The Shipping News – A Nuanced, Dryly Humorous Tale of Self-Discovery

"If life was an arc of light that began in darkness, ended in darkness, the first part of his life had happened in ordinary glare. Here it was as though he had found a polarized lens that deepened and intensified all seen through it."

Swedish director Lasse Hallstrom’s movies (‘My Life as a Dog’, ‘What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?’, ‘Chocolat’, etc) can be sickly sweet; feel-good dramas that could overdose on wistful nostalgia. It’s undisputed that he makes gorgeously-shot dramas, gleaning out memorable performances from star actors. But there have been quite a few lows in his career. His adaptation of Annie E Proulx’s Pulitzer Prize winning The Shipping News (published in 1993) is one of those. The film version essentially simplified the text, concentrating more on the sublime, quaint atmosphere and concealed its lack in depth of characterization by casting well-known actors. Eventually, the movie seemed like one among the average works, set in a picturesque, storm-battered coastal town. Reading Annie Proulx’s prose, however, provides one of a kind experience. Her intoxicating and inventive writing style that conveys the varying textures of the dazzling environment also serves as a perfect tool to divulge the tough yet uncannily humorous speech patterns of local characters.

The Shipping News is largely set in the village of Killick-Claw, a foggy, abandoned shell of a place in the Newfoundland coast, Canada. But it opens in New York, chronicling the miserable life of the protagonist Quoyle. Proulx describes Quoyle like this: “Hive-spangled, gut roaring with gas and cramp, he survived childhood; at the state university, hand clasped over his chin, he camouflaged torment with smiles and silence. Stumbled through his twenties and into his thirties learning to separate his feelings from his life, counting on nothing.” Quoyle is a plump, terminally shy, and ungainly man in his 30s, who makes a living as a ‘third-rate’ newspaper man. Well-meaning but ineffectual, Quoyle finds short-lived happiness after his marriage to Petal. She is an unfaithful, fretful woman who oft prefers the company of her raucous boyfriends than Quoyle and their two little daughters, named Bunny and Sunshine. More gruesome things happen to Quoyle: his cancer and-ridden parents commit suicide; Petal takes off with her new boyfriend, before selling Bunny and Sunshine to a pornographer. Nevertheless, a prospect for fresh life develops after Petal gets killed in a car wreck and subsequently the children are rescued without damage.

Author E Annie Proulx

Aunt Agnis Hamm, Quoyle’s father’s estranged sister, arrives to alleviate the family’s pain. Aunt also indulges Quoyle with disquieting stories of their Newfoundland ancestors. Quoyle’s grandfather is described as ‘an incestuous, fit-prone, seal-killing child……had drowned at age 12, having already sired Quoyle's father’. Furthermore, she vows to help Quoyle and suggests that they move back to her childhood home in Newfoundland. Her girlhood house in Killick-Claw stands isolated for decades, held down with cables to keep it from blowing away. A lot of work needs to be done to make the old house habitable. While aunt gets the things organized for renovation, Quoyle gains a job at the local newspaper called ‘The Gammy Bird’. His responsibility is to write ‘shipping news’ column (a record of ships entering and leaving the port of Killick-Claw). The newsroom is full of colorful characters: Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio and specializes in writing sexual-abuse stories; Billy Pretty who writes the Home News Page and becomes advisor to Quoyle on local matters; Tert Card, the gruff, belligerent managing editor; and Jack Buggit, owner of Gammy Bird with a deep love for fishing and sea. Meanwhile, Quoyle’s bratty, emotionally disturbed daughters forge new friendships to deal with their traumas. The Shipping News doesn’t have a plot per se. It’s full of mesmerizing vignettes, drenched in beautiful atmosphere and deeply humane characters.

It definitely takes few chapters to get used to Annie Proulx’s writing. Her clipped sentences, strange cadences, tough sinuous patterns can be bit off-putting initially. Nevertheless, I gradually got invested with the characters and Proulx’s powerful descriptions. The masterful imagery evoked in passages about weather and sea provides immense pleasure to the readers (something which easily trumps gorgeous visual frames). “The ice mass leaned as though to admire its reflection on the waves, leaned until the southern tower was at the angle of pencil in a writing hand, the northern tower reared over it like a lover”…………”the waters crosshatched in complex layers of arctic and tropic, waves foamed with bacteria, yeasts, diatoma, fungi, algae, bubbles and droplets, the stuff of life, urging growth, change, coupling”……….”the sullen bay rubbed with thumbs of fog”……………….”fog against the window like milk”, all such spectacularly-articulated passages are more than mere decoration; it’s the kind of prose that possesses power to instantly transports me to the ruggedly beautiful Newfoundland.

