‘Once There Were Wolves’ Charlotte McConaghy

Inti Flynn has come to the Scottish Highlands to lead a team of biologists on a mission. They are releasing a pack of fourteen gray wolves in an attempt to restore the ecological balance that has been badly upset by lumbering and killing of the wolves. The local rural community is up against the project as they fear for the lives of their sheep and themselves too, for wolves are a much maligned and feared of animals.

Inti and her twin sister Aggie grew up splitting their time between their father, who was a lumberjack turned naturalist in Alaska and their police officer mother in Australia who deals with crimes against women day in an out. This background pretty much sets the stage for the entire story – intimacy with nature, excruciating mental and physical pain that follows them through life, crime and its gory details, the impact it has on the victims and the perpetrators.

All the characters have shades of grey, and there are specific and plausible reasons for what they have done, have gone through. Aggie is catatonic, Duncan, the local police chief is obviously hiding some past trauma, Lainey, the local sheep farmer Stuart’s wife is being abused by her husband regularly but everyone seems to turn a blind eye towards it. The mysteries are solved one by one as the wolves are slowly reintroduced and start acclimatizing themselves to the wilderness. Inti and her team walks on a tightrope, for they know one misstep and the wolves would all be killed. Things come to a head when Stuart disappears. Foul play is suspected, Inti knows what happened, but she cannot disclose it to anyone. It is when Duncan is attacked in a similar manner that even Inti figures out what exactly was happening.

As in her earlier book Migrations, the theme is climate change, destruction of nature, extinction of species and so on that is the thread that holds the narrative together and takes it forward. The protagonists are similar, they are haunted by their past, they are so attuned to their natural surroundings that their trauma at nature as they knew it getting destroyed is visceral. In Inti’s case, it is even physical, she is afflicted with “mirror touch synesthesia,” a rare condition that causes the individuals to feel the same sensations that another person feels. Whether it is the wolves, Aggie or Duncan, the effect on Inti is devastating.

The intense connect that Inti and Aggie has with nature is directly related to their childhood that was spent with their father,

“The forest has a beating heart we can’t see,” Dad told us once. He lay flat on the earth and we copied him, placing our hands on the warm ground and we copied him, placing our hands on the warm ground and our ears to the underbrush, listening, “It’s here, beneath us. This is how the trees speak with and care for each other. Their roots tangle together, dozens of trees with dozens more in a web that reaches on forever, and they whisper to each other though their roots. They warn of danger and they share sustenance. They’re like us, a family. Stronger together. Nothing gets through this life alone.” He smiled then, and asked, “Can you hear the beating?” and we could, somehow we could.”

This is ultimately what the story is about, that like the trees, we cannot remain isolated. our redemption is in our connections, in understanding and supporting each other, and turning to each other to find solace, peace and redemption.

McConaghy’s forte seem to be in transferring the pain of nature and animals that are vulnerably left to man’s follies, to the reader. All the characters are flawed, many of them have had acts of criminal nature in their past. She addresses the matter of domestic violence in a subtle manner, yet it is so graphic in nature at times that it leaves you extremely disturbed. I wouldn’t recommend reading it just before you go to bed. Yet, it is hope that it conveys at the end. It will be a rare human whose heart will not beat with Inti and her wolves.

It is obvious right from the beginning that the inspiration for the story came from the Yellowstone Wolf Reintroduction Project. Wolves might very well be one of the most misunderstood species of animals. They are considered wild, yet they are so close to us, humans. We too were wild once. And we still are, just that we have learned to camouflage it well. McConaghy makes us live with the wolves, feel their thoughts and emotions. Even after a few months of reading the book, I can hear their heartbeats, sense their smell, even see them in their cave.

At the end of the second book by this author, I so wanted to meet her and ask her a hundred questions. “How do you feel so deeply? How do you find your stories? How deep does it drain you? Because if reading your stories shakes us to the core, how much more intense it would be for you? Have you lived in these places? Have you lived with wolves? Have you know such deep heartbreaks? Why is it that your protagonists are always running from law? How do you write like this?”

(note to self: time to pick up Clarissa Pinkola Estes’s ‘Women Who Run With The Wolves’ again)

Migrations

Dystopian fiction is something that I stay away from, give me a dose of reality any day. If I had known this book was set in the near future, I wouldn’t have touched it even with the longest of barge poles. Am I glad now that no one warned me about it!

