Book review: "Mirrors" (Eduardo Galeano)

Galeano's snippets of history in 'Mirrors' entertains, saddens

By Jim Higgins of the Journal Sentinel

Posted: July 4, 2009

Earlier this year at the Summit of the Americas, Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave President Barack Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano's "Open Veins of Latin America," a history of the region from European contact through the present, that is critical of the U.S. The pointed gift provoked a brief spike in book sales here.

But the Uruguayan writer Galeano deserves a better fate in the States than that of a talking point in a political stunt. To call him a leftist is accurate but reductive. Galeano is no yammering American-style pundit. He's a learned historian, a brilliant synthesizer and elegant stylist with a preferential option for the poor, to use the Catholic phrase, though Galeano parts way with the church on many points.

He's also a feminist, and a man who loves beauty, pleasure and the beautiful game: his lyrical "Soccer in Sun and Shadow" is one of the peaks of soccer literature.

"Mirrors," recently published here in Mark Fried's translation, should increase Galeano's stature in the English-speaking world and enhance his reputation as unclassifiably brilliant. This anthology of lyrically written vignettes runs from prehistoric origin tales through the present, with a focus on the dreams, accomplishments and suffering of the forgotten, the underdogs, the downtrodden and the persecuted of history.

With its blend of legends and careful history, it feels like an anatomy, the word Northrop Frye used to describe a work that blends satire with an encyclopedic impulse. It's filled with punch lines, but ones just as likely to be poignant or harrowing as amusing:

"The results of civilization were surprising: our lives became more secure but less free, and we worked a lot harder."

"In the Greek Olympics, women, slaves, and foreigners never took part. Not in Greek democracy either."

"Official history has it that Vasco Nunez de Balboa was the first man to see, from a summit in Panama, two oceans at once. Were the natives blind?"

"Then England invented the fairy tale of free trade: nowadays, when poor countries cannot sleep at night, rich countries still tell them that story to put them to sleep."

While Galeano can be playful, parts of "Mirrors" are almost unbearably sad, particularly the section of stories about the slave trade in the Americas. For all its short paragraphs and pithy tales, "Mirrors" is a dense book, a reduction sauce of human history best consumed in small portions, so the potent flavors don't overwhelm that taster.

Book review: "Steal Across the Sky"

A sci-fi novel with appeal for all readers

By Jim Higgins of the Journal Sentinel

Posted: Jun. 6, 2009 4:00 p.m.

To the best of my knowledge, Nancy Kress does not enter a sterile clean room when she gets down to work. But she is responsible for some of our most creative experiments in genetic engineering.

This former fourth-grade teacher has won multiple Hugos and Nebulas, science fiction's top honors, for her stories, which often play out the implications, positive and distressing, of altering human genes.

In her signature "Sleepless" trilogy, which grew out of her novella "Beggars in Spain," people reshuffle the genome themselves, creating humans who don't sleep, and raising profound questions about what the genetically gifted owe or don't owe the normal ones.

But in her new novel, "Steal Across the Sky," Earthlings were unsuspecting lab rats for a species now calling themselves the Atoners, who have returned 10,000 years later to make amends for their sins.

The Atoners, who hide behind screens and electronic communications, interview volunteers and choose 21 to go into space, to witness the descendants of humans who were seeded on other planets in an experiment. Lucca, a rich, depressed young widower, witnesses on Kular A, where a peaceful people live simply but manifest an unusual power that he struggles to understand. Cam, a passionate American and briefly Lucca's lover on the space flight, is dropped into a violent, militaristic world on Kular B.

Lucca is on the planet of the unchanged people; Cam reconnects with him there after a crisis. The third human witness, Soledad, monitoring them from the orbiting spaceship, puts it together: The Atoners turned off a gene in Earth's humans, depriving them of a sensory power they once had. The people on Kular A and six other planets still have that sense. An Atoner recording confirms Soledad's hypothesis and expresses the species' regret for its actions.

