The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy – Book

In her most recent novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy talks about modern India (which is not as modern as you would like it to be). Two women are the focus of her story, Anjum and Tilottama. However, this is really a story of human rights and human intolerance and finding happiness when and where you can.

Anjum is born a boy. However upon closer examination he has the organs of both of the sexes – a hermaphrodite. His mother is able to keep this biological state a secret until puberty. At puberty the boy, Aftab, realizes she is not a boy. Are such things accepted in India? Yes and no. Anjum would never find a life in “normal” India society but one day she follows a transgender shopper from the market and she learns that there is a separate society of transgender Indian people, that the name for some transgender persons, including Anjum, is “hijra,” and in her neighborhood the hijra live in a house called the Khwabgah.

Within this group she is able to have a circumscribed but full social life. She adopts a homeless child and becomes her rather jealous mother. Although she must face a life separate from her parents and siblings, she is protected by superstition and left to her own devices. Fortunately, although feelings about Muslims are running high (as they do periodically in India), and although Hindus are attacking and slaughtering Muslims with little provocation, it is bad luck to kill hijra. This does not prevent Anjum from experiencing something so horrifying that it turns her life upside down.

Tilottama is a young woman with considerable charm despite her dark “café au lait, except very little lait” skin, which is not considered desirable. In fact she is desirable enough to attract three men (and more) who are in school with her. Naga, Musa, and “Garson Hobart” meet Tilo when practicing to stage a play (which never opens). These four are caught up in the off again – on again brutal war for control of Kashmir, a province coveted by India proper, Pakistan and China. Kashmiris want only to be a free and independent nation. Musa becomes a Kashmiri spy and a fighter for the independence movement. Tilo loves Musa who she can connect with only in the moments he snatches away from the movement.

The lives of our two main characters, Anjum and Tilo, become intertwined over, of all things, a homeless child.

Now it may seem as if I am telling the whole novel and that this will make it unnecessary to read this book. But that is not so. Arundhati is a prize-winning author and not by mistake. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness is a 400+ page book. It is detailed without being dry; it is instructive without being pedantic, and long without seeming long. This book cannot be summarized. It must be experienced.

Arundhati Roy never sugarcoats political flaws of corruption and religious intolerance in India, corruption that possibly tops the corruption we lament in our own government. She also explores the courage of people who lead authentic lives.

If you enjoy travelling to another culture without leaving your comfort zone and you want to avoid the touristy spots and get some in-depth exposure to the true spirit of a nation, Arundhati Roy is your ticket. You will gain exposure to an internal turmoil that inspires people, frightens people, and generates great courage and great grief. Don’t be a chicken. What you learn makes the journey worthwhile.

I’ll end with Roy’s beginning quote, “I mean, it’s all a matter of your heart…” –Nâzim Hikmet

July 2017 Book List

Publisher’s Weekly

June 2

Confessions by Augustine (newly translated by Sarah Ruden)

Black Detroit: A People’s History of Self-Determination by Herb Boyd (NF)

Felix Y_z by Lisa Bunker (YA)

Beyond Trans: Does Gender Matter? by Heath Fogg Davis (NF)

The People We Hate at the Wedding by Grant Ginder (F)

Magpie Murders by Anthony Horowitz

Kennedy and the King: The President, the Pastor, and the Battle Over Civil Rights by Steven Levingston (NF)

A Fugitive in Walden Woods by Norman Lock (F)

Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou (translated from the French by Helen Stevenson) (F)

How to Be a Muslim: An American Story by Haroon Moghul (NF)

This Impossible Light by Lily Myers (F in poetry)

We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled: Voices from Syria by Wendy Pearlman (NF)

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhoti Roy (F)

The Best Land Under Heaven: The Donner Party in the Age of Manifest Destiny by Michael Wallis (NF)

June 16

The Girl in Between by Sarah Carroll (F)

The Boy Who Loved Too Much: A True Story of Pathological Friendliness by Jennifer Latson (NF)

