Town Boy

Author: Lat
Year: 1980
Genre: Memoir

In his native Malaysia, Lat is a phenomenon. A cartoonist since age 9, he's been enormously popular for the last thirty years, and was even commissioned to draw the artwork for AirAsia jets. Of course, he's practically unknown here in the United States, but First Second Press (publishers of American Born Chinese) are introducing him to American audiences by publishing two autobiographical volumes, Kampung Boy and Town Boy.

I haven't read the first volume, but that was no handicap at all. This book starts off when Lat's family moves from a village (or kampung) to the town of Ipoh, and follows the exploits of Lat and his friends through their first (age 10) and last (age 17) years of school together. They discover rock 'n' roll, cheat on the cross country race, perform in the marching band, and dream about pretty girls.

The striking thing about this kind of story is the mix of similarities and differences from what I would find familiar. While all the subplots could (and probably would) be found in an American memoir from the same generation, the setting shows some tremendous cultural differences. Malaysia is a very diverse country, and the English edition of the book includes some aspects of Malaysian English (notably the multi-purpose particle lah) as well as bits of dialogue in Bahasa Malaysia, Chinese, and what I believe is Tamil. Also, the schools are boys only, and the British-derived educational system makes some of the school scenes difficult to understand completely.

Despite the foreignness of the Malaysian setting, though, the overall feeling is of the warmth of friends and family. Lat has fond memories of childhood fun and mischief, an engaging storyteller's style, and a wicked caricaturist's sense of humor. I look forward to reading Volume 1.

Istanbul: Memories and the City

Author: Orhan Pamuk
Year: 2004
Genre: Memoir

Orhan Pamuk is a lifelong resident of Istanbul, and in this book he tells both the city's history and his own. It's a terribly difficult book for me to write about because there's a lot going on: he doesn't just write a history of Istanbul, but also a history of Istanbul writers and painters (both Turkish and Western), of himself as an Istanbullu, of himself as an Istanbul writer and painter, of certain buildings or classes of building or times of day that he finds evocative, of the different moods that these buildings and times of day evoke. There's a lengthy discussion of hüzün, which is a peculiar sort of Turkish melancholy that the residents of a city can feel collectively because of the knowledge that they have been the capital of three empires but are now marginalized and impoverished.

And, there are the times when Pamuk addresses himself directly to the audience and hints at his deeper purpose in telling the story. That purpose, as I understood it, is to describe the artistic lives of Orhan Pamuk and of Istanbul, but through tangential stories that show their richness as well as their deep interconnections.

Reading this book is like listening to the ramblings of your favorite uncle, if your favorite uncle were Turkish, and a Nobel-winning novelist.

Slaughterhouse-five

Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Year: 1966
Genre: Literary fiction

So much has been said about this book that I'm not going to attempt a comprehensive review. Since this is a reread, I'll focus on what I noticed in particular this time:

Imagine that Billy Pilgrim's daughter Barbara is right, and that Billy's time travel and Tralfamadorean dreams are, in fact, hallucinations. He's experiencing an extended episode of post-traumatic stress disorder initially brought on by his presence during the bombing of Dresden. He can't look at his wartime memories, but neither can he look away, so he feels that he has come "unstuck in time." Everyday events remind him unpredictably of the horrors he witnessed (typical of PTSD sufferers, I believe), leading him to see them so vividly that he believes he is literally reliving them.

The constant bouncing between 1945 Dresden and 1960s Babbittry, together with the all-too-human wishful belief that someone out there knows all the answers, starts to take its toll on Billy's sanity. Becoming the sole survivor of a plane crash pushes him off the deep end, and he invents himself some someones in fantastic Kilgore Trout style. The result is the Tralfamadoreans, whose four-dimensional sight tells Billy just what he has always wanted to hear: that one cannot totally escape from horror, but one can ignore it. 130,000 people burned to death? So it goes.

My father also reread Slaughterhouse-five recently, and found it to be a shallow book with little to offer beyond "People die; war is bad; so it goes." I think he might be right about his conclusion, but I don't agree that it comes from shallowness. Rather, I would argue that Vonnegut is expressing humility before the awesome and unspeakable events of war. So it goes, I believe, falls somewhere between a Zen koan and Wittgenstein's "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent."

