Vacation Reading

The book I started reading first but have not yet finished is a nonfiction work The Scandal of Evangelical Politics (BakerBooks 2008) by Canadian-American Mennonite theologian Ronald J. Sider. Directed largely at an American evangelical Christian audience, he argues that “Christian political activity is a disaster.” He calls for a reasonable, thoughtful and consistent Christian […]

The book I started reading first but have not yet finished is a nonfiction work The Scandal of Evangelical Politics (BakerBooks 2008) by Canadian-American Mennonite theologian Ronald J. Sider. Directed largely at an American evangelical Christian audience, he argues that “Christian political activity is a disaster.” He calls for a reasonable, thoughtful and consistent Christian approach to politics, moving beyond what is sometimes mocked as a politics of “conception to birth” to emphasize a nurturing and holistic perspective on “pro-life” issues.

The novel I found the most delightful on my reading list was the one that is probably the least relevant to my academic pursuits. The Little White Horse, a children’s fantasy by British author Elizabeth Goudge (University of London Press 1946), caught my eye when I saw that bestselling author of the Harry Potter series J.K. Rowling said she “absolutely adored” it.  In this 1946 Carnegie Medal in Literature winner, which was also recently adapted into the film The Secret of Moonacre (2010), an orphaned thirteen-year-old girl, Maria Merryweather, goes to live with her elderly 2nd cousin in the magical Moonacre Manor. In the sheltered valley where the Merryweather family has lived for centuries, the dreams Maria and her nursemaid Miss Heliotrope had while living in the imperfect outside world come true, animals are wiser and more powerful than humans, and people regularly burst into song. Yet although the first glimpse of this land seems ideal, Maria discovers that an ancient feud between two sides of her ancestral family has resulted into a bitter cycle of conflict that has touched every generation. I was initially worried that the story might overly romanticize its “aristocratic” characters, but I was charmed by the balance of power achieved at the end. The land is healed when a princess chooses to marry a shepherd boy, a landholder surrenders her property for the sake of peace, a noblewoman chooses work cleaning houses, and woodsmen, initially portrayed as wicked thieves, reconcile with their enemies. Everyone lives happily ever after. My main critique is that things probably work out a bit too perfectly in this moralistic tale. The novel is not nearly as deep as similar children’s fantasies by British authors such as C.S. Lewis or George MacDonald, but the story with its overarching message that love is more powerful than hatred, is a charming and imaginative contribution to children’s literature.

The other fiction I read was more intellectual and more self-consciously “literature with a capital ‘L’.”  My enjoyment of these works was in inverse proportion to this self consciousness literariness. First, I read the collection of short stories Woman Hollering Creek and other stories (Vintage 1991) by American author Sandra Cisneros.  She has a distinctive voice, telling her stories mostly from a Mexican-American perspective: recent immigrants to the United States navigating their identities in a new environment whether in immigrant communities or among English-speakers, families left behind in Mexico, wistful lovers, young children, girls on the cusp of womanhood, wives both loved and abused.  I enjoyed the collection, although some of the contributions felt more like sketches than well developed stories. I had the sense that Cisneros was able to get away with some of the less developed moments in the book because she was already established as a famous writer.

I felt this even more strongly in American author Ursula K. Le Guin’s collection Unlocking the Air and Other Stories (HarperCollins 1996), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1997. I have long loved Le Guin’s fantasy and science fiction novels. Her Earthsea fantasy series was one of my favourites in high school, and her short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” which imagines a utopian society built around the cruelty to one innocent, is unforgettable. However, while I liked a few of the stories in Unlocking the Air and found some to be interesting experiments in surrealism, most of them were confusing and overly-intellectual.  I finished reading the collection out of a sense of duty rather than out of a desire to read more.

This is also the case with the final fiction piece I read. The novel that is probably the most analyzed postcolonial title on my list was the one I enjoyed the least.  In a novel named after his protagonist Elizabeth Costello (Viking, 2003), Nobel prize-winning South African author J.M. Coetzee’s imagines the waning star of a famous but aging Australian novelist. The novel is structured through a series of “lessons,” stories built around lectures (reproduced in their entirety, many of which had previously been published by Coetzee) that Costello gives or listens to.  As she grows older, Costello, who is most famous for her youthful revisionist rewriting of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses from a woman’s perspective, gives confusing, contentious talks to bemused, sometimes offended, audiences and suffers from increasing uncertainty about what she believes. Her relationships with her son and her sister are distant. Their conversation is intellectual, rather than affectionate. Coetzee’s  harsh, often abstract, novels are filled with the important, theorizeable ideas academics like—indeed I plan to cite this novel in my PhD thesis—but I do not enjoy them.

I thought of Costello’s frustration at her uncertainty of belief while she gives lectures around the world, as I read Chinua Achebe’s collection of essays, The Education of a British-Protected Child (Alfred A Knopf 2009). The aging author of classic world literature is in a parallel position to the fictional novelist Elizabeth Costello. With the publication of his recent memoir There Was a Country: A personal History of Biafra (Penguin 2012), he is faced with similar controversies over opinions expressed in his old age. However, unlike the difficult, abstract lectures in Coetzee’s novels which made my mind wander, reading Achebe’s collection of talks and essays made me feel like I was settling down to a storytelling session with a master. Achebe is a plain-spoken, yet elegant, essayist. He weaves amusing and touching anecdotes of everyday life into his lectures. Even his essays that deal with academic material and literary analysis are accessible to the ordinary reader. Many of his arguments, anecdotes about his personal life, and analyses published here have been included elsewhere, in his essay collection Hopes and Impediments (Doubleday 1989) and in his aforementioned memoir, but even when re-reading these recycled materials, I find him refreshing, not tiresome. Achebe is blunt and truthful. He writes for the ordinary reader in clear, precise language.

Even though, I picked my vacation reading at random with the intention of escaping the careful purpose-driven academic reading that marks my work life, I found myself coming back to questions about the institutionalization of “literary” fiction and the self-indulgent obscurisms literary authors often seem to be awarded for. Achebe’s book of essays, which combine lucid scholarly thought and writing that is a pleasure to read, provide an alternative model. In his opening essay he points out that he “missed the opportunity of becoming a clear-cut scholar forty years ago when Trinity College, Cambridge, turned down my application to study there […] I stayed home then, and became a novelist. The only significant ‘if’ of that personal history is that you ladies and gentlemen, would be reading a scholarly essay today rather than an impressionistic story of a boy’s growing up in British colonial Nigeria.”

Briefly imagining an Achebe essay using Freudian theory, I breathe a sigh of relief and say, “Thank God Cambridge turned him down.”