Two Opposing Views of Homelessness

The Pale of Settlement. Stories by Margot Singer. University of Georgia. 213 pages. 2008. $24.95.
A Map of Home. By Randa Jarrar. 292 pages. Other Press, 2008. $24.95
 
Reviewed by James Dalglish
 
Two works of fiction, one Jewish in origin by Margo Singer, the other Palestinian by Randa Jarrar, clash violently in tone – just as their nations do in reality – yet bear a common theme: the drift of homelessness.
 
The collection of stories The Pale of Settlement by Margo Singer is tied together by the character of one young woman Susan, an American Jew with relatives in Israel whose peregrinations back and forth between Israel and the US connect most of the stories and themes. She seems to be a sexually sought woman of uncertain commitment whether in her love affairs, place of residence or profession.
 
The collection is full of insights on its principal theme--the process of self-dissociation through displacement. Singer’s characters are Jewish Americans and Israelis for the most part, so Jewish problems and migration patterns of course concern her the most. She is an expert at describing the various shades of change and loss that afflict them but which apply to the typical expatriate as well.
 
The author also tries to situate her characters within a historical context so that their decisions and desires are seen in relation to real events. In “Hazor” she tries to connect the theme of the difficulty of digging out other people’s secrets to the archeology of Israel whose layers of rock reveal differing interpretations depending on you’re Arab or Jew. This is perhaps the most profound story.
 
Another impressive tale, “Expatriate,” features a Jewish family who originate in Israel but move to New York City (violating the stereotype) and lose their Israeliness while not becoming fully Jewish-American either. The family’s first-born, conceived in Israel, may have had an Arab father, but we never find out for sure. The most interesting thing about them though is not this suggested scandal but all the shades of time-and-space alienation the author discerns in their situation.
 
Singer writes well and often with lapidary polish but sometimes her metaphors go awry:
She [an infant] gazed at Leah as if there was a certain knowledge sealed inside her, like a crystal hidden in a geode sharp and bright... She lost that look with time of course, .... As self-consciousness came trawling like a fisherman’s long net across her mind.
 
With the first image you cheer, with the second (“fisherman’s long net”?) you wish she’d had a tougher editor.
 
In The Pale of Settlement, the Jewish characters are always off to someplace, most often to Israel, but also to Berlin or simply touring--in Nepal for example. Unlike in Saul Bellow’s or Philip Roth’s fiction there are few important non-Jewish characters in these stories; Jews and Israelis circulate, immigrate and become tourists largely among themselves.
 
The greatest crisis of conscience toward the Palestinian issue is experienced by Susan, working as a journalist in the story “Body Count” which refers to a real incident in the West Bank during the Second Intifada when the Israeli Army was accused of a massacre in the city of Jenin. Susan’s greatest worry is that she may have been suckered by the Palestinians into exaggerating the body count in the Jenin incident (the actual one was bad enough).
 
It might seem cruel and perverse to include in the same review a novel by an Israeli and a Palestinian, representatives of two warring tribes since time immemorial, but strangely enough the two works bear many resemblances. A Map of Home by Randa Jarrar is similarly obsessed with roots and the lack of them as its very ironic title suggests. You almost wish the two authors would sit down together to share notes, so identical are the themes that preoccupy both.
 
But in all probability they wouldn’t find much in common.
 
Whereas Singer writes a cool disciplined prose inherited from Flaubert, Randa Jarrar’s aggressive temperament expresses itself in hyperbole, slang and a good deal of unabashed obscenity. (This was shocking to me until I passed the book to a compatriot of the lead character I knew who said she liked precisely that about it.)
 
Yet Jarrar’s Palestinian family ranks as high on the scale of displaced sensibility as does Susan’s. The architect father Waheed is automatically an exile by virtue of being a Palestinian; her mother is half-Egyptian, half-Greek so Nabila, their daughter and heroine of the story, is sufficiently mixed in her origins to boast about it. They have lost their secure middle class status (like many Palestinians) but appealingly still have pretentions to artistic and intellectual accomplishment.
 
