I am back for another set of books to review for the extremely small handful of people who occasionally stumble onto this blog by accident.
As a reminder, here is the scale I use when reviewing books.
***** An extraordinary book: one of my Top 15 all-time favorites
**** An outstanding book: highly recommended
*** A good book: worth the read
** An OK read, but you'd be better off finding something else
* Not worth the read; avoid at all costs
Roman Stories, by Jhumpa Lahiri (****)
The featured book of the month is by one of my favorite authors, Jhumpa Lahiri, an Indian woman, who teaches in the U.S., but now spends most of her time living in Italy. I have read all of her books except one and when I came across her newest book at my favorite Jakarta bookstore, I snapped it up immediately. Every single Lahiri book I've read has been outstanding and I recommend her as an author worth reading, no matter which book of hers you find.
This is a collection of short stories that Lahiri wrote in the Italian language, then she also translated most of the stories into English for this version, with the exception of a few that were translated by someone else.
These stories have a common theme. While many of them do paint a picture of the cityscape of one of the most beautiful and intriguing cities in the world, this is definitely not a Roman travelogue. Instead, the reader experiences modern Roman life from the perspective of outsiders, many of them Muslims or African refugees. The characters aren't named, so the reader must sort through the details of each story to determine the identities and backgrounds of each person in the narrative.
Roman Stories is a look at the subtle and sometimes overt discrimination and animosity that native Romans direct toward outsiders. In one of the stories, Well-Lit House, the reader learns about a refugee family from an undetermined Middle-Eastern land who work and struggle to finally purchase a house in a Roman suburb. But instead of reaching their dream of economic success and integration into Italian culture, the family is terrorized by the local populace who resent the intrusion of non-Italians in their totally segregated neighborhood. Lahiri sympathizes with the family and their plight, but ultimately the narrator's wife and children are forced to flee to their homeland and the narrator ends up homeless and destitute on the streets of Rome. It is the modern reality of a city where its inhabitants are facing economic uncertainty and, as a result, lash out against their perceived enemies who they feel might be taking a piece of the economic pie that they feel they should be enjoying instead.
A few of the stories don't address the theme of immigrant outsiders, yet alienation from society or family is clearly an issue in these other stories as well.
Last year the Italians elected a neo-Fascist government to represent them. Lahiri's collection of short stories gives us insight to the prejudice, ignorance, and hostility that led to this voting result. Instead of the romantic Rome of Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck in the 1950s film Roman Holiday, we get a glimpse of a declining city where civility no longer reigns. Ultimately, Lahiri's powerful, simple writing is a statement against this Roman inhospitality.
This is another Lahiri book I recommend. She is a master at taking ordinary lives and distilling the exceptional in each story.
Beg, Steal & Borrow: Artists Against Originality, by Robert Shore (*** 1/2)
This book about art looks at artistic borrowing from a variety of perspectives. Shore examines the issues of whether any work of art is truly original: what has been the nature of copying of art over the centuries? This is a fascinating book that traces the origin of artistic borrowing from back in the days of Albrecht Durer and Michelangelo. Lots of great pictorial examples and an excellent discussion of copyright law and the implications in our digital world where art is copied and re-purposed constantly. The author provides a comprehensive discussion of whether we can create any meaningful boundaries at all between what is "original" and what is not.
If nothing else, the reader learns that virtually nothing in the visual world can be classified as purely original and that we should stop getting hung up on the concept of originality. Love this book.
May Fire and Other Poems, by Warih Wisatsana (***)
This is the last of the eleven books I have read in my collection of the BTW series of books by Lontar Publishing. These trilingual versions (Indonesian original text along with German and English translations all in one volume) provide a platform for featuring the works of less-known, but outstanding, Indonesian writers who haven't been published extensively.
This collection of poems deals with the notion of reality and its merger with unreality. The poems explore the boundaries between reality and dreams, life and death, as well as memory of the past and the occurrence of today.
I think poetry is difficult to translate, so the English-language reader might miss a few of the subtleties of Wisatsana's poems. I went to the Indonesian-language version and though I don't understand the poems in their original language, when I read them out loud they had a rhythm and sound that was perfect and was lost in the English translation which didn't capture this rhythm at all. I suspect Indonesian readers would love these poems in their original form as I am sure they are wonderfully well-crafted just by my oral reading of them. But, even the somewhat-stilted English version of Wisatsana's poems is worth reading and captures some of the essence of these works, despite the perils of translation.
The last few times I've gone to Kinokuniya, the only bookstore in Indonesia that seems to carry these worthwhile books, there are no more left on the shelves, which is a shame because these wonderful volumes have given me great insight into a wide range of Indonesian literature.
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Whatever you do, read something this month. Your brain will be nourished if you do.
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