Meg Mullins' The Rug Merchant

Meg Mullins’ outstanding debut novel, The Rug Merchant, ruminates on loneliness, love, and dreams in the Gatsby-esque figure of Ushman, the contemplative, hopeful rug merchant. Uushman arrives in America from Iran with the intent of achieving the American Dream. His wife Farak, still in Iran to take care of Ushman’s mother, sends Ushman beautiful handmade oriental rugs to be sold in a shop in Manhattan. Business is good, and Ushman dreams about the day Farak will come to meet him in America. However, Ushman’s perceptions of his marriage are not shared by Farak, and when Farak announces that she is leaving Ushman for another man, he is devastated. Despondent and distracted, he goes to the airport, imagining that if he is there, Farak may emerge in the crowded terminal. Farak, not surprisingly, does not come, but Stella, a delicate, wise college girl, does, and Ushman latches his hopes and dreams onto her.

Stella and Ushman meet on the common ground of pain and abandonment. Ushman’s wife has left him, and Stella’s parents cannot understand how to interact with her now that she is older than six years old. Stella views her parents inability to understand her as a type of abandonment, and the reader wonders if Stella’s interest in Ushman stems out of an attempt to find affection and structure from an adult. Regardless, they are both looking for needs to be filled, but they are generous with each other, too, and their love affair unfolds into something beautiful and true.

Outside of Ushman’s relationship with Stella is Mrs. Roberts, a bored, rich, and voyeuristic middle aged woman. As Ushman desires to be part of Stella’s life, Mrs. Roberts desires to be part of Ushman’s life and culture. She fantasizes about the Muslim faith and the beauty of poverty. As Ushman achieves the American Dream that Mrs. Roberts represents in all of her finery, Mrs. Roberts desires to desire anything. She is glutted with everything and the greatest gift for Mrs. Roberts is anything that is forbidden to her. Mrs.Roberts circles Ushman and Stella, and the resolution is not what you think.

Mullins’ ability to create such a real and complex character in Ushman is a testament to the power of imagination. In a world, where many believe that the best fiction comes from, at least partial, personal experience, Mullins writes about someone completely opposite from her: a Muslim man from Iran. However, Mullins' core belief about humankind suffuses this book with humanity and opportunities to connect with the characters. None of these characters are mainstream; none of them are predictable. Mullins believes that humans are all the same at root, and through empathy, we can understand everyone. This notion is reminiscent of Forster’s epigraph for Howard’s End: “Connect,” and this novel does feel Forsterian in its interest of finding common ground between people of different classes and countries.

Mullins writes in first person, an increasingly popular tense in modern fiction, and the result is an intimate and immediate atmosphere. We feel what the characters feel, and we are able to understand them. The ending of the novel is surprising and ripe with possibilities.

This is a tremendously moving book, a book that plunges the depths of one man’s heart and dreams, and one that ultimately reveals the frail, tenuous, but real ties that connect all of us.

Mullins must put this forward for the Pulitzer.

Have you read The Reincarnationist?

I came across this book a few weeks ago in one of my frequent forays around what I've come to call the bookweb - websites/blogs pertaining to books, which tend to be interestingly interconnected. This book piqued my fancy, so I ordered it from the library. This is definitely the kind of book you should read if you're looking for something quick and entertaining.

The Reincarnationist flashes back and forth between the present and the past, as Josh Ryder tries to understand why he continually revisits Ancient Rome and turn of the century New York in his dreams or nightmares, depending on your definition. He is reliving past lives, and as he begins to understand more about his past, he realizes that events of the past are replaying themselves in ominous ways in his present. The imagery is good. The characters are interesting. I was excited for a bang finish, and then it donned on me that I might have read this book a few times before, that there may be a formula for suspense novels, and I became glum. I continued to read, hoping that I had not predicted the ending, which I hate. I am a willing-suspension-of- disbelief type person; I let the drama unfold for me and analyze afterwards. Here, though, the footprints were unmistakable.

