Upside Down

Eduardo Galeano

They don't live in the city where they live. They're not allowed to set foot in the vast hell that threatens their tiny private heaven. Beyond the walls lie regions of terror filled with ugly, dirty, envious people. They grow up rootless, stripped of cultural identity, aware of society only as a threat. Their homeland lies in the designer names on their clothes, and their language is a modern Morse code. In the cities around the globe, children of privilege are alike in their habits and beliefs, like shopping malls and airports, which lie outside the realms of time and space. Educated in virtual reality, they know nothing of real reality, which exists only to be feared or bought. 

From the point of view of statistics, if a person earns a thousand dollars and another earns nothing, each of them appears to earn five hundred dollars when one calculates per capita income. From the point of view of the struggle against inflation, adjustment policies are a good remedy. From the point of view of those who suffer such policies, they spread cholera, typhus, tuberculosis, and other damnations.

In a world that prefers security to justice, there is loud applause whenever justice is sacrificed on the altar of security. The rite takes place in the streets. Every time a criminal falls in a hail of bullets society feels some relief from the disease that makes it tremble. The death of each lowlife has a pharmaceutical effect on those living the high life. The word 'pharmacy' comes from pharmakos, the Greek name for humans sacrificed to the gods in times of crisis.

But God, being rather scatterbrained, forgot to make the first woman and man, and they had no choice but to make themselves. Way down there in God's garbage dump, at the bottom of that abyss, the first woman and the first man made themselves out of God's leftovers. We human beings were born from garbage, and that's why we all have a bit of day and a bit of night, and we're all time and earth and water and wind. 

Galeano lays out an incriminating vision of the modern world. It's incriminating because  if you're reading this, you speak English and you have access to the Internet and probably live in the developed world. This is incriminating because Galeano alleges that the developed world is responsible for a lot of evil everywhere else.

If the things he says are true, I come close to thinking that enjoying the pleasant life we lead here is a mortal sin, because it is afforded us by the suffering of so many people. So I take refuge in the lovely qualification, if the things he says are true. And you get the sense that the things he says are true by perception, just as so many things North Americans believe about the innocence of their society are true by perception. After all, it's a complex world, isn't it? And how can we really know if cheap mangoes arranged pleasingly on a shelf in a grocery store actually cause someone somewhere else misery. And how can we tell if trade agreements aren't fair? We can't even figure out if taxation within our own borders is fair.

So you read Galeano and if it's true, dammit. Which means you probably won't finish the book. Because half way through you are already feeling like there is just too much to deal with. Wow it sucks, yeah, in fact, you don't even make any excuses, you just say yeah wow it sucks. Besides, the copy of Upside Down I got from the library reeks of pot smoke, so despise the probably snooty granola hater who lives in this first world and hates it and read this book before you and probably felt all superior to the rest of us who are just trying to get by. At least that way you won't have to feel badly about the woman in Bolivia who has to pay extortionate rates for her water because a US company purchased it all.

Double Fold

Nicholson Baker

The British Library's newspaper collection occupies several buildings in Colindale, north of London, near a former Royal Air Force base that is now a museum of aviation. On October 20, 1940, a German airplane--possibly mistaking the library for an aircraft-manufacturing plant--dropped a bomb on it. Ten thousand volumes of Irish and English papers were destroyed; fifteen thousand more were damaged. Unscathed, however was a very large foreign-newspaper collection, including many American titles: thousands of fifteen-pound brick thick folios bound in marbled boards, their pages stamped in red with the British Museum's crown-and-lion symbol of curatorial responsibility. 

If the thought that the British Library later willingly destroyed these 'unscathed' newspapers arouses a surge off emotion in your breast, you will be interested in Double Fold. If not, you might want to read it anyway and see what it does make you feel, or you may not want to waste your time.

Life: A User's Manual

Georges Perec

However irksome are the discomfitures which a man who has given himself body and soul to the profession of ethnography may encounter in his attempt to grasp the deeper nature of Man in concrete terms--or, in other words, to apprehend the minimal sociality defining the human condition by conquering the heteroclite evidence of diverse cultures--and although an ethnographer may not aspire to more than the discovery of relative truths (since it is vain to hope to reach any final truth), the worst difficulty I have had to encounter was not at all of that kind: I wanted to go to the absolute limit of the primitive; had I not got all I wanted in these graceful Natives whom no one had seen before me, who would perhaps not be seen again after me? At the end of an exhilarating search, I had my savages, I asked for nothing more than to be one of them, to share their days, their pains, their rituals. Alas! they didn't want to have me, they were not prepared to teach me their customs and beliefs! They had no use whatever for the gifts I laid beside them, no use at all for the help I thought I could give! It was because of me that they abandoned their villages and it was only to discourage me, to convince me there was no point in my persevering, that they chose increasingly inhospitable sites, imposing ever more terrible living conditions on themselves to show me they would rather face tigers and volcanoes, swamps, suffocating fog, elephants, poisonous spiders, than men. I think I know a good deal bout physical suffering. But this is worst of all, to feel your soul dying...