Into the Gray Zone: A Neuroscientist Explores the Border Between Life and Death by Adrian Owen (NF)

Flesh, and Bone and Water by Luiza Sauma (NF)

Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table by Stephen Westaby

The Force by Don Winslow Morrow (F)

June 30

American, English, Italian, Chocolate: Small Subjects of Great Importance by Rick Bailey (NF)

The Graybar Hotel by Curtis Dawkins (F)

Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughan by Elaine M Hayes(NF)

Trophy: A Novel by Steffen Jacobsen (F)

Who is Rich? By Matthew Klam (F)

The Disappearances by Emily Bain Murphy (F, YA)

All We Shall Know? A Novel by Donal Ryan (F)

A Stone of Hope: A Memoir by Jim St. Germain

Words on Bathroom Walls: A Novel by Julia Walton (F, YA)

July 7

The Great Nadar: The Man Behind the Camera by Adam Begley (NF)

Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World by Billy Bragg (NF)

Alone by Christophe Chabouté (visually stunning) (F)

Death on Delos by Gary Corby (F)

Streams of Gold, Rivers of Blood: The Rise and Fall of Byzantium, 955 AD to the First Crusade by Anthony Keldellis (NF)

Dirt Road by James Kelman (F)

Hum If You Don’t Know the Words by Bianca Marais (F)

The Art of Starving by Sam J Miller (F, YA)

My Heart Hemmed In by Marie N Diaye (translated from the French by Jordan Stump) (F)

Conversations with Friends: A Novel by Sally Rooney

So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley by Roger Steffens (NF)

The End by Fernanda Torres (F)

July 14

The Late Show by Michael Connelly (F)

No Good Deed by Kara Connolly (F, YA)

The Epiphany Machine by David Burr Gerrard

Ants Among the Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India by Sujatha Gidla (NF)

Soul Cage by Giles Murray (F)

The Library of Fates by Adit Khorana (F, YA)

Like a Fading Shadow by Antonio Mũnoz Molina (translated from the Spanish by Camilo A Ramirez) (F)

Arbitrary Stupid Goal by Tamara Shopsin (Short Stories)

Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls (NF)

July 21

The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II by Svetlana Alexievich (translated from the Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsby) (NF)

Refugee by Alan Gratz (F)

Gather the Daughters by Jennie Melamed (F)

The Way We Die Now: The View from Medicine’s Front Line by Seamus O’Mahony (NF)

Fierce Kingdom by Gin Phillips (F)

Amazon

Literature and Fiction

Spoonbenders: A Novel by Daryl Gregory

Goodbye Vitamin: A Novel by Rachel Khong

The Outer Cape: A Novel by Patrick Dacey

Tornado Weather: A Novel by Deborah E. Kennedy

AFTERLIFE by Marcus Sakey

Before Everything by Victoria Redel

The Last Cowboys of San Geronimo by Ian Stansel

Rufuge: A Novel by Dina Nayeri

Quiet Until the Thaw: A Novel by Alexandra Fuller

Who is Rich? A Novel by Matthew Klam

Camino Island by John Grisham

Mysteries and Thrillers

The Late Show by Michael Connelly

Fierce Kingdom: A Novel by Gin Phillips

The Lying Game: A Novel by Ruth Ware

The Dead Comedians: A Murder Mystery by Fred Van Lente

Zero Sum (A John Rain Novel) by Barry Eisler

House of Spies: A Novel (Gabriel Allon) by Daniel Silva

Every Last Lie by Mary Kupica (A gripping novel of psychological suspense)

AFTERLIFE by Marcus Sakey

Biographies and Memoirs

Sting-Ray Afternoons: A Memoir by Steve Rushin

Chester H. Himes: A Biography by Lawrence P. Jackson

Reading with Patrick: A Teacher, a Student, and a Life-Changing Friendship by Michelle Kuo

Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughn by Elaine M Hayes

To the New Owners: A Martha’s Vineyard Memoir by Madeleine Blais

Giant of the Senate by Al Franken

Nonfiction

A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age by Ben Mezrich

Everything All at Once: How to Unleash Your Inner Nerd, Tap into Radical Curiosity and Solve Any Problem by Bill Nye

