This is the 3rd book in the Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz. For the first 2 books, see my review of Palace Walk and Palace of Desires.
Now that I'm at the 3rd book, I'm not going to waste any time re-explaining what this trilogy is and what it's about. (See my previous 2 book reviews for that.) I'm just going to jump right into the story.
And, because it's hard not to comment on the story without spoiling it, there will be plenty of spoilers.
The Review (*SPOILERS*)
This is the most depressing, and also the most interesting, book in the trilogy.
It's depressing because Naguib Mahfouz really hammers in his point about how time destroys everything. He is not subtle about this at all. He just hits the reader on the head over and over and over again with this theme.
In certain literary circles, subtlety is thought to be a virtue. And if you're of that mindset, Mahfouz's explicitness about his themes is going to be irritating.
But perhaps these things go in and out of style? In the Arab world in the 1950s, was the writing style more explicit? I don't know.
Anyway, be prepared for a lot of long descriptions about how miserable aging has made most of the main characters.
Mahfouz really has a depressing view of aging. His characters start to have problems at 50, and are dying by 65. It can be a bit of a drag to read this book, and think, "Is this what the next 30 years have in store for me? Boy, life really sucks!"
Personally, however, I'm inclined, to reject Mahfouz's extreme pessimism about aging. The older people I know have continued to be happy and productive into old age. (Or take Donald Trump. For all his many many faults, he does seem to be proof that one's ability to be active and participate in society is not over by age 70).
...I don't know. Check back on this blog in another 20 or 30 years to see how life is treating me, I guess.
Not all of Mahfouz's characters are destroyed by aging. Some of them have also been destroyed by tragedy. Aisha, who was so happy and carefree child at the beginning of this trilogy, has been so completely destroyed by tragedy (the deaths of her husband and children) that she is just a ghost of herself by the end. She is still technically alive (she still eats and smokes and drinks coffee), but she has completely given up on life.
And there are a lot of characters like this--characters who were once happy at the beginning of the trilogy, but whose fortune has been reversed. A rich family who lost all their money. A once respectable girl who ends up working at a disreputable bar.
It's a reminder, I suppose, that although our present happiness always has the illusion of permanency, life is inherently unstable. Everything we love could be gone tomorrow.
(...did I mention this book was depressing to read?)
But, for all that depressing stuff, this book is also the most interesting in the trilogy. A lot of things finally happen in this book.
On a societal level, changes in Egyptian society, that have been slowly brewing for the past couple decades, are now finally beginning to happen.
In the first two books, the second generation mildly pushed back against the traditions of their parents. But in this last book, the grandchildren have full out embraced radical politics.
And on a character level, a lot of the plot points that were set up in the first two books are now finally beginning to pay off. I used to be confused about what the point of certain characters was, but now that I've read the whole trilogy, I can see what everyone's arc was.
And it is for that second reason that I recommend this book. And this trilogy. It's a fascinating look on the changes in Egyptian society. I'll comment on a few of the themes that struck me, and some other odd details, down below.
Conversations With Egyptians
I've had the opportunity to talk to a two different Egyptian friends about these books on two different occasions, so I'll just jot down a few notes here about what they told me.
Both of them told me that these books are tremendously famous in Egypt. And that Naguib Mahfouz is looked upon as a national treasure.
I was a bit confused, because these books present an image of Egypt getting gradually more liberal over time. But isn't Egypt well-known nowadays for being a conservative Islamic country?
They both confirmed to me that there had been a period of liberalization, but now the pendulum has indeed swing back the other way.
"Well, then, how are Naguib Mahfouz's books regarded now?" I asked. "Since Naguib Mahfouz shows the gradual introduction of Western ideas into Egypt (like Darwinism and Marxism) and the gradual lessening of the patriarchal power, wouldn't these books be out of favor in a conservative Islamic Egypt?"
(...although, re-thinking it now, I may have exaggerated the liberalism of these books. The end of the trilogy has shown some changes in Egyptian society, but it's still firmly a traditional Muslim country. But I got the sense that Mahfouz's sympathy was with the characters who were pushing the intellectual boundaries--the transformation of Kamal into a humanist philosopher in the second book, and the transformation of Kamal's nephew Ahmed into a Marxist revolutionary in the third book--but perhaps that was just me reading in my own sympathies.)
Anyway, both of them confirmed that inspite the changing intellectual climate, Mahfouz is still as popular as ever.
