Jesusland by Julia Scheeres

This is yet another one from Mer A's pile. This is a very sad book. Scheeres' memoir depicts a childhood both unusual and terrible.

Scheeres grows up in rural Indiana in a strictly Calvinist home. Her parents adopt two black children because circumstances make it seem that it is the "Christian" thing to do. However, their town is completely white and the boys' seemingly lucky addition into Scheeres' family ends up being nightmarish for them. The first half of the book focuses on this early childhood, from elementary school through early adolescence. Her upbringing is shameful and strange: her (doctor) father drives a Porsche, but the family eats table scraps for dinner; her mother pipes Christian pop music into the entire house through the intercom system; her black adopted brothers are beaten and live in the basement but she is not and does not.

Her writing ranges from good to superb. She is wonderfully self-aware and extremely descriptive. One of her best qualities as a writer is the ability to connect her individual experiences with familiar archtypes, as well as with each other. In talking about her brothers, she says, "As we've gotten older, and Father's beatings have become more frequent, their [her brothers] blackness has finally united them. They are the outsiders, the basement-dwellers, Mother's failed mission to Afrrica. The black boys who get whipped by the white master."

Later in the book, I caught her describing her life at church with a similar theme: "When I was in grade school, I wanted to be an usher like my brothers but was sent downstairs to the nursery instead. That's where the women work, in the basement--changing diapers, organizing potlucks and teaching sunday school. In the basement, out of sight."

The second half of the book is where her story really gets strange. Scheeres' brother David is sent to a Christian reform school/boot camp in the Dominican Republic called Escuela Caribe and she soon follows. What she finds there (understandably missing from David's censored letters) is a nightmarish caste system coupled with ridicule, manual labor and physical abuse. She is able to outsmart the system over time, but her time spent there (over a year) is fascinatingly horrible. I had no idea that environments like this even existed today.

As she says upon arriving, "I want to focus on my misery. I want to roll around in it like a dog in a pile of shit. I want to claim it as my own. Right now, it's all I have. I still can't believe that a place like Escuela Caribe exists, and that I find myself enrolled in it."

Despite the many hardships she faced growing up, her tone is never one of martyrdom or self-pity. The story is more of a confession or a therapeutic exercise than it is a purposeful indictment of Midwest Christianity. Scheeres says she wrote the book to honor her relationship with her brother. However, it is nearly impossible to read this book without forming a critical opinion of (at the very least) the fundamental Christianity that her parents followed and that spawned Escuela Caribe. I see this book both as a memoir as well as the work of an activist.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

This book, by the same author as The Kite Runner, caught my eye several months before it was published. Sara Coe gave it to me on my birthday; Web had bought me a copy that day too in case nobody else gave it to me. I really enjoyed the book, probably as much as Kite Runner, although the plot was more predictable.

The story follows an unusual friendship between Mariam and Laila, two women living in Afghanistan from before the Russian occupation through today. The narrative follows them through their early lives as brides through child-rearing and into middle age. It was interesting to read about women this time (in contrast to in Kite Runner) and compare it to other books I had read recently on women in Muslim countries. Life changed drastically for women during the 30 or so years during which this book is set, and I learned a lot about Afghan history. I also enjoyed the contrast between the two women: Mariam, raised poor, ending up obedient and bitter, and Laila, raised in a more reasonable household, always hopeful and deceptive.

In some places, the description of women and their struggles was striking, like in this scene from a hospital:

"They want us to operate in burqas." the doctor explained, motioning with her head to the nurse at the door. "She keeps watch. She sees them coming; I cover."

She said this in a pragmatic, almost indifferent, tone, and Mariam understood that this was a women far past outrage. Here was a woman, she thought , who had understood that she was lucky to even be working, that there was always something, something else, that they could take away.

However, in other parts of the book, the voice that Hosseini gives Mariam sounded a little preachy to me. "And the burqa, she leaned to her surprise, was also comforting. It was like a one-way window. Inside it, she was an observer, buffered from the scrutinizing eyes of strangers. She no longer worried that people knew, with a single glance, all the shameful secrets of her past." I couldn't tell if it was his being a man writing a woman's character, his desire to defend some parts of Islam, or just bad writing.