A brief side note to put my disgruntlement in context. Everyone has read The Davinci Code unless you had moral issues against it or didn't want to follow the overwhelming tide. The Davinci Code was awesome, so I moved on to Angels and Demons. By the time I reached Deception Point, I knew I had already read this book. By the time I got to the last Brown book, I was super annoyed. It had happened again! Dan Brown was using the formula. Then I started to really dislike Dan Brown. He's duped all of us. He's written four books in different contexts with the same basic plot twists and gimmicks. (Why can't I think of something like that? Oh, right; there's no point!)

So, here I am in a quandary. Until page 450, I actually really liked The Reincarnationist. Now I'm annoyed and sort of angry that M.J. Rose didn't think of an ending more befitting her unique plot.

Plot Spoiler:
If you haven't read it, go read it and then come back and tell me what you think. If you have read it, continue.

As with Dan Brown, Rose resorts to the formula: one of the good guys becomes the bad guy at the end. The number one person we trust, besides the main characters, turns nasty. Yeesh. I was hoping for a little more grandiosity than that. I was hoping for something original. Then, when Josh dies, I'm convinced that Rose copped out. Good book, bummer, bummer ending.

Nadeem Aslam's "Maps for Lost Lovers"

"Shamas stands in the open door and watches the earth, the magnet that it is, pulling snowflakes out of the sky towards itself. With their deliberate, almost-impaired pace, they fall like feathers sinking in water." (Aslam 1)

Nadeem Aslam’s Maps for Lost Lovers opens with a poetic explanation of one of the main characters, Shamas, watching the snow. The experience of watching, waiting, and meditating in a cold, desolate place adequately opens this novel that contemplates pain, isolation, disappointment, and faith. Shamas soon realizes that his brother Jugnu and Jugnu’s girlfriend, Chanda, have disappeared. Later, it is discovered that Chanda’s brothers murdered the two lovers. Chanda and Jugnu die because they sinned in their faith and acted dishonorably by living together before marriage, the brothers tell their friends. The real tragedy, however, is that Chanda and Jugnu are unable to marry because, though her husband abandoned her a few years ago, she is not allowed to remarry after abandonment in Islam for seven years. Chanda and Jugnu live together as man and wife and wait for the seven years to end, but they are brutally murdered. Pain, guilt and loneliness radiate out of this event like giant rippling waves, and Chanda and Jugnu’s death becomes a symbol for everything beautiful and ugly in the characters lives. In fact, the Pakistani immigrants are so desolate that they have named their homeland, Dast-e-Tanhaii, the Wilderness of Solitude, the Desert of Lonliness. It is a pity that this desert is not only England but their own souls.

As Shamas and his wife Kaukab absorb the hurt of this traumatizing event, they are forced to look at their own relationship. Kaukab is a devout Muslim, “raised under a minaret’ by a Muslim cleric, while Shamas is a communist and a non-believer. The struggle of the West versus East, or Muslims versus non-Muslims takes places in their living room. They both come to England for a better life, but instead they find themselves in a half-world; they are not English, but neither are they fully Pakistani. They have forsaken their homeland for a new country that will not allow them to assimilate. Shamas understands this and makes the most of it. Kaukab pines for Pakistan and condemns the West for ‘stealing her children’ and making her miserable. She is a good woman, but she is stuck in a context where she is no longer understood by or relevant to her children and husband. One of her sons has married a white woman; the other son blames her for Jugnu’s death; her daughter left her husband in Pakistan, wears Western clothing, and cut her long hair. She does not know her children, and her tradition, plus her seemingly unwavering faith in Allah, hinders her from crossing the divide. After Kaukab fights with her daughter, slapping her across the face for a perceived slight, she desires desperately to connect with her daughter, to throw off the shackles of restraint ingrained in her mind by her mother and love her family, but she cannot. She is afraid of gossip and losing face with her neighbors; she worries that others will condemn her for accepting her children’s deviation from the true faith, so she keeps her distance. Kaukab is lonely and in pain, but, according to Aslam, this is not uncommon in Islam. Aslam makes clear that Islam is the hardest on its women.

