THE LITBLOG CO-OP

Will I Join? Are You Kidding Me?

It took me all of about 4 seconds to hit the reply button and type in "Are you kidding me, absolutely!" when Mark Sarvas mentioned that a couple of the original LBC members were stepping down and wondered if I'd be interested in becoming a member.

How could I not be excited?  Since the beginning of April, some 7 months ago, I've visited this site daily.  I've participated in some of the discussions.  Those names listed under participating weblogs are some of the places I visit within minutes of signing on to my computer every morning.  These folks have all also been extremely kind, frequently linking to various EWN (Emerging Writers Network) endeavors, helping bring me more visitors on a regular basis.

Some of you readers may have bounced over to my site in the past.  If so, and you stayed long enough to read the EWN mission, you should have no doubts about my excitement in being included here.  The mission at the EWN is to develop a growing community of emerging writers, established writers deserving of wider recognition, and readers of such writing, in order to expose such writers to as large an audience as possible.  I don't know about you, but to me, that's not all that far off from what you'll read at the top of this page:  "...the purpose of drawing attention to the best of contemporary fiction, authors and presses that are struggling to be noticed in a flooded marketplace."

Just finding the various blogs, over the past year or so, that you will find participating here has caused me great excitement.  Knowing there were others out there as obsessed as I was with titles not penned by Grisham or Steele or King, was reason enough to grab my attention.  Actually being asked to join them and try to help them get the word out through the LBC?  I actually think I burned up a little bit of the internet I answered yes so quickly.

Enjoy,

Try the Indian

As we close out our discussion this week, I'm aware (always keenly) of so many things about Maps that we haven't mentioned. Did I share the fact that chapter ten features a concert by the late, great Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan? Did I tell you, as the narrator does, that a sparrow has three thousand feathers and grows an extra five hundred at the beginning of winter? What good am I?

I wish we had said more about the humor in Maps, which sometimes takes a second or third reading to catch. There's a subplot, for example, involving efforts by the family of the honor-killers to cover the killers' tracks. It's too complicated to describe fully here, but suffice it to say that a) the family is not nearly clever or criminal-minded enough to get away with it, and b) their plan depends on the unlikely event of finding two young strangers to stand in for the missing couple. It's a hopeless scheme, but they find one boy who agrees to participate. In the end, they spend so much time conspiring with the boy that people start to notice. The family is shocked when a neighbor asks: so who's that kid that's always hanging around?

Speaking of funny, did I mention the plumber who drives by in chapter eight? His van bears the legend, "You've tried the cowboys, now try the Indian."

Good advice, that.

When two cultures collide

Your rumination on shame as a theme in the book is interesting, Sam, and, indeed, Kaukab's shame is almost excruciating to read about in the scene you describe.  The amount of shame a character experiences in Maps for Lost Lovers seems to increase his or her capacity for hurting others.  The character who feels the least shame of all, Shamas' missing brother Jugnu, is gentle - so gentle that he seems to attract the butterflies and moths that fascinate him.

But Nadeem Aslam gives another reason why these colorful insects are attracted to Jugnu.  Working with phosphorescent materials when he was younger has caused Jugnu's hands to glow in the dark.  This surreal touch, which paints Jugnu, who we meet only in flashback, as an otherworldly angelic figure, is one of many in the book.  Another is the idea, most strongly held by the women in the community, that djinns, ghostly demons that cause good Muslims to stray, can be blamed for some of their troubles.  (Incidentally, the Western concept of the "genie" derives from these djinns).  Aslam's decadent language lends a further dreamy quality to the book.

All of this is a counterpoint to the reality of the daily lives the characters in this book live.  While Kaukab dreams of fragrant roses in Pakistan, she fears encounters with English people.  Our characters must ride crowded buses.  They wonder if they should insert the word "fuck" when talking to English people, so that the urgency of what they are saying will come across.

