The Places in Between by Rory Stewart

I want to walk like Rory. Knowing a few Persian languages, and walking from village to village, seeing, listening and walking. 

His views on international aid and interference were quite striking.

"I now had half a dozen friends working in Afghanistan in embassies, think tanks, international development agencies, the United Nations, and the Afghan government, controlling projects worth millions of dollars. A year before, they had been in Kosovo or East Timor and a year later they would be in Iraq or offices in New York and Washington." 

"They worked twelve or fourteen-hour days drafting documents for heavily funded initiatives on "democratization," "skills training," or "protection issues."

The pure hopelessness of this observation, how quickly outsiders come and go, makes me wonder if community development really should have nothing to do with outside aid. 

"Most of the policy makers knew next to nothing about the villages where 90 percent of the Afghan population lived." And all of the villages and regions are different.  How could you please everybody?

"These differences between groups were deep, elusive, and difficult to overcome. Village democracy, gender issues, and centralization would be hard-to-sell concepts in some areas."   That's for sure.

"Critics have accused this new breed of administrators of neocolonialism. But in fact their approach is not that of a nineteenth-century colonial officer. Colonial administrations may have been racist and exploitative, but they did at least work seriously at the business of understanding the people they were governing. They recruited people prepared to spend their entire careers in dangerous provinces of a single alien nation. They invested in teaching administrators and military officers the local language. They established effective departments of state, trained a local elite, and continued the countless academic studies of their subjects through institutes and museums, royal geographical societies, and royal botanical gardens. They balanced the local budget and generated fiscal revenue because if they didn't their home government would rarely bail them out. If they failed to govern fairly, the population would mutiny. 

     Post-conflict experts have got the prestige without the effort or stigma of imperialism. Their implicit denial of the difference between cultures is the new mass brand of international intervention. Their policy fails but no one notices. There are no credible monitoring bodies an there is no one to take formal responsibility. Individual officers are never in any one place and rarely in any one organization long enough to be adequately assessed. The colonial enterprise could be judged by the security or revenue it delivered, but neocolonialists have no such performance criteria. In fact their very uselessness benefits them. By avoiding any serious action or judgement they, unlike their colonial predecessors, are able to escape accusations of racism, exploitation, and oppression.

     Perhaps it is because no one requires more than a charming illusion of action in the developing world. If the policy makers know little about the Afghans, the public knows even less, and few care about policy failure when the effects are felt only in Afghanistan."

The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga (2008)

I had high expectations after Liam's glowing review, but I was really not impressed by Adiga's writing style.

For some reason, it just felt forced, with good voice, but somehow over-polished.

It was perhaps that Adiga intended to shock or awe with his descriptions of Indian human rights violations. However I was not touched by his descriptions, or even disturbed by the murder scene.  Just not Heller's level, descriptively or emotively. 

I failed to develop any consistent relationship with the protagonist, and can't even remember his name now. "If you write, you must believe--in the truth and the worth of the scrawl, in the ability of the reader to receive and decode the message. No one can write decently who is distrustful of the reader's intelligence, or whose attitude is patronizing" (Strunk & White, The Elements of Style, 84). Perhaps Adiga did not trust me to accurately perceive the horrors of India, and because he denied me this trust, his premonition was accurate.

Candide, ou l'Optimisme by Voltaire (1759)

What a delightfully naive protagonist.

The atrocities described in the 18th century remind me or our own atrocities these days. That was disturbing. Many passages were laugh out loud funny as Voltaire uses satire to make some social commentary on everything from war to literature. The self-aware style of his writing reminded me of Mark Twain, and the pure openness, which could have been shocking in his day, was fresh and sharp.

I found myself reexamining some philosophies on happiness and economics. It was an easy examination made very entertaining by Voltaire's parodies on many stereotypes. So who has had the most horrible experiences in their life? Yeah, go ahead, try to measure that!

 

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007 film)

Full body paralysis, one blinking eye, yet wrote a book. I've got to read this book. Beautiful movie. Make sure you get the subtitles straight or know French really well.

The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson by Mark Twain (1894)

Leisurely paced tragedy that stands with Shakespeare in poise and delivery.

It was so pleasurable to have my own predictions come true. Twain maintains suspense and weaves each personality around a plot where really not that much happens. Omniscient narration creates empathy reminiscent of Dostoevsky's character development. Crime and Punishment, like The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, was published first by installment.  

The "reader's note" at the hilariously describing how Twain really had a completely different plan for the plot and characters. I don't know how much of it to believe. 

Le Petit Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1943)

Like Joseph Heller said, perhaps only the children will be left when you take out all the bad things from this world. The prince's travels from one adult's planet to another become successively more depressing. It's true that adults often live on their own restrictive planets according to rules that don't allow for other planets to exist.

"And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye." But children can see these things. When did I forget how to see?

Catch-22 by Joseph Heller (1961)

I read this book for the first time before I understood much about adult life, when I was 13. This time around every licentious comment, bureaucratic breakdown and gruesome death made me smile, laugh or cringe. Yossarian challenged my English vocabulary with words such as cabalistic, saturnalia and callipygous. Catch-22 will help you prepare for any standardized test with a verbal section on it.


I want to share a section that I found particularly striking. I recently went on a road trip from Saint Louis to New Orleans and back, passing through Memphis, Jackson, and Baton Rouge on the way. That's one reason that the continuing racial segregation, economic disparities and social ills of our country are on my conscience. Heller expresses my own doubts and frustrations more eloquently than I.


"A boy in a thin shirt and thin tattered trousers walked out of the darkness on bare feet. The boy had black hair and needed a haircut and shoes and socks. His sickly face was pale and sad. His feet made grisly, soft, sucking sounds in the rain puddles on the wet pavement as he passed, and Yossarian was moved by such intense pity for his poverty that he wanted to smash his pale, sad, sickly face with his fist and knock him out of existence because he brought to mind all the pale, sad, sickly children in Italy that same night who needed haircuts and needed hoes and socks. He made Yossarian think of cripples and of cold and hungry men and women, and of all the dumb, passive, devout mothers with catotonic eyes nursing infants outdoors that same night with chilled anial udders bared insensibly to that same raw rain. Cows. Almost on cue, a nursing mother padded past holding an infant in black rags, and Yossarian wanted to smash her too, because she reminded him of the barefoot boy in the thin shirt and thin, tattered trousers and of all the shivering, stupefying misery in t a world that never yet had provided enough heat and food and justice for all but an ingenious and unscrupulous handful. What a lousy earth! He wondered how many people were destitute that same night even in his own prosperous country, how many homes were shanties, how many hubands were drunk and wives socked, and how many children were bullied, abused or abandoned. How many families hungered for food they could not afford to buy? How many hearts were broken? How many suicides would take place that same night, how many people would go insane? How many cockroaches and landlords would triumph? How many winners were losers, successes failures, rish men poor men? How many wise guys were stupid? How many happy endings were unhappy endings? How many honest men were liars, brave men cowards, loyal men traitors, how many sainted men were corrupt, how many peopl in positions of trust had sold their souls to blackguards for petty cash, how many had never had souls? How many straight-and-narrow paths were crooked paths? How many best families were worst families and how many good people were bad people? When you added them all up and then subtracted, you might be left with only the children, and perhaps with Albert Einstein and an old violinist or sculptor somewhere." (Heller, Chapter 39, THE ETERNAL CITY)


I wonder if Bob Dylan read this book and was similarly affected by  "how many how many how many" theme.


There are many powerful discourses between characters. Heller uses satire with in a restrained and effective manner that lets me take him seriously.