A book (club) by its cover

My co-workers and I started a book club. I work in administration at a College, so it’s good that we all actively read. However, getting everyone together is such an ordeal, despite the fact that we are all “grown-ups.” I enjoy reading a lot, and will pretty much read anything, start to finish, no matter how bad, however, there are other people who refuse to read anything they don’t like. Talk about judging a book by the cover!

One of the books we recently read was The World To Come by Dara Horn. Technically it’s for young adults, but books are books, no matter what the level. This particular book is full of symbolism and metaphors. Most of them are Jewish, as the book is about a Jewish family and their legacy, but there were a lot of different things that were tied in: how to live life, how to enjoy life, what the meaning of life is, ect.

Now, as much as I enjoy philosophy, metaphors and Judiasim, I felt it was a bit much. Certainly the young adult thing could have thrown me off from the very beginning, but I made it all the way through the book. In the last 30 pages or so, I really felt a shift inside of me. By the end of the book, I loved it. I was able to look back and think: whatever age, whatever the author’s intended meaning, I really enjoyed this book.

I read this book and immediately started the next book of our book club, Run by Ann Patchett. Similarly this book seemed to probe the meaning and importance in life–indeed, perhaps all literature can be boiled down to this basic meaning–but this was done through the tale of a biracial family. It was a very touching book and a fast read. Yet, when I first heard that this would be the next book for the book club, I didn’t want to read it.

I’m not really interested in heartwarming stories in the traditional sense. When I read, I try to fill in gaps in my world. I read classic literature, modern Latin American authors, and other random works. Perhaps it’s because I did so much research on genocide, human rights, and issues of identity that I think this is too simple. It’s purpose is to go straight to the heart and offers little for the mind. And yet, at the end of Run, I was glad I had read it. I never would have picked it up on my own, though I had previously been told to read Bel Canto by Patchett.
In the end, I enjoy my book club, not just for the conversations we have after the book, but for the experience itself of stretching myself when it comes to literature. I am also a part of a human rights reading group that I enjoy for exactly the same reasons. We alternate fiction and non-fiction, and I have learned a lot from those books. One of the greatest accomplishments of a book is to get yourself out of your own positionality and see another person’s viewpoint. By extension, I believe this should be the highest goal of a book club, whether the cover appeals to you or not.

PS. Sorry this blog is so corny.

Dreams of Roma

I’m not sure how many of us imagine ourselves as conquering generals, ordering troops to massacre entire cities and thereby cleansing the country of the aristocracy. Yet, the main character in De Niro’s Game manages to have such images of grandeur while also remaining entirely sympathetic to the reader. Set in the midst of Lebanon’s civil war, De Niro’s Game is an amazing, multi-leveled story boy Rawi Hage. The book is accessible from many different standpoints: cultural references to The Deer Hunter and Robert De Niro; historical allusions such as the French Revolution; philosophy and literature as when Bassam reads Camus’ L’Etranger.

Yet, what I find most compelling about the book is the way Bassam seems to living in multiple layers of reality. From the very first chapter of the book Bassam sees events in the physical world as connecting with another philosophical or anagogical world. Roma is a city of great importance, though what that importance is I have yet to fathom though in my mind it is reminiscent of the poem Sailing to Byzantium by William Butler Yeats.

Despite the appearance of this dual reality, the real culmination of Bassam’s overlapping realities comes when he is in France. As he travels Paris he sees himself as a conquering general, cutting off the heads of noblemen and winning the revolution singlehandedly. Though the reader may doubt, as I did, that Bassam’s gripe on sanity was slipping, the doubts become lost as a complicated web of international terrorism is revealed. It is not so far fetched to see Bassam’s rebellious act of escaping the polarized country of his birth as revolutionary. He is the revolution of the revolution, precisely because he is a child of the revolution, having grown up and come to age in the midst of sectarian violence. Fighting communists, working with Jews, killing Muslims, none of it mattered because all of it amounted to was petty thieving, ruthless killing, and tiny men trying to make themselves kings of the garbage dump. The city Bassam grew up in was mere rubble, with bombs instead of stars, and bullet casings instead of marbles to trade.

Perhaps the most compelling part of the novel was its rich language and Bassam’s poetry-like stream of consciousness. If I took the time to look more closely at the analogies and imagery employed by Hage I am sure the richness of the text would become even fuller. But the simple act of reading this novel was so pleasurable that I am trying to get all of my friends to read it.