell’s story.)

Trotsky in New York, 1917 | Kenneth Ackerman

Littell explains Trotsky is a kind of celebrity in New York because of his association with socialist beliefs and his involvement in the failed 1905 Russian Revolution.

Trotsky is in his early twenties when he arrives in New York. Littell characterizes Trotsky as a libertine by introducing a female reporter in New York who becomes his lover. Littell reinforces that libertinism at the end of his story by suggesting Trotsky and Frida Kahlo had an affair while his second wife and he were exiled in Mexico.

Aside from Trotsky’s picadilloes, Littell shows how committed Trotsky was to his belief in Marxism and the plight of the working poor.

Trotsky gave several speeches that appealed to New York laborers and their families. An interesting sidelight is appended to Littell’s story when a Jewish industrialist meets with Trotsky after the 1917 revolution in Russia. Naturally, Trotsky is anxious to return to support Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the revolution. However, Trotsky is broke and doesn’t have the money to return to Russia. The industrialist offers an envelope with the money needed for the trip. Neither the industrialist nor Trotsky are believers in the Jewish faith but believe in the power of socialism and its benefit to society.

The political point being made by Littell is that the ideal of communism supersedes religious beliefs.

Trotsky is Jewish but not a believer in God. He is a political idealist. Littell notes Trotsky becomes a military leader in the communist movement. Littell infers Trotsky’s idealism gets in the way of humanism when he orders one in ten prisoners be shot for their opposition to the communist revolution. This is undoubtedly an apocryphal story but a way of explaining how a committed idealist can become a murderous tyrant.

Littell ends his story with a brief and somewhat inaccurate history of the Trotsky’ children. The two girls with his first wife died before they were 30. Zinada had mental health issues and died by suicide in 1933. Nina died at age 26 without any detailed information about her cause of death.

Rather than two boys noted in Littell’s story of the trip to New York, one was a girl named Zinaida. Zinaida, like her half-sister, died by suicide at age 32. Lev, born in 1906, is believed to have been poisoned by Stalinist agents in 1938. As some know, Trotsky was murdered by Stalin’s agents in Mexico City. In contrast to his children, Trotsky, the political idealist, is murdered as an exile at the age of 60. All-in-all, a tragic family history.

Whether an idealist or humanist, the historical truth is that rising authoritarians believe power is all that matters. Today, the world seems at the threshold of authoritarianism.

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