Society Today Magazine

Photographed by Peter Badge
NOBELS: Nobel Laureates
Published by Wiley-Blackwell
5th March, 2009
£115.00

This massively handsome book is utterly straightforward – here is a personal photograph of every living Nobel Laureate, accompanied by a brief biography on the facing page. Peter Badge’s photographs are mainly close-ups. He has succeeded in providing an encounter on the page – almost as if the subject had just turned from work or thought to gaze for a moment into the eyes of the reader. At such moments, a great deal is revealed, mostly through the eyes, but also through the expression on the face, utterly idiosyncratic, telling.

The introduction lays out the history of the Nobel Prize, explaining why the preponderance of science, medicine, literature and peace were key to Alfred Nobel’s interests. The book ends with an epilogue by Wim Wenders, in prose-poetic form. He says: “… You don’t get the Nobel Prize just for excellence in your field,
you get it for surpassing yourself, for hardship endured, for service beyond the call of duty. You get if for the price of your life, for having invested all you had in you …”
Wyley has published eight of the 700 extraordinary men and women who have achieved the Nobel Prize. This book, is of course, in its size and price, really suitable for a library or a reference shelf in your home. But it is also, in the truest and most serious sense, the ultimate coffee table book. These photographs testify to all that
is best in us.
ML

By Tom Lee
Greenfly
Published by Harvill Secker
£10.99
19.02.09

This is Tom Lee’s first published collection of short stories. A noticeable characteristic is a sense of unease, which is compounded as the story unfolds. In “Berlin”, a study in jealousy, a man devises a subtle punishment for his unfaithful wife by taking her on a trip to Berlin in November - a city redolent of pain and cruelty, shadowed by grim buildings and lacking sun and light. She suffers her penance silently, knowingly, but punishes him in a minor way on the plane home by  talking and laughing with another man. But the lightest touch of her husband’s hand on her leg as she passes him to visit the toilet, elicits a cry from her that tells all - there is more retribution to come. In the title story, this time a study in dislocation, it becomes clear that a woman is sinking into madness. The stiff dialogue that keeps the woman and her husband afloat is painful to read. An acute ear is at work here, along with ingenious ideas. For example, the couple wonder how disabled would they have to be, whilst still loving each other? How much damage could they tolerate in the other? The answer is played out in a banal-seeming arrangement to hold a dinner party. It seems they can and will continue to stand a very great deal in one another.

There is a smart logic to these stories, realistically painful dialogue drives the narrative, while the unspoken is portrayed with a raw edge. This is demonstrated in “The Starving Millions” – my favourite. Here, a man who has done well in America invites his brother and his wife, working in Africa with the “starving millions”, to attend his wedding. Resentment of the Christian, morally correct brother has festered in the successful brother. Everything the visiting brother does is open to an ungenerous interpretation – an African doll for his child, the wearing of a shabby old suit, his being ill-at-ease on a men’s night out. But, he begins to realize that, in fact, his brother is proving a credit to him. This culminates in the giving of a warm and witty bestman speech at the wedding. The good brother crowns his sins by persuading a friend of the groom to donate a large sum of money to his work in Africa – in effect diverting it from a joint venture already arranged with the successful brother. The bitter, scalding exchange they have, ostensibly about this, on the way to the airport tells us everything about family resentments and jealousies.

The main trouble with short stories is that the bad in people is so very much more interesting than the good and therefore that is what the writer will address. There can be a cumulative effect of darkness. Here, I only felt this effect with one particular story. With two others I heard other writers reverberate – but as one of those was the voice of Alice Munro, it may not be much of a criticism. We do need good short stories to distil down the essence of something.
Tom Lee can do that.
ML

By Margaret Anne MacLeod
There were three of us in the relationship:
The secret letters of Marie Antoinette (vol 1)
Published by Isaac MacDonald
£9.99
ISBN 978-0-9559991-0-9

Gateaux and guillotine are generally synonymous with French Queen Marie Antoinette but a new book of a collectionof letters between the queen’s mother and
her ambassador to France reveal she was also a gambler, a jewellery lover, a kind but thoughtless queen and one who was married to an impotent king.