One of them told me that everyone loved Naguib Mahfouz because he is the only Egyptian author who has gotten any sort of broader international recognition. "In Egypt, the people who read novels tend to be more open minded," he said. "So the people who actual read Mahfouz's novels aren't offended by it, because they are open minded. And the people who don't read still love Naguib Mahfouz because he has brought prestige to Egypt. And because they don't read, they've never discovered what is in his books, so there's no chance of them getting offended."
All of this brings me to my next topic, which is... Changes in Egyptian Society and the Expansion of Intellectual Boundaries
This book continues the theme of the trilogy which is that every generation pushes the boundaries of progress out a little bit more.
In the first book, the eldest son Fahmy became involved in the Egyptian nationalist revolution against the English. (And he became a martyr to that movement). In the second book, the youngest son Kamal loses his religious faith and becomes a secular humanist.
By this 3rd book, the nephews of Fahmy and Kamal have fully embraced radical politics. One of them gets involved in the Muslim Brotherhood, the other one joins the communists. (I suspect it's intentional symbolism that neither Fahmy nor Kamal have any physical offspring. Fahmy died young, and Kamal remained a bachelor. But in their nephews, they have intellectual offspring.)
Like most people, I first heard of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 2012 Egyptian revolution. I had no idea they went back all the way to the 1930s. But it turns out they do. (See their Wikipedia Page. Also one of my Egyptian friends confirmed this to me in conversation--although they only recently got political power, the Muslim Brotherhood have been around for a long time).
I do have one minor complaint, however....
In my original review of Palace Walk, I mentioned that Naguib Mahfouz had a talent for writing realistic 3-dimensional characters, with the exception of Fahmy's political radicalism, which seemed to me more contrived than realistic.
It's true that young people are often attracted to radical politics, but they do not become one note political zealots. They also have complex emotional needs and insecurities which interact with their political development in all sorts of ways.
The two brothers in Sugar Street are in danger of becoming one-note characters. One is always talking about Muslim purity, one is always talking about the poor people.
It's also maybe just a bit too contrived to have them be brothers in the same house-hold. On the one hand, I see what Naguib Mahfouz is going for, and there is some interesting parallelism going on with their different trajectories. (Each brother chooses a completely different path, but they both end up in the exact same place at the end of the novel.) But it's also a little bit too neat. In the first half of the book especially, I had trouble taking them seriously as characters. They seemed more like plot devices than characters.
They do, however, get more depth as the book continues, so by the time we got to the end of the book, I felt like they had been a bit more fleshed out into full characters.
Both brothers do get a bit more humanized when they encounter romantic obstacles. And, interestingly enough, both end up falling in love in ways which is challenging to their respective ideology. (The Muslim brother falls in love with a girl who he regards as a sexual temptation. The Communist brother falls in love with a girl who is looking for a rich husband.)
That complaint aside, I like a lot of other things about this plot.
I like the interaction between the nephews and their uncle Kamal. Kamal had been the radical intellectual in the previous book, but now he's finding himself outflanked by his nephews.
It's also interesting to see that the radicalism of the first novel (the Egyptian nationalist revolution) has now become regarded as conservative by the younger generation:
Ahmed, the communist nephew, says at one point: "It's not unlikely that in the future we'll come to regard martyrs of the nationalist movement as we now do victims of foolish battles between tribes and clans."
At which point his Uncle Kamal reacts by thinking "Foolish battles! You fool!" Kamal thought. "Fahmy did not die in a foolish battle. But how can you be certain?" (p.30-31)
By the end of the novel, both brothers are in jail.
The family members had suspected all along that the godless communist would end up in trouble, but it's a surprise that the brother obsessed with Muslim purity also ends up in jail.
When Kamal relates the news to his friend, his friend asks: "The one who worships God and the one who doesn't?"
Kamal answers "You must worship the government first and foremost if you wish your life to be free of problems." (p.328)
So true!
The interrogating police officer, it turns out, was a friend of Fahmy's 30 years ago. (This was actually set up back in the first book. Fahmy did have a police officer friend who was a minor character in Palace Walk.)
The officer says: "Your lamented uncle Fahmy was a dear friend of mine. I assume you know that he died in the spring of his life and that those of his comrades who survived now hold some of the most important [government] posts."