I suppose I keep coming back to that same theme, assimilation, or the lack thereof.  When two cultures collide, each can suddenly be observed through new eyes.  To the Pakistanis, the English seem vulgar, stupid and bland, and to the English, the Pakistanis seem backward, threatening and, as Kaukab fears, smelly.  Shamas and Kaukab's children, the younger generation, are able to assimilate much more smoothly, and while this frees them from some of the difficulties their parents experience, it also leads to terrible friction within the family.

Love and Shame

Funny you should mention the "unremitting grayness" of England, Max. I was struck, on the contrary, by how exotic Aslam makes the English landscape seem. A small example:

The house is on a street that runs along the base of the hill. This street is linked by a side-street to a shelf-like road higher up the hill and, in late summer, when the abundant fruit of the wild cherry trees gets trodden on, the footpaths up there are stained with red and dark-blue smears.

The violence too, in a way, adds to the otherworldliness of the setting.

I've been thinking about Maps in connection with other books I've read about the Indian diaspora, including classics like Naipaul's A House for Mr. Biswas (set in Trinidad) and more recent examples like M. G. Vassanji's The In-Between World of Vikram Lall (set in East Africa). Biswas is one of my favorite books, and there are a few parallels, I think, with Maps. One of them is the contrast between an easy-going writer-father (Raghu in Biswas, Shamas in Maps) and an angry, cynical son (Anand and Ujala, respectively). Naipaul explains the relationship like this:

Though no one recognized his strength, Anand was among the strong. His satirical sense kept him aloof. At first this was only a pose, in imitation of his father. But satire led to contempt, and contempt, quick, deep, inclusive, became part of his nature. It led to inadequacies, to self-awareness, and to lasting loneliness.

But in Maps, it seems to me, the focus is much less on the family and more on the community at large than it is in Biswas. I think love has a role in this, as a force that sends family members out into the world to find it, and at the same time circulates strangers into the family. Love in Maps, though in a more somber way, works almost as it does in a Shakespeare comedy, motivating all sorts of strange and unlikely behaviors. Lovers in Maps act as if under a spell, without regard, as with the disappeared couple, or with the affair between Shamas and Suraya, of logic or their own well-being.

The opposing force to love, in Maps, is shame or embarrassment. It's embarrassment, I would argue, not religious belief, which produces the suffering and violence in the book. Believers like Kaukab are not simply offended by, for example, seeing their offspring with non-Muslim partners; they are profoundly shamed and embarrassed. Embarrassment inspires much of the everyday anger in the world, and it's a fact I never thought much about until I read (speaking of unlikely things), Christopher Ricks's Keats and Embarrassment. This is certainly one of the oddest books of literary criticism you'll come across, and was written three decades before Ricks's surpassingly odd book on Dylan. Ricks writes:

Indignation stands interestingly to embarrassment; the one hot flush drives the other, as fire fire, so that a common way of staving off the embarrassment one would otherwise feel is by inciting oneself to indignation.

Like love, shame in Maps produces strange behaviors. I think of the scene in which Kaukab, embarrassed almost to the point of derangement when her son brings his white girlfriend home for dinner, uses a pair of old shoes as serving dishes. Ricks proposes that "one of the things for which we value art is that it helps us deal with embarrassment, not by abolishing or ignoring it, but by recognizing, refining, and putting it to good human purposes," and that artists like Keats instruct us in being "morally intelligent" about embarrassment and its consequences.

I don't suppose many the readers would think of Ricks (or Shakespeare, or perhaps even Naipaul) when reading Maps, and I suppose it rankles a writer to see such weird connections being made. But readers, like writers, bring to a book whatever they have. Which is, if the writer is very lucky, everything they know and everything they are...

[Amardeep reminds me that I omitted a link to OGIC's wonderful post on Maps when she announced the nomination. Read it here.]