Narrated by the sharp tongued heroine Nabila, her family (previously expelled from Palestine) is forced out of Kuwait by Saddam’s invasion in 1990, escape to Egypt through Iraq (the most exciting episode), survive for a while in Alexandria, and finally move to America, landing in rural Texas no less, where the narrator succeeds in losing her virginity and getting into a ‘good school on the East coast.’
 
They are hardened travelers but not tourists. “On the plane to Egypt,” Jarrar writes, “I watched the tourists that surrounded us and thought how nice it would be to travel just for the sake of traveling, how nice it would be to leave one country for another willingly... for fun!”
 
You can hear the tone of the eternal aggrieved adolescent in almost every sarcastic line of Nabila’s account of her family’s woes. When she isn’t writing her eccentric, competitive essays, her typical interests are unsurprisingly sex, boys and pop music. We believe in her brilliance—though there are perhaps too many demonstrations of her wit.
 
The most touching theme in A Map of Home is the family’s search for precisely that--a home. Father Waheed often draws maps of the lost Palestine the ‘map’ of the title, so his daughter will remember a place where she never lived. A short episode takes the family back to Palestine for the funeral of a grandfather where Nabila sees how the original loss took place. Baba explains: “I lost my home ...and gained an education... which later became my home. That can also happen for you.”
 
The close and sometimes violent father-daughter relationship is at the heart of the book. In anarchic America, however the father’s tyranny collapses, which he takes well, in a series of comic pratfalls. With the support of her mother, Nabila emerges from the Oedipal conflict without too many scars.
 
Both works offer a paradoxical mix of internationalized but still essentially tribal fiction. The title that has the better chance of escaping its tribal origins and addressing a wider audience is no doubt the boisterous, uninhibited A Map of Home.
 
Review originally published in Bloomsbury Review March-April 2009: page 17.
 
(In fact, Jarrar’s novel won some prizes, and the author gained a fair amount of fame – and was seen recently at the Dubai Lit Festival. I hope her second act is as good or better.)

Confessions of a Paper Addict

Confessions of a Paper Addict

After listening to many wise comments in support of an initiative to replace paper textbooks with electronic equivalents in hundreds of courses at a local university during a high level departmental meeting, I didn’t think the discussion’d exhausted the topic so sat down and wrote some reflections on a topic I feel strongly about: the future of readable print.

First, I agree that paper is one of the heaviest substances on earth – and yes, carrying around a whole set of behemoth hardbacks or just one specimen, say, of the mighty Norton Anthologies series of British or American literature can be a nearly back-breaking task.

Before we rush into that paperless utopia, however, please consider these points. First, have you ever tried reading an ebook? Did you enjoy the experience? During break I found myself forced to read ebooks due to lack of proper illumination in my ecotouristically remote hotel room (and a boring print choice, Desert by JMG Le Clezio in French). I read grudgingly on my laptop till late at night (I can’t sleep unless I read a bit beforehand) a collection of Chekhov short stories downloaded from Gutenburg. It wasn’t a great deal of fun for some reason (maybe because Chekhov is a poor fit for the tropics & I’d already read most of the stories), so I tried to buy and download a bestseller as well, one of those “Girl who Kicked the Hornet Nest” series that I imagined would be more fun to read in a Nippon hut. Even after shelling out, however, it failed to jive with several e-readers I’d acquired. The Adobe reader showed only one page at a time – horrors!

I wondered if my negative experience was due to using a poor e-reader program, and so the next step was to download a better reading program. Which I did pronto and indeed found that “BookReader” was an improvement, showing two pages for example, and emitting a papery “whoosh!” when page clicking--but of course not allowing mimetic finger swipes (as on ipad). I haven’t used an Ipad for any extended time, so can’t pronounce on that device. I suspect that I would prefer it to other ereading gadgets but would probably ultimately give it up for the reasons I mentioned.