Climate change has made its impact and most of earth’s wildlife has died out. It is in this scenario that Franny Stone is determined to follow the last of the Arctic terns in the world as they make their migration, perhaps their last, from the Arctic to Antarctica. She travels to Greenland and zeroes in on a ship whose crew is out to get one last catch that will redeem them from near penury. That she is riddled with secrets is evident right from the beginning. Through the course of the voyage her story as well as those of the crew is slowly unveiled and we see all of them moving towards their inevitable end. Moving from the ship to a prison in Ireland, from Australia to Galway, as each page turns we get to know the reasons behind Franny’s restlessness and her almost fanatic quest to see the birds to their final destination.

You read most books, then there are some you inhale and feel. This is one of those that strikes you viscerally and intimately. Franny’s vulnerability is something that you sense right from the beginning. The mist around chills you as well as the characters, yet you do not go numb. You can almost smell the ocean in its rawest form, your urge to check on the birds on the tracker is as primal as it is hers and the crew’s. The story leaves you with a sense of loss, reminds you starkly of how we are destroying the world around us, yet there is an underlying hope through it all.

There is hardly anything that I could find on the author online except that she is Australian and has a Masters Degree in Screenwriting from the Australian Film Television and Radio School. It would be quite interesting to know where her deep love for nature, wild life and climate change comes from. That it is something that she deeply relates to is evident from her next book ‘Once There Were Wolves’ with a female protagonist with her own set of secrets, who is on a mission to reintroduce wolves in the Scottish Highlands in an attempt to heal the dying landscape. Yes, I am half way through it already 🙂

How To Raise A Feminist Son

A topic that is so close to heart – feminism and how to raise kids whose values are rooted in equity and equality, especially the son. This book was a validation of many a thing I’ve always tried to do, as also who I am, with all my weaknesses and imperfections.

Part memoir, part manifesto, Sonora Jha takes us through her life, her years in India, her marriage and its break up, her father who was abusive and the brother who seem to have taken after him, the birth of her son, the angst and struggles of being a single parent and a professional, and her determination to bring him up with the right set of guidelines that she hopes will anchor him through his life.

Jha’s profession as a professor of journalism specializing in social justice movements and social media is reflected in the way she has structured the book. Well researched and interspersed with conversations with psychologists, experts, parents, other kids, each aspect of bringing up a child is explored and analyzed. She punctuates her thoughts with references to Hindu mythology, especially the goddesses, the intersectionality of feminism with caste and privilege as also the necessity and importance of having a support system, the proverbial village.

What was most heartening for me is her admission of being imperfect and errant,

“Feminism is a practice, and perfection is an illusion. You were a good feminist on Tuesday, you embraced a reparative ideology on Friday, but on Sunday your feminist friend may have gone ‘too far.’ You start over and over.’

her calling out the fears that most of us have as parents – how do we talk to them about sex (I’ve found it easier to talk about sex with my daughter than with the son), what if he slips up (a constant fear), what if I slip up (something that I repeatedly do) and how do i really know whether I’ve really succeeded in raising my son as a feminist, to name a few.

“Over the years, often with a sick feeling in my stomach, I realized I was not going to be able to raise a perfect feminist. I couldn’t fashion a boy or man who was wholly alert and engaged in the scrutiny, study, and practice of dismantling an immutable structure that offered him a paradise or privileges for having a penis and taunted him as a ‘pussy’ when he tried to so much as move a single spoke of said structure. What I could do was teach him to see when he’d slipped up, to hear someone when they said he’d slipped up, and to then fucking apologize. A tender, sincere apology, please.“

‘A tender, sincere apology’ – a lesson for not just the boys, but for all of us, whether parents or not, whether or not we are bringing up anyone. This is a manifesto to bringing us up as decent human beings. Period.

p.s. Should be added as a compulsory read in our schools and colleges.

In The Dream House: A Memoir

How do I even begin to describe this book? The theme, how it is structured, the language, how the tale is narrated – each word so carefully chosen and woven into sentences that cuts straight into your heart and leaves a pain so deep that it takes days to get out of it – any way I look at it, this was the most mind-blowing book that I read this year.