A Tragedy of Assimilation

We tend to see only the biggest battlegrounds in what some call a war between Muslim extremism and the West.  We see terrorist attacks and suicide bombs and we see Western armies in the Middle East.  But while bloody conflicts are playing out on battlefields (and on city streets and in subways), these two supposedly warring peoples are living side by side in our cities.  Some will suggest that we are living in a time of great conflict, but we are also living in a time of assimilation, and Nadeem Aslam's novel, Maps for Lost Lovers, is about that assimilation.

As Sam wrote yesterday, the family at the center of the novel has settled in a Pakistani community in an unnamed English town.  Aslam describes how the members of this community have struggled to recreate a sense of their homeland in the unremitting greyness of England:

As in Lahore, a road in this town is named after Goethe.  There is a Park Street here as in Calcutta, a Malabar Hill as in Bombay, and a Naag Tolla as in Dhaka.  Because it was difficult to pronounce the English names, the men who arrived in this town in the 1950s had rechristened everything that came before them.

Aslam weaves, with his dense descriptions, a lush portrait of this community.  For the first generation of immigrants, the illusion that they have created is a convincing enough backdrop to continue with their old traditions and religious practices, including the suspected honor killing that is at the center of the book.  The struggle to stay the same in an entirely new and hostile place is embodied in the family's matriarch, Kaukab.

Aslam's greatest feat is his ability to embody the struggle of a whole generation of people in Kaukab.  She is a proponent of ugly things about Islam, including ideas that seem to lead inexorably to violence against women.  As Kaukab's children, a generation removed from the homeland, become assimilated into Western culture, it causes great suffering for Kaukab.  And though Kaukab says and does many hateful things in the name of her religion, Aslam is able to make her sympathetic to the reader.  Kaukab wants desperately to understand why the Western world in which she must live feels so wrong to her, but, blinded by her beliefs, she is not capable of transformation.  In Kaukab, Aslam has showed us the face of intolerance.  She isn't a bomber or a politician; she is a little old lady who loves her family and likes to cook and dreams fragrant dreams about the land where she grew up.

I share Sam's reservations about Aslam's impenetrable metaphors and about an ending that is perhaps unnecessarily obscure, but, like Sam, I found the book to be quite rewarding.  Though Aslam is writing about a community that is insular in the extreme, his tragedy of assimilation feels universal.

Maps for Lost Lovers: The Final Nominee

The fifth and last book nominated for the autumn Read This! selection was Nadeem Aslam's second novel, Maps for Lost Lovers. Aslam has been known by readers of serious fiction in the UK since 1993, with the publication of his award-winning first novel, Seasons of the Rainbirds. But Rainbirds was never published in the US, so we American readers didn't get our first exposure to Aslam's work until May of this year, with the publication of Maps.

The plot turns on a mysterious event, set in the spring of 1996. In an unnamed English town populated by Pakistani immigrants, an unmarried couple has vanished. The man's brother and sister-in-law fear the worst. They know the missing couple's life together violated Islamic law, and they suspect the missing woman's two brothers are involved in the disappearance. The novel was inspired by an actual case of "honor killing" in 1988 in the town of Huddleston, where the Aslam lives.

While the fate of the couple and the causes and consequences of their disappearance drive the narrative, the novel's emotional pull comes from character, not plot. Jungnu, the missing man, is a free spirit who traveled the world in his work as a lepidopterist before settling down next door to his quieter brother, Shamas. Shamas, at age 65, works in the local community center and has a reputation as a good man. He also shares his brother's skeptical attitude toward Islam. Shamas's wife Kaukab provides more than a counterweight for his skepticism. Alone in the family, she maintains her faith and struggles with her anger, fear, and sadness for the spiritual corruption she sees in her husband and children. Jungnu's lover, family, townspeople, and passers-through are depicted with deep sympathy as well. It's a feat for a book with so much violence to be so tender at the same time.