Science Fiction and Fantasy

When the English Fall: A Novel by David Williams

New York Times

June 18

Everything under Heaven: How the Past Helps Shape China’s Push for Global Power by Howard French (NF)

Destined for War: Can America and China Escape Thucydides Trap? By Graham Allison (NF)

Be Like the Fox by Erica Benner (Machiavelli) (NF)

Goethe: Life as Work of Art by Rudiger Sofranski (NF)

Raven Rock by Garrett M Groff (History of the Cold War) (NF)

I Was Told to Come Alone by Souad Mekhennet (NF)

A Little More Human by Fiona Maazel (F)

Camino Island by John Grisham (F)

You Belong to Me by Colin Harrison (F)

Ginny Moon by Benjamin Ludwig (F)

According to a Source by Abby Stein (F)

Among the Lesser Gods by Margo Catts (F)

The Invisible Mile by David Coventry (F)

June 25

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone by Lev Grossman (NF)

A Fine Mess by T R Reid (NF)

Lincoln and the Abolitionists by Fred Kaplan (NF)

The Color of Law by Richard Rothstein (NF)

The Seeds of Life by Edward Dolnick (NF)

The Boy Who Loved Too Much by Jennifer Latson (NF)

Murder in Matera by Helen Stapinski (NF)

Awkward by Ty Tashiro (NF)

If I Understood You, Would I Have this Look on my Face? By Alan Alda (NF)

Best New Crime (4 titles)

Wolf on a String by Benjamin Black (F)

The Force by Don Winslow (F)

The Templars Last Secret by Martin Walker (F)

Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore by Matthew Sullivan (F)

Fly Me by Daniel Riley (F)

Some Rise by Sin by Philip Caputo (F)

A Good Country by Laleh Khadivi (F)

July 2

Kennedy and King by Steven Levingston (NF)

The New Urban Crisis by Richard Florida (NF)

An English Governess in the Great War by Mary Thorp (NF)

Hundreds of Interlaced Fingers: A Kidney Doctor’s Search for the Perfect Match by Vanessa Grubbs (NF)

Healing Children: A Surgeon’s Stories from the Frontiers of Pediatric Medicine by Kurt Newman (NF)

Open Heart: A Cardiac Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table by Stephen Westaby (NF)

Sometimes Amazing Things Happen: Heartbreak and Hope on the Bellevue Hospital Psychiatric Ward by Elizabeth Ford (NF)

Fiction

Modern Gods by Nick Laird

Based on a True Story by Delphine de Vigan

Little Sister by Barbara Gowdy

Compass by Mathias Énard

July 9

Fiction

Beautiful Animals by Lawrence Osborne

Saints for All Occasions by Courtney Sullivan

The Doorposts of Your House and on Your Gates by Jacob Bacharach

Standard Deviation by Katherine Heiny

The Zoo by Isobel Charman (NF)

The Chickenshit Club by Jesse Eisinger (NF)

Hue 1968 by Mark Bowden (NF)

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M Sapolsky (NF)

The Hue and Cry at Our House by Benjamin Taylor (NF)

The Best Land Under Heaven by Michael Wallis (NF)

Love, Africa by Jeffrey Gettleman (NF)

Return to Glory by Matthew DeBord (NF)

July 16

Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North by Robert Fergusson (NF)

Jane Austen at Home by Lucy Worsley (NF)

Among the Janeites: A Journey through the World of Jane Austen Fandom by Deborah Yaffe (NF)

The Making of Jane Austen by Devoney Looser (NF)

The Genius of Jane Austen: Her Love of Theater and Why She Works in Hollywood by Paula Byrne (NF)

Jane Austen: The Secret Radical by Helena Kelly (NF)

The Widow Nash by Jamie Harrison (F)

The Half Wives by Stacia Pelletier (F)

The Underground River by Martha Conway (F)

July 23

The Home that was Our Country by Alia Malek (NF)

We Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled by Wendy Pearlman (NF)

Hunger by Roxane Gay (NF)

The Fate of the West: The Battle to Save the World’s Most Successful Political Idea by Bill Emmott (NF)

One Another’s Equals: The Basis of Human Equality by Jeremy Waldron

Henry David Thoreau: A Life by Laura Dassow Walls

The Islamic Enlightenment by Christopher de Ballaigue (NF)

Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals by Jeremy McCarter (NF)

Queen of Bebop: The Musical Lives of Sarah Vaughn by Elaine M Hayes (NF)

The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (NF)

Fiction

There Your Heart Lies by Mary Gordon

The Changeling by Victor LaValle

4 new mysteries

The Smack by Richard Lange

The Fallen by Ace Atkins

City of Masks by S D Sykes

The Late Show by Michael Connelly

Stephen Florida by Gabe Habash

Black Moses by Alain Mobanckou

Quiet Until the Thaw by Alexander Fuller

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The Girl from the Metropol Hotel by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya – Book

The Girl from the Metropol Hotel: Growing Up in Communal Russia by Ludmilla Petrushevskaya and translated by Anna Summers in 2017 caught my attention because I had read, not long ago, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles, which was also set in post-revolutionary Russia in the Metropol Hotel, located in the heart of Moscow. While I enjoyed the novel by Towles, I felt that the life Alexander, once a member of the aristocracy, lived in the Metropol Hotel might be a somewhat romanticized version of the fate a person would normally have suffered as an enemy of the people during those early days of the Communist (Bolshevik)Revolution. The new leaders were purging the nation of old bourgeois influences and the privileged classes. Petrushevskaya’s story is quite different from Alexander’s and conforms more nearly to my understanding of the complicated and unpredictable suspicions that often led to the arrests of Russians in the wake of the revolution.

Anna Summers offers a preface which provides some background. She begins by describing a May 9^th parade that took place in every town and village since the end of WWII with rows of ragged and neglected veterans marching proudly, and then she has us picture the day of May 9^th in 2015 (Petrushevskaya originally published her book in Russia in 2006) when there were no WWII vets left to parade through the towns and villages; there were only pictures carried by their grandchildren. She tells us, “Except sometimes the facts of a family’s connection with the war weren’t suited for proud retelling and were therefore often concealed from the little ones who would then be forced to hem and haw and finally come up with some lie. Sometimes our grandparents didn’t just die gruesomely, buried alive in a tank, like mine or return disfigured or even return at all. Sometimes they were arrested and sent to the Gulag…” (Her father and her grandfather were killed in a mass execution in the late 1930’s, even though her relations were prominent Bolsheviks elevated by the October Revolution, so she had no war stories to tell and this was a problem.) “The shared experiences of their childhoods – evacuation, hunger – were heightened in her case by the unbearable – and unshareable – extreme because of the social stigma that branded her an ‘enemy of the people’”

Ludmilla’s childhood with her aunt and her grandmother was hungrier and dirtier than that of most children because of the classification and execution of her grandfather and her father. The female survivors were ostracized and interned in a prison without walls. Ludmilla’s story may begin when she was born in the Metropol Hotel but her life is lived far from Moscow for the most part. Whatever Russia was like after the Revolution for those who found favor with the Communists, Ludmilla’s memoir of her childhood years shows what life was like for everyone in a family once a progenitor became an enemy of the people, even though the reasons were often obscure, petty, or even imagined.

Soon this famous Russian writer, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya, will join the ranks of those no longer living veterans of WWII. Thankfully she got to publish this memoir of her early hardscrabble existence and outcast state. We should not ever forget that the Russian Revolution was often an ideological quagmire with many victims, both guilty and innocent. Sounds grim, but is very readable.

Flâneuse by Laura Elkin – Book

Laura Elkin’s book Flâneuse is not the first book about women who are the counterparts of the more usual male figure, the flâneur, A few other books with this title predate hers. Her book has a subtitle: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London and reads very much like a doctoral dissertation, although the language is not quite as academic, and the book tends to offer a warmer reading experience than the expected dry fare of the dissertation. The flâneur she tells us is “one who walks aimlessly…A figure of masculine privilege and leisure, with time and money and no immediate responsibilities to claim his attention.