Abuse in a lesbian relationship – the author herself says this is something that is rarely written about, or even discussed openly. The nature of the relationship itself is something that is still looked down upon by many, on top of that abuse? Isn’t that a male thing? It is as though there is an unwritten rule that such relationships should work, if only to prove a point.

Insecure about how she looks – curvy-to-fat – as she says, she just cannot believe herself when someone who ‘had a distinctly upper-class, New England air’ would take an interest in her. She was as accomplished as they come – Harvard educated, worked in publishing, lived abroad, spoke French, lived in New York – how or why should she have taken an interest in a girl like her? They soon settle into the ‘Dream House’ of a relationship.

Everything is perfect in the beginning, as it always is. You feel like you are the luckiest person in the world. Cracks begin to appear soon enough, the first sign is the rage when you do something without telling her. Then it is a series of accusations, insinuations, you cannot do anything right. The burden of proof, of loyalty and love is always on you. You start building defenses gradually, you need to provide evidence, so you stop even talking about people in your life. Your friends sense what is happening and is there to support you, but you are not sure. You still think it is something to do with you. She can confuse the hell out of you, you don’t realize you are being manipulated.

“How to read her coldness: She is preoccupied. She is unhappy. She is unhappy with you. You did something and now she’s unhappy. You talk to her. You are clear. You think you are clear. You say what you are thinking and you say it after thinking a lot, and yet when she repeats what you’ve said back to you nothing makes sense. Did you say that? Really? You can’t remember saying that or even thinking it, and yet she is letting you know that it was said, and you definitely meant it that way.”

It’s always a war , and she has to be the winner. And the classic behavior – the next morning it’s all bright sunlight – ‘a new day begins again.’ You are for ever apologizing, but you seldom know why. After a scary event that gets physical, you tell her she needs help, unless she gets it right you are leaving. Things do not improve, you fantasize about dying, you have forgotten that leaving could be an option.

It comes to a surprising end when she falls in love with someone else. The abuse still continues in the form of texts and calls until you decide to cut her off completely. You realize she has betrayed you multiple times over. But you have friends who have always known what was happening and are ready to be the support you need.

After it is over, you are still unsure, whether you were reading too much into it, whether you were being too melodramatic, you are dragged deep into a bottomless pit of darkness again. You know you can get it completely out of your system, your nervous system will always remember, it will turn into a warning system that raises an instant alarm all through your life.

The brilliance of the book is the narrative. The descriptions are seldom graphical. It is broken into snippets, with metaphors for each experience and every thought – ‘Dream House as Time Travel’ where she wonders whether if she knew about the outcome would she have done anything different, ‘Dream House as Romance Novel’ where she talks about the beginning of their relationship, ‘Dream House as Deja Vu’ where she writes about the cycle repeating itself and so on. She says of the structure of her writing during those times –

“I broke the stories down because I was breaking down and didn’t know what else to do.”

An intimate portrayal of emotions, a study on relationships, a text book on what abuse is, especially when it is not physical, most of all a brave baring of soul. Heart wrenching and disturbing to the core. A master class in writing.

Freshwater for Flowers

A lonely, middle aged woman tending to a graveyard somewhere in a small town in France. Sounds macabre, doesn’t it? You couldn’t be more mistaken.

Violette Toussaint is almost fifty and seem to be at peace with herself, tending to the graves and her plants. The two helpers are as lonely and odd in their ways as she. The story unfolds slowly, the layers getting unpeeled in a slow and graceful pace . She has grown up in foster homes, and was a bar tender when she met the flamboyant Philippe Toussaint. They are married soon enough, the reality of what he is hits her only later. Emotionally distant and irresponsible, Philippe is busy with his biking trips and video games while Violette is left with running the house. Before long, they start working as railroad level-cross keepers and lives in a small house close to the tracks. Their daughter Leonine sparks life into Violette, but tragedy strikes soon enough. The events that follow brings Sasha, the grave yard keeper into Violette’s life and she sort of inherits the job from him.

Violette knows the regular visitors to the cemetery and many of their family secrets too. When Julien Seul, a detective from Marseilles arrives with his mother’s ashes to be placed near the grave of a man who is a complete stranger to him. Little does she know how his story is entwined to hers as well. The story weaves in and out, between past and present, through the many characters that have an impact on Violette’s life.

