Americanah

Named as one of the ten best books of 2013 by New York Times, Americanah has been on my 'to read' list for some time. And I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Two Nigerian high school students fall in love, one moves to England, one to the US, and they both end up back in Nigeria. That's the bare bones of the plot. There's so much more to the book. Against the backdrop of the love story, there unfolded a nuanced description of family, ambition, separations, and race. Especially race. The distinction of being an NAB - non American Black and how your attitudes are so different from those of American Blacks. The significance of letting your hair go natural instead of continuing to use relaxants (which by the way sound like cruel and unusual punishment).

I enjoyed the book and recommend it.



Links to past book reviews, with some of my favourites at the top:
Non Fiction:
The Innovator's Dilemma
The Wave: In Search of the Rogues, Freaks and Giants of the Ocean (my most viewed book review)
Curiosity (my second most viewed book review)
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks 
The Checklist Manifesto
Uncharted
The Lean Start-up
The Upside of Irrationality
Thinking, Fast and Slow
Steve Jobs
Global Warring
Nudge

Fiction:
Americanah
Life After Life
A Possible Life (I love anything by Sebastien Faulks)
Mr. Penumbra's 24 Hour Bookstore
Major Pettigrew's Last Stand
Rules of Civility
The Taliban Cricket Club
The Vault
Before I Go To Sleep
A Son of the Circus
Still Alice
Faithful Place
Defending Jacob
The Strangler
The Help
The Housekeeper and the Professor


Some series I've liked:
Donna Leon's series about the Venetian detective Guido Brunelli: A Question of Belief
Canadian Peter Robinson's series about British detective Alan Banks: Before the Poison, Bad Boy
James Church books about a North Korean detective: A Corpse in the Koryo, Hidden Moon, Bamboo and Blood, The Man with the Baltic Stare
Gianrico Carofiglio's series about an Italian policeman: Involuntary Witness
Jo Nesbo's series about Norwegian detective Harry Hole: The Redeemer, The Redbreast, Nemesis
Alexander McCall Smith's series about the No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
Andrea Cammillieri's books about Sicilian Inspector Montalbano: The Shape of Water
Martin Walker's series about French local policeman Bruno, Chief of Police
Louise Penny's detective series set in the Eastern Townships of Quebec: Still Life
Jussi Adler-Olsen's series about Danish detective Carl Morck: The Keeper of Lost Causes
Ruth Rendell's books about Chief Inspector Reg Wexford
Arnald Indridsadon's books about Finnish detective Erlendur: Arctic Chill, Hypothermia and Outrage

Other books I've also liked:
The Spoiler
The Secret Race
The Blondes
San Miguel
The Better Angels of our Nature
Radioactive
The Believing Brain
Hellstrom's Hive
22 Britannia Road
The Imposter Bride
Murder as a Fine Art
Adapt
The Invisible Bridge
This Body of Death
Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air
Berlin Crossing
Gold
The Marriage Plot
The Paris Wife
The Forgotten Affairs of Youth
Turn of Mind
The Secret Speech
The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
The Makioka Sisters
Russka
Suite Francaise
The Man from Beijing
Innocent
At Bertram's Hotel
Red April
You Are Not a Gadget
Five Smooth Stones
River of Gods
Nasty, Brutish and Short: The Quirks and Quarks guide to Animal Sex and Other Weird Behaviour
The Ghost
The Council of Dads
The Elements
Tribes
The Elephant, The Tiger and the Cellphone
McMafia
The Janissary Tree


Some books I didn't like very much:
A Perfect Heaven
Potsdam Station
The End of the Wasp Season
The Dark Room
Dead or Alive
A Vintage Affair
The Finkler Question
When the Devil Holds the Candle

Family Portrait in Black and White

Family Portrait in Black and White opens in the Ukraine with scenes of laughing children playing together under the care of the saintly Olga Nenya, a foster mother taking care of 23 such orphaned children. Sixteen of them  are biracial,  and Olga's dedication is even more impressive when set against the malevolent, open racism in the town and the active skinheads who beat up and kill black people, seemingly with little intervention from the police.  

