A Toast to Winter, Part V: Oscar Wilde's Selfish Giant

When I was a child in Canada, I read The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde. The tales that stayed with me were "The Happy Prince" itself — the tale of a golden statue that beggars itself to mend the inequality of rich and poor in late Victorian London — and "The Nightingale and the Rose," and "The Selfish Giant."

What is "The Nightingale and the Rose" really about? — is it about people pouring out their heart's blood for the sake of love only to find out that it is lost, or if it is about people sacrificing themselves for art? I haven't figured it out yet and it isn't wintry.

"The Selfish Giant" is very wintry, however. It has been turned into a film and, despite its simplicity, appears to hit a fundamental chord with readers still.

"[P]late illustrating a story 'The Selfish Giant' in Wilde's
The Happy Prince and Other Tales. London: Nutt. 1st ed." (1888)
Picture by Walter Crane (1845-1915)
via Wikisource

***

The villain-turned-hero of the tale is a giant who keeps neighbouring children out of his yard. That is why he is selfish.

(Given how ogres behave in many fairy tales, presumably the infants can count themselves lucky that they didn't feature on the giant's dinner menu that evening. But Wilde doesn't see gianthood that way.)

Then the Spring came, and all over the country there were little blossoms and little birds. Only in the garden of the Selfish Giant it was still winter. The birds did not care to sing in it as there were no children, and the trees forgot to blossom. Once a beautiful flower put its head out from the grass, but when it saw the notice-board it was so sorry for the children that it slipped back into the ground again, and went off to sleep. The only people who were pleased were the Snow and the Frost. "Spring has forgotten this garden," they cried, "so we will live here all the year round." The Snow covered up the grass with her great white cloak, and the Frost painted all the trees silver. Then they invited the North Wind to stay with them, and he came. He was wrapped in furs, and he roared all day about the garden, and blew the chimney-pots down. "This is a delightful spot," he said, "we must ask the Hail on a visit." So the Hail came. Every day for three hours he rattled on the roof of the castle till he broke most of the slates, and then he ran round and round the garden as fast as he could go. He was dressed in grey, and his breath was like ice.

ONE DAY the children break in through the wall and visit the garden sneakily. Spring creeps in after them and the trees begin to flower again.

The Giant's heart is softened at the sight. He sees that one of his little visitors hasn't been able to perch in a tree like the others, so he lifts the disconsolate boy into the branches.

At that gesture, the neighbourhood children see their formerly grumpy neighbour in a different light. His garden is teeming with frolicking youth for the rest of the giant's life.

He saw a most wonderful sight. Through a little hole in the wall the children had crept in, and they were sitting in the branches of the trees. In every tree that he could see there was a little child. And the trees were so glad to have the children back again that they had covered themselves with blossoms, and were waving their arms gently above the children's heads. The. birds were flying about and twittering with delight, and the flowers were looking up through the green grass and laughing.

***

The Christian subtext (the echoes of "Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me" when the giant helps the boy, the stigmata later in the story, etc.)  and Victorian worship of childhood innocence here, might be a little too saccharine for modern tastes.

December 2020 In Books: What We'll Be Reading Next, Part II

It is only 16 days until 2020 is over and my chance to read the 25 books I promised to read for Goodreads has passed. But in the meantime I am still 'cramming in' more books. Aside from listening to Alien Oceans to the very end, I also finished listening to the audiobook recording of Brian Stelter's Hoax.

***

Trembling on the verge of the passing of the Trump presidency as we are, any non-fiction book centred on the 45th President runs the risk of anachronism. But I think that Hoax bypasses the risk.

Brian Stelter begins with the President but ends up largely discussing Fox News, and the President is only an especially noisy watcher.

"Rupert Murdoch - World Economic Forum Annual Meeting Davos 2007."
Copyright World Economic Forum (CC-BY-SA-2.0)

It makes sense anyway that the book's focus would be on television rather than governance: Stelter once ran the website TVNewser and now commentates the American press on CNN's show Reliable Sources. He is a media reporter through and through, and says of himself that he has tracked Fox News for 16 years.

But also, to borrow a phrase from the comedian Stephen Colbert and his former show Colbert Report, often American politics are more 'Videri quam esse' — seeming than being.

The 45th President took this motto more to heart than most: he was, as others have said, a television president.

He set aside 'executive time' in which he watched Fox and Friends and other political television when he should have been doing presidential tasks. If people wanted to influence him or to be hired by him, they would angle to appear on Fox rather than meet him in person. Long before he ran for office, he would feed stories to journalists and be credited as a 'source close to Trump.' He was altogether obsessed with ratings and with fans, rather than with sound policy and consensus. Stelter doesn't mention it directly as far as I recall; but it was quite sick that Trump reportedly used to track how popular his coronavirus briefings were, as if they were a television soap opera. ("Trump, Citing TV Ratings, Says Daily Coronavirus Briefings Will Resume" [New York Magazine])

It appeared that he had never grown out of his reality show, The Apprentice.

And, of course, the real estate magnate-turned-politician also took to heart the idea of 'seeming rather than being' when he fudged 'facts.'

Stelter recapitulates more trivial controversies that showed Trump's mendacious tendencies, like the 'crowd size' debate at the presidential inauguration in 2017.

But the main controversy that clearly weighs most on Stelter's mind is the Administration's and Fox's poor approach to the coronavirus pandemic. Even as the first doses of a vaccine are being distributed there, beginning yesterday, it is worth keeping in mind that as of December 13th, 2020, the US suffered 16,062,299 confirmed cases, with 297,818 residents dying with Covid-19, according to Wikipedia.

December 2020 In Books: What We'll Be Reading Next, Part I

Early this month, the website for National Public Radio published a list of top books for 2020 par excellence. I took it as a very, very long series of reading prompts, and below are some of the results:

***

A few books were interesting but I decided to skip reading the rest of the book after reading the introduction. (Also because this leaves me with a better chance of finishing over a hundred others...)

Later: My Life at the Edge of the World is a memoir of a time when the author, Paul Lisicky, took up a position as a fellow in the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts, further away from his family. It was in the early 1990s and AIDS was breaking out, and even before then the author (and his mother, perhaps exaggeratedly so) was conscious of his social vulnerability as a gay man.