It is a tale that is so well told, of life, death, betrayal, deep friendships, and finding happiness in the most unlikely places. Just when you think you have seen through all the twists and turns, comes the most unexpected one of all, a turn around a murder mystery, if you may call it so.

I loved how each character is built, with their back stories that explains their behavior, good and bad. No one is completely evil, there is a reason to who they are. Isn’t it how it is with each of us too? This is one of those books that has so well explained what ‘layering’ in writing means. As each story is unraveled, another one appears, and every story is interconnected with the other exquisitely. While the setting, premise and most of the events may sound depressing and sad, the success of the writer is in threading the characters and their tales in light and love.

One of the best books I read this year and have lost count of the people I have recommended it to. Go get it!

A Son’s Farewell

How do you write about the death of someone so exceptional, someone who was a legend in its truest sense? Especially when you are someone very close to the person, that you might question yourself as to why you are doing it. Rodrigo Garcia doesn’t hide his emotions as he grapples with this dilemma, his intent itself,

“What makes matters emotionally turbulent is the fact that my father is a famous person. Beneath the need to write may lurk the temptation to advance one’s own fame in the age of vulgarity. Perhaps it might be better to resist the call and stay humble. Humility is, after all, my favorite form of vanity. But as with most writing, the subject matter choses you, and so resistance could be futile.”

The subject matter in this case is the last days of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his funeral and a few days thereafter. The tale, if I may call it so, is poignant, tender and stark in its telling. Its grandeur is in its simplicity, the honesty of the emotions and thoughts touch you deeply. At times you feel the writer is detached from what is happening around him. Then you realize that too is a coping mechanism, else how do you deal with something intensely personal,  the loss of someone who has had such an impact on not just his family.

Dementia had affected Marquez in his last years and the memoir starts where the family has come to accept the inevitable, that he has but a few weeks or even days or hours left with them. There are no hospital stays anymore, it is at home that he will breathe his last. While chronicling the happenings during those days, the son in the writer gives us rare glimpses of the person that his father was, the life they had in Columbia, Spain and in Mexico City. He has mostly avoided the obvious and well-known aspects of his father’s life and rightfully so. At the same time he has not failed to acknowledge the stature that Marquez had commanded by mentioning the dignitaries at his funeral and the memorial service as well as the innumerous messages and calls they had received.

“The death of the second parent is like looking through a telescope one night and no longer finding a planet that has always been there. It has vanished, with its religion, its customs, its own peculiar habits and rituals, big and small. The echo remains.”

While a good part of the book is about Marquez, the last few pages is devoted to Mercedes, his mother, the love of his father’s life from when they were 14 and 10 respectively. The book is a tribute to a woman who had stood as tall as her illustrious and much acclaimed husband, she had in fact carved her own space right beside him. There is a picture of hers at the end of the book that says it all.

The sensitive way he has laid out the events and the honesty of his thoughts caught me by surprise. Here was something that could easily have turned self-aggrandizing, but he has converted it into something beautiful.

Rodrigo Garcia was a name that was alien to me, I didn’t even know Marquez had two sons. With a personality so overwhelming, you tend to ignore those around them, I suppose. Garcia alludes to this while talking about his decision to move to another city and country, maybe it was a subconscious way of making himself distant from and independent of, his father’s fame.

Talking about the subconscious, sometime in the twilight zone between being awake and falling into sleep yesterday, I was thinking of a beautiful Annette Benning movie that I had watched last year. A girl that was made to pay for an accidental teenage pregnancy all her life, the child that was given up for adoption, her own child getting adopted and the grandmother finally finding the grandchild. I couldn’t remember the name of the movie and I wondered why this memory had come up suddenly.

That Rodrigo Garcia was in the movie business was clear from the book. Google came to the rescue and imagine my surprise when I realized the very same movie that I was thinking about – ‘Mother and Child’ – was written and directed by him. Not just that, another woman centric movie that I’d watched a few months ago was also his – ‘Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her’.

It made complete sense now. The delicate way in which he handles emotions, how his writing is devoid of all embellishments and cuts straight to the core, his deep respect for the women in his life, is a legacy, and also something that he has nurtured carefully and with deep passion.

Don’t miss this, whether you have read the maestro or not.  