Aslam’s true brilliance in this novel is surprisingly not the characterization, which is incredibly subtle, nuanced and real, but his language. Maps for Lost Lovers is a prose poem. He imbues his story with perfect-pitched metaphor, sensuous allusions to Muslim fable and Eastern myth, and beautiful imagery from nature. Aslam tells his tale in first person with the result that the language lilts and moves like the prose from a fairy tale. Moths and butterflies fill the pages and chart the course for lovers. Jugnu’s hands glow in the dark, and as moths are attracted to light, so they are attracted to Jugnu. Jugnu glows with life and with love, but in a society where emotion and feeling are sacrificed to duty and covered up with fabric, he is sacrificed, too. Many of these characters are moths, with dull brown colors, unable to become vibrant butterflies, bright with color and life.

The pursuit of life, love, and light is the real purpose for many of these characters, and Aslam seems to blame Islam for their inability to achieve it. There is very little in this novel that praises Islam, and much that argues for change. However, this is not a political novel, and it does not argue for a revolution inside the faith. It does, though, illustrate the isolation and despair that Islam brings about within its own flock. It is a mind-opening experience for the Western reader, and I believe it is a must read.

Theroux's Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro

Paul Theroux’s The Stranger at the Palazzo D’Oro and Other Stories will not be reviewed here. The opening of the first, cornerstone story in the collection is deftly written and brilliant in the Sicilian sunshine. The main character flashbacks to his younger days when he was a traveler through Italy. In Sicily, he happens onto the Palazzo D’Oro, a beautiful, old world hotel, and meets a seductive, old, haughty, spoiled, and disturbingly infantile Countess. She has low self-esteem, so her assistant asks the young man to make her believe that he, the young man, loves her. Thus begins the really boring, totally trite, and very predictable love affair that I cannot force myself, as this is not a paying venture, to finish. It was so bad, I couldn't bring myself to even try to read the other stories. Theroux should try travel writing and keep fantasies about the bedroom to a minimum. Back to the library this one goes.

David Fulmer's Chasing the Devil's Tail

David Fulmer’s Chasing the Devil’s Tail takes place in turn of the 20^th century New Orleans, in the small, vibrant red light district of Storyville. It is the start of jazz, or jass, from the French word ‘jasser’, meaning to chatter, and the city is alive with dissipated characters, rivers of alcohol, loose women, and high/low notes of jassing horns, finding their voices. When a number of ‘sporting gals’ turn up murdered, the area rises to alarm. Valentine St. Cyr, a pale skin black man, who often passes as Sicilian, is a private detective for Tom Anderson, the historical self-appointed King of Storyville. Valentine St. Cyr takes the case, but soon discovers that his childhood friend, Buddy, the King, Bolden, the historical father of jazz, is the prime suspect. Along the way, we walk the streets of New Orleans with St. Cyr, meet characters from history, and happen upon a few scenes that would make the church ladies squirm. The end is surprising, but not entirely unexpected.

Fulmer’s strength lies in his ability to create a scene. A few deft strokes of his pen, and we are sitting in Lulu White’s front room on Basin Street, smelling the stench from the road and watching the crystal chandelier sway and gleam between the fans. For readers who are anxious to live in another world for a while, this is a great place to go.

The scenes are vibrant, but the characters are only mostly vivid. I want to know as much as I can about these characters, and I am left asking questions about their pasts and motivations. Fulmer does a better job developing his lesser characters, particularly the historically based characters. I wonder at St. Cyr’s motivations at some points, though he is nicely developed on the whole, but the antagonist, Picot, is not as fleshed out as I would like. He hates St. Cyr, this much is clear, but the reasons are unclear. I want the connection between Picot and St. Cyr to get more page time, but I just may have to read the next few books to get the background I want. Fulmer weaves historical characters in with made up ones, and the result is believable and seamless. The characters from history, Lulu White, Buddy Bolden, E. J. Bellocq, to name a few, bound off the page.