This first volume of two contains selected extracts from letters (translated for the first time from the original French) between Austrian Empress Marie-Therese and Le Comte de Mercy- Argenteau. The letters paint a vivid picture of the life the young queen endured, caught up in the intrigues of the French court, remaining childless for seven years and coping with the ineptness of Louis XVI.

For historians, scholars and researchers, as well as the general reader, unexpected insights are revealed, showing how the queen developed from a pleasure-loving young girl into an increasingly desperate woman seeking help from neighbouring
countries to intervene in the growing revolution in France.
By Carol Dwyer

A Different Mirror
Back Bay Books Little Brown and Company
5th March, 2009
£12.99

This revised edition of a prize-winning (American Book Award) history of multicultural America was first published in 1993. It is enhanced with material on the role of black soldiers in preserving the Union; the history of Chinese Americans from 1900-1941; an investigation into the issue of “illegal” immigrants from Mexico; and an examination of the sudden visibility of Muslim refugees from Afghanistan. It asks, “What does it mean to be an American?”

The author deals sequentially with the history of the different peoples who have come to America, starting with the first voyagers who arrived from Great Britain. His descriptions of how the Indian tribes had everything they held dear systematically taken away from them is truly harrowing. And there is much suffering in this story – of the blacks, the Chinese, the Japanese, the “illegal” Mexicans, the Irish railroad workers. As Professor Takaki goes on, he demonstrates how much of this suffering was due to the bad effects of stereotyping, for example, how the black slaves of the South were stigmatized as “savage”, ruled
by passions rather than by civilized virtues, or as children, and how long it has taken for such prejudice to be reversed. He also covers the issues of assimilation and integration, public policy, laws for and against minorities, the attitudes of minorities towards their own situation, protectionism and prejudice.

For example, although black soldiers accomplished great feats in World War II, they still suffered prejudice. Similarly, although the Tuskegee Indians utilized their own language to devise an unbreakable code for use in World War II, they did not benefit long-term. And, Japanese-American troops fought with distinction, despite their families having been interned back home. Recently, in the aftermath of the 2001 Twin Towers atrocity, Muslim Americans have suffered suspicion of terrorist connections.

Throughout the book, Professor Takaki the employs the metaphor of Caliban (the primitive being) and Prospero (the civilized wise man) from Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” to illustrate what drives some groups to look down upon others. It’s a good parallel, but some readers may not be familiar with the play.

Although the book is comprehensive in its coverage, I noticed that the Korean community is not included, nor is there coverage of the Scandinavian and Germanic groups. Another, minor, criticism is the book’s rather dull appearance, with cheapish, pulpy paper which is hard to handle due to its thickness.

In his new finish to the book, Takaki makes one particularly good point: “We will all be minorities soon.”, and he points out that, whereas the problem in the 20th century was “the color line”, now the “promise for the 21st century is the promise of the changing colors of the American people. Demography is defining who is an
American.” This is no stuffy textbook – everyone should have a copy.
ML

By Adina Hoffman
My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness:
A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century
Yale University Press
£17.99
02.04.09

This is the biography of an exceptional Palestinian writer and poet, Taha Muhammad Ali, born in the Palestinian village of Saffuriyye in 1931. With only four years of formal schooling, but possessing a passion for reading, particularly for  poetry, he sought and devoured books wherever he could. He is now a highly original poet whose work has captivated some of the world’s best writers. The book’s enigmatic title is taken from one of his best-known poems.

Adina Hoffman is a Jewish American writer who has lived in Jerusalem for sixteen years and whose husband is Taha’s translator. She is uniquely placed to bring Taha’s story to life. At the same time, her research skills and ability to keep a complex narrative in play enables the reader to grasp a mass of historical, political and social detail. More importantly, her particular empathy with her subject, and a novelist’s ability to bring all those involved in Taha’s story to life, engages the reader immediately.

