My First Updike

Following on the heels of my first Hemingway and my first Faulkner, I decided that this John Updike fellow seems to get a healthy amount of praise, so I decided to pick up Terrorist — not one of his award winners, and apparently one for which he caught some flak (or so I hear).

Terrorist takes place post 9/11 in a New Jersey town called New Prospect, across the river from Manhattan, and tells the story of Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, a rising senior at Central High.  Ahmad’s mother is Irish and his father is Egyptian, although his father flew the coop when Ahmad was very young.  Nonetheless, at the age of 11, Ahmad began to devote himself to Islam.

And this is probably where Updike caught some heat.  As he tells the story, Updike inhabits the mind of Ahmad and his devotion to Allah and the Holy Qur’an, and he speaks from the perspective of a young man who hates America and capitalism and all of the infidels who support American ideals.  I don’t know how Updike knows what goes on in the mind of someone like that, and I suppose some may have taken offense to this story, as it arguably stereotypes Muslims as hate-filled maniacs.

But putting that aside, what became clear to me immediately is that Updike is a brilliant writer.  And this work was probably his attempt to write about something current and front of mind, although how he chose to do that may have stirred some controversy.  But the writing is incredible.  And the storytelling is pretty darn good, too.  As the story progresses, we learn about several other characters in Ahmad’s life, including his mother, his non-practicing Jewish guidance counselor, his African-American female schoolmate, and the Lebanese immigrants that he begins working for upon graduating from high school.  There’s quite a mix of cultures going on, and as Ahmad journeys from high school student to a soldier in jihad, Updike does a pretty good job of touching upon all of the dynamics and tensions that exist between these cultures.

I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed in the ending of the story.  I think I know what Updike was trying to do, but I don’t think he succeeded; I won’t spoil it by telling what happened, but I was surprised that he wasn’t able to pull off the ending better, given what a talented writer he is.

All that said, I just picked up Rabbit is Rich, Updike’s 1982 Pulitzer Prize winner.  It’s the third in his series of four books about Rabbit Angstrom, and the first of two in the series to win the Pulitzer, preceding 1991′s Rabbit at Rest.  My understanding is that Rabbit is Rich focuses on Rabbit’s middle age years, and I suspect that it will be the second Pulitzer Prize winner I’ve read that attempts to portrays the trials and tribulations of the middle-aged American Male; hopefully I’ll appreciate this one a lot more than Independence Day (which I pretty much loathed).

My Father’s Paradise

Yona Sabar was born in Zakho, Kurdistan in the mid 1930s. Zakho is a remote city surrounded by mountains in Northern Iraq and for three thousand years was home to Jews, Christians, and Muslims who lived peacefully with each other. This part of Iraq is so isolated that it was one of the only places in the world where the inhabitants still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Every else in the Middle East, Arabic became the dominant language when Muslim armies from Arabia conquered Mesopotamia but for time immemorial, Aramaic remained the language of the Jews of Kurdistan.

My Father’s Paradise: A son’s Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq is told by Ariel Sabar, an American-born journalist and Yona’s son.  The story begins with Yona’s grandfather, Ephraim, who was the only fabric dyer in Zakho. He was a religious and spiritual man and the stories surrounding his practice of Judaism exemplify how robust Judaism was in this city.

Yona’s father, Rahamim, and uncles, expanded the family business and became prosperous merchants. Yona lived a charmed childhood filled with family, friends, and even education as he was one of the few children in his community who went to school. This all changed in the 1950s with the forced evacuation of all Jews from Iraq. After the establishment of the state of Israel, Iraq renounced the citizenship of its Jewish population. There was a mass exodus of 120,000 Jews to Israel and Yona and his family were part of it.

Yona’s family arrives in Israel as penniless immigrants at the bottom of the social ladder. As described in the book, Israel was completely unprepared for the mass influx of immigrants in the early 1950s, and there were not enough residences nor jobs for all the new arrivals. Furthermore, the Middle Eastern Jews were considered second class citizens as compared to the European Jews. Yona’s memories of his parents struggle for survival and daily humiliations are central to Yona’s future destiny.

Yona has a menial day time job and attends night school. Through his hard work, he is accepted into Hebrew University. While taking a language course, his professor takes an interest in him since Yona speaks Aramaic, which at that time was an unexplored frontier in linguistics. Yona flourishes at Hebrew University and after graduation leaves Israel to earn his doctorate at Yale in Neo-Aramaic and eventually ends up as a professor at UCLA. Yona became the language’s foremost expert in the world as well as one of the only people who has documented the culture and life of the Kurdistan Jews.

This memoir is told by Ariel who had a very distant relationship with his father growing up and never tried nor wanted to understand his father’s past and who he was. It is not until Ariel has a family of his own and he visits Israel with his parents does he realize the importance of his family’s story. In 2004 – he quits his job as a newspaper journalist and sets out on a journey to explore his family’s history. The result of his journey is this gripping, captivating history.

A finalist in the non-fiction category for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle’s awards, My Father’s Paradise, is certainly worthy of this prize.  The book reads like a novel while rewarding the reader with a fascinating history and linguistics lesson.

Sita Sings The Blues

My favorite movie of 2009 wasn’t at the multiplex, and it didn’t cost $12 to see.  I’ve been checking it out in fits and starts for free on my computer, and it’s so charming that it’s completely worth the hassle that has entailed so far. 

