Mau Mau - Iraq Connection
While doing research on the Mau Mau insurrection in Kenya just prior to their independence from Britain I developed a critical case of deja vu. The language used to describe the state of emergency, the actions taken by the colonial government, the outcomes of their lack of cultural understanding... It seemed so much like what is going on now at the hands of the US Government in Iraq.
In 1950s Kenya there were prison abuse scandals, prisoners who died while in custody... There was a government insisting that there was a highly organized group of terrorists and it was necessary to declare a state of emergency, remove the corrupt leadership and educate the savage people in the ways of the West.
I may find more intelligent comparisons later, but I've already come across an article that makes some of the same connections.
John Pilger wrote an article called
"Get Out Now, Before We are Thrown Out."
It is really eery the parallels between our so-called nation building and the acts of a colonial government bent on keeping power.
Alice Munro is a widely read, highly decorated and amazing Canadian Fiction writer. She isn't known as well in the states, maybe in part because she writes short stories and we are much more obsessed with the novel here.
Here's some stuff from different interviewers and reviewers:
Lorrie Moore in The Atlantic Monthly
Munro deals powerfully with the family and "the wrenching incompatibility of a woman's professional or artistic expression with her familial commitments."
Many of her short stories deal with ambivalent parents who don't expect toward their children as we might expect. "There are no happy ending here, but neither are the tales tragedies. They are constructions of calm perplexity, coolly observed human mysteries.
"Munro has said she sees stories architecturally, as a house whose various rooms one can roam in and out of, forgoing any prescribed order; this accounts for the nonlinear aspects of so many of her narratives."
"All the women here [the short story collection
Runaway] are attempted runaways of some sort, and they seem to feel that the situation they run toward harbors more truth and hope than the difficult daily world they run from, though the story itself will not judge."
Jonathan Franzen in the New York Times Book Review
Raves about how fantastic a writer Munro is. "I want to circle around Munro's latest marvel of a book, "Runaway," by taking some guesses at why her excellence so dismayingly exceeds her fame.
1. Munro's work is all about storytelling pleasures
2. As long as you're reading Munro, you're failing to multitask by absorbing civics lessons or historical data.
3. She doesn't give her books grand titles like "Canadian Pastoral," "Canadian Psycho," "Purple Canada," "In Canada" or "The Plot Against Canada"
4. The Swedish Royal Academy is taking a firm stand (too many Canadians and too many short story writers have received the Nobel).
5. Munro writes fiction, and fiction is harder to review than nonfiction.
6. Because, worse yet, Munro is a pure short-story writer.
7. Munro's short stories are even harder to review than other people's short stories
"Here's the story that Munro keeps telling: A bright, sexually avid girl grows up in rural Ontario without much money, her mother is sickly or dead, her father is a schoolteacher whose second wife is problematic, and the girl, as soon as she can, escapes from the hinterland by way of a scholarship or some decisive self-interested act. She marries young, moves to British Columbia, raises kids, and is far from blameless in the breakup of her marriage She may have success as an actress or writer or a TV personality; she has romantic adventures. When, inevitably, she returns to Ontario, she finds the landscape of her youth unsettlingly altered. Although she was the one who abandoned the place, it's a great blow to her narcissism that she isn't warmly welcomed back -- that the world of her youth, with its older-fashioned manners and mores, now sits in judgment on the modern choices she has made. Simply by trying to survive as a whole and independent person, she has incurred painful losses and dislocations; she has caused harm."
Daphne Merkin in The New York Times Magazine
Interviewed Munro in Clinton, Ontario (a three-hour drive from Toronto) where she lives with her second husband, Gerald Fremlin. She has published 10 collections of short stories and one novel. Her books have been translated into 20 languages She has won a National Book Critic's Circle Award in the United States and "every literary prize Canada has to offer."
Munro talked about her two marriages-- she met Fremlin when she was 18 at the University of Western Ontario when they were students and she was already engaged to James Munro. She was married to Munro for 20 years and had three daughters. She was very unsentimental in describing her first marriage. "You got married to have sex. Methods of birth control were too chancy." She also is matter-of-fact in her ambivalence toward being a mother. She didn't feel it was her choice, but something foisted upon her by the expectations of the time.
After leaving her marriage in her early 40s she took an appointment at the University of Ontario and met Gerald Fremlin again. From their university days he was the first admirer of her writing and she counts herself very lucky that both of her husbands supported her craft.
Alice Munro was the oldest of three siblings and grew up in the Scottish-Irish farming community of Wingham, Ontario. Her family were "outsiders on all counts: temperamentally, socially and geographically. Her father was an unsuccessful silver-fox breeder, and the family lived on the outskirts of town in what Munro has described as a 'kind of little ghetto where all the bootleggers and prostitutes and hangers-on lived.'" Unbeknownst to Munro, her father harbored literary ambitions of his own, and wrote a novel which was published shortly after he died.
Munro's mother fell ill and was eventually diagnosed with Parkinsons disease, leaving the oldest daughter to keep the household running at the age of 12. It was a very important event in her emotional life. She wanted to get out of this place where she didn't feel like she fit. She feels guilty that she emotionally abandoned her mother-- not going to see her for the last two years before her death.