The police officer means this as an admonishment for the young people to respect the government their martyred uncle helped to create. But the communist nephew Ahmad sees it instead as a call to perpetual revolution, and replies, "Allow me to ask you, sir, what condition Egypt would be in if my uncle and others like him had not sacrificed their lives." (p.320)
(Professor Grant Voth, in his analysis of this trilogy, says that Mahfouz is showing how individuals die, but society progresses. Fahmy sacrifices his life to the nationalist revolution, but by doing so he helps create the conditions that allows his nephews to push society further. In effect, Fahmy willed his remaining lifespan over to the next generation.)
Other Notes
* Some interesting historical details in here about life in Cairo during World War II.
I had vaguely known that there was a North Africa campaign during World War II, but I hadn't quite realized that the inhabitants of Cairo experienced bombing raids.
Naguib Mahfouz does a good job of showing how the War directly affected everyday life in Cairo.
* I suspect most readers of this book identify most with Kamal. At least this was true of me. (I'd be flattering myself if I called myself an "intellectual", but I am at least more inclined to books than to sports. And I think in general the type of person who would read a trilogy like this is most likely to be the type of person who would identify with the bookish Kamal.)
So I was most invested in Kamal's progression.
There's a frustrating moment in the trilogy when Kamal is on the verge of finding love, but throws it away through hesitation and failure to act. It's frustrating for the reader. (You want to slap Kamal.) But at the same time, I identified with it. I have been there many times in my own past.
Kamal had spent the whole 2nd book in the trilogy obsessed with a girl he could not possess. By this book, he is no longer in love with her. But he's still fascinated with his past obsession as something that had taken on a life of its own independent of the actual girl.
The truth was that he no longer wanted Aida. But he still wished to learn her secret, which might at least convince him that the best years of his life had not been wasted. (p.257)
This, I also felt, was something I could identify with.
At the end, we get somewhat of a conclusion to Kamal's progression. He leaves the book with at least some sort of purpose in his life.
Kamal had long wondered what was true and what was false, but perhaps doubt was as much of an evasion of responsibility as mysticism or a passive belief in science.
"Could you be a model teacher, an exemplary husband, and a lifelong revolutionary?" he asked himself. (p.330)
But the book ends before we find out if Kamal succeeds in his new purpose. Or if this is just one of the many phases he goes through. (Kamal has gone through several phases before.)
Connections with Other Books I've Read
I don't know exactly what Naguib Mahfouz's politics are, but he's obviously done his research on Marxism. (According to Wikipedia, he had some sympathies with socialist ideas).
He knows about the romance between Karl Marx and the aristocrat Jenny Von Wesphalen, and makes references to this. (Something that I had also picked up from the biographies - of - Karl Marx I read). And he seems well-versed in socialist history, name dropping figures like Louis Blanc (who was prominent in the 1848 Revolution).
Links
* Fellow blogger Blogging the Canon reviews this same book here. His takeaway?
the genius of Mahfouz is that he makes his characters so familiar and so human that they transcend the foreignness of the culture and become instantly relate-able. Whether we speak English or Arabic or German, we all have the same emotions, and we all grow old and have the same frustrations. I highly recommend these books, they're some of the best I've read for this blog.
The key points are:
1) This trilogy was originally published in Egypt in the 1950s, and is a huge classic in Egypt and the Arab world. (I have an Egyptian friend who confirmed this for me.)
2) I first heard about this trilogy via Grant Voth's lectures on The History of World Literature in the "The Great Courses" series (A--recommended, by the way), and my own analysis is heavily indebted to Grant Voth.
I'm also going to try to avoid repeating myself too much from my review of Palace Walk about the tone and general tenor of the trilogy. Much of the what I said about Palace Walk in terms of the general reading experience and pacing is true for the sequel as well. I'm going to try to contain myself to talking about what is unique about the sequel.
And I'll also be giving away a few spoilers.
The Review
This book starts out 5 years after the end of Palace Walk, and continues the chronicle of the life of a middle-class Egyptian family for several years during the 1920s.
This was a politically turbulent time in Egypt's history. (Egypt was still trying to secure independence from Britain, but also within Egypt itself factions were beginning to fight for control.)
One of the reasons I was interested in this series in the first place was because, as a history geek, I thought I'd pick up some history from it. But unfortunately I picked up very little. The characters make a lot of passing references to political figures and events, but it's not really explained. (I suppose Naguib Mahfouz was not originally writing for an American audience--he was writing for Egyptians who already knew the history). You get some sense of the turbulence happening during this period, but you don't get any details, and it doesn't really impact the plot all that much.
The good news is, you don't need any of the history to understand the plot. Although history geeks (like myself) will be disappointed that the book doesn't give a better history lesson, all you really need to understand the story is how the current events affects the emotional state of the characters, and this is always narrated directly.
