There and Back Again

With apologies to J.R.R. Tolkien, I wish I had hobbit feet, given the amount of trekking around I’ve been doing lately. Nothing so interesting as Middle Earth, however. I’ve been sightseeing nursing homes and extended care facilities for my dad, thus, the hiatus in these blog posts lately. So it is with delight that I return to an exotic voyage, and wind up my reviews of books on India with Jhumpa Lahiri’s Pulitizer Prize winning collection of short stories, Interpreter of Maladies.

The fact that I’m commenting on this now is a sad demonstration of how little I am caught up with modern authors. Lahiri published this in 1999, but by the time I get to it, it’s already enshrined in the modern canon. I first heard about it while wiling away the hours driving the Nikipedia back and forth, back and forth. There has to be something worthwhile to do with all that car time and given my proclivity for productivity, we were listening to the Teaching Company’s Art of Reading. If it hits the sonorous products of the Teaching Company, you can be certain it’s gone from trendy to enshrined.

While the three previous books I’ve mentioned about India mostly dealt with India and people arriving there, this one pretty much concerns people who’ve bought a one way ticket and landed in the other direction—Indians lost and wandering around the U.S.

Ms. Lahiri’s spare use of language nevertheless manages to create some resonant tone poems. I’m always interested in finding a way to understand people whose culture, values and choices appear very foreign to me, and Ms. Lahiri really gives voice to a subgroup that is sometimes voiceless in the juggernaut of American culture. Even though I think I’m pretty much a squeaky liberal, I am certainly guilty of thinking of some groups as “those people”, and find it really soul-expanding to be helped to understand. Both Ms. Lahiri (and another writer I love, Nahguib Mahfouz) really help to create a feeling of commonality, without betraying their culture’s uniqueness.

I just wish her characters weren’t so sad. Wow, it’s really bleak for Indians in the U.S. Even with family and a good income, Ms. Lahiri’s characters are really in a struggle to define themselves, eke out happiness, achieve authentic relationships, and they have a tough time succeeding, if at all. For anyone who has trouble wrapping their mind around arranged marriages, Ms. Lahiri offers a window into what they might be like—i.e., not much different than the Western choose-for yourself-and-be-miserable. I wouldn’t say either system has a lock on the secret to happiness or misery. Maybe people operate much more out of their own characters, even within different cultural contexts.

The stories are soulful and ambiguous, and normally I really like narratives that serve up stuff you’re still chewing on later. But jeez, couldn’t she have left some of them at least a little happiness? Maybe it’s the economy now compared to 11 years ago; maybe it’s my own personal life experiences lately. But I’d like to see a little hope, a little romance, or, gosh, the tiniest touch of humor. I’ve heard Lahiri compared to Raymond Carver, but no dice, in my opinion. I mean, Lahiri’s characters have jobs, families, spouses, big houses—couldn’t they enjoy a little of it? Carver’s characters are often busted, sick, broke, and they still sometimes have hope and happiness. Okay, what Carver and Lahiri have in common is—they both write/wrote short stories.

All said and done, it’s a helluva first publication (although my guess is she’d been cranking the hard disc for a good long time.) She’s gone on since the 2000 prize to become a literary lion with a veritable bookstore shelf all to herself. Yeah, I’m jealous. She’s a good read. Just not on a dreary day.

An Indian Epic

It’s harder to comment on excellence than on the mediocre or mundane, but I’ll give it a try anyway. Paul Scott’s magnum opus, The Raj Quartet, is just that: excellent in every way. The characters will haunt your thoughts for years, the setting is so vivid you’ll look for turmeric stains on your fingers, you’ll never be able to hear the sound of a sitar again without it meaning something to you, and seeing Indian locations in the news will forever after remind you of defining incidents in the book.

The Raj Quartet is, obviously, four books that make up an entire saga. All of the characters are somehow inter-related, and many know each other. Spanning the early part of the 1940’s, the past events in the lives of the characters keep intruding on the lives of others. What emerges is a portrait of Anglo-Indian relations and relationships, the political and the private, as complicated as a mandala. There are enough broken love relationships for a Hindu epic; characters who could behave well but choose the opposite; rather ordinary people who somehow rise to greatness; the silly, the sordid, and the sots. You’ll find yourself in love with a few of the characters, and some of them you’ll wish you could shake firmly (or worse). Good people are not necessarily rewarded, and by the end you feel sorry for even the worst villains, or at least understand them a bit.