It is about family drama as well as the author's individual life. It's also not light reading: molestation, suicide, and marital disagreements already appear in the introduction. [And, to be very clear: I only read the introduction, so the rest of this review should be taken with a grain of salt.] So I'd suggest that perhaps the memoir is best suited for readers who will find the depiction of this kind of dysfunction cathartic or interesting, rather than unsettling or too personal.

For example, he writes how his mother has, to a degree, given up on life. Rather than die by suicide, which would be too dramatic for her, she ekes out her existence in a half-life:

Not making new friends, not allowing herself to be known, eating too much ice cream, no exercise, watching daytime talk shows that don’t even capture her attention. Life as pure endurance instead of the hard, hard work of finding interests that refresh and nourish her.

It's an interesting line of thought, not far from Henry David Thoreau's "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation." I'm sure the mother was asked for her consent to have her inner life described in the book. Is this a topic that should be published for the entertainment of the masses, however, or is this a topic that you can talk about over dinner to close personal friends? I'd go with the latter.

In any case he's indubitably an excellent writer and I'm surprised I hadn't heard of him before; perhaps he's a writer's writer whom one hears about more in professional circles. He's also published a memoir before, The Narrow Door.

Later: My Life at the Edge of the World
Paul Lisicky
Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2020

Cover of Later, via Graywolf Press

*

Travelling from the coast of New England to the southern US, a collection of humoristic short stories about working- and middle-class Americans by George Singleton also looked really good; it was a little bawdy.

You can find three of his stories on the website of the Atlantic Monthly here to get an idea.

You Want More: Selected Short Stories of George Singleton is published by the independent Hub City Press.

***

Cover of Alien Oceans, via Princeton University Press

In the end, I've been reading two books. The first is this, published by Princeton University Press:

Alien Oceans: The Search For Life In The Depths of Space

Written by a Californian professor with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, this non-fiction book explores the ideas we have of oceans on other planets or moons.

Kevin Hand begins by telling anecdotes of the time when, as a graduate student, he took a submarine to the ocean floor in the company of Hollywood film director James Cameron. But the rest of the book so far is unsensational, and like a nice undergraduate lecture series.

He takes us from one moon in the orbit of Saturn to the other, and I was thrilled to learn that there are ice volcanoes (cryovolcanoes) on moons like Enceladus, and that such a small moon (500 km in diameter, I think) was already visible to scientists in the 18th century. Besides there are introductions to spectroscopy and a few other staples of astrophysics methodology.

Any person with a Grade 10 level of science, and no great inhibitions or feud against science, can follow it, I think. Even better: despite my analogy to undergraduate lectures, there is no need to do tests, tutorials, or lab work. The analogies — like the metal detector in airport security — are committed to and well spaced apart, so I didn't feel the bored bewilderment that I did when I read an Einstein biography that bombarded me with one analogy for special relativity after the other.

I could imagine a few post-graduates or professors in Chemistry or Physics wanting to thump their heads on their desks if they read Alien Oceans, because sacrifices of accuracy have been made to help general readers understand scientific concepts. But because these professional peers are not the target audience, they'd have to go out of their way to inflict this pain on themselves.

Enceladus, a moon of Saturn (Oct. 28, 2015)
"NASA's Cassini spacecraft captured this view as it neared icy Enceladus
for its closest-ever dive past the moon's active south polar region."
via Wikimedia Commons

On another note: As a humanities student, I have met examples of the Ivory Tower Ego. When I was at UBC, a professor had released a bestselling book that was turned into a documentary film. It's unfair to say this as I only saw the man once; but when he strode through the streets with his briefcase and took the bus along with hoi polloi, I felt it was with a strikingly self-conscious air. Not to mention a few other professors who also evidently saw themselves as mini-celebrities of the lecture hall, on far slighter grounds.

But in Alien Oceans, Hand portrays a collaborative research world in which long-term effort and sound thinking are as important as flashy brilliance. He honours Cassini and other NASA excursions for providing the data for scientists to work with. He mentions to which researchers (sometimes his friends) we owe which findings. And he forebears from saying anything ostentatiously modest about 'standing on the shoulders of giants.'

In general I like feeling that Alien Oceans mirrors the atmosphere that I sometimes felt when my father was working in physics or biology departments: real contentment in sharing knowledge with each other and asking each other for advice, and patiently putting in (lab) time day after day to figure out the puzzles they have set themselves.

(I am listening to the audiobook, so am not going to say anything about the prose as prose.)

October/November 2020: Books I'm Reading

As the Black Friday shopping season has brought with it mountains of workplace drama, I have barely had time or energy to read anything challenging. My Goodreads yearly book target also looks like it will not be fulfilled.

However, I finally finished the grim Colombian thriller La Casa de la Belleza, leaving me free to read more of A Hundred Years of Solitude and then South African books, to continue my journey around the world.

This week, Barack Obama's presidency memoir A Promised Land came out. Albeit a little daunted by the length, I might finally begin reading a book of his for the first time. 

In terms of topical political reading, the biography of Nero by Suetonius also seems relevant again.

***

For lighter reading in the train on the way to voice coaching lessons, I have been reading Mudlarking by Lara Maiklem, which uncle M. kindly let me order through him at the bookshop where he works.

Written by an ex-Londoner who grew up in the countryside, who now in her early forties traipses along the foreshore of the Thames (often during low tides) in search of historical bric-a-brac, it is a charming read. It is amazing how many unexpected treasures washed out of the banks and beaches: Roman tiles and pots, Tudor clothing accessories, Georgian coins, Victorian medicine bottles, grain-sized red 'Thames garnets,' and so on.

Cover of Mudlarking, via the publisher: Bloomsbury UK

Her mudlarking has an ethic. It would have been irrelevant to the original Victorian mudlarks who fished coal and whatever else they could find from the dangerously dirty river to make a living. But one requires a permit in the 21st century. And Maiklem herself eschews the Schliemann-esque force of metal-detecting and digging, and instead trusts to luck to see things that are lying on or lodged in the surface. Important finds are shown to the Museum of London, for example, and the government rules on treasure are observed.

Besides, washing and sorting the finds is a demanding workload, with which for example a 17th-century pirate might hardly have bothered when he retrieved his own treasures from a boarded ship. I felt secondhand anxiety at the thought of the finds that Lara Maiklem must order and store, or give away. How many medieval roof tiles can one display in one's dining room before they begin to be too much of a good thing?

Mudlarking — in the USA it is called Mudlark — honours and celebrates the history of Britain. At times it even eschews modernity altogether.