Much more relevant than the politics is the changing of Egyptian society which is happening here. Although it's still happening slowly. (There are hints that the younger generation is getting new ideas, but the old generation is still firmly in control).
Another big theme of the book is aging, and how time gradually destroys people.
Grant Voth had mentioned this in his lecture. So I had known to look out for this theme. But actually, it's so obvious you really can't miss it. Right from the first chapter the narration pretty much hits you over the head with this. Characters are thinking about how they are getting old, and how they are slowing down.
The patriarch of the family, Al-Sayyid Ahmad, is 55 at the start of the book, so he's right at that age where he is transitioning from middle-aged to old age. And his body is catching up with him. In the previous book, he had been infamous for his romantic affairs, and for his constant partying. But now it is harder for him to attract women, and the partying is beginning to take its toll.
It's sad to see such a strong vibrant man beginning to lose his strength. But at the same time, the reader knows that it is useless to lament this too much, because this is only natural. (Or maybe it's more tragic precisely because it's natural? I don't know.)
Fellow blogger Blogging the Canon opens up his own review of this book with a long lament on his own aging. And I almost feel obligated to launch into a similar lament. It seems almost hypocritical to talk about aging as if it were something that only affected other people. (I'm 40 now, but the way time is rushing by, I'm worried 55 will be here before I know it. After all, it seems like only yesterday I was writing this blog post lamenting that I was turning 27, and those past 13 years just sped by.)
But actually, that's the thing, isn't it? The reason books like this are noteworthy is that aging happens in real life more than it does in fiction. We age in real-life, but fictional characters usually don't age. For example Arthur Conan Doyle wrote Sherlock Holmes stories for 40 years in real life (1187-1927) but although the writer and the readers aged during this time, the character never did. (Okay, if you want to be technical there is one story with an elderly Sherlock Holmes, but that is the exception--you get my point).
Of course Naguib Mahfouz is not the only writer to deal with aging and the passage of time. There's a long literary history of documenting changes in families over time. (Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann just off the top of my head. And I'm sure a million other books) But I'd still argue that it is comparatively rare.
Meanwhile, while one generation is fading out in Palace of Desire, another one is rising to take it's place. The eldest son Yasin, now 28, is taking up his father's mantle with a vengeance, and doing all the womanizing and partying that his father once did. (The individual decays, but society progresses--Grant Voth had highlighted this as another theme of the trilogy).
But the biggest change is the youngest son, Kamal.
In the previous book, Kamal was just a little kid, and the least interesting member of the family.
At the start of the second book, however, Kamal is 17. And he's an intellectual now. He's suddenly gone from a little kid who only got into mischief to a young intellectual with goals and desires. (Kamal is roughly the same age that the author Naguib Mahfouz was during this same period of history. So I suspected--even before I read it on Wikipedia--that Kamal was somewhat based off of Naguib Mahfouz's own youth).
As Kamal advances in age from 17, 18 and 19, Palace of Desire also perfectly captures what it is to be around this age. Because of the stream of consciousness narration style, the reader is able to get intimately into Kamal's head.
On the one hand, Kamal's obsession with philosophy and ideal love make him seem pretentious and arrogant. He is so full of himself that occasionally he is almost unbearable. And yet on the other hand, his portrayal evoked a nostalgia in me for my own time at 17, 18 and 19--a time when life seemed to be about pure ideals that were big and important, and these ideals made me also feel big and important purely because of my attachment to them. Somewhere in adulthood, I lost this feeling, and life just became about the day-to-day grind.
Kamal's romantic obsession is the same way. He is obsessed with a girl. The reader realizes very early on that Kamal has elevated this girl to such a pedestal that he could never possibly possess her in real life. She has become such an object of reverence and worship to him that it is impossible to imagine him actually making a move on her.
(And, boy oh boy, does this ever characterize my own adolescence to a tea!)
Then the inevitable happens, and she winds up marrying another boy. Leaving Kamal to wallow in self-pity for several pages on end.
On the one hand, it makes Kamal a very pathetic character. And yet at the same time, once again, it made me nostalgic for the time in my life when I had these big emotions--when this idealization of romantic love seemed real, and there were emotions and ideas in the world which were pure and bigger than yourself.
A significant portion of this book (several chapters) is dedicated to Kamal's romantic obsession. Since the ending is entirely predictable, some readers find this frustrating or boring. (I read a couple reviews of this opinion.)