The children's lives are highly structured: strict rules and plenty of household tasks.  Life is modest - the council thinks the house should be condemned - but we see lots of caring and hugs between the children and their foster mother, whom they consider to be their real mother.  Through a charity organized to help Ukrainian children after Chernobyl, several children spend summers and Christmas with generous families in Italy and France, which adds enrichment to the spartan life they experience in the Ukraine.

But the movie slowly unveils problems within this unusual family.  Older children, especially the brightest ones, face difficulties following the educational paths they want.  When some of the European families want to adopt the children, they are blocked by Olga who holds their guardianship.  One girl 'escapes' from the family.  It's clear she's grateful to Olga and still holds her in considerable affection, but feels she needs to pursue the better life in Italy.

The movie ends with the reflections of Kiril, a bright and sensitive boy who makes it to university, resulting in estrangement from Olga.  Kiril characterizes the home as a totalitarian state with Olga in the role of Stalin, and Kiril a dissident.  

This film might have Black and White in the title, but there's nothing black and white about this situation.  It's a complex, nuanced film and not the one the filmmaker originally set out to make.  At first, she was going to make a film about racism in the Ukraine.  Then she thought it would be about the saintly foster mother Olga.  As time went on, the focus veered to the autocratic style of Olga.  The movie ended up containing elements of all these themes.

I wasn't the only one who loved this film.  It won the Best Canadian Feature at Hot Docs. 

Five Smooth Stones

Five Smooth Stones, a 1966 book by Ann Fairbairn, is another book I picked up on the Not Wanted table at our local regatta.  The book felt like a historical novel of a far-away time - and yet I was in university at the time of its publication (funny how that's happening more often these days).

The book traces the life of David Champlin, a black man born poor in New Orleans through his education in the North (liberal arts college followed by Harvard Law) and his ultimate involvement in the civil rights movement. 

It was a time when Coloured and Negro were both acceptable descriptors.  Older black people were focused on surviving in the divided Southern society, teaching their children to avoid any possibility of confrontation, to keep their eyes downcast around whites.  Blacks were barred from many public buildings, parks, pools, schools; more importantly they were blocked from registering to vote.  Blacks and whites are mutually distrustful.

Yet, David becomes the protege of both black and white people, and falls in love with a white girl.  The love story is interwoven throughout the novel.  Their relationship is unthinkable in the south and more importantly in David's mind, even though he meets couples of mixed race in the North.

The reality of the book felt so distant from our situation today.  It's not that everything is smooth and easy for blacks today, but you'd be hard pressed to find people to argue that blacks should be denied access to the fruits of civil society as they were back then in the South.

The book also made me wonder if we sometimes misjudge the significance of events in our own time.  In Five Smooth Stones, there are many mentions of Medgar Evers, the civil rights activist assassinated in 1963, but only a glancing mention of the contemporaneous March on Washington led by Martin Luther King.  If this book was your sole source of information about the civil rights movement, you would never guess how deeply the "I have a dream" speech is engrained in our psyche, nor that the Americans have named a holiday after Martin Luther King Jr. 

One other thing that really struck me, apart from the inordinate amount of smoking and drinking (liquor and instant coffee) that everyone indulged in.  It was that a book evangelizing civil rights and equality could have such a medieval attitude toward homosexuality.  Champin is almost driven out of the liberal arts college he attends through the evil machinations of a racist dean.  And how does he attack Champlin?  With an accusation that he is gay.  Being gay was worse than being black.  And when the dean is ousted from the college, it is because he himself is proved to be gay.  You can fight for human rights for one category of humans, and yet not generalize such rights to all humans.

I didn't consider this a great book.  Far too often, I could guess where the plot was leading.  The good characters were just a little bit too good, and the bad characters were really bad.  The latter part became a bit sermonistic and many of the descriptions of the activist events were rather convoluted and hard to understand.  Nevertheless, I was fascinated by its depiction of that era and  it kept me turning the pages for over 900 pages, so I guess it couldn't have been that bad.