The House of the Spirits

I finished reading this book yesterday, and all day today bits of it kept floating into my mind. I was surprised when I thought about my lunch and realised I wouldn't be reading this book. I think I know why so many people love this book. I think I have fallen in love with it too.

It is the ending that convinced me this book is worth being on the 1001 Books to read before you Die List. It is part of my 1% reading challenge. I have to say my inner literary bookworm is so thrilled that I ended up liking this book that she is actually speaking to me (I don't read enough classics for her, this elitist book snob part of me that prefers I read only the best books. My constant argument with her is that these are books chosen by other people, not by me, and they are snobs since they don't consider fantasy or other genre writing to be 'classic' in most cases. This is an ongoing argument with myself, but since I've signed up for the 1% challenge my ILB is happily planning how to convince me to read Proust and is leaving me alone with Charles de Lint for the next year instead making me read Canadian authors I don't like just to please her. I wish I could like Carol Shields, but her early book Swann's Way I couldn't finish, and I can't stand Mordecai Richler's The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz. I hate that book!!! So I don't care what the rest of the world says, I'll keep reading LM Montgomery and Charles de Lint instead....yikes, I think my Inner Literary Bookworm just snarled at me!) Sorry for the side comments, you see the struggle I have between wanting to be well-read and actually reading 'classics'.....

So, I opened The House of the Spirits not knowing what to expect, except that I knew a lot of people, both in the blogging world and from my years at the bookstores, who read and loved this book. From the beginning this book swept me up into the story of the Trueba family. Clara, Esteban, Alba, Miguel, Ferula, Nanny, Pedro, Blanca, they were alive in the way that only the best characters are. Clara floated through the novel as she floated in her world, and in the same way she was the heart of the house, and her family, she was the heart of the story. Clara the clairvoyant, who talked with the spirits and dreamed the future; Esteban, who seems to be a loud tyrant, and slowly is revealed to represent the old Chile - he is the voice for the wealthy landowner, conservative MP, who doesn't understand why his serfs want rights and equality. It is fascinating to see how Allende gives voice to all her characters, so we see Esteban proud of what he has accomplished and unaware of how feared he was - yet knowing he had to 'rule his peasants with a firm hand because they are like children'. Clara, who knows the future, but unable to run her household or prevent her dear sister-in-law being thrown out, or stop the future from happening - she just sees it. Blanca, the only one to get her heart's desire in the end. All these characters are the centre of the book, the heart of the family, this proud, dysfunctional family caught up in Chile's tumultous 20th century culminating in the terrible coup d'etat in Sept 1973 that saw President Allende - the uncle of the writer - overthown. The Trueba family is caught up in these events, and to my mind, the most powerful part of the book is the ending, when Alba is taken away in the night to be tortured. I stayed up late Tuesday night to finish the book, and I wept through all the terrible suffering and torture. Isabel Allende takes the story of Chile's change from an agricultural country with the land held by a few to a semi-industrialized nation with the dispossessed workers moving to the city and starving and makes it become real through the position the Trueba family holds and the differing values and beliefs of each of the family members. While this is a common technique in novels, in this book, this brings the struggles to change, the resistance by the rich, leading to the Marxist president and then his eventual overthrow by the army a gripping one that had me on edge, because the characters are intimately involved in different levels of society in that world. Jaime is a doctor, Esteban is a senator and landowner, Blanca loves a revolutionary, as does Alba. Knowing the outcome of the real-life events only gives the novel a deeper edge. One of the most shocking moments for me was when Jaime (one of Esteban and Clara's sons) receives a phone call from the President's Office on the morning of the coup. He goes. It gave me a start because in real life, I had recently watched one of our talk-show hosts on TV Ontario (a public station like PBS in the US) interview Ariel Dorfman, who worked as one of the spokesmen for President Allende. He survived the coup because on the morning of the coup, he didn't receive a phone call. He wondered why later, and found out that someone already at the Presidential Office had crossed his name off the list and offered herself instead, thereby saving Dorfman's life. Dorfman was allowed to flee the country, and eventually ended up in the US, and has just recently made a film about the coup, called "A Promise to the Dead", and what life has been like for him as an exile. I also would like to say that I lived next door to a woman for many years here in Ottawa, who was also an exile from Chile. She and her brother fled after the coup. She only ever talked about being away from Chile and not being able to go back, and what her family did before, a little. She was always so sad, and for her, life was before the coup, and after. So I brought all this with me to the book, and when I read that paragraph: "The day of the coup the sun was shining, a rare event in that timid spring that was just dawning. Jaime had worked practically all night and by seven in the morning his body had had only two hours of sleep. He was awakened by the ring of the telephone. It was a secretary, her voice slightly agitated, who scared his drowsiness away. She was calling from the Presidential Palace to inform him that he should present himself there as soon as possible; no, the President was not ill, no, she was not sure what was happening, she had simply been instructed to call all the President's doctors." I gave a little jump. From now on, it was the recounting of what really happened, in the guise of fiction. And by putting into fiction, by writing about it, Allende has born witness to what happened, and made sure the story is told.