I personally thought that these sections could get a little tedious at times, but overall I was charmed enough by Kamal's young romanticism to forgive it.
Kamal's idealism also causes a crisis of faith, and by the end of the book he has lost his faith in religion (although he still believes in God).
There's an irony here, in that Kamal was one of the few members of the family who ever took religion seriously to begin with. His father and older brother pay lip service to Islam, but they also don't think to seriously about it, and break the rules every night with drinking and adultery. They are culturally Muslim, but don't take the tenants of the faith seriously. And so consequently they are never bothered by the intellectual contradictions of the faith
But it is precisely because Kamal takes the faith so seriously that he can't handle learning about the contradictions. When he finds out that the famous Muslim saint al-Husayn is not actually buried at the local Mosque (as he had been told all his life) he is devastated.
One of the more interesting parts of the book is when the father finds out about an article on Darwin that Kamal had published. (Grant Voth highlights this part as an illustration of how the generation clash, and how the ideas of the younger Egyptians were conflicting with their elders.) His father asks angrily "What sect does this Darwin belong to? He's an atheist, his words are blasphemous, and reporting his theory's a reckless act. Tell me: is he one of your professors at college." (p.357)
**********************
This book is a classic. (At least in the Arab World it's considered a classic. And among university literary types like Grant Voth. So I'm counting it as a classic). But it also has all the appeals of a trashy soap opera. So you can satisfy your high-brow and your low-brow cravings at the same time.
There's a lot of household quarrels that escalate into really big drama.
But there's also some interesting plot twists in the father and son relationship. Both Yasin and his father end up falling in love with, and sleeping with, the same girls.
I initially read this as just cheap trashy sexual drama that somehow snuck its way into classic literature. (And to give credit where it's due, it did make the story very interesting).
But The Washington Post review (LINK HERE) points out that this is an echo of The Brothers Karamazov, and that's probably not an accident.
Now I'm embarrassed that I didn't catch that on my own. I read The Brothers Karamazov just last year, and should have remembered that.
...actually now that The Washington Post got me thinking about it, I'm beginning to realize there are a lot of echos of The Brothers Karamazov.
Just like in The Brothers Karamazov, this family originally had 3 sons. Just like in The Brothers Karamazov, each son has a different personality. And, just like in The Brothers Karamazov, the father is a sensualist, and one of the sons is also a sensualist, and it is precisely the sensualist son that ends up competing with the father for the same women.
That, plus Kamal, as the intellectual son who also becomes the religious doubter, is a parallel for Ivan Karamazov.
All of this is probably deliberate on the part of Naguib Mahfouz.
(Of course, the parallels don't go all the way. There's no exact parallel for Alexei Karamazov, and in the Cairo Trilogy, one of the sons is already dead. But there's enough parallels to detect an influence).
***************
There's actually a lot more themes in this book that I haven't gotten around to, but I think I'll end this review here. I think I've hit on the things that struck me the most.
See Blogging the Canon's review of this book here.
I had also talked about this book briefly before back in April in the vlog: The Books I'm Currently Reading .
Why I Read This Book
I had never heard of this book until a few years ago. But when I was in graduate school, a friend loaned me a copy of the Great Courses Series: History of World Literature by Grant L. Voth. I used to listen to that series in the background while I did my exercise.
The Cairo Trilogy by Naguib Mahfouz was lecture number 44 in that series, and although I had never heard of Naguib Mahfouz or the Cairo Trilogy before, Grant Voth's description of it sounded absolutely fascinating.
(Although it's technically copyrighted material, at the moment of this writing the lecture is freely available on Youtube. You can listen to it yourself here. Be warned, there are some spoilers).
This trilogy has been on my list of "books-to-read" ever since then.
This is one of the best books I've read in a long time, hands down. I mean, I really loved this book, almost as much as I'm loving this third, very delicious and refreshing artisan gin and tonic. This book is brilliant.
I've been pushing for my bookclub to read this book for several months now (as I've previously related here and here).
The other bookclub members were not opposed to this book, but they wanted to wait a bit before tackling it. The Cairo Trilogy takes place during the British occupation of Egypt, and some people felt that after we finished A Passage to India, they wanted a short break from books about British Imperialism.
...but eventually everyone came around, and we decided to do this book for Book Club. And here I am with my review.