Yeah, it’s long. Like everyone, I hope for short books that give me a satisfying sense of accomplishment—gee, I actually completed something. But, fond though I am of my blue pencil, I don’t think an editor could have cut a word in the 1,984 pages that make up my edition. Don’t let it stop you—consider it a cheap vacation. You might even learn more than you would on an actual trip to India, at considerably less cost. Although once you read this work, you’ll be looking at airfares the same way I am.

In the interest of honesty, I must admit that I saw the 14 episodes of The Jewel in the Crown before reading the books. This PBS series from the 80s is also terrific. Because I saw it first, I don’t know if the visuals would have matched my imagination, but I will say that the series is worthy of the book—subtly acted, not too many pretty boy actors, minor characters and subplots given their due. Fourteen episodes are a lot, but I’ve seen it twice now, and truthfully I’m thinking about watching it again with the Nikipedia. She won’t get all the subtlety at 16, but it’s no bad thing to see how complicated life can be, and what a variety of choices people make, with sometimes appalling consequences.

Along with Kristin Lavransdattir and Middlemarch (gosh, maybe I really do like LOOONNNNGGG books) this is probably in my 10 top list of all time. Read The Raj Quartet and expand your soul.

More ladies in distress—India

It’s tough out there. My previous post was about the plight of young Indian widows. It wasn’t so hot (or maybe it was, groan) for Western women who made their way there, either. East of the Sun, by Julia Gregson, is a chunky bedtime read about three women who travel to India pre-World War II to find husbands.

I didn’t love these characters, but I did find myself reading to the end because, ultimately, I did care what happened to them. Not all of the women are equally appealing, nor are they all as thoroughly fleshed out as one might wish, but you know all of them—everyone with female friends does, although I had some trouble actually identifying with any of them. I suppose I have a blind spot that happily ever after doesn’t necessarily mean getting married.

What Ms. Gregson has done superbly well, in my opinion, is handle point of view in an extremely interesting way, and anyone working on fiction should have a look. She does a masterful job of switching between how her characters see themselves (in chapters where one woman dominates) and then how other people see them. She does this quite well with one character in particular, Viva, whose interior monologue is confused and scared, but whom others see as, well, their mom or big sis.

One plot strand that was unusual in such a gal pal book was the introduction of a whacked out stalker for whom Viva has become responsible. His mental illness is never really specified, but Gregson does a great job of portraying his behavior and how the other characters understand and react to it.

Despite the exotic local, India just provides the excuse for a story that is really closer to Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants than it is to the Jewel in the Crown. But more about that in my next post. East of the Sun is a great book to read under an afghan with a cup of Darjeeling, when the Sunday New York Times is just a bit too much reality.

Booking a passage to India

Ever notice how ideas cluster? I didn’t actually set out to read a ton of material on India, but for some reason several books have recently insinuated themselves into my six foot high bedside stack. So, the next few blog posts will be discussing books set in India or about Indians. For some reason, most of these have a 20th or 21st century setting, so I’m going to skip the Mahabharata and Ramayana retellings which both Nikipedia and I read last year. If you’re interested, the R. K. Narayan versions were terrific.

I don’t read anywhere near as many YA novels as I should, given that I’m working on one, but those I read I generally enjoy, and highly recommend them to adults as well. Usually they’re easy to follow, tell a good story, and can be completed in two or three nights of bedtime reading. Homeless Bird, by Gloria Whelan, is one such and it won a ton of prizes, including the National Book Award in 2000. Spoiler alert—don’t read further if you don’t want to know the plot of the book.

Homeless Bird is about Koly, whose dirt-poor parents marry her off at a very young age to the son of a family they barely know. He turns out to be hopelessly ill (the family is trying to use dowry money for one last desperate attempt to save him).

After he dies, she has a miserable existence with her mother in law, who’s in pretty desperate straits herself, and who ultimately abandons her on the streets of Vrindavan, a city known as the City of Widows. Widows become a huge economic liability, and this is a city where some can stave off starvation by chanting at temples all day long. It’s a hopeless survival. There are several twists of fate, and Koly ends up (presumably) living happily ever after.