This is why writing is important, why books are censored, why writers are feared by dictators, presidents, tyrants, anyone who fears free speech: writers, and the stories and books they tell, show the truth. They tell the stories so people will remember what happened. So all the people who died in Chile, in Rwanda, in the Congo, in World War 2, in the past and in the future, will be remembered. So their voices will be heard.

"they can't do that to someone from my own family, in my own house, because then what the hell is left for everybody else, if people like us can be arrested then nobody is safe, that more than twenty years in Congress aren't worth a damn and all the acquaintances I have, I know everybody in this country, at least everyone important, even General Hurtado, who's my personal friend but in this case hasn't lifted a finger to help me locate my granddaughter, it's not possible she could just disappear as if by magic, that they could take her away in the night and that I should never hear a word of her again...." Every parent is in those words, every person who lost someone in that coup, and in Argentina, and anywhere else where people disappear because of what they stand for.

This book breaks my heart, and puts it back together, and is amazing, beautiful, and haunting. It is a story about love, and death, about idiosyncrasies and human souls and evil and ghosts and it is above all wise and haunting, like Clara, like the ghosts who run up and down the halls of the house of the title.

I will do another post of the banned book Challenge, but as I still have to review A Wrinkle in Time (which I also loved), I will leave it for another day, when it is not so late! It's well past midnight now! I, and my Inner Literary Bookworm, are still mulling through all the ideas and emotions The House of the Spirits brought up. And I haven't even discussed the poetry of the settings, the language, the humour, the life in this novel. If you haven't read it yet, then it's worth it to get it. and if you have, let me know and I'll add your review link to the bottom, and I'll come see what you thought about the book. If I had a book club, this would be one of the books we'd read the first year.

And, in a side note, the coup in Chile occurred Sept 11, 1973. Ariel Dorfman has written a book titled : "Other Septembers, Other Americas". Here is a link to a recent interview with Dorfman on Salon , about his film, and what it was like to go back to Chile and revisit his memories of President Allende and the coup. If we get the film up here I will be going to see it.

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury

It has been many years since I last read Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. I picked it for the Banned Books Challenge so I could re-read it again. I am so glad I did. In a mere 179 pages - mere considering the enormous tomes that come out now in trilogies and 7 book series - Ray Bradbury reminded me of what science fiction is at its heart. We look into the future, and we are shown a possibility, a world that could be.

Fahrenheit 451 looks into a future for our world, and shows us a terrible world that is even more creepy because we are on our way to becoming that world. If we burn one book, if we allow the freedom to ban books, to ban thinking and remembering, which is what books are, then what is the result? Fahrenheit 451 shows us that result. This book is a chilling look at a future that we are on our way to having, and that is the worst thing about it. How can we not have learned anything in the last 60 years since this book was first published? How did Bradbury imagine we would have reality tv, barely-there earphones that keep us plugged in to our own music, or the radio, so all the time we are surrounded by sound? And, of course, the book banning. Whereas I can't figure out why Inkheart would be banned, I know why this book would be considered, which is ironic.