Sidenote:
Although I had already listened to Grant Voth's lecture on the trilogy, by the time I actually got around to reading this book, the lecture was not fresh in my mind. (I had some vague idea that this trilogy was going to show changes in Egypt, and that it would deal with the struggle against British rule, but that was pretty much all I remembered). So I was able to enjoy this book pretty much unspoiled. I did, however, re-listen to his lecture after I finished the book, so I'm going to borrow from some of his analysis in my review.
Background
If you didn't listen to Grant Voth's lecture, here's the quick background. This book was originally published in Arabic in 1956, and is the first book of the Cairo Trilogy. It was hugely influential in Egypt and Arabian literature, but it wasn't discovered in the West until Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. Then this trilogy was translated into English.
The Review
I had wanted to read this trilogy in part because I was attracted to the historical elements of it. I was interested in the British Empire, Egypt's struggle for independence, and the 1919 revolution (W).
As it turns out, however, this is not the focus of the book.
The main focus of the book is to document in minute detail the daily life of a middle-class Egyptian family.
Grant Voth, in his lecture, takes the historical literary perspective and identifies this novel as being part of the realist tradition and influenced by the realist writers of the late 19th century.
Personally, I was reminded of War and Peace.
When I started War and Peace, I thought I would be reading an epic tale about the Napoleonic Wars. Instead, I found that Tolstoy's real purpose in War and Peace was to fully document everything about daily life of the upper-class in Russia at the turn of the century. The big historical events do eventually intrude in on the novel, but not until you've gotten to know every detail about the daily lives of these characters.
It's the same with Palace Walk.
According to Grant Voth's lecture, Naguib Mahfouz was intent on documenting everything about the daily life of a time and culture which no longer existed.
By the time Naguib Mahfouz published this novel in 1956, Egypt had changed so much that the traditional conservative Egyptian family lifestyle he describes in Palace Walk no longer existed.
And (again according to Grant Voth) there are some customs and habits of Egyptian daily life during 1917 that would have been completely forgotten had they not been preserved in Mahfouz's novel.
So that was the major adjustment in expectations that I had to make as a reader. I had to realize that this was not an epic book about war and revolution, but instead a quiet book about the daily life of a middle-class family.
The good news is that once you realize this is what you're in for, and settle yourself down for it, it's very well written.
At our bookclub, we met up once at the halfway point of this novel to discuss our thoughts so far.
Tom said he thought the book was well written, but it was moving very slowly, and going into much more detail than he wanted. And I sympathized with that.
At the same time, we both remarked on how interesting it was to see a middle-class Islamic family from the inside.
In our discussion Tom mentioned an interesting quote from somebody or other: "A reader lives a thousand lives. The man who never reads lives only one."*
Tom said (and I agreed with him) that this book was a perfect example of that quote. By reading it, we have intimate access to a long ago time and a far-away culture.
I will never grow up in a Muslim country, but after having read this book, I feel like I have some idea of what it must have been like for people who did.
At the meeting, I predicted to Tom that the action would take off in the second half of the novel. I suspected that, like War and Peace, the first half of the novel was going to be all about getting intimately so that when the big historical events finally did intrude in on the novel, they have a much bigger emotional impact because you know these characters so well.
....and that prediction turned out to be correct.
To say more would be to spoil the novel. So I'll just leave that here for now, but I'll get into spoiler territory in my musings down below.
Various Musings (and SPOILERS warning)
On Islam
It's interesting to see Naguib Mahfouz's portrayal of a Muslim community.
Many of the traditions are different and yet... I was struck by how many more things were the same.
People who grow up in Christian communities will recognize many of the same things in this book. Change the names from "Allah" to "Jesus", and change the "Quran" to "The Bible", and all of the religious platitudes that these characters express would be equally at home in a Christian community.
The dedication with which these characters studied the Quran, and the way they used selected verses from the Quran to debate every issue in life, reminded me of the way in Protestant schools every ideological belief is supposed to be supported by a Bible verse.
But what struck me most was the blind faith that whatever happened was part of God's ultimate plan. No misfortune or tragedy ever occurred in this community without someone asserting that it must be the will of God, and that they should trust God.
It echoed perfectly the same belief in the Christian community I grew up in, and which I still see parroted frequently by old Christian school friends on Facebook.
I don't know what Naguib Mahfouz's own religious beliefs are, but I got the sense that he was subtlety mocking this blind faith. But perhaps that's just me reading my own agnostic biases into the book.
On Hypocrisy
A major theme of this book (one that's been commented on by every other review) is that of hypocrisy.
The father in this book holds his family to a very strict standard of Islamic morality, but he himself goes out every night to drink and have love affairs.