The opening pages of Maps — which are dense with minute observations of nature and the physical world, and thick with eccentric metaphors — can set readers back on their heels. But Aslam is showing us the world through the eyes of Shamas, who was a poet in his youth and has not shaken off the habit of compulsive metaphor-making: an "eye that sees the rough material for metaphors and similes all around it." Microscopes that "slept like hawks with their dust covers on." A cloud of bugs is a "lace of insects." Fluttering seagulls are like "white-paper scraps." Grass the "the orangey-gold of the foil that orange flavored chocolate bars come in." Like jokes in a comedy routine, they can't all be gems. But many, many of them are. As the novel progresses the flow of metaphors slows and we are delivered over to the steady momentum of events.

I've read that Aslam's decade-long labor in this novel included the creation of hundreds of pages of history for each character. If so, it's a tribute to him that so little of this labor is apparent. Much of what we learn in Maps is suggested rather than explicit, and the novel ends with the primary mystery solved but much else unexplained. It's a deeply rewarding book nevertheless — certainly one of the best I've read this year.

Elizabeth Poliner on Mutual Life & Casualty

Thanks so much to the LitBlog Coop, Wendi Kaufman, and other readers who have taken an interest in Mutual Life & Casualty.  It’s very rewarding and interesting to hear others’ takes on the book, and between what Wendi Kaufman wrote about it on this blog, and the most recent entry by Kassia Krozser, I feel the book is being well read indeed.  Thank you for your thoughtful comments.

I was especially impressed by Kassia Krozser’s ability to embrace the entire family dynamic in her remarks.  Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of visiting a number of book groups which have read the book, and there has often ensued a lively debate, particularly with regard to the title story, about who is the bad parent in the Khan family, mother or father.  Some readers see Naomi Khan as deeply troubling and feel the father gets short shrift.  Others identify with Naomi’s dissatisfactions, which have a lot to do with traditional female role playing, as well as with how her husband tends to talk down to her, and these readers tend to overlook her destructive side, the side that drags the girls into her woes to the point where they are fighting her battles for her.  My goal in this story, and really throughout the book, was to depict social problems as realistically and complexly as possible, that is to say, as mutually shared by people, as no one person’s fault.  Even if Naomi Khan hadn’t engaged her daughters in her marital problems, they may very well have empathized with her anyway because they identify with her through gender and by their closeness with her–she’s the “companion parent.”  So, along with the parents’ personalities, the way in which gender roles get played out at this time period is another complication, another part of the “mutual” story.

If I had to say in a nutshell what the book is about, I would describe it as a study on the metaphor “Mutual Life & Casualty.”  It’s concerned with different kinds of suffering that stem from human relationships.  Mrs. Tucker suffers from her status as a non-mother, despite all her talent as a teacher.  Helen Grober suffers from the loss of her marriage, from no longer being a wife, which was so much of her identity.  Each of the children who are introduced as Hannah’s classmates–Diana Nicholson, Marty Littleton, Peggy Hardley, and even Jackie Thunder (once he marries Hannah)–have their own vulnerabilities and situations to contend with, their own Mutual Life & Casualty stories.  Most poignantly, Hannah and Carolyn Kahn grow up burdened by their troubled family dynamics.  And, as mentioned above, each of their parents has suffered too.  In this family, nobody escapes being an agent of hurt and getting hurt–which I like to think is one of the book’s strengths because it’s an honest and full portrait of how entangled human dynamics are, for better or for worse.

As far as the novel-in-stories being successful as a novel, I’d like to throw out the possibility that they’re different creatures.  Often more a fiction of community than anything else, novel-in-stories often jump, as my book does, from character to character, with an aim of gathering a sense about a community, or about relationships within a community, more than with the aim of telling a story through the traditional novel’s device of unified plot.  In Mutual Life & Casualty I found this form a means to explore three kind of relationships simultaneously: the relationship between two sisters, the relationship or dynamic within a family, and the relationship of a single family to the broader community, particularly with regard to women’s changing roles during the 1970s and beyond.  I’ve recently written an article the subject of novel-in-stories, citing any number of exciting new works in this form–Kate Walbert’s Our Kind, for example– as well as exciting older works in this form–Sarah Orne Jewett’s The Country of Pointed First, for example–discussing how innovative the form can be.  My growing sense–and of course I could be wrong–is that a novel-in-stories is its own, often quite wonderful, thing.