Blankets

Author: Craig Thompson
Year: 2004
Genre: Autobiographical

Everything seems bigger and more important to a teenager. A bad grade feels like a personal insult, and one bad day can make them think their life is over. As for the things that by any measure carry serious weight - consider romance, or family, or religious faith - adolescents often experience them with an intensity that makes adult life seem a pale imitation. In Blankets, Craig Thompson's art and storytelling somehow transport you back to that phase of life. He reminds us of the 17-year-old's persistent emotional rawness caused by the mere fact of living, the immediacy of the world seen through adolescent eyes.

The story focuses primarily on young Craig's first serious romance, during his senior year of high school. His relationship with Raina begins as a bible-camp flirtation, but when he stays for two weeks at her house, the time they spend together develops an almost religious importance. They offer each other an escape from the constant frustrations of teenage life: school responsibilities, lack of privacy, his family's rigid fundamentalism, her parents' impending divorce. The two are the "blankets" of the title (represented by a quilt that Raina makes for Craig, as well as the constant snowfall of the Midwestern winter); they shelter each other from the harshness of life that teenagers are often so ill-equipped to face alone.

During their two-week idyll, Raina leans on Craig and Craig literally idolizes Raina, as his love for her forces him to question his Christian faith. At first, he worries over literal-minded questions of lust and temptation, but eventually he finds a more profound spirituality, recognizing immanence in her earthly beauty. This brush with the divine is symbolized in the artwork, where a motif of radiance takes on the forms of a snowflake, a pattern in the quilt's fabric, and a halo for the deified Raina.

Their love is a small and fragile thing. After Craig returns home, their connection is quickly broken by long distance and everyday responsibilities. The next ten years of his life are told in a space of some five pages, showing that he has gotten over Raina without allowing the reader to move on as well. On the contrary, we look back with a deep nostalgia for his adolescent romance, and forward to her influence on the adult he will become: an artist, a thinking Christian with more questions than fundamentalism, a man who forms a fully adult relationship with his younger brother.

Perhaps comics, as a combination of images and words, is uniquely able to convey the unmediated emotion of adolescence, the sense of unbearable significance. Thompson makes a strong case: the experience of reading Blankets is like being surrounded by ghosts of your own teenage years. I certainly wouldn't want to return there, but I feel I have a different appreciation of it now.

Assassination Vacation

Author: Sarah Vowell
Year: 2005
Genre: History

This was a quick, entertaining read about presidential assassinations. I haven't had this much fun since I saw Assassins (and I've had the soundtrack stuck in my head the whole time I've been reading this book). There are a lot of interesting historical details about Presidents Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley, but mostly it's the story of the author's compulsion to visit morbid presidential history sites while forcing her friends to tag along.

Since it's a book full of trivia about one woman's obsession with historical minutiae, Vowell's attempt to conclude the book with a hint of grander significance (weird coincidences in history give us a sense that life might not be random and meaningless) falls flat. It doesn't matter, though - that's not the point of the book. Vowell is more like the high school history teacher who can make you like her class, even if you don't like history, because she evidently loves it so much. Since the McKinley chapter, I've been feeling strange urges to check out the new biography of T.R., and if I do, it's to her credit.

Hello to All That: A memoir of war, Zoloft, and peace

Author: John Falk
Year: 2005
Genre: memoir

This book alternates between Falk's own experience with chronic depression and the struggles of ordinary Sarajevans he witnessed as a freelance journalist during the 1992-1994 seige. The parallels between the two settings keep leading you back to the same messages: in life, bad things happen to people; the important thing is how you deal with them; and regardless of whether you are fighting Chetnik snipers or your own brain chemistry, the love of your family can make all the difference.

Falk goes a long way to make these relatively obvious points, but the real significance of the story is that he himself had to travel to the depths of depression and war, and come out the other side again, before he really learned them.

One detail that I noticed and appreciated is that Falk subtly acknowledges his own poor understanding of the conflict. Even with his graduate degree in foreign affairs and his coursework in the political differences between rural and urban Serbia, he arrives in Sarajevo knowing more or less the BBC-CNN version of the war: Serbs=aggressors, Bosnians=victims. He gains a greater appreciation of its complexities from, of all people, a Bosnian Catholic sniper, who teaches him about the happier days of former Yugoslavia, which most Serbs, like most Bosnians, had preferred to the war and brutality of the 1990s; and about the deep ethnic divides that went unacknowledged for so many years, but eventually led to the war in which the sniper himself had to assassinate his former best friend.