This got me thinking about the nature of hypocrisy.
My initial reaction was to think of all the people I knew who were similar. I've had several Muslim friends who also regularly broke Islamic rules.
And come to that, I've known several Christian friends who regularly broke Christian rules.
In fact, as I've become an adult, I've noticed something interesting: among my former Christian school classmates, the ones who now take the most conservative views of Church doctrine often have the least concern with their own personal morality.
"Well," I thought, "Maybe this is a personality difference. I tend to over-intellectualize everything, so I'm concerned about the connection between intellectual ideas and actions. But not everyone is as concerned about intellectual consistency."
But then I thought about it some more, and I wondered if I wasn't being too kind to myself. I remembered in college I used to have a roommate who was constantly accusing me of hypocrisy, because (in his view) there was a big disconnect between my altruistic liberal worldview, and my selfish middle-class lifestyle.
Maybe, when it comes down to it, we're all hypocrites, because we all have ideologies we can't possibly live up to, whether we're liberal or conservatives.
...I don't know. I'm just thinking out-loud here. But the point is, hypocrisy is a major theme in this book, and so it forces the reader to think about it.
On Political Evolution and Fahmy's Character
As I mentioned above, this is one of those books where the plot moves very slowly, but where you get to know the characters intimately.
Although I don't know anything about Egyptian culture in 1917, the characters all "felt" real and authentic to me.
...with one misstep.
Fahmy's political obsession comes out of nowhere.
I realize that students Fahmy's age are naturally idealistic and are naturally attracted to idealistic causes. But nonetheless, these things do not come out of nowhere. There is a gradually process of becoming aware of the outside political world, and forming opinions on it.
None of this was shown with Fahmy. He was politically apathetic one day, and a political zealot the next.
It wouldn't have bothered me, except that this book is so dedicated to realism, that this one false note seemed especially out of place.
Connections With Other Books I've Read
Urabi Pasha is mentioned a few times in this book. He was long dead by 1917, but he was mentioned as an Egyptian nationalist that the Egyptians still revered.
The story of Urabi Pasha was covered in two books that I've read: Three Empires on the Nile by Dominic Green and The Scramble for Africa by Thomas Pakenham.
Also, the 1919 Egyptian Revolution, as it's described in Palace Walk, sounds like it was a really big deal. In the book, daily massacres and shootings by the British troops are reported.
There may be some exaggeration going on here, but I got the impression that in 1919 there was an Amritsar happening in Egypt every day.
It seemed suspicious that I had never heard of this before, so I went back to The Decline and Fall of the British Empire: 1781-1997 by Piers Brendon. And sure enough, Piers Brendon had actually covered all of this, and I had just forgotten about it. (In my defense, there was a LOT of material in Piers Brendon's book, so I can't be expected to hold it all in active memory 3 years later.) But the relevant pages are available on Google books HERE.
If you read those pages, Piers Brendon presents a view of atrocities on both sides--the Egyptian mob (at least according to British reports) was violent and bloodthirsty.
Naguib Mahfouz presents no such balance. In Naguib Mahfouz's book, the Egyptians were protesting peacefully, and the British were shooting peaceful demonstrators.
Changes to Come
Because I've listened to Grant Voth's lecture, I feel like I have somewhat an idea of where this trilogy is going. And I think that part of the reason Naguib Mahfouz documented traditional Islamic culture in such detail is because the next two books are going to show how that culture changed over time.
...But I'll have to hold off comments on that until I actually read those books.
Footnotes
* I just googled this quote, and it appears to come from George R.R. Martin of all people. See here.
Book Club Notes
For whatever it may or may not be worth, here are some of the posts from our bookclub Facebook page.
July 27, 2017--I posted
The next book is Palace Walk by Naguib Mahfouz. Tom has once again generously provided the book club with a PDF copy (see his post below). I'll be going to the print shop on Monday July 31. Anyone who wants a paper copy, let me know by then.
Tenative plan is to hold the first meeting on Monday, August 21. Aim to have the first 35 chapters read by that point.
July 27, 2017--I posted
Some notes about the new book (for anyone who has never heard of it before).
As always when one is suggesting books for book club, one is going off of the reputation of the book, and not one's own personal experience with the book. So it's always dangerous to recommend books one hasn't read yet. (Sorry again about Lady Chatterley's Lover).
But, for whatever it is worth, this book comes highly recommended, and sounds like it will be really cool.