So what is there in Fahrenheit 451 to be afraid of? On top of everything listed above, there is the sound of the 'war' in the background of this novel. Periodically the news will mention briefly that another war has been launched, and every night or morning, it's a daily thing - Guy Montag (the hero) and the rest of the city shudders under the sound of the jets flying over head. Or they would shudder, if they weren't numbed by tv and the audio shells. It's always in the background, and no countries are named, and it's over by nightfall. It's so constant that no one talks about it, no one wonders. And I began to think of our own current day, with our current war-that-is-not-war in Iraq. Unlike the US, we have never declared war openly on Iraq. We simply went to war to fight the insurgents, one day. There was never any debate in our House of Commons, and we are over there not under the arm of the UN, nor really as colleagues of the US, even though we are supporting the US war on terrorism. It is very strange, and I can't quite figure out how we are supposed to know we have won when 'the enemy' is not something you can crush - we all know that idealogy can't be wiped out even if you destroy its army. And Fahrenheit 451 is about the numbness that people in general feel when they stop thinking, when they accept what they are told without question. Have you noticed how the news about the war in Iraq is changing? Here in Canada, we no longer here about the bombing errors, we only hear about the occasional 'successful' raid, and about every casualty our army suffers. We don't have to put up with George Bush's rhetoric, thank heavens, because he is terrifying and has made this war numbing to hear about. For the rest of us back here it is numbing, not for the men and women of so many countries (some under the UN banner) who are out there in Iraq, fighting, and in Afghanistan (where we are based), 'restoring peace' I think is what we are officially doing. For them, the war is real. And for their sakes as well as ours, we owe it to remember, and to recognize that our governments don't want us thinking very hard about this war. Fahrenheit 451 is about that numbing, so that no one knows and no one questions anything anymore. And while I hear promises that one day we will all be out of Iraq, I don't hear any active discussion, debate, no active dissent any more. No one seems to have an opinion, or if they do, it is quickly hushed up. And that is the future that Bradbury envisioned, the numbing of the freedom to think, which becomes the numbing of the ability to act. So this book is as relevant as it was when it was first published 60 years ago.

Fahrenheit 451 is the temperature at which books begin to burn. Guy Montag is the hero, the fireman who wears 451 on his hat, signifying he is a fireman who sets books and houses on fire. Among the many horrors of this book is the fact history is being rewritten - according to the fireman's rule book, Benjamin Franklin in 1790 was the first fireman! To burn 'English-influenced books in the colonies'. Books can rewrite history, and the winners write that history. So they can't be all true. So what is so frightening about them? If one book can say one thing,and another the opposite? If history is rewritten, so what came before is changed again? Why is this important? It's because books carry the history of what people did before.
Or, as Granger, one of the characters we meet near the end of the book says:
" But even when we had the books on hand, a long time ago, we didn't use what we got out of them. We went right on insulting the dead. We went right on spitting in the graves of all the poor ones who died before us. We're going to meet a lot of lonely people in the next week and the next month and the next year. And when they ask us what we're doing, you can say, We're remembering. That's where we'll win out in the long run. And someday we'll remember so much that we'll build the biggest goddamn steamshovel in history and dig the biggest grave of all time and shove war in and cover it up."

In case you think this book is dark and terrifying - which it is, in places - there is also love and hope and friends. Guy discovers he is not alone, in hiding books, in questioning what they are living, their life. He can't remember simple things like where he met his wife Mildred. It is a terrifying world where no one connects except those who ask questions, but then they become dangerous because they don't accept the status quo. Where teenagers race to see who survives the night, because they don't care, and everyone accepts this fact. Where Mildred his wife tries to kill herself, and then is given a memory-wipe pill after she is saved, so the next day she has no idea what her husband is talking about. That underlying despair that everyone tries to cover up with noise. One of the most memorable characters is Clarisse McClellan, who he meets at the beginning of the novel. She is a teenager, and acts as his muse:
"I sometimes think drivers don't know what grass is, or flowers, because they never see them slowly," she said. "If you showed a driver a green blur, Oh yes! he'd say, that's grass! A pink blur? That's a rose garden. White blurs are houses. Brown blurs are cows. My uncle drove slowly on the highway once. He drove forty miles an hour and they jailed him for two days. Isn't that funny, and sad, too?"
"You think too many things," said Montag, uneasily.
"I rarely watch the 'parlor walls' or go to races or Fun Parks. So I've lots of time for crazy thoughts, I guess. Have you seen the two hundred-foot-long billboards in the country beyond town? Did you know once that billboards were only twenty feet long? But cars started rushing by so quickly they had to stretch the advertising out so it would last."
"I didn't know that!" Montag laughed abruptly.
"Bet I know something else you don't. There's dew on the grass in the morning."