It has become a Sunday Times bestseller, but I mentally associate it with the Daily Telegraph.  Of course I have no idea of the author's private politics. But the book has the aesthetic order often found alongside old-fashioned, right-wing ideology although I suspect it also appeals to a strain of British reserve across the political spectrum.

(It is a fine book to read during these times, too, for a superficial reason: it is liberating to read about people who spend hours outdoors!

It is also an excellent companion read to Robert MacFarlane's The Old Ways — I broke off that book during the first Berlin lockdown in March, but plan to take it up again once taking the U-Bahn to work regularly is safe. The scene of the mouth of the Thames in a fog in Maiklem's book is reminiscent, for example, of the more ominous scene of vast tidal flats in MacFarlane's.)

Whether they own the book or not, anyone can glimpse Maiklem's finds as she presents them engagingly on her Twitter account.

***

Additional information taken from "Lara Maiklem" [Wikipedia]

Around the World in 32 Countries: Spain

It has been surprisingly difficult to gather a list of Spanish books that I would like to read that feel representative of the country and its history.

Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes requires no further introduction. This tale of adventure and knighthood is not nearly as tough to read for an Anglo-German speaker like me as, for example, some 19th century Spanish-language literature. It is also reassuring to have a massive yellow-covered Langenscheidt dictionary at hand. That said, I am still reading all of the prologues and state censors' notes and dedications, so I haven't yet reached even the opening phrase:

En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme, no ha mucho tiempo que vivía un hidalgo de los de lanza en astillero, adarga antigua, rocín flaco y galgo corredor. Una olla de algo más vaca que carnero, salpicón las más noches, duelos y quebrantos los sábados, lantejas los viernes, algún palomino de añadidura los domingos, consumían las tres partes de su hacienda.

[Loosely translated: In a village in the Mancha, whose name I cannot be bothered to remember, not so long ago there lived a knight of somewhere, who had a lance put away, an old shield, a thin workhorse and a coursing greyhound. A pan of something more inexpensive beef than mutton, cold cuts most nights, eggs with bacon or sausage on Saturdays, lentils on Fridays, scrapings in addition on Sundays, consumed three-fourths of his pension.]

15 pages down, perhaps 1300 to go.

*

Reading a sound biography of Federico García Lorca — a German one, by Karen Genschow — and a translation of The House of Bernarda Alba has also been good as an 'encapsulation' of Spain. I did this a few years ago, however.

García Lorca's life ended prematurely in the 1930s, the era of Spain's Civil War. Leftist intellectuals and workers fought General Franco and the Church; Pablo Picasso was inspired to paint the gruesome violence of a Guernica that had been wasted by the aerial bombing of his countrymen; and the fascist brutality of World War II was foreshadowed. But his biography also spans a traditional upbringing in the late 19th century, the leftist stirrings of the early 1900s, as well as his generation's endeavours to explore and uphold Spanish regions' cultural identities. (Much like the Andalusian, Sevillan, etc. dances that Isaac Albéniz and Enrique Granados were composing during García Lorca's lifetime, to speak of music instead of literature.)

In terms of media, García Lorca delved not just into traditional/modern poetry, theatre, etc. but also into the fledgling art of film.

Mujer 1: Los pobres sienten también sus penas.
Bernarda: Pero las olvidan delante de un plato de garbanzos.
Muchacha 1: (Con timidez) Comer es necesario para vivir.
Bernarda: A tu edad no se habla delante de las personas mayores.

(First woman: The poor also have their sufferings.
Bernarda: But they forget them as soon as they see a plate of chickpeas.
First girl: (timidly) Eating is necessary to live.
Bernarda. At your age one does not speak in front of older persons.)

"Parroquia Nª Sª de la Granada, Moguer. (Huelva, España)."
Church in the village of Moguer, where Juan Ramón Jiménez was born.
© Miguel Angel, via Wikimedia Commons

*

Canada Reads 2020: From the Ashes

In mid-July, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation held its annual Canada Reads competition. The stand-up comedian Ali Hassan hosted the show again, and five jurors were assembled to judge the candidates for this year. Each of them championed a book of their choice.

"From the Ashes is a remarkable memoir about hope and resilience, and a revelatory look into the life of a Métis-Cree man who refused to give up," runs the introduction of Jesse Thistle's publisher, Simon & Schuster.

Simon & Schuster (Canada)

In 2019, the memoir first came out and it became a bestseller. Jesse Thistle was born in the prairie province of Saskatchewan, where his Cree maternal grandparents lived. His parents split when he and his two elder brothers were small, and their father took them into his care. Plagued with drug abuse, he left them on their own for days on end, found food in garbage cans and through shoplifting; their experience then was Dickensian; and I was baffled that this was possible in 1970s Canada.

Then their father never returned. Their white grandparents rescued them from foster care, where they had been maltreated. After that they raised the grandchildren to the east in suburban Ontario.

The grandparents loved them. But they were set in their ways and raising three hungry, traumatized children challenged them. Their grandfather — an elevator engineer — was raised in a tough school. He handed out bruising beatings.

The 'cultural mosaic' Canada didn't exist in the boys' schools; the schoolyard appeared to be divided along ethnic battle lines. Thistle felt uncomfortable accepting a First Nations heritage he barely knew, when it was despised by his classmates. And the brutal social dynamic seemed to turn him off his school work.

Aside from keeping in touch with his parents, his cultural heritage could have been a steadying influence, I think adult Thistle is hypothesizing. I think (or hope) that the child welfare system might agree with this more now than in the 1970s.

I found the childhood scenes, although my siblings and I saw no abuse whatsoever, very relatable. [Edit: Although this is more my narcissism than because the experiences were alike.] The precarious feeling of being raised by just one parent for a while — if nothing else — and of children being left to improvise themselves while that parent was busy doing something else (in my father's case, it was just computer programming!), was familiar. In my father's case I also think there was an air of misery, and self-discontent when he felt that he wasn't managing to do everything quite as well as he intended.

When he was still a teenager, I think, Jesse's grandparents found him with a bag of cocaine. Especially because the drug abuse and imprisonment of Jesse's father had hurt them so that they weren't willing to take any more, he was kicked out of the house. He became homeless.