Kevin Spacey plays Quoyle & Judi Dench plays Agnis Hamm in Lasse Hallstrom's movie adaptation

Each chapter in the novel opens with line drawings and short descriptions about different knots, taken from The Ashley Book of Knots (by Clifford Warren Ashley; which Ms. Proulx claims she found at a garage sale for twenty-five cents). The knots are one of the often repeated imagery in the novel, presenting its ability to bind the essential things. However, our bumbling protagonist Quoyle pretty much reminds us of intricate, deadlocked coils within the roughly made knots. Quoyle’s gradual metamorphosis, which constantly renews his human connection and purpose in life, sort of persists as an act of deftly molding the bungled spiral coil of rope. Writer Annie Proulx excels in weaving wonderfully natural or organic episodes, devoid of the typical mawkish feelings. Many of her characters are confounded by inexpressible grief and desolation. But early in the novel, Proulx writes, “A spinning coin, still balanced on its rim, may fall in either direction…. Even now in that moment before the coin falls, it really seems like everything will be all right.” Hence the author often injects this outwardly tragic tale with a fine (slightly macabre) sense of humor and also finds abundance of hope in life’s little triumphs. She also shows deep empathy for the way common people lead their lives in the face of massive social, ecological, and economic change (a lament for our relentless ability for self-destruction). Furthermore, the Newfoundlanders slang, the account of fishermen’s dispirited life, their high-spirited gathering over dishes of snow crab, cod cheeks, lobster salad and seal-flipper stew, etc immensely adds to the novel’s charm and emotional depth.

The Shipping News (337 pages) with its dreamy and slightly daunting prose isn’t definitely a novel that would please everyone. Many might find it boring, although I vastly loved the author's exquisitely beautiful writing style which serves as subtle meditation on fragility and endurance of life. It also stands as a testament to the revised sarcastic saying: don’t judge a book by its movie.

 
The E is for enigma -- Independent

The Sympathizer – An Exquisite and Acute Political Satire

We were displaced persons, but it was time more than space that defined us. While the distance to return to our lost country was far but finite, the number of years it would take to close that distance was potentially infinite. Thus, for displaced people, the first question was always about time: When can I return?

“My book has something to offend everyone”, says Viet Thanh Nguyen, an associate Professor of English, American Studies and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, whose debut novel 'The Sympathizer’ (published April 2015) went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Nguyen’s tale unfurls in the form of extended confession, written by an unnamed North Vietnamese spy or agent, simply addressed as ‘The Captain’. He works his way inside military and security establishment in Saigon, South Vietnam. After the city’s fall in 1975, he gets relocated to California with The General, and on the orders of North Vietnamese high command, the agent monitors the activities of the displaced members of southern Army. The Sympathizer is equal parts farcical spy story and a treatise on perplexed refugees, narrated through a beguiling voice that’s richly atmospheric, incendiary, poignant, and utterly unforgettable. In fact, the morally conflicted narrator draws comparison to the anti-heroes of Graham Greene and John le Carre. Nguyen’s revulsion and rage aimed towards the hypocrisy and idiocy of power-hungry humans also partly reminded me of Louis-Ferdinand Celine’s ‘Journey at the End of the Night’.

Nguyen says that his unnamed spy protagonist was inspired by a very famous spy named Pham Xuan An, who studied in Orange County, became friends with many Americans, and was silenced after the war. While there has been plenty of Vietnam War books from the perspective of the U.S. soldiers, and even few novels/memoirs depicting the Northener’s view of war (for eg, Last Night I Dreamed of Peace), The Sympathizer is unique because it’s narrator is knowledgeable enough to address and criticize all parties involved (in the war), and their dubious, extreme ideological fervor.  The Captain views himself as a committed communist, and yet he holds sympathy for the people he shadows. Moreover, his westernized internal culture alternately respects and hates what the western nation promises. If the Captain often feels that he is constantly in a position of conflict, belonging nowhere, it’s not just because he’s a spy. The Captain is of mixed-race heritage -- the bastard child of a French priest and a poor Vietnamese maid – making his loneliness not only professional, but existential.