To some degree, this is a Cinderella trope. At first, I had a hard time placing what era the story was set in, until I started to see mention of computers and realized to my horror that Ms. Whelan was describing present day conditions. It’s particularly horrifying to be reminded that in this huge country there is no real social safety net and that in a place where I talk to well spoken people every day in call centers, other people—young and helpless girls—can starve to death any day of the week. It’s easy to shrug off horrors set in the past, but Ms. Whelan’s choice to set this story in the present day is arresting and impactful.

Ms. Whelan does an excellent job of portraying three dimensional villains. Her bad people make cruel choices, but you do have some understanding of why they make those choices, and you find yourself pitying or at least being able to forgive them. Also, characters are introduced subtly, and unfold over time, rather than the stock and unchanging minor characters one often encounters in a short novel.

The introduction of Vrindavan is fascinating—well off the familiar settings Westerners might stereotype as India. It had me running to a map and doing an internet search for more info. I think she includes the right amount for the average YA reader. However, I always wish for notes in the back of any novel that deals with historical or foreign settings. At least some links on the writer’s website would be nice. It’s a quibble. Maybe it’s a tribute—the writer has made you want to know more. To her credit, Ms. Whelan does supply a page of further information, but no links. Maybe that’s appropriate for YA readers. On second thought, maybe this book is intended for middle grades—I’m never quite sure where the cut point is.

I’m not very fond, any more, of books where the happy ending is that the girl gets the guy. Based on my own experience, that’s neither the end, nor necessarily very happy in real life. Given the realities of poor women in India, it appears that was one of the few resolutions available to the heroine, but I’m glad Ms. Whelan also gives her a trade where she can earn money and have some independence.

This book might be distressing to sensitive readers, adult or YA, but it provides a rich and thoughtful picture of a contemporary culture with troubling issues. It caused me to think a lot about the differences and, more disturbingly, the parallels between women’s situation in India and my own home culture. BTW, I've classified this as historical fiction, even though in my estimation it's not, because that's what the librarian who told me about the book billed it as.

Cookbooks for when you’re broke

Which is nearly always for us, mostly due to the amount I spend on food and books! February’s “cookbook of the month” experiment turned out to be two: Ann Rogers’ The New Cookbook for Poor Poets (and others), and Mary Ostyn’s Family Feasts for $75 a Week, which I picked up for about $10 while shopping at Sam’s Club to “save” money. (BTW, for the Rogers book I have the earlier version, but since Amazon is currently selling that one for $50, the link is to a cheaper one.)

Let’s attack the $75 a week one first. Can’t be done in my house. Ms. Ostyn seems like a terrific person, and in addition to 4 biological kids, she’s adopted 6 from other countries—Korea and Ethiopia. Since I’ve barely been able to cope with one child, I’m surprised all her recipes don’t start out with, “First, take a large swig of whiskey”, but she seems a more sensible and able person than I am. Some weeks, I’d be doing well to feed us each on $75 a week, and when we decide to try some new diet book with prescribed menus, well, checkout sticker shock can be pretty devastating. Too bad anxiety doesn’t cause me to lose weight.

If you buy organic food, I just don’t believe you could possibly feed 4 people on $75 a week, and I’d like to hear from anyone that can and how you do it. Maybe if you grow all produce yourself. However, I must admit that following Ms. Ostyn did cut the grocery bills somewhat. I’ve also noticed that if I actually make out a week of menus, this in itself cuts down what I spend dramatically. Even though she didn’t save me a ton of money, her recipes were interesting, as they include a lot of Ethiopian dishes, and a few techniques I’d never heard of, like dry frying onions, then adding oil. Surprisingly, it didn’t not end up being “Cajun blackened” frying pan.

Except for the addition of cayenne pepper, we found the recipes to be somewhat bland. As Nikipedia put it, this is food kids would eat. Just not MY kid, who has always liked highly seasoned food. For example, we tried the white chicken chili recipe, but it just lacked something—maybe a handful of cilantro? And the portions are small (unlike a lot of cookbooks). Now, you have to remember that my idea of portions is pretty skewed. As a kid my aunt used to cook 3 pounds of pasta for 5 people. Even so, I need more than a scant cup of chili for dinner. Hats off to Ms. Ostyn for what she is doing, and her “front of book” is interesting, but the recipes need some work.