Human reactions to Soledad's startling discovery drive the rest of the novel. Even the Witnesses, now both celebrities and marked men and women on Earth, can't agree on the meaning of what they discovered. Governments spy on them, hunting for scraps of info about the Atoners, some of whom are holed up on a Moon base.

Opportunists abound, and hate groups swing into action.

That's the skeleton of a complex plot, but it doesn't describe Kress' skill in creating characters: the moody, loyal Lucca; passionate, driven Cam; lonely, thoughtful Soledad. A longtime writing teacher, Kress composes with grace and economy. A writer who prefers shorter forms, Kress has constructed this novel as a series of short chapters from different points of view. Sometimes she even gives us the same events from more than one perspective: We see how both Cam and a Kular B native experienced the same crisis.

Kress breaks up these character-driven episodes with faux documents that supply background or context, and that satirize human responses to major news: a Witness interview (with attached sticky-note comment); a Web site page about fighting alien abduction; an "Oprah" transcript; an intelligence briefing; even a New Yorker cartoon triggered by Soledad's discovery. This cultural part of Kress' game has grown even from the brilliance of the "Sleepless" novels.

What makes Kress so stimulating and pleasurable to read is that her fiction is always multidimensional. In sci-fi terms, "Steal Across the Sky" is a genetic engineering story, but also a space travel story, a first contact story, even a military/law-enforcement story. She cares about character, plot and language; ideas and emotions; the fates of individuals and of societies and species.

Jim Higgins edits the Sunday Cue section.

Battle of the Book Titans

[Click image to enlarge, if you dare.]

Book provides peek into Nohl's world

In the 1920s, Leo Nohl bought a wooded acre-plus on the lakeshore in Fox Point for a summer cottage. To mark the entrance to their land, he and his 12-year-old daughter, Mary, built two stone-and-concrete gateposts.

Many decades later, when her home had become the legendary drive-by of the North Shore, Mary Nohl wrote to friends about that youthful moment of staking claim:

"The pleasure of mixing concrete in a wheelbarrow and straining sand from the beach for concrete - I'm sure my sculpture-filled yard had its origins in the gateposts."

Untold numbers of people have turned onto Beach Drive for a look at the woodland Easter Island that Nohl's yard had become, teeming with the concrete figures she made. If the light was right, they could also see that she had built her art into the exterior of the house itself.

The ruder visitors came to scoff, mock and sometimes vandalize the "witch's house." But many cruisers were simply curious about this art environment in a placid lakeshore suburb.

Nohl, who died in 2001, did not invite many people inside her home, which is now in the care of the Kohler Foundation. The property's fragility and the complexities of zoning make it unlikely it will ever open to the public.

So a new biography, "Mary Nohl: Inside & Outside" ($29.95), is as close as we may ever get to sitting in her living room and soaking in the imagination of this determined creator. Without disrespecting Barbara Manger's biographical text, the chief thrill of this book is the chance to gaze at more than 300 photos of Nohl's life and work without having to check the rear-view mirror.

Continued

Book review: "Lucky Girl"

Reconnecting

Memoir takes realistic look at joy, pain of adopted woman's discoveries

Posted: Apr. 18, 2009 4:18 p.m.

Mei-Ling Hopgood celebrated Chinese New Year 1998 in the Taiwan home of her Chinese birthparents, with her white American adoptive parents, her Korean brothers, her younger sister's Swiss mother, and her flock of Chinese sisters and their husbands, boyfriends and children.

Amid the shrieking, multilingual cacophony, awareness struck her:

"My God, I thought. Everyone, every person, every movement - all the chaos in this room is related to me in some way."

As her memoir reveals, Hopgood, 35, has been a lucky girl at least twice in her life. At 7 months, she was adopted by Rollie and Chris Hopgood, a loving pair of suburban Detroit teachers. Then, as a young woman, a line in a letter to the friendly nun who helped arrange her adoption was the opening that led her to her large and boisterous birth family. That reunion has led to painful discoveries as well as joyful embraces. But she is clearly a much deeper person because of it.

