Granskningar och kommentarer

Mr Ali, a retired Indian civil servant, quickly becomes bored with not having anything to do and not being able to convince his son to give up his political rabble-rousing. So he decides to set up a marriage bureau to help both muslims, hindus and christians arrange their marriages. Since he's very good at what he does (apparently, all you really need to do is advertise), he soon has more business than he can handle on his own and hires Aruna, a young unwed hindu woman, to be his assistant. Aruna's family is too poor to be able to marry her off, which seems to doom her to eternal spinsterhood, but then a rich young doctor walks in looking for a wife, and...

...You know where this is heading. Really, you do. The Marriage Bureau For Rich People is a quick, easy, sympathetic read, but also painfully predictable and clichéd. Its main selling point seems to be exotism; Zama spends pages at a time describing how someone ties a sari, how to cook binyari, excursions to picturesque temples, etc etc etc, all seemingly aimed at a reader who's never set foot in India.

Which is a pity, because there's some interesting stuff in here. The conflicts between traditional arranged marriage and encroaching Western values, between religions and castes, between globalisation and the good of the people, between men and women, between generations... it's all in the book somewhere, and at times I start suspecting that Zama is really going to sneak in some harsh questions under all the fluff. But time and again, it's all resolved by having Ali or Aruna or any of all the other oh-so-very-nice-and-wise characters say "compromise" a few more times. None of the alleged compromises really require anyone to give anything up or do anything except, well, say the word "compromise". Everything's resolved by all the characters realising that any perceived conflict really doesn't exist at all and that problems are all immediately solved by seeing the other person's side. Which is an admirable position, but he makes it far too easy for himself, especially when all that's left once the problems have all been proven to not exist in the first place is 260 pages of equal parts Visit India! and detailed descriptions of office work.

The Marriage Bureau For Rich People is desperately, unblinkingly, white-knuckledly feel-good. You'll breeze through it in a couple of hours, you'll think the characters are nice, India sounds nice, a curry would be nice, and all is well with the world, which is nice. Then you'll forget it.

"I had to fast. I can’t do anything else. Because I couldn’t find a food which tasted good to me. If I had found that, believe me, I would not have made a spectacle of myself and would have eaten to my heart’s content, like you and everyone else."

...says the titular character of Hamsun fan Franz Kafka's A Hunger Artist. Which reads a bit like one possible interpretation of Hamsun's Hunger - but only one of many.

Hunger is a powerful thing, as our nameless narrator finds out as he drifts through late-19th-century Oslo, starving. Or possibly starving himself. Because as poor as he is, there seems to be either something deliberate or something pathological behind it: he constantly sabotages himself. If he has money, he gives it away and starves. If someone offers him money, he puts his nose up and lies that he has everything he needs. He's constantly acting (or telling us he's acting) like a rich nobleman even when he's dirt poor. Why? Since it's all told from his perspective, and he's clearly not all that reliable, we're left to making up our own explanations. Is he too hung up on false ideas of honour, conscience and goodness, or just not true enough to them? Is he representative of a society needing new, harsher ideals (reading it with the foreknowledge that Hamsun went on to support the Nazi occupation of Norway is a tiny bit unsettling) or one needing more compassion (our narrator as Prince Myshkin in a city full of emotionally and physically starved people)? Is he mentally ill? Is he the only sane person in a world of people needing to wake up? Is he Job unto God, Man unto lack of God, bourgeousie unto poverty, poverty unto oppression, art unto prosaicness, what?

And then there's the city he walks through and the people in it. Which even through his fevered, dizzy, and obviously not completely sane eyes comes across as almost hyper-real. And in the middle our narrator, soaking it all in, deliberately taking all the shit upon himself, deliberately going without so that... what? To what purpose? For what greater (or smaller) good?

It's off-putting. It's engrossing. It's hilarious. It's crushingly depressing. And like hunger itself, it's singular; it's a question that's only permanently put to rest by death. You can't ignore it for long, you can't cure it; it devours, and the more you put into it, the more it howls after more.