Whenever I open Poor Poet’s cookbook, I feel 40 years younger. I bought this book as a teenager when I first ran away from home (something I still would like to do at times). I spotted it in a bookstore in Berkeley, and it was my introduction to budget cooking. At a time when I was lonely, lost and broke, she taught me that style was not necessarily linked to money.

I remember showing it to my mom several years later. She was unenthused—“they’re cheap recipes”. Yeah, well…after a childhood spent gnawing bones clean, Mom believed in MEAT on the table. The rest of us have since realized that maybe that isn’t always such a hot idea.

The Poor Poet eats well—lots of flavor, interesting ingredient mixes, easy to make with ingredients I tend to have on-hand, and cheap for the most part. Ms. Rogers believes that food should feed the soul, and a good meal inspires the creative spirit. I’ve enjoyed this book for many years, but this last month I tried many recipes I’d ignored, although I already had plenty of favorites in the book. Only one flatbread recipe was kind of a dud—it ended up being 4 inch crackers rather than any kind of bread.

My one quibble with this book is that it often substitutes easily available ingredients for authentic ones. Since this book was written in the 1960s, it’s an interesting time travel to realize that most of these ingredients simply weren’t available in the U.S. at that time. These were the days when dinner at a restaurant was your choice of roast beef, ham, fried chicken or roast turkey, not matter paneer or pesto something-or-other. So, Ms. Rogers paneer uses cottage cheese, her Noodles Basilico is delicious, but not pesto, etc. The flavors, if not the ingredients, have stood up well to the test of time. If you can get your hands on a copy (it’s long out of print) I recommend it just to absorb Ms. Rogers’ attitudes toward the art of food. The recipes are a great bonus.

Columbia University College Tour

It’s hard to be running late when you’re in charge of the deadlines, but somehow I manage. So, this is late—in the sense that I’m writing a report about a month after we toured Columbia. Assuming, however, that the throes of college applications have passed by this time of year, perhaps I can just declare that this is EARLY for the next admissions season. There, I feel better.
The Nikipedia is only sophomore-level, but given how LATE we are on just about everything, it seems reasonable to check things out when we’re in an appropriate city. Thus, trip to New York = visit to Columbia. Why were we interested? Okay, I feel a digression coming on.

In the few schools we’ve so far toured (Oberlin, Peabody, Northwestern & Univ. of Chicago) there seems to be two prominent methods of organizing an education. First method: have few to no required courses—student is free to concentrate heavily on major or professional training. This method often allows the student to double or triple major. One might wish, as a parent, that this would result in complementary majors—say, French and Education, or Marketing and Art—you know, something that is likely to enhance the probability that Junior will actually be able to pay off those college loans. Unfortunately, in my observation, it usually results in bizarre mash ups, like French and Accounting, or Piano and Biology, where the kid is majoring in what they really love, and double majoring in something they force themselves to take to get a job. Not so good.

The other route is to require a significant core curriculum, which nearly everyone takes. These often feature heavy reading of classics, along with math and science, or at least enough math and science that the kid will graduate with some idea of the topics (at least enough to discard all the creationist/intelligent design crap.) The idea is that the student will have a depth of cultural knowledge that they can then apply to a concentration in the last two years.

We can argue about the benefits of each until the gargoyles fall off their perches, but at least right now, the Nikipedia’s (and my) strong preference is for the core curriculum approach, à la University of Chicago and Columbia.

Okay, we already all know Columbia is a terrific school. I mean, it’s Ivy League (which really only speaks to sports, but who cares?) and has a roster of famous alumni as long as the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge (including our beloved Barack, who by the way was a dorm daddy while there). If you want to know more about the core curriculum, check out the book Great Books, by David Denby. He’s a journalist who graduated from Columbia, then went back as an adult and retook the curriculum. Education is so wasted on the young.