 

A Promise Of Friendship. And Faith

Privilege. A word I wouldn’t even have heard of in my childhood, let alone knowing what it meant. Yet, its invisible and silent blessings were many, I know today.

A well read father who opened the doors to the wonderful world of books and reading, teachers who expanded those horizons even wider, friends who introduced me to new authors and genres, books that seemed to jump into my lap from nowhere as if they had been searching specially for me, life had always served words in abundance, that too on a golden platter. There were times when money was short. Love and books, never.

Not everyone was not so lucky, someone dear had to remind me today. I seldom take anything or anyone in life for granted. Except books, I realized. That is a story for another day, as the cliche goes.

And then, serendipity. As always. Yet another of those, just at the right time.

The year is 1997. A 12 year old girl in Hatfield, Pennsylvania decides to write to a 14 year old boy in Zimbabwe as part of the ‘pen pal’ program in her school. This was the first time she was even hearing of such a country. Little did the two them know how it was going to change both their lives, in ways they could never have imagined.

Caitlin is a typical American pre-teen, more worried about what she will wear to school and whether boys like her or not, more than what she need to learn in school. Far away in Mutare, a rural town in Africa, Martin is worried about how to stay in school and whether he had his family will have anything to eat for their next meal. One thing both of them have in common is their respective families that love them beyond anything and stands by them fiercely.

At first Martin is reluctant to open up fully, fearing their friendship will be affected if Caitlin comes to know how poor they are. But he realizes there is no choice but to let her know how desperately he needs her help if has to stay in school and his family in their house.

The book is written in alternate voices of Caitlin and Martin, through the six years of their correspondence and the epilogue after another five years. While Martin makes Caitlin open her eyes and heart to a world and realities beyond the narrow confines of the life of a typical American teenager, Caitlin is first the window and then the door of opportunities to a better life for Martin, his family and later to scores of African students in need.

This is a story of faith, hope and unconditional love. Of a friendship that goes beyond color, race and boundaries. Of love that can make miracles happen.

More than anything else, this is also about how the young are our hope for a better world. Maybe, the only hope.

p.s. Martin is an investment banker in New York now. You can read more about him, Caitlin and their foundation at iwillalwayswriteback.com

Between Two Kingdoms : A Memoir Of A Life Interrupted

Never judge a book by its cover, they say. Not for nothing, I say. One of those rare books that I picked up by seeing just the cover, did not even bother to read the blurb. The girl on top of a mini van, a dog next to her and a contemplative look on her face, a travelogue – the judgement was swift as the download. Little did I know the kind of journey I was getting into and what a journey it was!

Suleika Jaouad was like any other youngster, just out of college, figuring out what to do with the rest of her life. A career in writing as a foreign correspondent is what she wanted to be, her Tunisian heritage had more than a little to do with it. After a very short stint of summer internship at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, she moves to Paris, ‘where people go to live out the fantasy of a different life.‘ Things settle the way she wanted soon enough, and with Will whom she met in New York deciding to move in with her, it was as if she was fast forwarding her way to a dream life. In the background was an itch that had started earlier now spreading fast and the inexplicable fatigue that she kept attributing to the insane working hours. Things soon some to a head, she has to travel back home for a diagnosis. At 23 years of age, comes an announcement that might have sounded like a death knell to many in her position – leukemia, with 35% chance of survival.

What follows is an excruciating three and half years, more often in than out of hospitals through multiple rounds of chemo and experimental therapy before she is finally adjudged cancer free. Jaouad writes in detail the diagnosis, the treatments, the hospital stays and the immense struggles that she has to go through. However, it is the emotions and the relationships that she analyses that stands out and makes her story as remarkable as it is.

You cannot but love Will, the young man who had just fallen in love with this girl when their life turned upside down in more ways than one. He doesn’t think twice before deciding to move back from Paris and be with her, whether at her parent’s home or by her hospital bed. He takes charge along with her parents and becomes the solid rock that she learns to lean on. As months turn into years and as her health turns for the worse before it could better, their relationship also takes its twists and turns. Jaouad is painfully honest as she analyses what happened, in retrospect.