Hunger is a powerful thing.

On reading The Alchemist, or "Du liest Paulo Coelho? Vergiss die Peitsche nicht!"

(spoilers ahead, not that it should matter since you'll know everything simply by reading the blurb on the back cover anyway)

Short version of this review: The Alchemist is crap. Through and through.

Slightly longer version: The Alchemist is crap for several reasons. Because there's no plot to speak of - everything zips along on a trail straighter than Fred Phelps' public persona; it does exactly what it says on the tin with no twists, no surprises and nothing to grab your interest, and everything turns out exactly as you'd think it would 10 pages in. Because the characters are a series of identical cut-outs saying the exact same things in the exact same voices over and over again. Because the prose jumps back and forth from purple to something that would be better suited for a children's book, full of repetitions and redundancies. Because it's a ridiculously conservative piece of pseudo-pop-philosophy that's only slightly dumbed down from your average Ricki Lake monologue and... OK, imagine if Candide had been perfectly serious. If Voltaire had thought irony was just a colour, like goldy only greyer. Then add some new-age nonsense to Pangloss' teachings, get rid of the gorier bits and you'd have The Alchemist: a book so unaware of its own shallowness that people were already parodying it 250 years ago.

The book is about this sheep herder. His name is initially given as Santiago but rarely ever mentioned after that, he's just referred to as "the boy," presumably since Coelho has watched that Simpsons episode where a greedy self-help guru tells Springfield to "be like the boy" (except he must have missed the second part of that episode where the advice predictably leads to disaster). This "boy" is certainly no Bart Simpson, though; for one thing, he must at the very least be in his late teens. For another Bart's not a blithering idiot like Santiago, or "Thicko" as I'll call him from now on. Thicko has to have everything explained to him at least four times, since even though he's supposedly been to seminary school and reads obsessively, the simplest words and concepts make him go "huh? Whassatmean?" Of course, the real reason for this is that Coelho is supremely uninterested in telling a story; his one purpose in writing is to impart Wisdom on his readers, and since he obviously considers his readers about as lucid as Thicko's sheep (there's a slightly disturbing Also Sprach Zarathustra undertone to this) he's going to have to be as literal and anvilicious as he possibly can. At one point, the Alchemist points out that this kind of wisdom can only be imparted orally - and since he's very obviously an authorial self-insert on a scale I've never seen outside of Erich von Däniken novels, you have to wonder why Coelho bothered writing the book. Maybe he got sick of people laughing at him when he tried to peddle this pap face-to-face.

So anyway, Thicko has this dream in which he finds a treasure at the Pyramids. This dream confuses him, but two Mysterious Strangers (one of whom we are explicitly told comes straight out of the Bible - subtle storytelling there, Paulie) tell him that this dream means he's going to find a treasure at the Pyramids. Thicko is highly impressed by their dream-interpretation skills and promptly sells his sheep and hitches a ride to Tanger, where he loses everything and ends up working for a living. He immediately forgets about his treasure, but after he's made enough money, he suddenly remembers it again and joins a caravan across the desert where he learns to accept that things happen because they are written and that nobody can change what is written - cue up the soundtrack from Lawrence of Arabia, since that's the only way you'll get the slightest sense that any of this is real. Finally, he meets up with the Alchemist of the book's title, who turns out to be... Yoda. Yoda with better grammar and a worse script, but still Yoda, right down to the big test where Thicko has to lift his spaceship out of the bog... uh, I mean turn himself into a gust of wind. Yoda teaches him to use the force, that we are all one and that there is no "try" only "do" and "do not," and Thicko sees the light. Except without the part where the beautiful Arab girl with whom Thicko fell in love at first sight (and she with him, since women in this story are nothing but rewards for male heroes) turns out to be his long-lost twin sister; a pity, since this is the sort of novel where even incest would have been an improvement.