The Captain’s only solace in life is the friendship he shares with Bon and Man, the trio sworn to be blood brothers way before their hardened teenage years. Now in his early 30s, The Captain works as personal aide to The General, the head of the South Vietnamese National Police. The novel opens with Saigon, the last stronghold territory of the South, falling into the hands of Viet Cong (in April 1975). The General has arranged a safe passage to US through CIA for his family, selected officers and their family. Forever leading an isolated life, the Captain decides to bring friend Bon and his family with him for US exile. Unbeknownst to Bon (a patriotic South Vietnamese soldier), and others the Captain is advised to go deep undercover by his handler (Captain has once studied college in US), who is none other than his other childhood friend Man. The Captain must report back on the activities of the General and American diplomats through coded letters. He dutifully reports the General’s attempts in California to raise a small army of expats, with the help of CIA and a Congressman, to liberate Vietnam from the communists.

Author/professor Viet Thanh Nguyen

 Confined to the suburbs of California, the fascinating middle-part of The Sympathizer turns the simple spy premise into a much complex commentary on refugee experience in American soil. By employing well-calibrated witty invective, our narrator deeply mocks the American dogma, its xenophobic authority, and penchant for cultural mores. In a branched-out story-line, the Captain becomes advisor to an American director, who is making a Vietnam War movie titled ‘The Hamlet’. The Captain contests with the Oscar-winning director (addressed simply as ‘The Auteur’, a reference to Coppola and his 1979 movie Apocalypse Now) to at least include a single Vietnamese voice in a movie about Vietnamese war. Parts are eventually created for Vietnamese characters, although the Captain is sneakily overpowered by the machinations of Hollywood. Author Nguyen directly quotes Coppola’s speech at Cannes (‘My movie is not about Vietnam; it is Vietnam’) as the words of ‘Auteur’ and depicts how the wonderful artistic work is problematic, in how it represents the Vietnamese or the whole of Southeast Asians. In an interview, Nguyen remarks that he has a ‘respect/hate relationship’ towards ‘Apocalypse Now’, and further adds that “the movie is a condemnation of American behavior, but also keeps the focus on Americans, since for Americans, it’s better to be the villains or antiheroes of their own story than to be the extras.” Equally hilarious and thoughtful is the Captain’s belief that Hollywood as part of the American political-military alliance:“Movies were America’s way of softening up the rest of the world, Hollywood relentlessly assaulting the mental defenses of audiences……… The point was that it was the American story they watched and loved, up until the day that they themselves might be bombed by the planes they had seen in American movies.”

Although The Sympathizer’s most subversive prose are reserved to the ugly pretensions of American imperialists, Nguyen remains unsparing towards atrocious principals of communists, and the cruelty of his own people. Not only the author exposes the worst of humanity in different quarters, he also avoids instilling unnecessary pieties to either Western or Eastern characters. The novel’s most harrowing third-act is an intimate study of the great disillusionment of revolutionaries, whose radicalized behavior wreaks havoc in both success and failures of the revolution. For the most part, Nguyen’s story and writing is very well-paced that it’s hard to not lose yourself to the progressively unfolding drama, abetted by funny ripostes. The Sympathizer, however, isn’t just a cerebral, literary thriller that only works on the surface. On closer reflection, we could identify profound treatment of universal themes like war, immigration, and displacement as well as personal themes, relating to memory and identity. The later themes lead to a satisfying conclusion that acknowledges solidarity, the need for compassion as opposed to allegiance for debased ideologies. The final outlook offers a bit of hope and a promise for possible redemption, even though the cauterizing experiences of war wouldn’t easily vanish. Altogether, Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (384 pages) is an incredible historical fiction, equipped with enlivening and raging high-brow style. The multi-faceted novel fills a vacuum in the ‘immigrant experience’ stories, providing voice to the oft belittled, caricaturized characters. 

Viet Thanh Nguyen: "The Sympathizer, Memory of the Vietnam War"

 

 

The Underground Railroad – An Ambitious Literary Conception to Deftly Explore the Insidious Chapters of American History

The premise of Colson Whitehead’s much-heralded The Underground Railroad has originated from the casual misunderstanding or unchecked imagination we may exhibit upon hearing the word ‘underground railroad’: that it is a literal subterranean rail network, run by former slaves and white abolitionists, to deliver runaway slaves from pernicious antebellum south to the free American states. The Underground Railroad actually represents different covert methods, secret routes and signals employed to help escape African-American slaves into Canada and northern free American states. The hiding places of fugitive slaves were as simple as caves, haylofts and the mode of transportation were sometimes as arduous as being confined to crates which is sent through boats or trains. The alleged ‘railroad’ operated between early and mid 19^th century (terminated with American civil war in 1861), and rough estimates state that more than 100,000 slaves had escaped via the unorganized network. 