You Say You Want A Revolution

In 1971 or maybe '72, Rosalie Hayes wore a pair of red, white, and blue pants to school. On an older girl, they might have been called hip-huggers, but Rosalie was a good ten years away from that. She wore these pants on a Wednesday. This was a bold fashion choice. Prior to this, the girls of our school were only allowed to wear pants on Fridays (an early incarnation of what grew up to be Casual Friday). The rest of us played it safe with double-knits while she veered dangerously close to denim.

On the lower side of Venus Avenue, Mary Alexander declared herself a hippie. She was older and more sophisticated, and I wasn't about to ask her to define terms. I drew a few conclusions: hippies had long hair, wore purple pants and silver POW/MIA bracelets, and spent a lot of time with motorcycles. Surrounding us was the war and Richard Nixon (my grandmother was firmly opposed to the man -- he was, apparently, a lousy tipper). I was still trying to comprehend that someone had walked on the moon.

My mother divorced my father. This act, actually, wasn't nearly as traumatic as the fact that I was the only kid I knew who didn't have the two-parent thing happening. It was probably the only time in my life that I was ahead of the curve. For my mother, it was like someone had nullified a contract right after she'd fulfilled all of her obligations. She had been raised to get married and have kids. She had the kids, but the rest of the scene was gone.

These are the things I carried with me as I read Mutual Life & Casualty, which begins in the early 1970s. It was a strange time to be a girl, and I can only imagine how incomprehensible it was to be a woman. My mother, and the mothers of my friends, was part of the last generation of females for whom marriage and family was considered the only career path. Right behind them was an entire generation who understood that there are choices in life. Despite the fact that vestiges of this era remain in our world (just for fun, try being childless by choice), many of my peers simply don't understand the world of this novel.

The novel, more or less, revolves around three females: Hannah, the bright child; Carolyn, the lost child; and Naomi, their mother, the one who will never be happy. Other women filter in and out of the story, all caught off balance by this new world: a teacher who has only the classroom filling her life; the newly divorced woman who can't put her world into perspective; the women scouring Loehmann's for bargains. As I read the book, I wanted to shout, "Get a life, lady!" Then I realized these were women for whom the very notion of life was shifting. There were choices, there are always choices, and I won't suggest that men had it easier when it came to staying with their families or leaving, but I think the burden rested with the women. I know the burden rested with the women. I saw it happen.

Mutual Life & Casualty (truly a brilliant title) covers the lives of the Kahn family from the early 70s to the mid-1990s. The three major characters stumble through their lives, and it is painful to see how one parent's perspective influences the attitudes of his or her children. You can really warp a young mind if you are not careful. The war between Naomi and Daniel, the Kahn patriarch, isn't as much about their incompatibility as it Naomi's desire to win. She never realizes the depth of the wounds she inflicts on the casualties.

She is also one of the most flawed characters I've read in a while. Naomi doesn't possess the selflessness necessary to be a mother. She uses her children to further her own ill-defined agenda. She's constantly searching for fulfillment, but wouldn't realize she'd reached her goal if she fell over it. The surface carries more meaning for her than the interior. When she decides to do battle, she takes everyone down with her.

Women weren't the only ones changing. The father in this story is doing what he was raised to do. He works at this job, makes good money, and interacts with his family in his own way. His world is becoming different; one suspects there are women working in his office, women who are starting to influence the business -- and he wasn't given a manual for the new world either.

 

Elizabeth Poliner employs the novel-in-stories approach, and this is not always successful. It rarely is in novels. Character arcs must often be inferred and some characters are left hanging (most notably the teacher) or underdeveloped. The work doesn't have a real protagonist, though early on, one feels guided toward Hannah. By the end, we understand that it's Caroline who undergoes the most profound growth. I was hoping Carolyn's character would complete the circle -- she'd been poisoned against her father by Naomi -- by reconciling with Daniel, but I'm a sucker for happy endings.