The blurb on the back says that the book is "a magical fable about learning to listen to your heart, read the omens strewn along life's path, and above all follow your dreams." Fine. Problem is, that's ALL it's about and it says it both literally and repeatedly, again and again and again until it finally sinks in for poor Thicko: "Hey, I think I'm starting to get this! You're saying I should... uh... listen to my heart, read the omens strewn along life's path and... follow my dreams?" THANK YOU, CAPTAIN OBVIOUS. (No wonder Julia Roberts loved the book so much her endorsement is printed TWICE on the last few pages - the whole thing is based around the chorus to a Roxette ballad, just like Pretty Woman! Gee, I wonder what life-changing morals Coelho's other novels have in store - "If you want to know what love is, ask someone to show you"? "Dance cheek-to-cheek with ladies in red"? "Love lifts you up where you belong"? "Do anything for love (but don't do that)"? "Listen to the winds of change"? ...wait, that last one is already in The Alchemist.) The only thing the 180 wide-spaced pages of narrative add to the blurb is a profound sense of boredom, probably laced with some anger if you've actually shelled out cash for this twaddle. Every single character except for the one who's even dafter than Thicko keeps telling him the same things, every single character and every single thing that happens serves only one purpose: to convince Thicko to read the blurb on the back of his own novel until he gets it and is rewarded - in cash, of course. No wonder rich celebs like it; Madonna must have gone "Hey! He's right, I deserve to be rich!" when she read it.

I'm not even going to try to pick apart Coelho's "philosophical" and "spiritual" meanderings, which seem to consist of 50% random lifts from various religious writings and 50% hospital greeting cards. If you're the kind of person who thinks "today is the first day of the rest of your life" is a deep, thought-provoking comment on the nature of humanity, then you'll love The Alchemist. According to Coelho we're living in the best of all possible worlds, so never aspire to be more than what God has dictated for you, always follow the traditional ways, and remember that the only value of other people existing is that they can help you realise this. It's a remarkable mix of selfishness and fatalism and I'm honestly confused as to whether the writer even realises this or if he just mixed and matched from some 1-dollar book of aphorisms without thinking about it.

Alchemy is the art of turning base things into gold (and Coelho honestly seems to believe in it, even if no sane person has for the last few hundred years), but Coelho is no Midas; the only thing The Alchemist manages to prove is the old saying about polishing a turd. No matter how many stars and quotes from stars you stick on the cover, I'd suggest not sticking your fingers into it.

Small town (in Maine, duh) suddenly gets sealed off from the outside world by an invisible force field. After the initial shocks and a few grisly deaths, things get worse as the local republican bigwig seizes the opportunity to convince people to give up freedom for safety and quickly and efficiently sets himself up as dictator. Leading to more grisly deaths, an incredibly unsubtle parable about paranoia in Bush-era US, and funnily enough one of King's most entertaining novels in a while.

Which isn't to say it's great, by King standards or otherwise. Even if you shrug and accept the blatant political subtext (whether you agree or disagree, getting hit with the Message Bat always hurts), you're still stuck with a story that repeats a number of old King storylines without necessarily adding anything new to them; it's basically The Mist (one of the characters even compares it to the movie) meets The Stand. And if you start picking at the details, there are a number of things that make little sense (so the phones are cut off, but TV and Internet still work, and yet the citizens of the town immediately start acting as if there is no way at all to communicate with the outside world, or tell them what's going on in town...? What?)

That said, for a 1000+ page novel, it really zips. The advantage of King sticking to favourite subplots and character types is that he knows exactly what he's doing (unlike the ambitious but inept Lisey's Story) and while you could probably edit 100 pages or more out without losing much, he manages to juggle the dozens of main characters and their various story arcs well enough that there's never really a dull moment. King's approach to epic stories (put good guys and bad guys in the same pressure cooker, have the bad guys do awful things to the good guys until we beg him to stop torturing them, and then keep it up a while longer) is predictable but effective, and the thing that once helped make me a King fan - that you can never trust that the good guys will succeed, and certainly not escape unscathed - is still there. As political allegory, it's clumsy and overwritten; as straight-ahead action with blatant emotional manipulation, it works.