Sita Sings the Blues is billed as “greatest breakup story ever told.”  It’s got everything: romance, comedy, heartbreak, action, dance numbers set to twenties jazz tunes – and its animated!  The movie is based upon the Indian epic The Ramayana.  The film is narrated by three puppets that can’t quite agree on the details of Rama and Sita’s story to hilarious effect.  Interwoven with the classic story is the modern day break-up of the film’s creator, Nina Paley, and her husband.

Along the way, Paley has had some copyright problems with the songs used in the film.  The copyright issues are an interesting story in their own right and are covered in depth at the Sita web site.  

Check out the entire movie for free or download a higher resolution copy (recommended) that you can burn to DVD yourself with the movie maker’s blessing, if you know how to do such things.

Gambling On Literature for The Kids

The 2009 Tournament of Books is slated to kick off next Monday, MArch 9th.  Once again, Coudal Partners is hosting a betting pool to benefit the charity First Book.  Last year the organizers were able to buy over 5000 books for needy families, and they hope to smash that record this year.  Because the event helps provide children with their first books, we’re all winners.  But the actual winners of the contest will receive fabulous prizes in addition to fantastic karma.  Win.  Place your bets.   For the children.

The Great Brain

My wife was lucky enough to have read many more books when she was young than I did.  If it didn’t have “Encyclopedia Brown” in the title or wasn’t about the sinking of the Bismark, I probably didn’t read it in my youth.  But now that we’ve got two kids of our own, my wife and I endeavor to read with our kids as a family, and my wife is always a great resource for picking out family books.  The Great Brain, by John D. Fitzgerald, was no exception.

This book, the first in the Great Brain series, tells the story of young J.D. Fitzgerald (short for John Dennis) and his brothers T.D. (short for Tom Dennis) and Sweyn, and their parents, a non-Mormon family living in primarily Mormon Adenville, Utah, in the late 1890′s.  T.D. is known as ”the Great Brain”, while J.D. is our narrator.

This first book tells the story, in unrelated but related chapters, of how T.D. manages to use wits and strategy to achieve positive outcomes in all sorts of circumstances.  Oftentimes these positive outcomes come at the expense of our storyteller, but he never seems to get too down; it’s almost as if his young mind feels that T.D. deserves everything he gets.

I won’t relate the whole story, but for those of you with kids in third grade and up, this really is a fun read for the whole family (and you can all take turns).  Just be prepared to explain to your kids what “Jackass Leapfrog” is.  I’m just lucky that was something I didn’t have to deal with when I was young.

Adieu, Wordsmiths, Adieu

Zachary Steele, owner of Wordsmiths Books, announced today via newsletter and blog post that Wordsmiths Books in Decatur is closing its doors for good. 

Wordsmiths was the home of the Baby Got Books Reading Series, as well as the host of numerous world-class book events far too numerous to mention here. It will be missed.  So many great bookish memories (cue Seasons in the Sun):

Zach and Russ doing their thing as the Abbott and Costello of the book world…  Katie, Lucy, and Dea Anne smiling behind the counter… John pouring the two-buck Chuck at events large and small…Webmaster Mike keeping us all in the loop… Your community will miss you all.

Wordsmiths is dead.  Long live Wordsmiths!

Book by its cover and all that

I’m pretty sure Tim really didn’t like Beginner’s Greek as much as I did. I say this because when he traded the book in as “used”, he gave me a nasty look and made some snarky comment about “never listening to my recommendation again, ever” and then forced me to wash and wax his car while making dinner for his entire family.

Some of the above things are true.

Regardless of anyone else’s opinion, I loved it. Beginner’s Greek, the debut novel from 48-year-old former Times editor James Collins, wrench’d my heart and tear’d my eye and provided one of my favorite quotes for my GoodReads page: “If you look over to see what the beautiful young woman sitting next to you is reading, and it turns out to be a book about angels, then you can with perfect justification refuse her entry into your life.”

That said, and having been in a bookstore at the time of the book’s release, I don’t think it ever really took off the way it deserved to. Critics fawned (unless they didn’t, at which point their opinions don’t count right now), people gasped, ladies dropped hankies and men bent to pick them up and everyone I suggested read Beginner’s Greek swooned (unless they didn’t).

So it’s fitting, then, that the book’s publisher should want to breathe new life into it for its release in paperback this year. In publishing, “breathe new life” always means “try to target another market.”  The original US hardback release of the book seemed aimed at readers of quirky, off-set modern fiction.

Now, Beginner’s Greek makes absolutely no bones about being a full-blooded “he gets the girl but bumbles along the way” love story. But, dear reader, the atrocity and insult done to Collins’ work by this new paperback cover…

…just breaks my heart and causes me to choke a little.  It was originally viewed by yours truly as the first page of a press sheet that had me, literally, screaming “what are they doing?”

I can understand the desire to prominently feature quotes from paragons of literary criticism like Entertainment Weekly, but really, that Meg Ryan-movie cover? Oh, wow.

So please, please, if you haven’t read Beginner’s Greek, I implore you to do so, despite the fact that it now looks like something you’d find between the greeting cards and the dish washing soap at your local grocery store. Don’t judge a book by…