Sunday Theology: A Jewish Prayer in Isaac Bashevis Singer's Poland

Before I cut short the reading in German translation of Isaac Bashevis Singer's novel The Magician of Lublin, I copied a quotation into my notes:

"Was sind wir, was unser Leben, was unsere Gnade? Was unsere Frömmigkeit, was unsere Hilfe, was unsere Kraft, was unsere Stärke? … Alle Helden sind wie nichts vor dir, die berühmten Männer, als ob sie nie gewesen, die Weisen wie ohne Erkenntnis, die Einsichtigen wie ohne Verstand, denn die Menge ihrer Werke ist eitel, und die Tage ihres Lebens sind nichtig vor dir."

These words are spoken in a place of worship by an Orthodox Jewish man who is praying by himself. The character of the Magician (who is wrestling, like the author himself, with contradictory forces of secularism and faith) overhears him on one of his journeys from Lublin.

To translate roughly: What are we, what is our life, what is our mercy? What our piety, what our assistance, what our power, what our might? ... All heroes are as nothing before you, the famous men are as if they never existed, the wise are without knowledge, the perceptive without reason, for the mass of their works is in vain, and the days of their lives are nothing before you.

Whether it is an excerpt from a known religious text, as I assume, or Singer's own composition, I was struck by it.

From a literary perspective, its words are weighty. Atmospherically I feel pathos in it — a sadness about not living up to an individual ideal — rather than a brutal denial of humanity at large, although this is debatable.

What I like in a subjective, non-literary way is the sense of proportion of a human's role in the history of the world, and in the width and breadth of the present time. It appears healthy to follow a religion or philosophy that is not meant to coddle and feed ego, but rather to help us look beyond ego.

I also like the idea of a God who is forceful enough to influence our lives through the quieter inner paths of conscience and the path of outer events without clear cause and effect, not a thin-skinned, fragile narcissist who relies on human propaganda, vigilanteism and perpetual obeisance to achieve the good. (Whatever that good may be.)

On the other hand, I may have quoted before the thought that God is infinitely small as well as infinitely great. We do not need to worship a Nietzschean superman.

*

On second thought, writing about a Jewish prayer on Sunday may be clumsy. So apologies for that, as well as for the perhaps frivolous habit of picking and choosing from religions what interests me and what doesn't, and offering an uneducated opinion without taking into account what the reactions may be.

Source: Der Zauberer von Lublin, by Isaac Bashevis Singer. Translation by Susanna Rademacher. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2017.

Around the World in 32 Countries: Argentina and Jorge Luis Borges

Niedertracht und Ewigkeit: Erzählungen und Essays
Jorge Luis Borges
Transl. Karl August Horst and Gisbert Haefs
Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1991

"Cuesta del Obispo, Provincia de Salta (Argentina)."
Attributed to eMaringolo, 2012
via Wikimedia Commons, CC-BY-2.0 License

***

Argentina in a Nutshell:

Surface area: 2,780,400 km2 (smaller than Brazil, larger than Mexico)

Main country immigrated from historically: “62.5% of the population has full or partial Italian ancestry” Now the country is only 2.4% Amerindian.

Recognized regional languages:

• Guaraní in Corrientes
• Quechua in Santiago del Estero
• Qom, Mocoví, and Wichí in Chaco
• Welsh in Chubut

(Yes, that Welsh)

Independence from Spain: declared 1816

Driving side: Right

Notable geography: "Aconcagua is the highest mountain outside of Asia, at 6,960.8 metres (22,837 ft), and the highest point in the Southern Hemisphere."

Sources: Argentina , List of countries and dependencies by area [Wikipedia]

***

Finding Argentine authors was difficult, but perhaps I didn't go about it the right way.

I was thrilled to learn [via Goodreads] that the classic film Blow-Up, by Michael Antonioni, is based on a short story by the Argentine writer Julio Cortázar. Also, because I was interested in Patagonia, my mother found the Chilean writer Francisco Coloane's book Tierra del Fuego in our bookshelves, for me to read as a supplement.

Technically there are many biographies and memoirs one could read. The Pope is Argentine. Ernesto (Che) Guevara was from Argentina and wrote his Motorcycle Diaries about travel in the country. And there are plenty of biographies of Eva Perón, wife of the 1970s president Juan Perón and symbolic heroine of the nation who inspired a film where Madonna acted the title role.

Photograph of the first meeting between the Argentine writers
Borges and Ernesto Sabato.
Published in the Revista Gente, nº 499, Feb. 13, 1975
via Wikimedia Commons, public domain in Argentina

However, our home library doesn't have many books by Argentine authors. The exception is the literary giant and polymath Jorge Luis Borges. He also happens to be a favourite author of a colleague.

We have a German translation of a collection of short stories and essays, and notes by the author, that were published from the early 1930s through to the 1960s: Niedertracht und Ewigkeit: Erzählungen und Essays 1935-1936.

***

The Universal History of Infamy — the Niedertracht part of the book, originally published as the Historia universal de la infamia in Spanish — is a series of short stories about villains who really lived, in fictionalized form.

The villains: A Chinese pirate who led a fleet of over 20,000 people and rivalled the fleet of Portugal in the early 19th century, John Murell (Lazarus Morell) who pretended that he wanted to free slaves in the southern United States and instead ensured that they were recaptured and murdered, a gang lord in New York, and Billy the Kid, amongst others. Their tales are all gripping, the details that Borges may have added in from other sources were colourful and helped set the scene as thoroughly as any set designer could in a well-financed Hollywood film. The book made me so curious that I looked up all of the real-life stories after reading his fictional versions.

I think that Borges might have considered, but didn't say, if dramatic villainy like this, perpetrated by frowning people who wield firearms and murder people with great publicity, does more harm than everyday villainy. Likely I should read Hannah Arendt's thoughts on the banality of evil before I write more. But maybe more people are killed by criminal negligence, the guns manufacturing and marketing industry, fake medicines, overwork, etc., than by the kind of first- and second-degree murderers who end up in prison.

Incidentally, I wish that the vocabulary Borges had used for African-American characters were less dehumanizing. 'Negro' and 'mulatto' were considered polite enough terms in the 1930s, I think, but when he talks of 'heaps of negroes' in stories where he no longer seems to be satirizing racist attitudes, it feels as if he genuinely did subconsciously consider Black people to be an incoherent and mindless mass.

Anyway, Borges faithfully lists his sources: Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain, The Gangs of New York by Herbert Asbury, etc.