As always there is a thread that seems to weave together the books I'm reading, no matter how far apart they objectively may be. And as usual with this thread, I do not always realize it until I have already been reading books that are a part of its weave for some time.

Perec's book, although somewhat ponderous to read, seemingly filled with trivialities and recorded data that may not have anything to do with plot or anything other than Perec's urge to report, is a story told by recounting different bits and pieces about all the residents of a single building in France. Sometimes he tells you of past residents, sometimes of present ones, but the story is always circling around this building. The chapters themselves are divided by rooms or characters (In the Boiler Room, Entrance Hall, Dinteville). The story is concerned with puzzles and is itself a puzzle. It's a book that's fonder to remember having read, than to read.

Much of what seems to be the clutter of Perec's story can either be ascribed to his desire to create puzzles or to his ethnographic impulse. Although Life is placed under the genre of fiction, it isn't hard to imagine it simply being an ethnography of one rather strange set of neighbors.

Box of Matches

Nicholson Baker

Claire told me last night that Lucy, the frail but funny woman who lives on our street, has had to go into the hospital. She's going to be okay, but the woman who helps Lucy was trying to fin d a home for Lucy's pets. Claire was wondering whether we should take one of the cat. I see that it would be a good thing to do but it seems to me that our current cat gets into terrible fight with neighbor cats already, and he's had a major blow this year as a result of the arrival of the duck. Greta, although not very bright in some ways, is shrewd about cats. What you do is you walk up to the cat slowly, as if you want to say hello, and when the cat tentatively extends its nose in the willing-to-sniff-and-be-sniffed stance, you peck at him sharply. Then, when the shocked cat turns to walk away, his ears back, his feelings and nose hurt, lunge at him again and peck him directly on or near his anus. That makes him gallop off--for no animal likes to be pecked on the anus by a duck.

I want to take care of the world. Sometimes I think of a helmet with a set of plastic earlfaps that I swivel down over my ears. There are holes on the outside of the earflaps that pick up sounds of distress from far away. It is like listening to the whales groan and squeal--there is usually one cry that is prominent, and, by turning my head from side to side, I use the signals reaching each ear to guide me to where the crime or misery is. I can fly, of course.

This is a good-feeling book. You wouldn't imagine that a good story could be made of a man describing his thoughts while sitting in front of a fire in the early morning, but Nicholson Baker manages to do this: his narrator writes a series of goodmornings each based on the starting of a fire by a match. You know you can trust him because it is a truly wise person who can point out that no one likes to be pecked on the anus by a duck. But beyond this, Baker demonstrates to me that it's not really that important what your story is about; as long as you can tell it good and tell it well, it will be interesting.

Wonderful World

Javier Calvo

If you want to create a special place, says Mr Bocanegra, put in all the statues you can.

Wonderful World makes for an interesting light read, but honestly it didn't stand out to me. It's a wacky crime story, and a bit of a farce--okay, it's a gigantic farce (when was the last time you heard of the high crime world of antique dealers?)--but as much as I enjoy these styles, something about Calvo's writing never really does it for me. It has all the right things: he takes Stephen King and Pink Floyd seriously and makes them central players in the reality of the story; there are majestically outrageous characters, absurd characters with a touch of prophetism about them; and it has all the color of sherbert ice cream, but I think the flaw is in how he ties it all together: it didn't tie together for me.

Garbage

Stephen Dixon

Two men come in and sit at the bar. I say 'How you doing, fellas, what'll it be?'
'What are you, about to close?' the stocky one says.
'No, it's just empty for a change. Still want to stay?'
'Sure. Beers. Whatever you got.'

Interesting story about a bar owner who gets pressure from a garbage company run like the mob. The bar owner doesn't want to switch services, in fact he is damned stubborn on this count. Dixon makes a story out of it.

The Bridge of San Luis Rey

Thornton Wilder

The Archbishop knew that most of the priests of Peru were scoundrels. It required all his delicate Epicurean education to prevent his doing something about it; he had to repeat over to himself his favourite notions: that the injustice and unhappiness in the world is a constant; that the theory of progress is a delusion; that the poor, never having known happiness, are insensible to misfortune. Like all the rich he could not bring himself to believe that the poor (look at their houses, look at their clothes) could really suffer. Like all the cultivated he believed that only the widely read could be said to know that they were unhappy. On one occasion, the iniquities in his see having been called to his notice, he almost did something about it. He had just heard that it was becoming a rule in Peru for priests to exact two measures of meal for a fairly good absolution, and five measures for a really effective one. He trembled with indignation; he roared to his secretary and bidding him bring his writing materials, announced he was going to dictate an overwhelming message to his shepherds. But there was no ink left in the inkwell; there was no ink left in the next room; there was no ink to be found in the whole palace. This state of things in his household so upset the good man that he fell ill of the combined rages and learned to guard himself against such indignations.

Even now, she thought, almost no one remembers Esteban and Pepita, but myself. Camila alone remembers her Uncle Pio and her son; this woman, her mother. But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.