He lives in a world in which television has become interactive walls in your house, where you can have three - ultimately 4 - walls in the 'tv parlor' which are set with your name, so when the announcer of the game shows or tv reality shows announce your name - because you've paid for the subscription price, of course - you feel like part of the 'family'. Where you wear audio SeaShells every other moment, or, when on public transit, ads are blasted at you. Mildred wants the 4th wall so she can lose herself entirely in the tv family. Of course, Montag has realized that the tv isn't real, and the family isn't real. But his wife doesn't want to see it. So when Clarisse starts talking to him, all the simmering unconscious questions he has suddenly surface.

Fahrenheit 451 is about one man's awakening, and how he escapes. It is chilling, yes, especially the ending - and I don't want to give it away, so I can't say more, but it is so amazing and powerful it is breathtaking, it is stunning, and also full of hope. Most of all, against all the horrors of a world gone mad with numbness, Bradbury shows the way out: Pay attention. Ask why. Read. Remember. If the book begins with acts of destruction, it ends with what we should be doing:
"Everyone must leave something behind when he dies, my grandfather said. A child or a book or a painting or a house or a wall built or a pair of shoes made. Or a garden planted. Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die, and when people look at that tree or that flower you planted, you're there. It doesn't matter what you do, he said, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that's like you after you take your hands away."

This is a powerful novel. I hope you get to read it one day, Gentle Reader, if you have not read it yet. This is one of those necessary books to read, I think.

Other people's posts - and please, if you have reviewed this or any book I have posted about, send me your link and I will add it (thanks!):
Chris at Book-A-Rama
3M
Rhinoa
Joanna (Lost in A Good Story)
Teddy (So Many Books)
Nymeth

Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky

What an extraordinary book. It took me a little while to get into, because at first almost all the characters are so unsympathetic, looked at with such a clear, cold eye, all their faults and shortcomings exposed, that it was difficult for me to know what I was expected to feel. Was there no character I could like? I enjoyed the details, the drama of the exodus from Paris, so I kept reading. And soon enough, characters to cheer for emerged- the Michauds, then eventually Lucile, and Jean-Marie, and even Bruno the German soldier.

The descriptions in the book, the settings, the people, overtaken by events, and then settling down again - it does feel like music, and that was her aim. She wanted to write the novel in 5 momements or stages, 200 pages each. Suite Francaise contains the first two parts, although she had notes for the other three and an ending in mind. The novel ends, of course, halfway through the story, and in teh story timeline, at the middle of 1942, which is when Nemirovsky was taken to the camps where she died. By writing the book in real time - that is, using real dates of the Occupation, she sets the novel in real time, and this adds an extra dimension to my (at least) reading experience, because side by side with reading the book I found myself thinking, it reads like the novel is happening as the war happens. And indeed, Nemirvosky wrote this novel very quickly, and it is astounding at how good it is for what is really a first draft with major corrections done by the author. It is a fascinating study of people, of historical events shaping lives and how ordinary people cope. This is a haunting and memorable book, and in the back of any one who reads this book are two things: one, this war between these people at this time really happened, and two, the author was killed at Auschwitz, a direct result of this war. It is one of the most stunning accounts of what life under the Occupation was like, in France, in small ways; because the French had their own society feuds that kept on, despite the German requisitioning of everything. The awfulness and pettiness of people is revealed, but also the human capacity to try to survive, and for even fewer people, to survive with dignity.

In the notes to herself, contained in the journal that this novel was discovered in, she writes: "The most important and most interesting thing here is the following: the historical, revolutionary facts etc must be only lightly touched upon, while daily life, the emotional life and especially the comedy it provides must be described in detail." This was her goal in writing the book what she hoped to achieve.
These are Irene's own words, written in her journal that her daughters carried around with them when their parents were taken away because they were Jewish. The girls went into hiding until the war ended, and only long after was the journal finally looked at and the novel discovered. Denise, the eldest daughter, grabbed it as they ran from the house because it was a momento of her mother, who was always seen writing in it.