August 2020 in Books: What We'll Be Reading Next

2020 in books: a literary calendar

Guardian, January 4, 2020

The Death of Vivek Oji is a novel (to be published August 4th) set in Nigeria, written by Akwaeke Emezi.

via Penguin Random House

Because there is no extract on Ama**n yet, I don't yet know if I want to read it. Plot and setting are one thing, writing style another, so first chapters are important to me. But at any rate, according to Emezi's publisher, this is the plot:

One afternoon, in a town in southeastern Nigeria, a mother opens her front door to discover her son’s body, wrapped in colorful fabric, at her feet. What follows is the tumultuous, heart-wrenching story of one family’s struggle to understand a child whose spirit is both gentle and mysterious.

But because an excerpt of Emezi's earlier work Pet looks interesting too, I might read that already. It's a young adult novel that, within the fantasy genre, appears to be a (not overly subtle) pastiche of American social politics.

***

Recently the 25th anniversary of the massacre at Srebrenica took place. As a child of the 80s, I dimly remember the Balkan Wars, with the snipers who made cities uninhabitable to civilians, the soldiers who fought against each other from the Croatian and Serbian sides, the Bosnians and others who were massacred, the streams of refugees, and then a few years later the Kosovo War.

via Amazon.com

In To the Lake: A Balkan Journey of War and Peace, by Kapka Kassabova, summarized in the words of her publisher Granta Books:

Setting out to resolve her own ancestral legacy of the Lakes, Kassabova’s journey unfolds to a deeper enquiry into how geography and politics imprint themselves upon families and nations, and confronts her with questions about human suffering and the capacity for change.

I feel bad for mentioning a small literary quibble. But I will say that in the first chapter, her good intentions appear to outdo her writing style. For example, there are mixed metaphors:

Some places are inscribed in our DNA yet take a long time to reveal their contours, just as some journeys are etched into the landscape of our lives yet take a lifetime to complete.

It sounds mysterious and vague and deep, but does it make sense? wouldn't other metaphors work better?

Anyway, she has a prime quotation from Henry David Thoreau at the beginning: "A lake is the landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is earth’s eye, looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." Fantastic.

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In the meantime, I am also reading other books:

First Nations/Indigenous literature (Canada):

Monkey Beach by Eden Robinson

Him Standing by Richard Wagamese

African-American history:

Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly

Around the World in 32 Countries:

Niedertracht und Ewigkeit: Erzählungen und Essays by Jorge Luis Borges [Argentina]

Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes [Spain]

Gute Nachrichten auf Papierfliegern by Juan Marsé [Spain]

Platero and I by Juan Ramón Jiménez [Spain]

Hundert Jahre Einsamkeit by Gabriel García Marquez [Colombia]

Apartheid: A Collection of Writings on South African Racism by South Africans, Alex La Guma ed. [South Africa]

To-Be-Read: 'Book Haul' from a Berlin bookstore a few weeks ago:

Half Blood Blues by Esi Edugyan

On the Come Up by Angie Thomas

Humankind by Rutger Bergman

Extra:

The Story of a Non-Marrying Man and Other Stories by Doris Lessing

***

“New Releases for August 2020” [Goodreads]

The Death of Vivek Oji [Penguin Random House]

"Most Anticipated: The Great Second-Half 2020 Book Preview" [The Millions] (July 15, 2020)

To the Lake [Granta]

Canada Reads 2020: Radicalized, by Cory Doctorow

Last week, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation held its annual Canada Reads competition. The stand-up comedian Ali Hassan hosted the show again, and five jurors were assembled to judge the candidates for this year. Each of them championed a book of their choice.

Akil Augustine is a basketball commentator on the NBA championships who grew up in Scarborough,  a formerly independent city that was merged into Toronto in 1998.

He chose, as the book that he wanted to convince all of Canada to read, Radicalized: short stories published by the Canadian-British author, internet freedom advocate, and technological blogger Cory Doctorow in 2019.

Radicalized is 'of the moment.' It addresses pandemics even though it was published before the coronavirus spread in Europe and North America, and it addresses the Black Lives Matter movement and police brutality even though it was published before George Floyd's murder made these subjects leap to everyone's mind again in June. It also addresses the intimate role that large technological companies like Facebook monopolize in daily life.

But as Doctorow is not just Canadian — he lives in the United States, and his stories are set in the United States — Augustine's fellow jurors argued that Radicalized did not have a Canadian focus.

There are parallels of the US to Canada and other countries. As Augustine said, Black Lives Matter and police brutality are not just American questions, and he used his presence on Canada Reads to draw attention to anti-racist activism in Canada. There are also clear differences, of course.

But Akil Augustine's arguments that the coronavirus pandemic and the role of social media companies are international issues and as such should be taken to heart as Canadian issues as well, were rejected by the roundtable on Canada Reads.

A few fellow jurors also felt that the competition has a social function and not just a literary role: they preferred to publicize books from authors whose national background, romantic/sexual orientation, and gender are less traditionally advantaged in the publishing industry.

To quote his publisher, Doctorow's Radicalized embraces these four tales:

Unauthorized Bread is a tale of immigration, the toxicity of economic and technological stratification, and the young and downtrodden fighting against all odds to survive and prosper.

In Model Minority, a Superman-like figure attempts to rectifiy the corruption of the police forces he long erroneously thought protected the defenseless...only to find his efforts adversely affecting their victims.

Radicalized is a story of a darkweb-enforced violent uprising against insurance companies told from the perspective of a man desperate to secure funding for an experimental drug that could cure his wife's terminal cancer.

The fourth story, Masque of the Red Death, harkens back to Doctorow's Walkaway, taking on issues of survivalism versus community.

Radicalized: Four Tales of Our Present Moment [MacMillan]
Cory Doctorow [Wikipedia] 

Cory Doctorow at ORGCon 2012
Attributed to D. Morris, March 2012
via Wikimedia Commons (License: CC-BY-2.0)

Excerpt from "Unauthorized Bread":

“The way Salima found out that Boulangism had gone bankrupt: her toaster wouldn’t accept her bread. She held the slice in front of it and waited for the screen to show her a thumbs-up emoji, but instead, it showed her the head-scratching face and made a soft brrt. She waved the bread again. Brrt.

“Come on.” Brrt.

She turned the toaster off and on. Then she unplugged it, counted to ten, and plugged it in. Then she menued through the screens until she found RESET TO FACTORY DEFAULT, waited three minutes, and punched her Wi-Fi password in again.”

