The Song is You

Julian Donahue’s life has revolved around music since as early as he can remember, beginning with stories his father told about an encounter with Billie Holiday in 1953, before he lost his leg in the Korean war. Now in middle age, Julian is adrift:

"Julian Donahue married in optimistic confusion, separated in pessimistic confusion, and now was wandering toward a mistrustful divorcistan, a coolly celibate land.”

Then one night when he goes out to buy milk, he stops into a bar where an Irish girl is singing with her band, and he discovers a new structure to his life – obsession. As his obsession grows, we learn about the triumphs and tragedies of his life that brought him to this point, and wonder how far he will go in pursuit of this relationship. Will they ever actually meet in person? I’m not telling, but it’s a good story and well written. Julian, his Jeopardy-playing genius brother Adrian, his estranged wife Rachel, and the singer Cait are just a few of the interesting characters in The Song is You by Arthur Phillips.

The White Tiger

Since my book club discussed The White Tiger last week, my memory is somewhat refreshed about this excellent book. Aravind Adiga uses an interesting device to tell this story of a lower caste man in India (The White Tiger, aka Balram) and how he changes his destiny. In a long letter to the Chinese premier who is coming to visit India, Balram sets out to explain the truth about Bangalore, the center of entrepreneurship in India, by telling the premier his life story. Of course the story is full of people doing horrible things to each other. But Adiga tells the story with a lot of humor, and he creates incredibly colorful and memorable characters.

Balram asks, rhetorically, why lower class people in India do not rebel, why they don't steal from their masters when it would be so easy. And he has an answer: the Rooster Coop. You know that's where they keep chickens in deplorable circumstances and then kill them, but the chickens don't rebel because they know they are next. As Balram says, "The very same thing is done with human beings in this country."

"The Great Indian Rooster Coop. Do you have something like it in China too? I doubt it, Mr. Jiabao. Or you wouldn't need the Communist Party to shoot people and a secret police to raid their houses at night and put them in jail like I've heard you have over there. Here in India we have no dictatorship. No secret police. That's because we have the coop.
"Never before in human history have so few owed so much to so many, Mr. Jiabao. A handful of men in this country have trained the remaining 99.9 percent -- as strong, as talented, as intelligent in every way -- to exist in perpetual servitude; a servitude so strong that you can put the key of his emancipation in a man's hands and he will throw it back at you with a curse."

Balram works as a chauffeur to a man (and his American wife, Pinky Madam... an unforgettable character) who isn't as horrible as most but still treats him as if he were a lower species. Eventually, Balram escapes the coop by murdering his employer, knowing that in so doing he is most likely sentencing his family members to torture and death.
The book raises so many interesting moral questions. We root for Balram, we celebrate his escape from the coop, but how can we justify murder or the betrayal of his family? It's just a great book to read, think about, and discuss.

The Right of Thirst

I'm going to catch up on the last three books I've read one of these days, but while it's still fresh in my mind, I want to write about The Right of Thirst, which I just finished and loved. This is a beautifully written novel about a middle aged man (Charles), discombobulated after the death of his wife, who wants to do something meaningful in his life, so he sets off to do earthquake relief in an unnamed country (Afghanistan?).

"... my eagerness made me realize that I truly had come for a reason, that the simple freedom of experience was not what I sought. I needed something else, something clear and redeeming and larger than myself, whatever it might be..."

Written in the first person, it's a very personal, interior story, but Charles and the other characters are all beautifully realized. Charles is so thoughtful, he so much wants to do good, but of course things don't work out quite as planned. He finds that the country is caught up in a civil war of sorts and that feeding starving people affected by the quake is not a priority.

"...all the questions of hierarchy and honor, the eagerness to spend precisely what they could least afford on conflict and war, to remake the struggle as one between men when it should have been one between hunger and food, between legs and stones -- suddenly it infuriated me."

And later, as he is getting ready to leave and return home, his mission unfulfilled:

"I saw it clearly. I was guilty of the commonest of American failings, a modestly successful man, and no more, and there was so much I could not grasp, and did not understand, and I was old enough to know that I never would. If that was the best I could manage, I thought, it wasn't good enough, because surely there was more.
Surely mine was not the only story to be told."

There is so much more to this novel than I could possibly recount here, including his relationships with other people, past and present. It resonated strongly with me through universal themes ... the desire for a meaningful life, guilt about not giving enough or doing enough for your loved ones, confusion about how to find the right balance, recognition of the simple things that give one's life meaning. Huyler's writing is spare but evocative and compelling. It's one of the best books I've ever read.