My top concern in sending my precious to Columbia was safety and security. For a lot of people, that’s a concern for the Univ. of Chicago, too, but I live here and even went there in the bad old days—it wasn’t all that scary then, and it’s a lot safer now. Same with Columbia. I was really impressed with the attention to security, especially in the dorms. Something like 98% of students live on campus—no duh there, given the price of New York City housing. Even better, the admissions counselor said the overwhelming majority of professors live within walking distance of campus.

Mostly what I was impressed with at Columbia was the sense of a real campus community. The layout of buildings tends to feel like a giant hug around the main plaza, with the dorms anchoring the corners and edges. The architecture is interesting with a nice mix of old and modern (engineering, what else?) We ate in a dining hall that could have been lifted from Harry Potter (lots of wood paneling) and the food was terrific. Ever had dessert pizzas? Pineapple, coconut, omigod.

What we both especially liked about the dining hall (okay, after the food) was the interactions we observed. Columbia touts the number of minorities it admits, and that’s lovely, but I always watch to see if all groups appear to be interacting. I mean, it’s not fostering communication if all the Asian or African American kids sit off at their own tables. Not so here—totally interactive.

One interaction we couldn’t help but observe. We happened to sit down next to an African American girl (girl to me, at least, given what an old bat I am). She calmly checked us out, then began talking to Niki—obviously recognizing us as on visit. Her boyfriend appeared, she had a quiet set to with him where she read him the riot act for keeping her waiting—lots about honoring commitments. Yay! just the kind of girl I want my girl to be! After he left, she calmly picked up a book, then kindly spoke a little more to Niki and left—what self possession!

As 1 o’clock approached, the dining room emptied—another yay! No lolling about cutting class. In fact, my dominant impression watching students was, these kids are moving.

The admissions counselor cautioned everyone not to say in their application that they wanted to come to Columbia because it’s in New York, but let’s be real—that’s a huge attraction. I mean, the museums, the arts, the business—geez, imagine the internships. There’s a subway stop right at the entrance to campus, and you can be in midtown in about 15 minutes. My main worry is that Niki would skip class to inhale museums (I guess that’s better than the other stuff you can inhale). With most everyone living in dorms, and not a big Greek scene, it didn’t appear that drugs or alcohol were much of an issue. Or as the tour guide said, who has time? There’s just too much to do.

How would I compare Columbia with other schools we’ve seen? Well, the most comparable would probably be the University of Chicago. My totally unscientific feel is that there’s more eccentricity at the U of C. More kids look like mad scientists or poets, the purple hair quotient is higher, discussions overheard are more serious and esoteric at the U of C. The kids at Columbia look more normal and, dare I say, attractive, with more conventional albeit big city style. Not the chi-chi coed look you see at Northwestern, but polished and clean. I bet Columbia is more fun for social kids than the U of C would be, and U of C a better fit for real academics on the geeky side.

What they have in common is that kids at both campuses seem to love and cherish the common core. But then, if you didn’t want that already you most certainly would not go to these schools. I dunno, but to me it seems to produce an intellectual confidence that allows them to tackle further studies with direction and assurance. I was very impressed that our tour guide had a clear plan for graduate school, was carefully assessing how much money she could land to pursue it, and also had a Plan B that she was enthusiastic about if Plan A didn’t work out. That’s what I’d like to see in Nikipedia by senior year.

As a good daughter of the U of C, I still hope the Nikipedia might get in there, especially because, sniff-sniff, she’d only be a 45 minute drive away. But we’d do a very happy dance if the fat envelope eventually comes from Columbia.

Cooking up January

Julia Child apparently could not get it together enough to send out her Christmas cards in December, so she and hubby made a practice of sending out Valentines instead. Boy, can I relate. Forget the cards, ain’t going to happen. However, I do feel the need to catch up, since I’ve had precious little time to post here since January, due to actual big paying writing gig, trip to New York, class, and grandpa canning himself while I was away and breaking his collar bone. But you don’t want to hear about this, right? Let’s talk about what’s to eat.
As I mentioned in the last post, we are going to select one cookbook a month and actually cook from it. I absolutely have to pay homage to Julia, so the first one (January) was Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume 1. I’ve mentioned before how Julia Child taught me to cook. Back when I was in college, I actually had a printed copy of the television show recipes in paperback, which I still have of course. But for most of college and grad school I was way too broke to afford the actual bible, which was not then available in paperback in the U.S. To my extreme delight, I discovered that it was available in England in a Penguin edition and snatched up a copy when I spied it in a bookstore in Salisbury. This became my bedtime reading for the rest of the trip.