Canada Reads 2020: Small Game Hunting

Last week, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation held its annual Canada Reads competition. Although a few writers and others have criticized its colosseum-like approach to literature, it is intended to spotlight Canadian memoirs, novels, or short story collections that every fellow citizen 'should read.' In one of my bursts of patriotism, I am willing to take up the cause.

The stand-up comedian Ali Hassan hosted the show again, and five jurors were assembled to judge the candidates for this year. Each of them championed a book of their choice.

A fresh-faced young YouTube star, who was speaking via video screen due to coronavirus distancing measures, Alayna Fender was arguing that her fellow jurors should vote for Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club as the book of the year.

Canada Reads also introduced the author, Megan Gail Coles.

St. John's, Newfoundland (ca. 2005)
Attributed to user Aconcagua
via Wikimedia Commons (License: CC-BY-SA-3.0)

Megan Gail Coles was born on the island of Newfoundland.

Together with the mainland region of Labrador, Newfoundland is the easternmost tip of Canada, with its own half-hour time zone. Newfoundland has a seagoing flavour still, with its ports where fishermen have been coming and going for centuries, not as often now that the Atlantic cod has been wildly overfished. To western-Canadians like me, other stereotypes are the Irish and Scottish cultural influences, and the folk music ... and offshore Irving oil platforms. It entered Canada later than any other province, in 1949.

The travelling spirit seems to have infected the author, too, because she went across to the other side of Canada to do her Master of Fine Arts in Vancouver.

*

So Coles drew from experience when she set her tale in St. John's, the capital city of Newfoundland, in an expensive restaurant. The action unfolds, with an Aristotelian sense of unity, on one cold February day — Alayna Fender's fellow jurors agreed that it was an atmospheric book; 'you feel cold' just reading the book.

It's hard to judge just from the first chapter. But in my view a quirky, cleverer-than-thou tone sets in right away. We start the story with Olive, a young woman who is looking at the restaurant from the street.

A scattered taxi slogs by carrying fiendish-looking passengers who attempt to discreetly smoke from barely cracked windows. Discretion is a skill they have fallen out with but they don’t know that yet. They still fancy themselves stealth, piling four parka-plied humans into a single toilet stall, scarves dangling beneath the door, telling tails on them all.

Fender explains on Canada Reads that the character's name is 'Olive' because she represents 'all of' us. At the same time, Olive specifically (if I remember the discussion correctly) is an 'outsider' in more sense than one. The book's publisher mentions that she is "far from her northern home," and she is no 'townie.'

Most of the book seems to take place inside the restaurant, however, with the chef, the diners, and the waiters.

*

Small Game Hunting was voted 'out' on the second day of Canada Reads. Many jurors enjoyed it but found it too enigmatically written to appeal to many Canadian readers.

Akil Augustine also felt that the characterization of the male figures was not convincing. To paraphrase, he said that 'the bad men I've known generally don't know that they're evil; they think that they're good.' He also mentioned that the book had 'lots of axes to grind,' starting with misogyny and classism.

But this social commentary pleased the three female jurors, who felt that it thereby touched on the interests of a broad part of Canadian society.
***

Canada Reads
Wikipedia

Canada Reads 2020: Day 1
YouTube: Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC)
July 20, 2020

Small Game Hunting at the Local Coward Gun Club
Megan Gail Coles
House of Anansi, 2019

Around the World in 32 Countries: Polish Literature for Beginners

1989: Poland forms its Third Republic and ends its decades 'behind the Iron Curtain'

Capital City: Warsaw

Surface area: 312,696 km2 (larger than Italy, smaller than Norway)

Currency: Polish złoty

Driving side: right

Historical figures:

Casimir III, who ascended the throne in his early twenties and was king from 1333 to 1370, is apparently Polish history's answer to French history's Henry IV. He weakened the predominant power of the aristocracy in the nation's law, creating a balance with the bourgeoisie, and "was known for siding with the weak when the law did not protect them from nobles and clergymen." Besides he encouraged Jewish people to settle in Poland, and forbade Christians to kidnap Jewish children for religious conversion. When the Black Death broke out in 1347, the King closed the borders and Poland was mostly safe. Also, for example, he established the University of Kraków. His rule ended when he died during a hunting excursion.

Sources:

Poland [Wikipedia]

Casimir III the Great [Wikipedia]

List of countries and dependencies by area [Wikipedia] 

***

For Polish literature, I will content myself, I think, with not reading a whole book; instead I will mention a few works.

THE EARLY PARTS of Ève Curie's biography of her mother, Madame Curie, give (I think) a fine snapshot of Poland in the late 1800s.

The daughter writes of the familiar places where Marie Curie grew up, not just in Warsaw where Marie's family lived but also in the countryside where she might go for holidays as a child. Here she quotes one of Marie Curie's letters:

We go out in a band to walk in the woods, we roll hoops, we play battledore and shuttlecock (at which I am very bad!), cross-tag, the game of Goose, and many equally childish things. There have been so many wild strawberries here the once could buy a really sufficient amount for a few groszy [...] Every Sunday the horses are harnessed for a trip in to Mass [...]

Ève Curie describes public, educational and vocational life beneath Russian domination (every Russian whom she names is apparently a villain), the Polish hierarchy that divided the aristocracy and a professor's family. Also, it is clear how few resources there were for women who wanted to study there — which made emigration to France attractive.

"Specjalny obszar ochrony siedlisk Dolina Środkowego Świdra." c. 2015
by M. Nowaczyk?
via Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA-3.0-PL Licence)

ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER's The Magician of Lublin has wonderful passages on Polish scenery, animals and trees and snow; the food; and Jewish faith. He wrote after the Holocaust and in his books rebuilt a lost world; it is estimated that some 3 million Polish Jews died under Nazi rule. I did not finish the book. (After Singer began writing about the third extramarital affair of the main character, and it really began to be questionable if the mistresses were free agents or if they were being manipulated by the main character or by their circumstances, I decided that enough was enough.) The delineations between the religious and ethnic communities — e.g. the difficulty of intermarriage — were also kind of depressing; but I imagine that it was the same in most or all countries. But aside from that, from a literary perspective and for its social insights, it was exactly the book I want.

Überall war Gottes Hand sichtbar. Jede Obstblüte, jeder Kieselstein, jedes Sandkörnchen verkündete Sein Dasein. Die taunassen Blätter der Apfelbäume funkelten im Morgenlicht wie kleine Kerzen. Jaschas Haus lag am Stadtrand, sodass er auf die großen Weizenfelder hinausblicken konnte.