Wendi Kauffman described this title as a quiet book. I'd describe it more as a desperate book. Characters are trapped in worlds they didn't necessarily choose, and they don't possess the skills to find the hidden key. I think many readers will apply modern mores to the alien culture inhabited by these readers. The early seventies haven't really been explored in literature, not from the perspective of women, and if we remember the day Rosalie wore her insanely bold-patterned pants, Mutual Life & Casualty resonates long after you finish reading it.

• Mutual Life & Casualty at Powell's

A Few Words from Kirby Gann

We asked Kirby Gann to talk a little bit about Our Napoleon in Rags before we move on to another book next week. Gwenda Bond came up with some questions, and Kirby kindly responded.

First I want to say thank you to those who read the book and shared their thoughts on this site; it's a great idea and very rewarding for a writer to get a glimpse of what complete strangers actually think about/struggle with in his work.

That said, I'm not sure how to respond to what appears to be a common response: that the book is difficult to get into. Yes, the language - especially in the opening pages - is ornate and unusual; I was trying to reflect the deep-night strangeness of the setting, and also work within an elegiac tone. I wrestled with that beginning for some time (it was difficult to decide, actually, where to open the novel), and understand that it's both unconventional and yet very old school -- starting with setting and mood, introducing characters by portrait rather than action, etc.

I'm a believer that good novels teach one how to read them: The more unique the experience, the deeper the reader can go into that invented world (prompting him or her, hopefully, to look freshly again at the real world, too). This also makes sense to me in the way I go about writing a novel, in that I feel like I'm "learning" it during the first few drafts. It's all about going against cliché, not just in language and expression but also in thought and experience and the people one chooses to explore.

That was my intent with Rags, at least.

To get to the questions that were forwarded to me:

1) How much of an inspiration was Louisville, where you live now, for Montreux? Beyond setting and character, I'd be interested in how the heated divisions brought on by police actions in Louisville influenced or manifested those in Napoleon.

Montreux IS a skewed version of Louisville; I started toying with the invented city in my first novel, The Barbarian Parade. The reason being that with an invented city you can place neighborhoods and monuments wherever you want, conflate areas as you need them, etc. In Rags, however, Louisville served more as inspiration, in a couple of ways. An idea I'd been turning over for some time is that Southern writers in general and Kentucky writers in particular are thought of as depicting the rural life; it's almost like we are preordained to write about Appalachia or coal mining in order to truly explore the experience of living here. Yet I grew up in Kentucky, and my experience of the rural world was that it was what you saw on the sides of highways between cities; I grew up in an urban environment and wanted to reflect that.

Another way Louisville influences the novel is that events in the book reflect certain events that have happened here. It's true that for an exasperatingly long time we've been dealing with violent police actions that, well, look fishy under examination. And these actions usually end with the death of an unarmed suspect.

Something like that happens once and it's tragedy; when it happens again and again it becomes a farce. I do not understand it, but then I've never been a police officer. So I've tried to keep an open ear to both sides in these matters, looking for clues as to why they might happen. As for the police action in my novel, it was inspired by an actual event that occurred in Louisville a few years ago. Initially it wasn't planned, but the further I got into the first draft, the more inevitable it seemed that Mather Williams was headed to a sad end. I think this developed out of a) logically following the trajectory of the characters' fates that I'd started and b) picking up on "what's going on" out in the real world while I was writing; when you're deep into the writing of a novel it's odd how so many things in reality tend to touch upon it, how so much seems to belong in what you happen to be working on.

2) Have you ever been a regular in a place like this? If you haven't, have you ever been a regular in any place and why that place?