Adoption stories can be tediously didactic or passionately overwrought. I know: I'm the adoptive father of two Asian children, and I've read many of them. Happily, "Lucky Girl" is a superior book because Hopgood is fair-minded, realistic and uninterested in making big pronouncements about adoption.

"I sometimes resented people's assumptions that adoptees must automatically, deep down, feel part empty or abandoned," she writes. She felt secure in the love of the Hopgoods, and when she writes about Rollie Hopgood's unexpected death in her memoir, we feel her pain.

But growing up in white and black Detroit, she felt awkward being Asian, and overcompensated to prove her Americanness. Meeting her Chinese sisters leads her to greater acceptance of not only her ethnic identity, but also her body: She shares some telling and funny moments of discussing and comparing breasts, legs and eyes with her newfound siblings.

Bringing her journalistic skills to her life story (she's been a reporter for Detroit and St. Louis newspapers), Hopgood learns that she was the sixth daughter born to a couple she calls Ma and Ba. Ba, desperate to have a son, insisted that they could not afford another girl and asked hospital nurses about placing her for adoption. The author was named Mei-Ling after the Chinese name of Sister Maureen, the nun who helped arrange her adoption by the Hopgoods. We find out that she has a younger sister, Irene, who was adopted by a Swiss family.

Her Taiwan sisters are a strong, successful bunch, but as Hopgood digs further into her family's story, we learn how Ba's obsession with having a son has warped and damaged his marriage and family. Being an outsider to years of family dynamics, Hopgood struggles to grasp why Ma has endured some of Ba's actions, and finally learns a painful family secret. She comes to accept, if not fully understand, her birthmother, and to feel secure and truly fortunate in being a girl from this family.

Now a mother herself, living in Argentina with her husband, she is truly a woman of the world.

Hopgood will read from "Lucky Girl" at 7 p.m. May 18 at Boswell Books, 2559 N. Downer Ave., Milwaukee.

My Easter message

From a letter written by Flannery O'Connor in 1962:

"Students get so bound up with difficulties such as reconciling the clashing of so many different faiths such as Buddhism, Mohamedanism [Islam], etc., that they cease to look for God in other ways. [Robert] Bridges once wrote Gerard Manley Hopkins and asked him to tell him how he, Bridges, could believe. Bridges was an agnostic. He must have expected from Hopkins a long philosophical answer.

"Hopkins wrote back, 'Give alms.'

"He was trying to say to Bridges that God is to be experienced in Charity (in the sense of love for the divine image in human beings). Don't get so entangled with intellectual difficulties that you fail to look for God in this way."

Picador's Twitter book club for The Housekeeper and The Professor

PicadorUSA editor David Rogers hosted a book club on Twitter for Yoko Ogawa's novel "The Housekeeper and the Professor."

It was Good Friday, so that might have kept volume down a bit, but there was discussion throughout the day.

The next Picador book up for Twitter discussion will Augusten Burroughs' "A Wolf at the Table," on April 17. Hash tag is #pic2. Since Burroughs is a Twitterer, I'd expect a higher volume for this one.

Play ball! A lifetime of loving baseball

[Originally published in the March 31, 2002 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.]

While time may begin for some on opening day, my field of dreams is humbler than any big-league ballpark. I can see the village diamond out of the window of our living room.

I enjoy professional baseball as much as the next guy in a town where the team hasn't finished above .500 for nearly a decade. But the game I truly love is a homemade thing, not the store-bought variety.

In the Little League where I grew up, every child, by rule, had to bat at least once and play in the field in every game he showed up for. All you need to know about my level of baseball skill as an overweight, near-sighted boy was that I batted ninth and played three innings a game in right field, the least damaging place for any competitive coach to put me.

Yet he who is least desired often loves the fiercest. Playing the game is threaded through my life in an intimate and powerful way.

I don't like sports-as-life-lessons-learned analogies, but when you bat ninth, it's hard to avoid picking up on a few things.

For example, some coaches don't care about the guys at the bottom of the lineup. In one game, I misplayed a ball in right field, and the batter ended up safe at second base.