Carol Shields - Larry's Party
When I read Carol Shield's book
Swann - A Mystery, it really pissed me off. I can't remember why exactly. I read it voraciously trying to get at the answer to the mystery and I think the answer was such a disappointment to me that I felt betrayed as a reader. I got to the end and thought, well there's a chunk of my life I'll never get back. What a waste of ink. Other than vague memories of anger, I have no remnant of the book remaining in me. Couldn't tell you what it was about. Some poet. Who wasn't really maybe. I don't know.
I did remember thinking that it was well written and I think that's why I was so angry. It COULD have been a good book. So I wasn't at all worried about Larry's Party. I was pretty sure she couldn't disappoint me the same way twice as a reader. I was right. I got a lot out of this book and the way it was structured.
The chapters are almost stand-alone short stories. They are very linked, and very chronological. There are hints dropped about the past and the future, but for the most part each section could survive on its own.
1 - 15 minutes in the life of Larry Weller, 1977
Once upon a time there was a guy named Larry Weller and he was kind of odd and worked in a flower shop and had a Harris Tweed coat. One day at a coffee shop he took someone else's much nicer Harris Tweed coat and wore it outside. He was all set to keep it, but remorse and fear got the better of him and he threw it in the garbage, walking the rest of the way in his shirt sleeves.
2 - Larry's Love, 1978
This guy named Larry Weller got a haircut, was married by a justice of the peace and then went on a honeymoon in Europe with his newly pregnant wife. He fell in love with hedges and mazes and this would become a pretty important part of his life.
3 - Larry's Folks, 1980
Larry buys a house and goes about creating a hedge maze that takes up the whole yard. He worries about his parents. He recalls the history of their coming to Canada. They left England after his mother's unfortunate incident with runner beans, botulism and a mother-in-law. Murderer.
4 - Larry's Work, 1981
Larry likes his work. Flowerfolks becomes more corporate-- purchased by Flowercity. Larry still likes his work.
5 - Larry's Words, 1983
Labyrinth, paradoxical, hypothesis, axiomatic, closure, upmarket, preoccupation, turf mazes, shepherd's race, Julian's bower, knot garden, Jerusalem, Minotaur, jeu-de-lettres, pigs-in-clover, frets and meanders, the Tremaux algorithm, pavimentum tessellatum, fylfot, wilderness, unicursal, topiary, nodes, the Mount of Venus, maisons de Dedalus, Troy-town, cup-and-ring, ocular or spiral, serpent-through-waist, chevron, banal, spokeshave, vellum tips, endpapers, lips, cords, lying press, millboard, headbands, glair, codex, railway, cooker, petrol, mazel tov, tantric, obsession, Cotoneaster horizontalis, Caragana arborescens, Ribes alipinum, dilemma, accomodate, Leguminosae, solstice, equinox, knowledge, pain, shame, emptiness, sorrow, relief.
Larry's marriage ends when Dorrie has half the maze taken out with a backhoe.
6 - Larry's Friends, 1984
Larry goes to a 16-year class reunion with his friends.
7 - Larry's Penis, 1986
Some of Larry's sexual history. He is now married to an intellectual woman called Beth.
8 - Larry Inc., 1988
Larry's business card reads A/Mazing Space Inc. He's hired to do custom mazes. Dorrie still has the half-maze in the yard of their old house in Winnipeg.
9 - Larry So Far, 1990
Larry turns forty and freaks. Then he relaxes when he turns forty-one.
10 - Larry's Kid 1991
Larry's relationship with his kid is awkward but bolstered with occasional bright flares of authentic love. He wants to talk to the kid about his conception and his parent's decision to marry, but Dorrie talks him out of it.
11 - Larry's Search for the Wonderful and the Good, 1992
Larry and his wife Beth both apply for Guggenheim fellowships. His is accepted, hers is denied. He didn't tell her he applied. So some strife, but they both go. Both do their work. His in mazes. Hers in female saints.
12 - Larry's Threads, 1993-4
Beth is offered a job in England. She takes it and they try a long distance marriage for a while. We get the history of Larry's clothes and then his hair. His second marriage is over.
13 - Men Called Larry, 1995
Larry King - TV personality, Larry Holmes - boxer, Larry Olivier - actor, Larry Liddle - from Windows Incorporated who rediscovers each year that he shares a name with Larry Weller, Larry Wellington - Chicago architect, Larry Fine - a neighbor who teaches psychology at the University of Chicago.
14 - Larry's Living Tissues, 1996
Larry falls into a coma. The ex-wives send faxes as flowers. The girlfriend sits vigil. The son reads him the newspaper out loud. Larry comes out of the coma. He and his sister take their mom's ashes to scatter them in the same lake as his father's ashes. They forget to bring the ashes, but go back the next day.
15 Larry's Party 1997
Larry hosts a dinner party for nine people:
Larry and Charlotte
Garth and Marcia McCord
Sam Alvero
Midge and Ian
Dorrie
Beth
In which it becomes clear to everyone that Dorrie and Larry still have something between them. Beth reveals her pregnancy, announces plans to move to Toronto and then withdraws this plan after seeing Larry and Dorrie at the party.
Looking back over this list I'd have to disagree with myself. Very few of the chapters could stand on their own as an independent story. But they could be shuffled around almost at will. They wouldn't need to be chronological. Sometimes peoples lives don't make the most sense in chronological order.
The chapter titles and the hedge mazes at the beginning of each section did a lot of work. It's part of what made each chapter feel complete I think. There was a theme. It's what I'd like to try with the Kenya material. We'll see.