By the time I got home, I’d learned a lot about technique and treatment of ingredients, but I can’t actually say I cooked much from the book. Somewhere I read an article that it took more than two days to make the Beef Wellington preparation. About this time I had also discovered the cookbooks of Elizabeth David, and her somewhat sketchy directions and loose approach seemed much easier to me. I understand now (especially after January) that Julia Child’s recipes are not so much difficult as they LONG and precise, but who has time as a grad student, or for the rest of life, for that matter? So MAFC became the go-to if I didn’t understand a technique or wanted the definitive recipe for Gateau Pithiviers or some such, but I generally used someone else’s recipe.

I used it enough that the Penguin edition began to yellow (rapidly) and lose pages (slowly but consistently). Finally, 20 years later, I looked at my baby daughter and wondered what legacy I would leave her. Seriously, she was in danger of not inheriting a copy of MAFC. Cannot be. This was just about the time that there was a buzz about re-issuing MAFC, and when I saw the pre-publication price, I started combing used bookstores, nabbing both volumes for about $5 each (made me happier than a good stock pick).

From the condition of the books, it became obvious that using MAFC is like saving money or losing weight—everybody talks about it but nobody actually does it. So, when Nikipedia and I began this cookbook-of-the-month project, the very first one obviously had to be MAFC, volume 1.

My conclusion after about a dozen recipes? If you have any interest in eating, you must have this book. Notice I did not say “cooking”. You don’t need to know anything about cooking. Believe me, Julia will tell you everything you need to know—don’t think about it, don’t try to improve, don’t skip any ingredients—just do exactly what she says and you’ll have a taste orgasm. I mean, the Casserole-roasted Chicken with Tarragon smelled so good and tasted so transcendent I wanted to take a bath in it, smear it on my face, take the pot into a corner and snarl away my beloved child, eating it all myself.

I’ve been making omelets for more than 30 years, but never tried them Julia’s way. Who knew two crummy eggs in a pan could cause your eyes to fly open? And the Gratin of Creamed Salmon! We barely got that one to the table and when we did, it already had two forks sticking out of it.

Maybe there’s a bad recipe in there somewhere, but we didn’t unearth it. A lot of people have joked that you can make anything taste good with enough butter, but canned salmon? These recipes are just superb, and represent a kind of cooking that can rarely be beat, here in the U.S. or even in much of Europe, any more.

There were a few things I didn’t like about the book, however. The recipes are set up with ingredients running down the left column, and how and when you use them running parallel in the right column. Myself, I like recipes to list all the ingredients at the beginning, in order of use. Just easier for me. The instructions are LONG, however simple their actual execution, and this may be either intimidating, comforting, or over-kill depending on your level of cooking expertise. I’ve been cooking for at least 40 years now (I started in infancy), but I have to confess I learned a few things. I hate the index for several reasons—the typography is just horrible—can’t distinguish heads and sub heads. The recipes are not listed by exact title: if you want the Chicken casserole I mentioned above, you have to look it up under Casseroles, where you’ll find “Chicken Fricasees”, or under “Chicken” or under “Poulet”. For me, a pain.

This is not a budget cookbook. But, even with the butter, floods of vermouth and cognac, and all the très cher seafood, it’s not terribly expensive or caloric either. Why? portions are small to reasonable. In fact, Julia mentions that the portions are even larger than she wished, but her editors convinced her to change her expectations from the multi-course French way to the fewer, larger American expectations. If you can control your gluttony and stick to the portions sizes, it’s not so bad.

What about the time factor? As long as you read the entire recipe beforehand, and that’s an important caveat, the recipes weren’t bad at all. I wouldn’t attack a major entrée at 6:45pm on a week night, but many of the recipes are minutes to prepare—takes longer to read them.

January with Julia was great. We didn’t put on an excessive amount of weight. The Nikipedia groaned when I announced February would have a cookbook of its own. Onward and upward.