009 The Pickup

The Pickup by Nadine Gordimer, 2001.


A rich white woman from South Africa falls for a Middle Eastern illegal immigrant. When he is deported, she decidedly buys two tickets and follows him to his village. After nearly a year and much effort, he is granted a visa into the U.S.; however, she tells him, two days before departure, that she will stay in the village.

Abdu, later identified as Ibrahim il Musa, hungers for the lifestyle Julie rejects while she desires the life in the village bordering the desert. Both believe the other is naive to want what they do not.

The Pickup is a complicated book about love, taking changes, identity, imagined places, seeking out the kinds of fantasies that are the opposite of what one knows, a hunger and drive to fulfill oneself, regardless of the opinion of others. Both characters are like that and through a series of events, they help each other reach the footholds of spaces where their imagined selves begin to form.

It's a book that sneaks up on you. Bravo.

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures by Vincent Lam, 2005.

Giller Prize winner by Canadian novelist and doctor, Vincent Lam.

Touted as the inside scoop on medical school and practice in Canada, this book follows four people through their pursuit and later, their practice of medicine.

I did not find the characters engaging: Ming, the focused Chinese girl who is cold, methodical, slicing into corpses without compunction; Fitzgerald, the alcoholic doctor who gets fired and later contracts SARS while working for a private medical company; Sri, the psychiatric and sentimental doctor who dies young; and Chen, whom I have no recollection of other than he married Ming.

The book peeps into the medical profession. The bottom line is doctors are human; they make sacrifices, grapple with doubts, walk in gray zones, and fib truths to spare people pain. Generally speaking, there are no surprises but there are specifics, that is, set up and details of choices that doctors must make.

A quick read with functional writing.

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, 1968.

A quick read. The writing itself is what I would call, functional, that is, it does the job but nothing else.

Set in 2021 after the World War, earth is full of radioactive dust, abandoned buildings slowly crumble, and debris or "kipple" encroaches into every living space. Most humans, encouraged by the government, have emigrated to Mars. Animals are scarce and ownership of one, depending on their rarity, signifies social status. Androids, built to ease life on Mars, become nearly indistinguishable from humans. Several kill their human owners and flee to Earth.

Rick Deckard is a bounty hunter of rogue androids who've escaped to earth. He identifies them through an empathy test which is comprised of questions about dead animals. Appropriate verbal answers as well as speed and physical response times are measured.

We find that empathy and later, the will to live even in hopeless situations, are what distinguishes human from android.

This book inspired the movie Blade Runner. I watched that movie ages ago but remember little of it. An image of a very tall Daryl Hannah with wet hair comes to mind. The premise of Philip's book is good, and I wanted to know more of how people lived, both on Mars and on Earth; however, the book, as it should be perhaps, was focused on the "android/robot" literary conundrum: where does the dividing line lie?

Yes, as foretold by many a science fiction and Japanese anime writer, we will one day make androids who will be as human as we are. Whatever criteria we deem as requisite to be human, androids will satisfy them at some point. It's not that bad! Obviously there will be bad robots, but there will be good ones too -- look at Wall-E.

008 Blindness

Blindness by José Saramago, published in English in 1997.

This is the third entry today. And like the previous two, I no longer have the book on hand . I have reservations about continuing on with this reading list. So many outdated books. Too much American content. Having said that, I don't enjoy translations of international books because translations never do originals justice. Meanings are lost or twisted and the art of the writing itself is crippled. So reading American books are easier and in some sense, the intended meanings are less skewed because they are written in English and I know, to some extent, American history. It's pickle 22.

Ok. Now on to two paragraphs or so about José's book. I like science fiction, and this book was written recently (in book time) so it was a refreshing read. Of course, like all winners or books by winners, heavy themes exist. José's story of a society going blind en mass, except for one doctor's wife, and people being quarantined, references the holocaust.

Over three hundred blind people are confined to an old mental asylum. No outside help is given to them because the "white blindness" is highly contagious. Rooms, halls, courtyards are covered in feces. Food is delivered daily. A group of twenty men, armed with one gun and self fashioned weapons, control the food and demand payment first in material goods and then in women.

The doctor's wife stabs the leader of the blind thugs in the throat with a pair of scissors.

In a way, this book is similar to Grapes of Wrath. In the worst of inhumane conditions, people reveal their true nature. People will do acts previously unimaginable. Like the doctor's wife who kills.

From these books, over and over again, it is the message you don't know what you are capable of nor what you are made of until tested.

007 The Known World

The Known World, 2003 by Edward P. Jones and winner of the 2004 Pulitzer prize.

The book revolves around a dead black slave owner, Henry Townsend. Events and stories of people connected to him -- his old master, parents, wife, teacher, and slaves -- are presented in snatches in and out of flux.

Ed first tells us what will or has happened and then goes back, like memory, to fill in the gaps. It's like a reverse mystery where you see the crime scene, and then work backwards to understand how things happened the way they did. For example, in one scene, a slave starts carving a doll for his daughter, and we are told that this child would, in her nineties, live to ask for this very doll on her deathbed.

I have read many books with the subject of slavery and The Known World differs from them by focusing on slavery as a keeping of boundaries. Little is known about black slave owners and this is another distinguishing feature of Ed's book. And so in short, as a one sentence sum up, this book is about the boundaries between black slave owners and their slaves.