In a small US town, a liberal-minded female sex ed teacher comes under fire from the local evangelicals for daring to teach teenagers about contraception. Meanwhile, in the same town, a former drug addict turned evangelical Christian makes the "mistake" - having no will of his own, apparently - of leading the kiddie league football team he coaches in prayer. Tempers flare and everyone will have to look at their own actions and prejudices and... blah-de-blah-de-blah.

My first, and until I read this only, exposure to Perrotta was the movie adaptation of Little Children, which I really liked. Of course, it's possible that Little Children is a vastly superior book to The Abstinence Teacher, but I'm leaning more towards the idea that Todd Field and Kate Winslett can make anything look good. Because The Abstinence Teacher didn't agree with me at all. Which annoys me even more because it's such an interesting subject; the collision between fundamentalism and secular society, faith and doubt, freedom of religion and freedom from religion, etc... a great author could have made a great novel of this.

Unfortunately, Perrotta is competent at best. He writes like a journalist, padding his pedestrian prose with endless pointless asides as if he were paid by the word, and except for possibly the two protagonists, his characters are little more than clichéd parodies that we've seen hundreds of times before. There's a bit at the beginning, where our fearless (well, not really) sex ed teacher Ruth almost gets suckered in by the obviously exaggerated stories of an abstinence supporter (you know, the "My college roommate had sex and got AIDS and became pregnant and got raped ALL IN THE SAME WEEK" type.) Well, that's the kind of novel Perrotta has written; every single backstory is so generic, so simplified (apparently, every single Christian is either a former junkie or severely depressed) that it doesn't convince.

Even his two "heroes" are far too flat and unengaging to carry the novel; rather than shine a light on serious questions, they mostly just seem both single- and simple-minded. And while Perrotta occasionally uses them to ask an interesting question or two about the supposed subject, for the most part it's treated like a generic backdrop that serves no purpose but to advance the plot - which, granted, works pretty well, and it's certainly a quick, painless, harmless read. But for the most part, his own contribution to the debate seems to mainly be to line up the arguments from both sides, then he goes "people disagree, everybody makes mistakes, nobody can do much about it. Shrug."

According to wikipedia, Perrotta wrote the book because "I did feel somewhat inadequate as a novelist, just like I'd missed something huge happening in this country." He should have trusted that instinct and handed this plot idea to a more than just barely adequate novelist.

Having a sense of humour doesn't mean being able to tell jokes. Humour is the ability to play with the expected. Which is never more apparent than when authority tries to tell people what to think.

In 1970, the young intellectual student Han Shaogong was sent to the tiny village of Maqiao, where not much has changed since the emperor's days. But this was the cultural revolution and everything was to be made new: city-dwelling weaklings would become good workers, and in the process help turn the farmers into good socialists. So when he's not working the fields or the mountains, Han gets to teach the farmers to recite Mao quotes in proper, modern Chinese. But of course, to do that he first needs to understand their dialect, which isn't easy - you'd think the whole village was speaking backwards! "Awake" means "stupid", "expensive" means "young", "respect" means "punish", "hick" means "city boy", "democracy" means "chaos"... woops, sorry, some of those are modern Chinese. But anyway.