(Roughly translated: God's hand was visible everywhere. Every fruit tree blossom, every gravel stone, every grain of sand announced His presence. The dew-dampened leaves of the apple trees glittered in the morning light like little candles. Yasha's house lay at the edge of the city, so that he could look out onto the great wheat fields. German translation from the English/Yiddish by Susanna Rademacher, Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2017.)

"Henryk Sienkiewicz i jego wizje" (1905)
by Czesław Tański (1862–1942)
via Wikimedia Commons

MANY YEARS ago, I read Henryk Sienkiewicz's Quo Vadis, written in an earlier generation of Polish writers and representing Poland's Catholic side. Taking place in ancient Rome, it is (as far as I remember) a saccharine but readable story of young Christians making their way against their decadent Roman overlords; St. Paul appears in vignettes. Looking at it again now, every feminist fibre of me is horrified by the beginning of the book. But if one decides to ignore the objectification of women (also of Black women who appear incidentally as the scene is set), it seems entertaining.

The best of all times for visiting is after noon, but not earlier than when the sun sinks towards the temple of Jupiter Capitolinus, and begins to throw oblique shadows on the Forum. It is usually still very warm in the autumn, and people are fond of sleeping after eating. At this time it is pleasant to listen to the murmuring of the fountain in the great hall, and when one has taken the thousand obligatory steps, to muse in the purplish light sifted through the purple of the half-drawn awning.

(Quoted from Quo Vadis, Henryk Sienkiewicz.

Translation by S.A. Binon and S. Malevsky, Philadelphia: Henry Altemus, 1897. p. 15. via Hathi Trust)

*

Artur Rubinstein's My Young Years: It's well over 15 years that I read it. In my recollection the famous 20th-century pianist mixes extraordinary talent — of which he is extremely aware — with likewise extraordinary cattiness, also with despair and gloom. Whether it offers insight into Polish history and society I don't recollect, but doubt.

*

A colleague recommended (but with a warning) Jerzy Kosiński's The Painted Bird, which is apparently a dark book about a childhood during the Holocaust. I kind of doubt I will read it because it sounds too grisly. He also recommended Joseph Conrad 'if Conrad counts' — I decided that his books do have more of a British perspective — and Stanislav Lem's science fiction classic Solaris.

*

RYSZARD Kapuściński's speeches, The Other, are in the family bookshelf. It is no longer entirely up-to-date, I'd say. The translator — his speeches were held in Polish — uses the phrase 'Third World.' Also, I'd argue we rarely still need to read European anthropologists to learn about the world — we have books, videos, and social media written by people who live elsewhere. It's still fascinating to think of what Kapuściński saw during his journalistic career. While his focus is beyond the borders, he also illustrates, perhaps, the change in Poland's 20th century fortunes. First he was a representative of an Eastern Communist state as a foreign correspondent; but his speeches have allusions to Christian belief and the theology of Pope John Paul II now. His literary, anthropological, religious, etc. references are often Polish, despite his international career; perhaps this is also because the audiences for these specific speeches were Polish. But aside from that, rather than Russian, he cites British influences.

*

LASTLY, as an outsider's look at Polish history for those who love early 19th-century English kitsch, I'd recommend Jane Porter's Thaddeus of Warsaw. In a more contemporary vein, a book subscription service I use has books by Olga Tokarczuk; so I've started reading Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of The Dead.

***

Madame Curie, by Ève Curie [Goodreads]

The Magician of Lublin (novel), by Isaac Bashevis Singer [Wikipedia]

Quo Vadis, by Henryk Sienkiewicz [Goodreads]

Quo Vadis (film) dubbed into Russian [YouTube]

My Young Years, by Artur Rubinstein [Goodreads]

Jerzy Kosiński [Wikipedia]

The Painted Bird, by Jerzy Kosiński [Wikipedia]

Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad [Wikipedia]

Ryszard Kapuściński [Goodreads]

The Other, by Ryszard Kapuściński [Goodreads]

Thaddeus of Warsaw, by Jane Porter (Later 1831? edition) [Hathi Trust]

Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead, by Olga Tokarczuk [Goodreads]

***

Lady with an Ermine (ca. 1483-1490)
by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)
Although an Italian painting, it was brought to Poland in 1798 by Prince Adam George Czartoryski.
It now belongs to the Polish government. (Source: Lady with an Ermine, Wikipedia)
via Wikimedia Commons

Around the World in 32 Countries: Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History

Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History
Lawrence E.Y. Mbogoni
Dar-es-Salaam: Mkuki Na Nyota, 2013

Because it has been clear lately that my reading hasn't been representative of the world's populations, I've begun a new project. For the 32 most populous countries of the world, according to a count for the year 2000, I want to read 1 book per 20 million inhabitants.

First, the countries whose population was estimated at 38 million to 58 million in 2000:
Tanzania, Poland, Argentina, Spain, Colombia, South Africa, South Korea, Ukraine, Myanmar, Democratic Republic of Congo, Italy.

It has been easy to find Tanzanian books on an online book subscription website, and I've nudged colleagues to recommend Polish books.

"Kibo on Mt Kilimanjaro" ca. 2007
"This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73
and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kibo_Mt._Kilimanjaro_5.JPG
under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license."

First, a brief introduction to Tanzania:
***

Number of languages: 126
Official Main languages: Swahili and English; "Approximately 10 per cent of Tanzanians speak Swahili as a first language, and up to 90 per cent speak it as a second language"

Modern-day state formation year: 1964
Tanganyika and the Zanzibar Archipelago merge to form the United Republic of Tanzania
Colonial 'overlords': Germany, Britain

Tanzania is also home of the African continent's highest mountain:

"Eastern ice field in Mt Kilimanjaro" ca. 2007
"This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73
and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eastern_icefield_Mt._Kilimanjaro.JPG
under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license."

Capital city: Dodoma
Surface area: 947,303 km2 (larger than Nigeria and smaller than Egypt)

Currency: Tanzanian shilingi (shilling)
Driving side: left

Main exports to these countries: India, Vietnam, South Africa, Switzerland, China
Main imports from these countries: India, Switzerland, Saudi Arabia, China, United Arab Emirates
Crops that are food: maize, cassava, sweet potatoes, beans, bananas, rice, millet
Cash crops, food or not food: sugar, cotton, cashew nuts, tobacco, coffee, sisal, tea
Main meat products: beef, lamb, chicken, pork

***

Aspects of Colonial Tanzania History is an academic book, published in Dar-es-Salaam, by a professor of history at William Paterson University in New Jersey. Aside from teaching at an American university, he also taught at the University of Dar-es-Salaam.

