In brief: An early winner of the Booker Prize, a prestigious annual award for the best English-language novel about India, Krishnapur is an insightful, action-packed, and surprisingly funny look at how Victorian idealists conduct themselves in the face of destruction at the hands of mutinous sepoys. As a fair assessment of India under company rule, it appreciates the complexities of empire while avoiding the trap of revisionism; as historical fiction, it is an old-fashioned delight.
(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Siege of Krishnapur, keep reading below.)
Prior to the last week of the American presidential election, I gave little thought to race. I kid you not when I say that for a while there, I completely forgot that Obama would be the first African-American elected to the White House. For some of us foreign observers, anyway, the election was about issues, in spite of the best efforts of the Sarah Palin crowd to convince us otherwise. Colin Powell said it best:
We are only correct in saying that the racial barrier has budged at all because Barack Obama was never, at any point, an identity politician or a token candidate. Race, as overwhelmingly significant as it is, was something to talk about after the electoral votes rolled in. That’s what happened, and that’s what should have happened.
I thought of a book on Tuesday night: the Richard Powers novel The Time of Our Singing, published in 2003. In a roundabout way, it is about Barack Obama. The novel follows the lives of two brothers—half Jewish, half black—who pursue careers as classical musicians. As they see the twentieth-century history of the civil rights movement unfold from their unstable cultural bubble, they have to sort out whether classical music is part of a hegemonic white establishment, or if music just is.
There’s a line from the novel that stays with everyone who reads it:
The bird and the fish can fall in love. But where they gonna build their nest?
Where else? America.
(Well, Canada too—but permit me to set my country aside for the sake of rhetoric.)
The resonance of the Powers novel with the Obama candidacy was so strong, in my mind, that I felt compelled to consult Google to see if anyone else had observed it. As it turns out, someone did—and who should it happen to be, other than Douglas Hofstadter!
Yes, that Douglas Hofstadter. Which makes perfect sense, if you are at all familiar with his work. Richard Powers has always struck me as Hofstadter’s fiction-writing counterpart—what, with their shared interests in deep structure, classical music, artificial intelligence, wordplay, and the dissolution of the form-content boundary as the key to human cognition.
In the interview I linked to above, conducted just prior to the election, Hofstadter passes on the following Palin-drome:
The source of the VP-hopeful’s extensive domestic policy experience:
In brief: Reading this memoir, I learned a lot more about Barack Obama than I did about race. It is impossible now to speculate on what the book must have been like before its author rose to global significance; clearly, it is all the more interesting now because of the ending that had yet to be written. Obama’s ruminations on cultural identity are nothing novel, but rest assured that of the available positions, he adopted the one that is the most confused—which is also the most mature.
(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on Dreams from My Father, keep reading below.)
In brief: Less a textbook history of twentieth-century classical music than a supreme work of historical criticism, The Rest Is Noise is a persuasive treatise on how tumultuous political landscapes shape artistic production. Ross walks a fine tightrope straddling analytical detail and popular accessibility, but nonetheless conveys a continuous lineage of ideas threading the persistent revolutions and counter-revolutions of twentieth-century composition.
(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Rest Is Noise, keep reading below.)
In brief: The first novel in the Sally Lockhart thriller series is an engaging caper, if a rickety one. The Victorian flavour is authentic and never descends into parody or kitsch. There’s a great story hidden beneath the tangled web of opium smugglers and London thugs, though the way it comes out into the open is at times haphazard; the plot depends too much on the cherry-picked concealment of information from the reader to cast a fluid line of discovery.
(The Wednesday Book Club is an ongoing initiative of mine to write a book review every week. I invite you to peruse the index. For more on The Ruby in the Smoke, keep reading below.)