Colson Whitehead has come up with the fantastical ghost of an idea for the novel 15 years before. Although Whitehead’s basic idea is a deliberate misrepresentation and by taking this imaginative discourse he unearths the truth behind dangerous historical misrepresentations, especially about White America’s myopic perception of slavery. Using the speculative premise of a literal Underground Railroad, Whitehead doesn’t weave a comforting fairly tale; he does the opposite by exposing the United States’ perpetual crimes against the black body and conscience. And, Whitehead’s powerful re-imagining of subdued American past has a timeless quality to it, since the savagery of white supremacy often tries to rear its head in contemporary 'Trumpian' times. The Underground Railroad received glowing reviews and won both Pulitzer Prize and US National Book Award for Fiction (this year). Plans are already underway to turn it into a TV series and the rights were bought by ‘Moonlight’ fame Barry Jenkins. 

Author Colson Whitehead

Fifteen or sixteen year old Cora is the heroine of Whitehead’s novel. She is born into slavery on a Georgian cotton plantation owned by brothers James and Terrance Randall. The first section of the book intensely conveys the realities of life on the plantation. What’s more memorable in this part is the depiction of relationship between the slaves, which is so often sentimentalized in literature or cinema. It’s not a plantation where the traumatized slaves alleviate each other from pain; here they fight among themselves for every inch of property and morsel of food. And, it’s understandable because these are the people who are raped and tortured and their unchecked rage is shown to manifest in different ways. Cora’s grandmother Ajarry was abducted by raiders from an African village when she was a little girl. After toiling for decades in the cotton plantation, with only a little patch of land (to cultivate vegetables) to call as her own, Ajarry eventually dies of stroke. Her daughter Mabel ran away from the plantation leaving little Cora behind. Mabel is alleged to have succeeded in her escape attempt. 

Ostracized by most other slaves and plagued with resentment for her mother, Cora is tempted by an idea brought up by a freshly arrived young slave Caesar. Having witnessed the horrific torture inflicted upon runaways, Cora initially decline Caesar’s offer (he sees her as a lucky charm since she is the daughter of one who successfully escaped). But when the plantation is taken over by sadist of the two brothers (Terrance Randall), Cora’s reluctance crumbles. After receiving a savage beating from Master Terrance for committing a humane act, Cora gives into Caesar’s plan. From then on, Cora takes several trips through the ‘Underground Railroad’, located beneath houses or barn trap doors. The underground in Whitehead’s imagination realizes wondrous tunnels of at least 20 feet tall with small platforms and walls patterned with bright and dark color-stones. Cora waits on the hidden stations for the dilapidated carriages affixed to a powerful steam engine. She moves from slave-holding Georgia to the alleged radically transformed South Carolina. Populated with skyscrapers and genteel whites, South Carolina seems to be paradise for afflicted African American slaves & freemen. But Cora discovers deep layers of purgatory beneath the seemingly race-tolerant society. On each leg of her journey, Cora unearths different variations of racial persecution in America whose devious schemes could still be felt in the modern times.  

From proposing eugenics as a tool of emancipation to the nighttime entertainment of coon shows, Whitehead takes us across America’s grotesque display of slavery sins. North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Indiana, each state represents different facet of the nation’s indelible and toxic obsession with race. Whitehead’s simple yet piercing prose tells us a narrative that goes deep and beyond Cora’s escape from indomitable slave catchers. He lays bare the simplified or mythologized truth regarding slavery. Whitehead’s penchant for ironically humorous observations also doesn’t water down the dreadful moral stakes of the narrative. Cora is absolutely believable as a young woman trying to be a human in a crazed world. Bloodhound villain character Ridgeway was also finely etched, making him more than a device for readers to hate. Although the events and tools used in The Underground Novel (320 pages) puts it under speculative fiction, its character and their profound emotions shatters myths and reclaims truths unlike many other American history books of the past. 

Colson Whitehead -- Talks at Google