Taha’s happy youth in Saffuriyye came to an end with “al-Nakba”, the Catastrophe, the creation of the state of Israel, and the subsequent clearing of many indigenous Palestinians from their homes by force to make way for the incoming Jewish settlers. Bombed at night, with no warning, the village that Taha and his community loved – and which constituted their whole world - had to be abandoned as they fled over the border to camps in Lebanon. Always tough and responsible, Taha provided for his family from then on, using his entrepreneurial skills to provide for them from a little kiosk selling sweets, cigarettes and drinks.

Haunted by their lost home, Saffuriyye, poverty-stricken, and riven with humiliation and bewilderment, the lot of the Palestinians is only tolerable because they never lose their traditions of friendship, and mutual support and family loyalty. The village itself is a key character in this story. Another key aspect of the story is that of Arabic poetry. We see Taha learn from the great poets and from the writers, thinkers and editors he begins to meet after he doggedly moves his family back into Palestine, Nazareth, where he talks to all those who come to his shop and begins to move in literary circles. Taha never leaves his work, so he is beyond 50 when his poetry begins to be published and immediately command attention, for its freshness, boldness and originality. His two abiding loves - for his village, for his lost
first fiancée, Amina – inform his work. The book is very much enhanced by the appearance of a number of the poems.

The introduction of the differing viewpoints of numerous Palestinian and Jewish writers, intellectuals and politicians provides a valuable balance to set against the ease with which the writer is able to wring tears from the reader in describing the suffering of the Palestinian families. But, in the end, what we learn is how truly crucial poetry is to Arab culture. (A minor difficulty is the unfamiliar Arabic names of characters and especially of the poets, but it is worth the effort, because this book is rich in every sense.)
ML

By Amos Oz
Rhyming Life and Death
Published by Chatto & Windus
19.02.09
£12.99

(It is important to be clear that Amos Oz is a famous, prolific and distinguished  author before embarking upon this book, and that his last work was a highly successful memoir.)

The main character is a famous author, always referred to as “the Author”. He is spending a typical distinguished author’s evening at a reading of his work, followed by a question and answer session. His musings before the event, and his wanderings and encounters after it, constitute the plot, whose timescale occupies 8 hours. In his forties, it seems that the author is weary, that a certain anomie afflicts
him. He is pondering life and death, the meaning of writing and reading (his audience forces such questions on him) His thoughts are invaded over the evening by memories of a poet called Tsefania beit-Halachmi, who had used the title “Rhyming Life and Death” for a book of his. This nested-box effect is a feature of the book’s style. Throughout the evening, the Author is unable to stop fictionalizing everyone he meets or notices in a café, at the meeting and afterwards, when he seems to engage in a sexual encounter with the reader of his work at the event. He appears to be helplessly trapped not only in this habitual “back-story-writing” reaction to others, but also by the way in which his characters, once given wings, persist in flying away from him. Also, the pitiable and less than lovely aspects of old age concern two of his nights’ characters. So, what is writing? And, what is reading? In the morning, the Author is unsure of what has happened, and his night’s odyssey ends appropriately with his discovery of the old poet’s death.

We are forced to assume an autobiographical aspect to the book because of the “Author” naming convention. Because the Author is finding life hard, the book is also designed to be hard for the reader - we seem to have become part of the scenario and the joke (a joke is promised at one point by one of the characters, but the punchline is never delivered).

This postmodernist approach is clever, intriguing, and readable, but it lacks the power to engage the reader beyond a certain point. The cerebral, theoretical
nature of the writing is unsettling, making the reader wonder how much to engage before the next enigmatic reversal occurs. The book, the author, is always going to have the last word. The most satisfying aspect of the story is the way in which it addresses life and death as an inextricably bound together. And, too, the setting of the book in the context of real Tel Aviv locations, events and characters provides familiar parameters.

The news of the poet’s death rouses a philosophical acceptance in the Author,
“… tomorrow is today.” Dare we, the Readers, say, (quoting from a less distinguished source), “Tomorrow is another day.”?
ML