25 years later Han has grown to an accomplished novelist and puts together this fiction about life in Maqiao (any similarity between that name and Macondo is surely a coincidence) before, during and after his visit, in a form he's borrowed from Kundera's The Unbearable Lightness of Being: A dictionary of the Maqiao dialect, where every chapter heading is a different word he needs to explain, at once making up a part of the ongoing story and an explanation for why that particular word has that particular meaning in this particular place. And of course, he doesn't present it all in alphabetical order like a proper dictionary; alphabets - especially the Chinese one, where words can be spelled several different ways, each of which gives them a different meaning - are arbitrary, after all. So instead he arranges them in a different order, to tell a very entertaining story of the people who make up the village, full of serious gallows humour and with an amazing cast of characters - none of which seem to fit neatly into the categories his standardised Maoist vocabulary tells him they belong to. And 25 years later, as a Chinese intellectual with his head full of Western books, he can't help but draw parallels between his outsider status then, and the different but similar one he faces today.

In 1986 I visited an "artists' colony" in Virginia, USA; that is, a center for artistic creation. The word "colony" kept making me uncomfortable. Only later did I realize that many Westerners in countries that used to have a large number of colonies don't associate the word with murder, fires, rape, plunder, opium smuggling and other things that the people in former colonies think about when they hear it. [To them] the colony is an outpost for the noble, a field camp for heroes.

...says the man who was sent to the countryside to teach them how to think in a new age. All words, all concepts, mean different things depending on by whom, when, where and how they're spoken. What starts in a small village in inner China becomes a cross-section of the world where battles are increasingly fought with words and ideologies rather than brute force - defeating someone is one thing, changing their minds is another, even Mao knew that. And as burlesque, angry, sentimental or hilarious the stories of the hicks... sorry, that word doesn't work here... in Maqiao get, the subtext of how we control and are controlled by language runs through everything in a way that's both very similar to and completely different from what a writer like Herta Müller does. Orwell was wrong; Big Brother's doublethink will always, through usage, be knowingly or accidentally subverted into triplethink.

A Dictionary of Maqiao, as a deconstruction of the idea of ideological revolution (whether Maoist or capitalist) imposed from outside, knows better than to offer simple problems or solutions. Instead Han creates a very entertaining chronicle where both the characters and the underlying themes float like a river of rice gruel, blood, sweat and shit, always leaving new layers of sediment and breaking through every attempt to dam it, yet always clear enough to see the bottom and calm enough to reflect the person reading it.

One of the first things, or so it's often said - for instance, by Mario Vargas Llosa in last year's Nobel Prize lecture - that happens in a dictatorship is that the artists get silenced. All those brave painters, playwrights, poets and novelists who stand up against tyranny, whose works are distributed in secret on photocopies and are sung at secret gatherings, who are more powerful than a thousand bombs, and who get thanked as liberators once democracy returns...

Except is that really what happens? By night in Chile, that long period when Pinochet's fascists ruled, everything was silent according to Bolaño. Much like 2666, By Night In Chile seems almost an accusation against literature itself and its failures. We follow our narrator as he makes his deathbed confession, how he started as a young priest turned literature critic, as he learns from both fellow critics, from Opus Dei and from the fascist junta the importance of conservation, purity, loyalty, a world in which everything always remains what it is, where nobody questions anything. He praises the silence that dictatorship brought, when he finally gets to rise to prominence as both a Marxism expert to the junta and an eloquent appraiser of classical, eternal literature - since nothing new gets written about what's happening now. Afterwards, with Pinochet gone, everyone talks about how they resisted, but our narrator, who maintains his innocence right up to the end, was there and he didn't see it. While they gathered in secret rooms and whispered of their independence, people were tortured. In silence. Literature didn't change anything (he writes in his novel).

Bolaño's roots seem less South American and more central European - there are parts of By Night In Chile where it feels like I'm reading one of the latter-day East bloc satirists, especially Hrabal comes to mind. He's both funny and desperately, bitterly furious. It's not the masterpiece that 2666 is; the characters are a little too sketchy, and there are a few ideas (for instance, naming the Opus Dei representatives Raef and Etah) that feel a bit too on the nose. But on a whole, it's a dark little bitter pill of a book, at 150 pages just thin enough to sneak in the next time we get a little too self-congratulatory about how we made the world better today.