This is a compelling, clear, and carefully composed story. It is heavy on setting and character development, and if you are inclined to pass this one up because it’s billeted as a mystery, don’t. This story is worth an afternoon or two. Plus, you’ll really want to visit New Orleans afterwards, which is always a good thing these days.

Binchy's Whitethorn Woods

Maeve Binchy’s Whitethorn Woods slips between novel and short story, but the effect is charming. Binchy’s books are a perfect complement to a quiet afternoon with shortbread and tea. Reading her work feels like having a good chat with your best friend over the kitchen table. This is a different experience from her earlier work, and is not as all-consuming as some of her wonderfully long and involved novels, like Tara Road or Scarlett Feather, but this is a great set of interwoven stories about interesting characters.

The stories in Whitethorn Woods revolve around the upcoming destruction of a sacred well in a beautiful section of woods near the town of Rossmore. Rossmore is growing, and the town needs a road, but the new road will go through the woods, destroying their beauty and the well of St. Anne. Binchy chats with you through her pages about all of the different sorts of people who need St. Anne’s or who even know about St. Anne’s. Some of the characters visit the well; some of the characters disparage the well, but it provides a nice center circle for the wheel spokes of her story. Father Brian Flynn is a young priest struggling with extinction as people move away from the Church. Frustratingly, though, they will miss Church on Sunday, but will not miss a chat with St. Anne at her well. Neddy Nolan is called “Simple Neddy”, but he’s not as simple as he appears. His land will be paved over for the new road. Lilly Ryan lost her baby twenty years ago. She was stolen from her pram when Lilly was inside the grocery. All of these characters leap off the page, and, as I always do after I finish one of her books, I wonder what they go on to do.

Binchy clearly believes that character drives plot, and her characters are given the lead to speak for themselves. Unlike some of her earlier works, Whitethorn Woods takes place in modern Ireland, and the situation of the plodding Irish village faced with the prospect of modernization is something that Ireland, itself, has dealt with, very successfully, over the past years. Binchy includes hints about modern Ireland that are not present in her earlier work. Rather than merely crafting tales about characters dealing with the Church or horrible family members, love and the pursuit of careers, which fill much of her other work, this collection talks about the tension of England versus Ireland, though subtly, the new prosperity in Ireland and how that affects community, and women who choose to behave in ways formerly condemned by the Church. It is a snapshot of Ireland as it is now, carefully sifting through its tradition and moving slowly toward a modern, prosperous nation that may become the envy of Europe.

Brian Jay Corrigan's The Poet of Loch Ness

I have re-discovered the library. I went to the library frequently as a child, but when I graduated from college, it became important for me to create one of my own, which meant I had to spend more time in bookstores. Buying books, though, is incredibly expensive and sometimes disappointing. Usually, I am very good about choosing a book off the shelf, but sometimes there’s a really huge miss, and I end up paying $14.00 for the most boring, poorly written book in the world. I decided to try the books out at the library, a fairly low-risk financial option, and if I liked the book, I would purchase it for my Red Room Library.

The Poet of Loch Ness by Brian Jay Corrigan is on my list to purchase from Barnes and Noble. I found this book at the Woodruff Library at Emory. It’s not PerkinsJ, but it will have to do for my university library fix because Durham is just too far away.

A socially awkward, tone-deaf biology professor and his beautiful young wife travel to Loch Ness to search for the Loch Ness monster. Professor Perry Miggs says that he is working for the Royal Geographical Society, and Perdita Miggs (I really detest this name choice) comes along. She meets Andrew Macgruer, a poet, whom she knew when she was a student at St. Andrews. They have a past. Perry’s pursuit of the monster becomes a metaphor for the pursuit of other lost or hidden things. The story investigates the search for and realities of real, everyday love versus dreams of love. The heartbreaking beauty of wild Scotland creates a poignant backdrop to these musings.