There are places and events in the book that are written with such clarity that I think Nemirovsky must have put in events she had witnessed. There is a horrific scene in the beginning, when a train station is bombed by a German plane : "The glass roof shattered and exploded outwards, wounding and killing the people in the square. Panic-stricken, some of the women threw down their babies as if they were cumbersome packages and ran."
I had to stop and re-read that passage. It is horrifying and awful and terrible to imagine. The whole book for me was like that, filled with images that were reporting the war to the readers through the images in the book. There is a veracity to the events and descriptions that made me realize, that Nemirovsky must have witnessed herself these, or heard first-hand accounts. Her desire, though, wasn't to show the horrors of war; she wanted to write about the affects of war upon ordinary people caught up in the events. In chapter 29, she writes in a paragraph that seems to me to be the heart of the novel: "Important events - whether serious, happy or unfortunate - do not change a man's soul, they merely bring it into relief, just as a strong gust of wind reveals the true shape of a tree when it blows off all its leaves. Such events highlight what is hidden in the shadows; they nudge the spirit towards a place where it can flourish." When I read that passage, I marked it, which I rarely do in a fiction novel, but I knew I wanted to remember it. War, Nemirovsky is saying, doesn't change people. It brings out what was in them all the time. So the characters we meet at the beginning were always mean and grasping, layered with middle-class bourgeois attitudes, or more rarely, gentle and sweet.

As the novel progresses, we do meet more people, farmers, villagers, and the local gentry, and the effects of the German occupation on the village and people.


Nemirovsky doesn't play favourites: the French come across as lazy and whose first duty is to pleasure, which is what costs them the war with Germany. She doesn't go on about how awful life was except through the villagers complaining about food shortages, and in casual comments or observations from the characters, the shootings of people who break the laws, but done more as an aside, not the central part of the book at all. The Germans are given, surprisingly, good and bad characteristics also. I say surprisingly because it must have been the novelist winning out over the real-life precarious position she was in the whole time she was writing the book. The German who lodges with Lucile and her mother-in-law is an awesome character - he is close to noble, a musician who can't write his music because the drums of war have beaten the melodies away. He is well-bred, and polite, and thoughtful, and is close to an ideal hero, but not, because he is on the other side of the war. In contrast, one of his comrade in arms, Bonnet, is a sadist: "During the retreat of the French army, when he was in charge of taking the pathetic herd of prisoners back to Germany, during those terrible days when he was under orders to kill anyone who was flagging, anyone who wasn't walking fast enough, he shot the ones he didn't like the look of without remorse, with pleasure even." Again, this is a passage that I marked when I read it, because it is so clearly drawn that I wondered if Nemirovsky had seen someone doing just that, or heard about it. It almost reads as though she is getting revenge on the German occupation by writing the truth, and disguising it in the novel. This is part of what raises this book so high in my esteem. There is a ring of veracity in this book that is rare in fiction.

There is beauty and love in this novel, as well as hatred and seediness and greed and pity. This is a novel about people caught in a terrible situation. And it is gripping reading, and lovely in places, horrifying in others. I love this book, and it is one I will return to again and again.

This should also be required reading in schools - Grade 11 or 12, I would think. There would be much to discuss and learn from reading this book, and history would come alive, for a while. I don't know why the book is banned ( or someone tried to ban it), again the book list for the challenge is from here in Ontario, but it shouldn't be. This is one of the best fiction novels I've ever read.

Links: Marg
Charlotte

http://pelhamlibrary.blogspot.com/2008/01/banned-book-challenge.html

This is a challenge running from Feb 24 to June 30, 2008. You can register at the site, and there is also this year's list of banned books by the Pelham Library to choose from as well as past years'. I have chosen five books:
1. Inkheart - Cornelia Funke
2. Suite Francaise - Irene Nemirovsky
3. Ulysses - James Joyce
4. Fahrenheit 451 - Ray Bradbury
5. A Wrinkle in Time - Madeleine L'Engle

Nothing like a challenge to get me moving, especially as I did find a list of banned books in Canada and put it on my computer and hadn't gotten around to choosing any for this year. I also like how Feb 24 is Freedom to Read Week in Canada! I believe in that!

Let me know if you decide to join the challenge. I still can't get over Stephen King being banned this year. I would have added some of his, and I might still do, if I get the others read in time.