Flâneuse is the feminine form and denotes “an idler, a dawdling observer, usually found in cities. But each flâneuse discussed in any detail by Elkin is not truly idle. These women were writers, photographers, artists. Until recently it was difficult for a woman to be a flâneuse. Writer Janet Wolff did not give credence to the flâneuse as “such a character was rendered impossible by the sexual divisions of the nineteenth century.” Other writers agree. But Elkin reminds us that the rise of the department store in the 1850’s and 60’s “did much to normalize the appearance of women in public.”

Laura Elkin was born on Long Island where no one walked anywhere. Her father was an architect who designed some of the corporate headquarters as companies left the city and moved into newly designed corporate parks. But Elkin discovered that she belonged in cities when she moved into New York City to attend college. “To sit in a restaurant on Broadway with the world walking by and the cars and the taxis and the noise was like finally being let in to the centre of the universe, after peering in at it for so long.”

The book is dense with detailed examples of women writers, artists, journalists, and more who felt most at home in cities and used the intimate details of city life gained through wandering and observation to enlighten us all. Elkin gives us a taste of London, following in Virginia Woolf’s footsteps; a soupçon of Venice, New York, and Tokyo (where wandering alone around the city is basically impossible even in daylight); but mainly of Paris which ended up being her home.

Artists she expands on in some detail, both about their lives and their work include Jean Rhys (allied with Ford Maddox Ford), George Sand (who dressed as a boy/man to roam the city freely), Virginia Woolf, Martha Gellhorn (wife of Ernest Hemingway and war journalist and more), and Agnès Varda, in French films.

Elkin’s sums things up in this way, “You don’t need to crunch around in Gore-Tex to be subversive, if you’re a woman. Just walk out your front door.” Reading this tome is a bit like being a literary flâneuse without having to leave your armchair – lots of great little tidbits.

Edgar and Lucy by Peter Lodato – Book

Edgar and Lucy by Victor Lodato is a story of mental illness so severe that even love and medication cannot prevail. It is a story of grief that makes a person forget all the rules that humans should heed. And it is story of parenting both neglectful and obsessed; the story of a boy so small and pale he seems to have been born an albino child; a child so dependent on his grandmother, Florence, that when she dies he is too bereft to heed the protective advice routinely offered to children.- “never speak to strangers.”

Lodato’s novel is well-written, but I was torn. The plot itself is not quite as formulaic as it might seem. This kept me reading. And clearly we cannot spend too much time thinking about the issues that arise from mental illness and our less-than-successful treatments and enabling behaviors. The rights of an individual to freedom are set against the chaos that comes with untreated serious mental illness, a set of circumstances which offers the mentally ill both a sort of dignity and the potential to destroy the balance of more than one life. Lodato makes us hope that we come up with better answers in the future. This issue that continues to challenge us all is a frustrating, but is also a rewarding thread in this book.

What I found hardest to take was the bad parenting the reader encounters in this story. Sadly, it is a fact that bad parenting is a common topic in modern literature. What happens to children when parenting is absent or inappropriate is heartbreaking and, although it probably reflects accurately on what is really the case (and not only in these times), I wish I could believe that exposure leads to improvement and that we get parenting right in the majority of families, however unorthodox the family might be. However, I have sincere doubts that such optimism is valid.

There are plot twists in Lodato’s novel that I cannot discuss. The author uses internal cues to make us think that things will come out one way, while the outcomes are actually less predictable. This should be a good thing but ends up being a bit creepy in ways I cannot specify as I don’t want to interfere with letting readers judge this aspect of the novel as they read. It bothered me; it might not bother another reader. I am concluding with a belief that those who read Edgar and Lucy by Peter Lodato will find in this novel an almost constant stream of personal emotional reactions. While it is a good read; it does not make it onto my list of favorites.