Corrigan’s story starts off slowly. The language is beautiful in fits and starts. He seems to be finding his stride. He has a great story that’s coming, I can tell, but he’s too focused on what’s coming later and not on what comes first. Some of the imagery is awkward and jarring. For example, the Miggs pack up their house “like nuts.” The reference being to squirrels not crazy people, but I was caught up here.

By the end though, Corrigan has found his voice and his stride, and the last one hundred pages are beautiful and packed with insight. The ending is shocking, but the three main characters all realize what love is, and the result is satisfying for me. Nessie makes an appearance in the final chapter, too, which, considering the conclusion, is poetic justice.

Martel's Life of Pi (plot spoiler)

I resisted reading Life of Pi when it first came out. I often do this with books that ‘everyone’ reads. I resist the herd mentality when it comes to reading, though I was completely unsuccessful in this regard when it came to Harry Potter. I suspect many people were. Anyway, when Life of Pi won the coveted Man Booker Prize in 2002, and it was recommended for my book club at work, I trotted down to the bookstore and bought myself a copy. Though I am sensitive to the herd, I am a complete fool for the Man Booker; if the MBP chooses a book for its long list, it is already on its way to becoming to a favorite of mine.

The book opens with Pi, a young Indian boy, reveling in the smörgåsbord of religious options in his town. He becomes Catholic, he becomes Muslim, but he’s already Hindu. His parents are aghast at his activities and encourage him to choose. He refuses. He can’t make a choice: they all tell the same message to him.

His family owns a zoo, which they decide to transport to America. Pi and his family board a ship with all of the animals (Noah anyone?) and proceeds to sail to their new home. Along the way, they are met with a violent storm and the boat wrecks. Pi ultimately finds himself alone on a raft with an orangutan, a hyena, and an attitudinal tiger, Richard Parker. (I liked Richard Parker immediately, and renamed my rotten cat, Heathcliff, Richard Parker while I read this book. This, too, failed to get Heathcliff to return to good graces.) The other members of Pi's family presumably die. Aboard Pi's small raft, the orangutan and the hyena fight for supremacy. The hyena wins. Richard Parker ultimately wins over the hyena, and it is just Pi alone with Richard Parker, who is as depressed as ever. Pi and Richard Parker survive their long sea voyage across the Pacific and find themselves shipwrecked on the shore of Mexico. Pi watches Parker as the raft rolls ashore over the waves. He hopes to have some closure with the tiger, but nothing happens, and Richard Parker stalks into the woods, never to be seen from again. (Hmmm, a Bengal tiger in Mexico…)

Now comes the interesting part: Pi is found and taken to a hospital, where he is interviewed about his journey. The interviewers do not believe his story. They question first how an orangutan could float on a ton of bananas when bananas don’t float. When it is proved to them that bananas do float, they merely move onto another point in the story they find questionable. Finally, they ask for “a story without animals that will explain the sinking of the Tsitsum.” Pi pauses and proceeds with a tale not dissimilar from the first one.

The second story has four characters with the same personality traits as the first story, but this one includes Pi’s mother as the orangutan character and a French sailor as the hyena. When he finishes, he says “was this better, are there points you’d like me to change?” (311). The interviewers accept this version, saying that it is a “horrible” story; the insertion of humans for the animal characters now makes this story believable. The novel finishes with a letter from one of the interviewers to the narrator. The letter admits that it is very rare that a castaway could have survived so long at sea, especially in the “company of an adult Bengal tiger.” It would seem that this interviewer has decided, upon reflection, that Pi’s first story is the true one.