Plenty of the book, however, was good writing. Mariam grows up as the illegitimate child of a local aristocrat, and she is abruptly married off when her mother dies. Hossieni's descriptions of her confusion in growing up were brilliant. He writes in her voice: "Husbands who doted on their mothers and wouldn't spend a rupiah on them, the wives. Husbands who gambled. Mariam wondered how so many women could suffer the same miserable luck, to have married, all of them, such dreadful men. Or was this a wifely game that she did not know about, a daily ritual, like soaking rice or making dough? Would the expect her soon to join in?"

Overall, I'd recommend this book. It had some great descriptions and unusual scenes which I'm sure I'll confuse with movie scenes over time. I also enjoyed learning more about Afghanistan given how much attention it has received in the media since 9/11.

Eventide by Ken Haruf

I had been saving this sequel to Plainsong for as long as I could, but in need of a pick-me-up book this weekend I finally succumbed. Eventide was good not only of its own accord but also because it reminded me how much I liked Plainsong.

This book is a continuation of the story begun in Plainsong. The book also uses many of the same literary affectations as its predecessor: conversations without quotation marks and local grammar in non-conversation descriptions. "First they set to cleaning it, as people do when they move into a new house." This made the book immediately familiar to me, despite having read probably 40+ books since Plainsong.

One of the best things about Plainsong was the surprising connections between seemingly disparate characters within the story. Prepared for this, I kept trying to figure out who would end up living with or helping out whom in Eventide, but to no avail. Thankfully, Haruf made similarly clever connections between the characters that surprised me at every turn of the page. The characters were interesting to follow, well-developed, and appropriately likable or hate-able. Their tragedies and mistakes felt like my own.

Towards the end of this book, I noticed that I was reconsidering my superiority as a capuccino-drinking therapy-going, Tivo-using blue-stater. The characters in this book (no doubt based on people Haruf has come across in his native Colorad0) are at least as good as my contemporaries are in solving problems and comforting each other. I yearned, briefly, for a simpler life in a small town.

Perhaps my only disappointment with this book was that it was exactly as good as Plainsong, for all the same reasons.

Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb

I had a hard time putting this book down. On Saturday, I was trying not to read it too fast, so I would read a chapter, then look something historical up in Wikipedia and force myself to spend 10 minutes learning before going to the next chapter. It is the first book taking place in a foreign country that I've read in a while, and I loved that feeling of being transported.

This book is about a woman who (as a small child) is left by her British-born bohemian parents at a Sufi shrine in Morocco for a long weekend. They die that weekend, and she ends up converting to Islam and making a pilgrimage to Ethiopia as a young woman. The political unrest in Ethiopia sends her to London, and the bulk of the book alternates between these two locations and times in her life.

The book's main theme was identity. As a British-born woman in an Islamic society, Lilly did not fit in; nor did she fit in returning to London after that experience. She is a strong, independent woman, but as the book continues and the places where she finds comfort are threatened, she hardens on the outside. Lilly is a very likable character, but one who seems distant; I believe that distance is purposeful, not an indication of bad writing.

I learned a lot about Ethiopian history and culture, as well as Islam, neither of which I was expecting. For me, Ethiopia was always a country that (a) also used to comprise Eritrea, (b) spawned some good restaurants in the States where you ate without your hands, and (c) had a famine that prompted the original We Are the World or something. I am much better educated now, although I didn't find any of those things to be untrue.

If I have any criticism of this book, it's that in what I perceive to be an effort to describe Islam as having incarnations that are kind and joyful (not terrorist fodder), Gibb gets a little preachy and long-winded through Lilly. I think it's great that the literary community is trying to support a wider worldview of, among other things, Islam, and that's one of the reasons I love reading so much. But, a few of Lilly's comments about Islam were less about telling a story or developing a character and more about defending it to its critics.

That aside, there was some excellent writing in the book. At a social gathering, Lilly notices she is being spoken to in English, not the native language: "It's okay, I wanted to tell them, I even dream in Harari now. And Harari dreams are not like Arabic or English dreams: there are always a great many more people involved."

And Gibb makes some larger points through Lilly as well: "Once you step inside, history has to be rewritten to include you. A fiction develops, a story that weaves you into the social fabric, giving you roots and a local identity. You are assimilated, and in erasing your differences and making you one of their own, the community can maintain belief in its wholeness and purity. After two or three generations, nobody remembers the story is fiction. It has become fact. And this is how history is made."

Definitely recommended, this book will open your mind.