I’m still trying to get thru an ecopy edition of Huxley’s Brave New World and don’t know if it’s the turgid late chapters of that novel or the annoyance of having to constantly “click” the page that turned me off. At this moment I can’t say I have ever finished reading an ebook.

Even if you don’t mind the clumsy electronic apparatus, however, this kind of reading is superficial because you can’t jot marginalia – nor compile notes inside the back-cover. I know, I know, I’ve seen the clever ipad marginalia system, and it might work for the younger generation, but for me this is actually inefficient compared to what I can do more quickly with primitive tools such as a pencil and paper. Besides, I like the tactile impressions those two objects make on each other.

If I were using a book for research or reviewing it professionally, I would never use an ebook; it would be impossible to read the text thoroughly enough by flipping through screens; the fact is a paper book (I mean a book made of paper) gives more random access than the fastest computer. Besides, the small screens block scanning and skimming tactics that readers sometimes need to “cheat” or review at whim. I think it’s possible those small screens block a lot of the peripheral text I like to play with while reading in depth. E-readers, no matter how well intentioned, make reading more linear.

The esthetic aspects of reading are also important to my mind. To take a book seriously, I need a physical object in my hands – the heft of pages of a certain brightness and the resistance of the binding. Paper and actual print –such as Goudy Old Style or Garamond and not hideously ugly efonts. The publisher’s imprint tells me a lot too about the physical quality of the book. I also like to note my progress thru the book as the divide between read and unread pages gradually moves from left to right and the ratio of read to unread diminishes to zero. In the case of a difficult book, what an accomplishment; in the case of a fascinating page turner, a happy melancholy.

My more serious arguments against e-book media are these. First of all ownership of content. I don’t know if you read the recent news about Amazon customers who had content—ebooks—removed from their devices that they had purchased from Amazon. This struck me as a poor way to treat double customers having bought both “Nook” and an ebook file. But the incident is highly significant about the medium in question. You may “buy” a “book” from Amazon but the content is still under the company’s control. For someone who grew up with an extensive personal library, this is a chilling prospect. Apple’s itunes has one of the same limitations—Apple can and does control all the content you download from the itunes store. I can’t even make another copy of music I buy to play on another device. At least with books, you have a clear right of ownership – and the company can’t reclaim it.

(I'd like to see a representative from Random House have my house surrounded, knock on my door at midnight and "repo" my copy of "Ulysses.")

The other objection I have against e-books is based on the well-known tendency of computer companies and media merchants who adopt electronic media to enforce upgrade cycles on their customers. For ebook buyers, the idea of one’s library going out of date due to some hardware or software upgrade, unless they pay up, is certainly a possibility, no better an inevitability given the nature of the electronics business. Whereas for old-fashioned paper addicts like myself hooked on Gutenburg’s, system, no system 2.0 can come along to make it unreadable.

There is a place for ebooks in my opinion – reference works that you can’t carry around & only use for a few minutes, but I’ve seen few on the market I would use.

My last argument is semi mystical: to me a book is a living thing (almost). One develops a deep relationship with a book through its physical manifestation – yes – but the spirit deep inside it can’t be released unless its pages are turned by living fingers and oxygenated in the actual air. Only paper and ink can preserve the living spirit deep inside books. Finally, electronic media will never allow the mystic-physical interpenetration between book and reader that is essential to the life of the mind.

My final conviction: the life of the mind depends upon books, not ebooks, real books printed on paper in recognizable typography that you can carry around with you, show to others, discuss & build up a culture. If you get rid of real books and those quaint institutions we used to call bookstores but the French rightly call libraries then farewell life of the mind. A recent news story indicating the mental benefits to those who read long and complex works of fiction should give pause for thought.

A paper addict and Gutenburg throwback to the bitter end!
James Dalglish (poor sap!) has reviewed hundreds of books in Japan, Hong Kong, London, the USA and Middle East (including for the Review).