“Suffering can make you selfish, turn you cruel. It can make you feel like there is nothing but you and your anger, the crackle of exam table paper beneath bruised limbs, the way your heart pounds into your mouth when the doctor enters the room with the latest biopsy results. But I wasn’t the only one whose life had been interrupted by illness; my loved ones all faced a rupture that was similar in kind, if not in degree. That I wasn’t the only one in the room meant I was one of the lucky ones, I knew.”

She was indeed one of the lucky ones that her job in Paris and her father’s insurance covered most of the costs which otherwise would have broken the backbone of a family like hers. That her mother could afford to be with her and rotate the time with Will was no small blessing. Most importantly, her brother who had to turn his life upside down to be the donor for a bone marrow transplant. As the author realized later, the physical pain her body was being subjected to, the need for depending on others even for basic matters and the all pervading frustration of life possibly passing her by made her turn blind to the struggles her loved ones were going through. She shuts them out of her life, one after another.

What gave her solace, in fact maybe the strength and will power to withstand the negative after affects was her daily journal that soon turned into a column and video series for the New York Times – ‘Life, Interrupted’ . People from all walks of life who had gone through similar experiences themselves or with their loved ones started reaching out to her. She also discovers her own group of cheerleaders in the hospital corridors and treatment rooms. Young people with cancer, just like her.

I was not disappointed in my original expectation of the book seeing the cover. She does go on a road trip, after she is pronounced well enough. A hundred day journey, to meet some of the people she had come to know during her years of illness. A sort of giving back, being grateful and reaching out just as others had in her times of need. Yet, setting out on it was a struggle by itself. As one of her friends warned her, it was getting back to ‘normal’ life that was going to be even tougher than overcoming the cancer.

“To stay is to consign myself to refrains of brokenness forever. To leave is to create a story of self. Really, it isn’t much of a choice.”

It’s a story of triumph , not survival. Of spirit and body, of stretching your self beyond limits that you never would have thought you could surpass.

More than anything, it is a story of human connections, of the all pervasive magic of love.

Robert Kincaid, again

Books are like memories, connected in explicable ways. You start on one, go on to another and before you know you have reached somewhere far away from where you started, a place where you would never even have thought of or imagined.

A picture of three frogs perched one on another took me on a search for an old family photo where the spawns were perched on the man in the same style. That journey brought me to this picture, and my immediate reaction was one of total disbelief. How could I, a die hard fan of Francesca Johnson and Robert Kincaid, not have known about this? Obviously, this was a book I’d either seen somewhere or was in my possession. If I’d had it, why hadn’t I ever read it? Or of all strange things, having read it, had I completely forgotten about it? But how could I forget what happened to two of my all time favorite characters? Anyway, the time had come and I had to read or was it retreading?

Connections never stop, does it? After a long rut, I had picked up a few books of fiction this week. One was ‘The Midnight Library’ by Matt Haig. About regrets, possibilities of other lives, what ifs and what could have been. Serendipity again, but then such surprises in life has become the norm for me. Another book on the several possibilities along life’s strange journeys.

Ten years have passed since Robert Kincaid has gone in search of the covered Bridges of Madison County and found Francesca. There is not a day when he hasn’t thought of her or relived that night in her kitchen. Does she even think of him , he wonders. How different his life would have been , if she had decided otherwise. But he knew they were inextricably connected to each other, even if they never met again.

^{“One great love in one dancing moment when the wind had come around to his back and the universe hesitated in whatever the universe was up to. One dancing moment when the old traveler saw the fires of home, when the trains came to rest and their whistles turned silent. When his circling around Rilke’s ancient tower had ceased for a time.}“

He had thought of returning several times over the last few years and he knew he had to visit Roseman Bridge one last time. In another part of the country, Wynn Macmillan, a free spirit of a woman sometimes thinks of the man on the bike that she had met at Big Sur almost forty years ago. A moment in time as if it was predestined, the man long forgotten but the memories that he left, she could never forget.

Francesca meanwhile is at the same place, even after her husband had passed on. There is nothing that really holds her there except for the hope that her one true love might come looking for her again. This time she is sure what she would do. Yes, Robert does get to Roseman Bridge and we know they do not meet. However, on his way back he does meet Wynn.

Things seldom happen by chance. A time and place for everything and everyone. Robert Kincaid finally comes to know he was never really as alone as he had believed himself to be.