Yes, I've been a regular in a number of "places like this." I like weirdness and I like bars, though I don't go to these places anywhere near as often as I used to. I don't like to drink as much as I used to, and rising early is a habit I've become accustomed to and prefer. The geography of the Don Q fairly aligns with a place in Louisville called the Rudyard Kipling, though my bar is much darker and less safe than the Rud is. I worked at the Rud for a while in my early twenties, and was very enamored by the strange people who were regulars there, by their camaraderie and their loneliness and their idealism. Basically what I like about bars is that you get to meet people and, just maybe, get a glimpse of lives and points of view you never would have been able to imagine on your own.

3) The book has very specific and ornate language and a (welcome) strong authorial voice. Was the style of this book in place right from the start, or did you have to experiment to find the way you eventually chose to tell the story?

A little bit of both. As I mentioned above, I learn a book as I'm writing it. For example, the structure of the book turned on the metaphor of the windmill above the bar: Haycraft Keebler is the hub, the rest of the characters are sails -- the book follows that form: we go to the hub, then follow a sail, then back to the hub, etc. I didn't realize this until I was in, like, draft #3. The tone of Rags was pretty clear early on, prompted most likely by the setting and the characters. Style is very important to me; style and story should mesh. Therefore it only makes sense that, over the course of a novel (and this one was much longer than the finished book, at one point!), the style should shift as necessary, when certain characters move to the front of the stage. Still, I like to think that Rags has a cohesive style -- a main voice with variations upon it. Thinking along those lines, as I was writing, most likely led me to identify that the book was in fact being narrated by one of the characters. This I discovered only a few pages before it happened, and realized I had a lot of work to do in the revision stages in order to make it work.

Our Napoleon in Rags: Tone, Style, and Narration

To contribute to this discussion, and maybe open up more avenues for ideas, I'll start with some things Carrie said. She struggled a bit with some of the stylistic elements of the book, and wondered if there is such a thing as an "unflawed" novel.

The question of "flawed" and "unflawed" novels depends on your aesthetics, and assumes a certain idea of a novelistic ideal. One of the things I like about the novel form is that it can encompass and include just about anything, from minute character study to complex plotting to parody and picaresque. A few of our nominees this quarter aspire to put various novelistic techniques into play, and that's something I particularly like in Our Napoleon in Rags.

I think there are a few justifications for varieties and oddities of tone and style in the book. There's a certain archness to the opening section, but then the other sections each have their own slightly different rhythms and dictions. The most obviously different comes toward the end, with "The Sutherland View", where the point of view switches to first person, and the voice is more conversational, more ordinary in its poetry, than anything the previous sections have offered. It can be perplexing and jarring, but then the revelation(s) of the ending put it into a different perspective, and the entire book gets recast as a study in ventriloquism as an attempt at compassion and knowledge. Two sentences on the second to last page are essential: "As Haycraft always said -- and Glenda, too -- we suffer from a lack of willingness to imagine the experience of others. It is in their honor that I have reimagined this story and written down all of what I could access." If you keep those sentences in mind on a second reading of the book, it becomes quite a different, richer, and more complex experience than it is on the first read. Our Napoleon reveals itself to be about the limitations of understanding, the difficulties of compassion, and the pitfalls of imagining, because the last pages show that these attempts have not entirely succeeded.

I've just finished reading Charles Johnson's Middle Passage, and the complexity of narrative there made me think of Our Napoleon -- the various layers of imagined reality, the ways of imagining it. Writing inscribes memory into time, becoming itself both an act of history and an evocation of imagined pasts. What I like about both Middle Passage and Our Napoleon in Rags is that they don't ignore the power the storyteller has over the story, and they both quietly, but clearly, remove any pretense of objectivity from their imagined realities.

The ending is unsettling not just because it rearranges our relationship to all the pages that come before it, but because it recasts the narrative as being narrated by someone who is, in many ways, despicable. This complexity makes the moral/political pronouncements of the last paragraph simultaneously seductive, hollow, and horrifying, and leaves an admirable amount of room for readers to draw their own conclusions.