Although the words 'academic book' may strike fear into one's heart if one associates it with the hundreds of pages of dry or waffling prose that one is forced to read as a student, Lawrence E.Y. Mbogoni's style is pithy and fluent. His choice of anecdotes is also striking and often funny.

He does not write about Tanzanian prehistory — famous after archaeological excavations at Oldupai Gorge — or much of the years of Muslim influence and Arab rule until he treats Zanzibar in the late 1800s through the 1960s at the end of the book.

He writes of the British society in the early 20th century. Unlike neighbouring Kenya, the former German colony of Tanganyika fell to the share of the British government mainly after World War I. His, and later Her, Majesty's Government paid salaries to local chiefs, and had a small administration besides. The remaining European contingent was, for example, big game hunters or gold miners who had come to reap the natural resources of the country; doctors; etc. There were few British people who came systematically as settlers.

I was surprised that the 'fool's paradise' of modern-day Tanzania for British government workers and visitors in the early 1900s, and the 'Happy Valley' expatriate society of Kenya that Ngugi wa Thiong'o lampooned in Wrestling with the Devil, sound so similar.

To borrow from Dr. Mbogoni's turns of phrase and to attempt to put his portraits in a nutshell: a British newcomer to Tanzania could listen to the radio, or become a naturalist. If these hobbies weren't to the Briton's taste, the newcomer could drink liquor — whisky, gin, beer, ... the list goes on — and run into debt, to try to cope with homesickness and tedium.

This colonial (mis)rule rather proves the essential ridiculousness of colonialist ideology even from a European standpoint.

Kipling wrote in his famous poem (1899),

Take up the White Man's burden—
    Send forth the best ye breed—
Go bind your sons to exile
    To serve your captives' need;
To wait in heavy harness
    On fluttered folk and wild—
Your new-caught, sullen peoples,
    Half devil and half child.

[...]

Take up the White Man's burden—
    Have done with childish days—
The lightly profferred laurel,
    The easy, ungrudged praise.
Comes now, to search your manhood
    Through all the thankless years,
Cold-edged with dear-bought wisdom,
    The judgment of your peers!

The question is why this 'heavy harness' and 'thankless years' were ever thought necessary by anyone — except for financial motives.

At any rate, I am perhaps 1/6th of the way through the book; the next part is about elephant-hunting.

"Kibo on Mt Kilimanjaro" ca. 2007
"This Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons image is from the user Chris 73
and is freely available at //commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Kibo_Mt._Kilimanjaro_1.JPG
under the creative commons cc-by-sa 3.0 license."

***

Additional information taken from:
List of countries by population in 2000 [Wikipedia]
Languages of Tanzania [Wikipedia]
Tanzania [Wikipedia]
Lawrence E.Y. Mbogoni [African Books Collective]
Kipling quoted from: The White Man's Burden [Wikipedia]

What I'll Be Reading in July 2020

It is unlikely that this July I'll be reading many new publications. With the Black Lives Matter movement resurging in June after the killing of George Floyd, it became clear to me again that I have many books that have been published even decades ago that I need to catch up on. Therefore my pile of books 'To Be Read' turned from a manageable stack of perhaps 5, to a mountain of well over 15.

I have paper copies of Wole Soyinka's Aké and Teju Cole's Open City, both of which my mother purchased in past years, to read. In terms of e-books, I was already reading Wrestling with the Devil by Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o and have now moved on to Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly. In between, I managed a few articles from the Anti-Racist Reading Guide put together by Victoria Alexander, and when those are done there are a lot of books that she has recommended. And aside from paper and pixel texts, I've been watching more videos from African-American YouTubers in the 'BookTube' community.

Of course part of this reading and watching is 'hopping on the bandwagon.' But I'd be foolish to ignore good book recommendations and good YouTube recommendations just because they are also part of the zeitgeist.

***

On another note, after picking it up in a bookshop yesterday, I have finally read We Should All Be Feminists. It is a bestselling book based on a speech that novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie gave at a TED conference in the UK, a conference centred specifically on countries in the African continent.

It is not a long book. It is also not a revolutionary book if it's compared to the feminist canon just on the basis of its ideas. But it mixes anecdote with declarations of opinion and purpose, it has refreshingly little jargon (academic or ideological), and it is engagingly presented. And I think it is a brisk, encouraging starting point for the early 21st-century reader.

As an adult, Adichie identifies herself as a feminist. But she has been amused, or surprised, by the reactions to feminism in general of people to whom she has spoken.

As a feminist, people worry she might be ill-tempered, un-African, man-hating, etc. So she jokes that she has eventually needed to call herself a "Happy African Feminist Who Does Not Hate Men And Who Likes to Wear Lip Gloss And High Heels For Herself And Not For Men."

Cover, We Should All Be Feminists
Design by Joan Wong (website)
Penguin Random House, 2015

In Nigeria and in the United States, Adichie has been confounded by gender stereotypes that persist without a logical foundation. When she pays a tip to a self-assigned 'pilot' who guides car drivers to parking spots, for example, he thanks the man she is with; he presumes that the man is the breadwinner.

Gender roles also strictly define everything from marriage to the types of careers we undertake. But she wants "A world of happier men and happier women who are truer to themselves." This begins with how we raise children.

What would happen, she wonders, if teenage girls and boys can go out on a date, and the teenage boy is not expected to pay — whoever has more money can pay? (I don't really know how dating etiquette is in practice in Nigeria or in North America, to be honest; so I wasn't sure if she was speaking more of gender roles in Nigeria, where some of her anecdotes take place.)

"[I]f we start raising children differently, then in fifty years, in a hundred years, boys will no longer have the pressure of proving their masculinity by material means."

If men are not raised to feel that financial muscle is part and parcel of their masculinity, it reduces the pressure on them. It even reduces pressure on women — women no longer feel that they need to earn less, if they do not want to 'intimidate' men.

A passage from Adichie's speech that people like to quote on Goodreads is:

The problem with gender is that it prescribes how we should be rather than recognizing how we are. Imagine how much happier we would be, how much freer to be our true individual selves if we didn't have the weight of gender expectations.