Before my red face even had time to cool off, the next batter smoked a ball my way. I fielded it cleanly on the run, turned and threw out the first runner at home plate. The coach of my own team had nothing to say to me about either my error or the best throw I had ever made -- but the opposing coach came over to our bench between innings to compliment me, an act of sportsmanship I'll never forget.

Continued

Adding Magic: Book weaves wonders of math, baseball together

The Housekeeper and the Professor. By Yoko Ogawa. Picador paperback, $14.

Baseball and math are old friends. But no one I've read has ever demonstrated their congruency as gracefully as Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa does in this slender novel.

The unnamed narrator is sent to work at the cottage of the Professor, who has worn out nine previous housekeepers. He's not senile, explains his sister-in-law. But due to a car accident 17 years ago, his memory is limited: "It's as if he has a single, eighty-minute videotape inside his head, and when he records anything new, he has to record over the existing memories."

The Professor copes with his condition through handwritten notes attached to his suit. The biggest note reminds him of his memory loss and 80-minute limit. Soon he has added one with a sketch of his new housekeeper's face.

Damaged and shy, the Professor is still brilliant, spending his time on complex mathematical puzzles for journals. We're in Oliver Sacks territory here, of mental gifts offsetting mental deficits. The down-to-earth housekeeper is drawn slowly into his orbit of factorials, perfect numbers, Euler and Fermat.

She, in turn, gently tethers him to humanity. She's a single mother; when the Professor learns she has a 10-year-old son, he insists the son come to his house after school. Seeing the son's flat head, the Professor nicknames him Root, for square root. A friendship blossoms. The Professor is an enthusiastic teacher, praising even wrong answers for the effort of discovery. The fatherless boy doesn't love school, but basks in the old man's warm attention.

They also bond over baseball. Root is nuts about it. The Professor, too, is a fan. He has never seen a game, but he has a tin of prized baseball cards, including his favorite player, left-handed Hanshin Tigers pitcher Yutaka Enatsu, whose perfect number 28 is so pleasing.

The housekeeper treats them to a game by the visiting Tigers, though she and Root sweat about how to explain the absence of the long-retired Enatsu. The game is magical, and the Professor finds math everywhere in the experience: His excited discourse on the Ruth-Aaron pair of 714-715 is not to be missed.

Misunderstanding of their affection forces them apart, until the Professor demands their reunion in a most mathematical way. After she returns to work for him, the housekeeper glimpses some of the secrets hidden by his memory loss.

Ogawa's prose, as translated by Stephen Snyder, flows so smoothly her book can easily be read in an afternoon on the couch, especially if a Brewers game is playing softly on the radio. The sometimes complex math that surfaces in the story is fully explained in context.

"I think I'm a little smarter when I'm in the Professor's office," says Root. Anyone who reads this magical book will likely be both a little smarter and a little kinder afterward.

A footnote for Milwaukee readers: In 1985, at age 36, after his illustrious Japanese baseball career ended, Enatsu signed a minor-league deal with the Brewers and tried unsuccessfully to make the big-league club in spring training.

Follow Jim Higgins on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jhiggy.

Brain Twister now an audiobook

Thanks to the good volunteers at Librivox, the amusing SF novel "Brain Twister" is now a public domain audiobook free for your downloading. This early '60s Hugo nominee is sage of the search for a telepathic spy. (Clean up the period idioms and mild chauvinism and it would play nicely as a USA network series today.)

You can download the audiobook here.

Scary Adventures in Typography

Zoe, my 8th grader, came home with a photocopy of "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," which her lit class is reading and discussing. It was a Project Gutenberg free etext version of the story that some grownup had printed out for the kids. Fair enough. But whomever printed it out printed the entire story in ITALICS! Bad idea. This became a teaching moment in typography for me. PAGE AFTER PAGE OF ITALICS IS BAD, people. Too hard to read. She was finding the story somewhat confusing. Reading Washington Irving in italics would make my head hurt, too. Zoe, being charitable, wondered if the perpetrator had printed it all in italics to replicate an old-fashioned publication. Maybe so, but there is no statue of limitations on typographical crime!

Bones: The Princess and the Pear