Summer tales for the soul
It isn’t late to start some holiday reading. Yang Yang recommends a few popular books.
The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
In late June, British actress Emma Watson hid copies of The Handmaid’s Tale in various parts of Paris for people to find and read. It was not the first time she played this game. At the end of 2016, Watson hid Maya Angelou’s memoir Mom & Me & Mom in the London subway as part of activities for her feminist book club.
The Handmaid’s Tale, considered a feminist novel, tells of a dystopian future in which women in the Republic of Gilead are deprived of almost all human rights. Many women are forced to become purely reproductive tools for upper-class men amid widespread sterility in a polluted world.
Canadian author Margaret Atwood had said in an interview that George Orwell’s classic 1984 came to mind while she was thinking about her future novel.
Atwood said she was collecting news about banning abortion and contraception around the world when she read a report about a fundamentalist sect taking over a Catholic congregation in New Jersey. The name that the fundamentalists called their wives — “handmaidens” — also had affected her.
In Atwood’s novel, women are divided into different categories according to their “purity” and child-bearing capabilities, under terms ranging from wives to “unwomen”.
Although Atwood rejected the idea that she wrote the novel particularly for the feminist movement, she expressed a warning of sorts through the narrator’s mother’s words, “You young people don’t appreciate things … You don’t know what we had to go through, just to get you where you are. Look at him (a husband), slicing up the carrots. Don’t you know how many women’s lives, how many women’s bodies, the tanks had to roll over just to get that far?”
At the start of 2017, Atwood joined the Women’s March in Toronto.
In an interview with The New Yorker, she said, “After 60 years, why are we doing this again? But, as you know, in any area of life, it’s push and pushback. We have had the pushback, and now we are going to have the push again.”
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson
US writer Marilynne Robinson published her first novel Housekeeping almost four decades ago, but the Chinese version did not arrive until recently.
Her second novel, Gilead, which won her the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, had already been published in Chinese.
Housekeeping is not about housekeeping per se. It is about the transience of life, love, friendship and family. The novel involves a family living in a remote Idaho town called Fingerbone.
The town boasts a huge, picturesque lake, with a bridge for trains passing through.
A girl named Ruth and her sister Lucille live together with their grandmother Sylvia Foster, whose husband Edmund died in a train accident. He plunged into the lake with the train and was never found. Sylvia’s three, quiet daughters had all left the town within a year.
Sylvia’s second daughter, Helen, eloped with a man who later left her. Helen had to look after her own daughters, Ruth and Lucille, on her own. At the suggestion of a friend, Helen drove her two girls to visit Sylvia, but left them at their grandmother’s house before she killed herself by driving into the lake.
Sylvia dies several years later and her two sisters-in-law arrive to look after the two girls. But they also move away after a cold winter, leaving the girls with Sylvia’s youngest daughter, Sylvie. Ruth and Lucille worry that Sylvie, a drifter, might leave them at any time, since she always sleeps with her clothes and shoes on.
In the end, Lucille moves out and Ruth joins Sylvie to drift around the world.
The novel was shortlisted for the Pulitzer for fiction and listed as one of the best 100 English novels by both The Guardian and The Times newspapers.
The New York Times listed it as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, saying that Robinson “knocks off the false elevation, the pretentiousness of our current fiction. Though her ambition is tall, she remains down-toearth, where the best novels happen”.
The Children Act by Ian McEwan
British author Ian McEwan’s novel was published in 2014 and has recently been translated into Chinese. The Children Act, touted as his best novel since On Chesil Beach, poses difficult questions regarding the law, religion, ethics, marriage and love.
At the start of the novel, 59-yearold Fiona Maye, a respected high court judge specializing in family law, is reviewing a case at home when she is asked by her husband for “permission” to have an affair with a 28-year-old statistician because their marriage is not physically intimate.
The shocked judge refuses her husband’s terms. Amid the ensuing argument, she receives a phone call about an emergency case: A 17-year-old leukemia patient did not receive blood transfusion because he is a member of the Jehovah’s Witnesses religious group, whose believers do not accept such medical treatment.
The teenager, Adam, is three months from his 18th birthday and is still under the Children Act which protects the young. After visiting Adam and finding him intelligent and kind, Fiona decides to force blood transfusion on him. Adam is saved and somehow develops special feelings toward Fiona.
Fiona later rejects Adam’s request to live with her when he traces her during one of her work trips, but she ends up kissing him.
The novel ends with a sudden twist when Adam’s leukemia returns. But he is now 18 and has the right to decide whether he wants to be saved.
Redeployment by Phil Klay
This collection offers some of the top stories about the Iraq War. The New York Times called it one of the best fictions about war after Tim O’Brien’s Vietnam War collection The Things They Carried. Phil Klay’s stories are “the best thing written so far on what the war did to people’s souls”.
US writer Klay is a graduate of Dartmouth College and a veteran of the US Marine Corps. From January 2007 to February 2008, he served in Iraq’s Anbar province as a public affairs officer. Anbar was among the most violent places in Iraq.
In the 12 short stories, Klay recounts the war from different perspectives of people including a serving soldier, a priest, a public affairs officer and an army veteran. He shows how the war psychologically affected people sent from the US to Iraq and how the conflict damaged their souls.
Published in 2014, it is Klay’s first book. It won the US National Book Award for fiction.