This telling and re-telling of this “unbelievable” story in Life of Pi provides a unique insight into the telling and retelling of religious stories. Pi is uniquely posed to understand foundational and similar themes couched in seemingly opposing contexts because he is an adherent of not one, but three, separate faiths. It makes sense to him that he could tell the same story, with the same action, same characters, and same points, but with different names, and connect with different people. He believes that all religious stories are the same. He does not get lost in details like names and places. We are the ones who get lost in details like this and make them the most important elements of our religions.

Martel’s point, which he roundabout suggests in Chapters 21 and 22, is to create a situation where the reader is required to understand the root of a story. It is not important who the characters are on the boat – they may be animals or people or be a figment of Pi’s imagination. It is the action that occurs on the boat that is incredibly relevant. Richard Parker, whether he be man, beast, Jesus, Pi, or Mohammed, saves Pi. What these characters do, not who they are, is what is important. Focusing on who/why religion is rather than its foundational message renders you as incapable of comprehending the real nature of religion, as the interviewers are incapable of understanding Pi’s first story. As Martel says:“lack imagination and miss the better story” (64).

Who do you think helps Pi cross the sea?

Hosseini's A Thousand Splendid Suns

Margaret Atwood said that Orhan Pamuk, 2006 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, “is writing his country [Turkey] into being.” Khaleed Hosseini does the same for Afghanistan in A Thousand Splendid Suns. The delicate beauty of Afghanistan’s past meets its bloody present in this story, but the landscape and people come alive for me, and I care for them. When Hosseini describes Herat in the beginning of the book, I feel sad and nostalgic that this city was destroyed. I, of course, have never been to Herat, but the description of wide tree-lined boulevards, open parks, beautiful tiled Mosques, and crowded cafes seem like the kind of place I would happily spend an afternoon. I remember Dad speaking about Sarajevo like this, that it was beautiful in a singular kind of way, and completely gone after the wars in the 1990s. The giant Buddhas that Laila sees with her father and her close friend Tariq are used as target practice by ignorant Taliban terrorists and completely destroyed. I understand, for a moment, while I read, the ravages and loss of war. By the end, I think I have seen and known a bit of Afghanistan.

Hosseini creates a world of places and people that I want to know. His descriptions of Mariam’s childhood and Laila’s atrocious life with her husband are so different from anything I have experienced or could ever experience; yet, I want to know as much as I can about these women. They fascinate me. Mariam is shy and defeated, but she will make the most critical decision a person can make when the choice is given to her. Laila fights and defends and loves. I understand her more than I understand Mariam. Mariam describes taking solace and pride in her husband’s desire that she wear the veil; she believes he must love her more than other husbands love their wives if he cherishes her enough to keep her hidden from other men. She has no understanding of freedom like I do, but this does not make me feel sorry for her. She’s a fighter in her way, and she fights for things like love and family. People are people everywhere, even in veils and running from sniper’s bullets. Hosseini makes this point time and time again.

Ultimately, this is a moving snapshot of women’s lives, but it antithetical to most of the stories that are published in America today about women. These women are not worried about their body image. They are not guilty over getting drunk and doing something foolish with a guy they met at a bar. They are not contemplating leaving their families because they feel unfulfilled. Mariam and Laila aren’t given the privilege of these emotions and thoughts. I read this book, and I think how lucky I am to have the time to whine over not fitting into those pants I bought last year. These women live in terror, poverty, and isolation. At the end, when they are given the opportunity, they make choices for family and community, not themselves.

Hosseini creates a portrait of a world we hear about on the news but will never see. The narration is slow and full of imagery. The voices of Mariam and Laila are distinct and clear. Hosseini takes time with his story and trusts that the reader will follow his lithe hand, and we do because the path of the story is so heart-wrenchingly compelling. Perhaps this book is so successful because it creates a bit of beauty out of the shards of misery, deceit, betrayal, selfishness, and cruelty that so often afflicts human kind. Hosseini suggests that our ability to love and create beautiful lives amidst devastation is the greatest gift we have.