Robert James Waller’s writing is as endearingly romantic as ever. But then, as in life, in books too, it is nearly impossible to have more than one great romance. There is not much of Francesca here, and Wynn is a fleeting spirit, though you get to catch her now and then. What we see in her is a kindred spirit, one that takes life as it comes. The surprise element is her son, Carlisle Macmillan.

I am not sure whether I would have read it through if it was not for the previous story. The curiosity to know what happens in the end is what kept me through. And of course, the beautiful writing that peeps in and out, now and then.

By the way, Robert Kincaid had been to India as well, the Periyar Lake, no less. So go ahead, pick it up. After all, how can one have enough of the peregrine soul that is Robert Kincaid?

‘Mirrors’ by Eduardo Galeano

 

Book #18

Blessed serendipity. How else would a writer from Uruguay appear in my horizon from I don’t remember where and why would I go in search of a book that I knew fairly nothing about? But then, why should I be bothered about inanities like these?

It may not also be strange that I started reading this while discussing Yuval Noah Harari’s much acclaimed ‘Sapiens: A Brief History Of Mankind’ with a friend. Having tried to read it a couple of times and not being able to move beyond a few pages, I had given it up for good. As years go by and the sheer volume of the TBR pile goes up physically and virtually, if a book doesn’t hold interest for long, it is tossed away with no regrets whatsoever. Metaphorically, of course.

The number of pages at six hundred plus was a deterrent, before I opened it. After the first page, there was no looking back, though. The weekend helped, I should say.

How do you classify a book that transcends definition? But then, do you really need a classification to enjoy something as interesting and thought provoking as this is? You could consider it similar to ‘Sapiens‘ in that this is also a history of humankind. Each page is a snippet – myths, legends and facts. Starting from the times of cave dwelling when men were hunter gatherers, Galeano takes us through the path of civilization, if you can call it that. Black Africa, Sumeria (better known now as Iraq), ancient China, India, Egypt, the Mayans, the anecdotes are amusing and thought provoking.

As humans become more civilized, a thread starts getting visible. Of tales of the vanquished – the blacks, the poor, the neglected, the down trodden, and yes, women. How country after country, continent after continent was no different. The organized crimes of the Catholic Church, there is no other way to describe the Crusades and Inquisitions. After the Church, the western governments took over. In the guise of lofty ideals of freedom and justice, countries were taken over, races were destroyed and left bereft.

The colonization and destruction of Latin American countries, Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, Castro find place in these pages along with Pele, Maradona, Jesse Owens. Particularly heart wrenching is the plight of black athletes and sports persons in the early and mid years of the twentieth century.

As we slowly progress through the pages, a sense of despondency descends. What we see today is nothing new. If cows gain priority over women in India, so was it in Nicaragua. As we try to bang pots and pans to ward of Corona virus, we realize that was a women’s ritual during the times of the great plague.

A common thread is of how women was treated across the centuries, irrespective of region. They have done similar things as their male counterparts as rulers. Yet, they were considered to be frivolous, troublesome, dumb, in short, well, women. The interesting fact though is, when women took the reins whether are rulers, healers or educators, they brought about real change. There is the hand of a woman behind almost every pathbreaking invention or change. Expectedly, most of them have been forgotten, not inadvertently.

Galeano has not spared anyone, yet there is no rancor in his writing. He puts it across in a matter of fact manner, yet calls out the inequities sometimes in the garb of homer, at times subtly and where needed loudly. The book is a true tribute to the ones that were defeated , from whose perspective history is never told. As he says,

“In democratic countries, the overriding duty of the mass media is objectivity.
Objectivity consists of conveying the points of view of both sides of a conflict.
During the years of the Vietnam War, the mass media in the United States made the public aware of the stance of their government and of that of the enemy.
George Bayley, who is curious about such things, added up the time allotted to one side or the other on the television networks ABC, CBS, and NBC between 1965 and 1970: the point of view of the invading nation took up 97 percent, while that of the nation invaded got 3 percent.
Ninety-seven to three.
For the invaded, the obligation to suffer through the war; for the invaders, the right to tell the story.
The news makes reality, not the other way around.”

Totally enamored by the book, I went in search of his other works and realized his seminal ones are others. ‘Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent’ is next on the list.

p.s. If there is only one book that you read this year, let it be this.