Sula

I’m not too sure whether I enjoyed Sula or not.  It’s an interesting book, certainly; Toni Morrison is a talented enough writer that her work is almost always interesting to read.   It’s just- she does like to write about poor black communities in small towns in the Deep South.  To be fair to it, this book about is set in Ohio, but it’s very similar and as I’ve read quite a lot of her over the last year or so, it’s starting to wear a bit thin.

Sula tells the story of Sula Mae Peace and her childhood friend Nel.  More accurately, it tells the story of Bottom of the Medallion- encompassing most of the history of Sula’s family; her mother Hannah and grandmother Eva, Nel’s mother, Shadrack (a man traumatised by World War One) and the place itself.  It’s a lot to pack into under 200 pages.  In short, Sula’s family is less than conventional; they lead men into extra-marital affairs and once widowed have no interest in husbands.  Nel is more traditional- at seventeen she marries while Sula leaves for the big city.  The books up with the pair ten years later, after Sula returns and is largely rejected by the town that distrusts what it doesn’t understand.

There were great themes in this book.  It’s really interesting from a feminist perspective.  Shadrack is quite simply mad, but he is assimilated into the town with relative ease- after a few years no-one pays attention to his Suicide Day ritual.  It is not so easy for them to accept the perceived eccentricity of the Peace women, though.   Upon her return, Sula becomes a social pariah she is to blame for all the ills of the town for no reason other than she is an unapologetically independent woman.  Her unnatural femininity excludes her from the town (granted it doesn’t help that she sleeps with Nel’s husband so that he leaves her) and the town becomes united in its hatred of her.  She is their witch.

The one part where the book wasn’t quite what I wanted was the ten year interval.  The gap itself works and is a necessary narrative device, but I wanted to know more about what she was up to in Cincinnati.  We find out the Sula slept with a bunch of men (some white) but other than that, the details are thin on the ground and I’d actually really of liked to read a story about a headstrong young black woman in a big city in the 1930s.  That could be a really interesting book.  Nel I care about less.  She gets married and has children.  That is not such an interesting tale.

I’ve talked myself into liking this book more than I did originally.  There are some great parts.  Sula is a character who needs to be told, “You a woman and a colored woman at that.  You can’t act like a man,” and responds, “You say I’m a woman and colored.  Ain’t that the same as being a man?”  She is years ahead of her time and is duly punished for it; but she’s a little bit awesome in the face of a life that is going to give her nothing.  Even though in the end she isn’t shown as someone to be emulated, I quite like her for her fierce independence.

I’m now on to The Fox by D.H. Lawrence.

An Obedient Father

So, I haven’t really been writing blog posts about the books I’ve read recently, there are a few books I’ve skipped writing about at all, but here I am, trying to get the blog back on track.  I did not pick my get back on track book wisely.   An Obedient Father is not a bad book; it’s just not a particularly great one either.  It’s kind of predictable and just a little bit trite.

Akhil Sharma’s debut novel tells the tale of the Karan family- more specifically Ram, his daughter Anita and granddaughter Asha.  The blurb promises that Ram is, “a man corroded by a guilty secret.”  To the surprise of absolutely no-one who reads even half as many books as I do, that dark secret is paedophilia.  Ram raped Anita repeatedly when she was twelve and the family covered it up to avoid scandal.  The book covers Anita suspecting that he may have similar designs on his eight year-old grandchild.  It’s such an overused narrative trope that at times it’s difficult to care about the characters at all.  Ram does himself no favours as he’s not at all guilty or penitent- he spends the majority of the part that deals with the actual rape justifying it.  I understand that it’s meant to show that he still loves his daughter and it’s not meant to be excusing rape or the incest… but it kind of is.

Anyway, Ram is also a corrupt official- again this seemed trite to me because I haven’t read about any other sort in any India literature I’ve read.  His saving grace originality-wise is that he’s not very good at it, and while playing the two big political parties (Congress and the BJP) off against each other after the assassination of Rajiv Gandhi, he fails spectacularly and ends up losing all the money he has embezzled.  Anita is very much the brains of their operation.  But Ram is the man and this is India.  So he is the public face.   This is actually one of the parts of the book I found most interesting, like A Fine Balance, it taught me things about Indian politics and history; things that happened within my lifetime that I am just ignorant of. 

The truth is that there was just something about this book that didn’t gel with me.   I’m not sure if it was the misogyny, shown my pretty much every character throughout the entire thing; or simply that the book is not long enough.  Sharma’s novel is only around 200 pages long and, yet, the narrative tries to wind and drift in a way that would only work if the book itself were twice the length it is.  It’s a book that I wanted to take it’s time, I wanted to luxuriate in it and I couldn’t.   It was frustrating and a real bar to enjoying the thing. 

So, there it is- my welcome back blog.  On the whole, I didn’t hate An Obedient Father.  I think it’s just one of those books that I’ve been waiting too long to read; checking the library for it every time I went with no joy.  I’d built it up too much in my head to enjoy it fully.  But at least I learnt something about Indian politics. 

Next up and already read is Sula by Toni Morrison.