I first heard of this book from the History of World Literature lectures (produced by the great courses series). Lecture 44 was devoted to The Cairo Trilogy. (Of which "Palace Walk" is the first book).
It sounded really interesting to me. But don't take my word for it. Listen for yourself and see what you think. (Or don't, if you're worried about spoilers. He does kind of summarize the plot of the book as he discusses it, so bewarned). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvwTizWQy2I&t=4s
I also saw this book highly praised on the blog: "Blogging the Canon" http://bloggingthecanon.blogspot.com/2017/03/book-65-part-1-palace-walk-naguib.html
(Blogging the Canon isn't anyone famous. It's just a blog I stumbled across a few years ago, some guy blogging his journey to read all the books in the canon of classic literature. But for whatever it's worth, Blogging the Canon gives the book high praise.)
And lastly, The Guardian includes this book in their list of "The non-western books that every student should read"
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2016/nov/26/the-non-western-books-that-every-student-should-read
They say of this book ***quote*** The first part of Naguib Mahfouz’s epic Cairo Trilogy, which traces the story of the al-Jawad family over three decades to the end of World War II. Mahfouz, who in 1988 became the first Arab to win the Nobel Prize, lived his entire life in modest circumstances in the Egyptian capital, but was influenced both by nineteenth-century realists such as Balzac and Zola and twentieth-century modernism. Palace Walk is set in 1917–19. The al-Jawad family is ruled over by the strict patriarch and merchant Ahmad, who keeps his wife and daughters in seclusion, while taking full advantage of the pleasures offered by the sleazier backstreets of Cairo. His five children are, in one way or another, engaged in a struggle to find their own identities, while labouring under the twin regimes of their father and the British colonial authorities. But the novel is very far from schematic. It’s at once a tremendously readable family saga and a novel of adolescent and political awakening. The characters are fully realised and the book teems with the sights, sounds, aromas and bustle of the city. The climactic chapters, which unfold against the backdrop of a demonstration against the British authorities, successfully interweave the personal and social themes of the book. It’s a novel that achieves the rare feat of being deeply satisfying on both a political and an emotional level.
***End quote***
And that's all I know about this book. (If you follow those 3 links, you'll know as much as me.) But hopefully it will be good
August 17, 2017--Tom Posted
Okay, I have to admit that Mahfouz's use of figurative language is wearing me down. There's a simile or metaphor every other paragraph at this rate. It's always "so and so resembled such and such," "similarly blah and blah," "it was like when a bleh bleh did bleh".
He's done a great job giving depth to his characters. I just wish he would trust in his readers to understand the emotions and situations without resorting to needless imagery.
August 30, 2017--I posted
So apparently there was a 1964 movie of this book. Just watched this clip on youtube. Can't understand a word of the arabic, but having read this part of the book I at least have a rough idea of what is going on.
The production values actually look pretty good considering this was a foreign film from the 1960s. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00esOM4I6qg
Tom Commented:
Oh, guess I should have mentioned that I have the film. We could watch it. I totally forgot I downloaded it. I Replied:
Subtitles? Tom Replied:
Yeah, but i haven't checked to see if they sync up well. I'll get back to you on that. If not, I can always edit them. I Replied:
If we have a watchable copy with subtitles on our hands, I'd totally be up for watching it. Maybe at the next meeting we can make a plan for a movie night I Later Replied:
Found the whole movie on Youtube. It has subtitles, but unfortunately the subtitles don't show up well on the screen and are hard to read: https://youtu.be/Ias1l5nAQNA
August 31, 2017--I posted
Okay, after getting to that really depressing ending, I needed something to lighten me up a bit. And this video helped: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1ITL-VnfoE
August 31, 2017--I posted
Okay, confession time. I re-watched this video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RvwTizWQy2I&t=34s
I had seen it before, but I didn't remember the details of it well, and it was all a bit hazy in my mind, so it didn't really spoil the book for me.
Now that I know who the characters are, however, it sticks in my mind more, and I'm afraid by re-watching it I've gone ahead and spoiled major details of the 2nd and 3rd novel.
I couldn't help myself though. After that ending to the first novel, I felt like I just had to know what was going to happen to this family.
So, the bad news is I've now gone and spoiled plot points of the 2nd and 3rd novel for myself.
The good news is, though, I feel like after watching this video, I absolutely have to keep reading this trilogy. The way he describes it, it sounds like everything in the first novel is just set up so the reader can see the changes in the 2nd and 3rd novel. And it sounds like there will be some real interesting changes coming up in the next novel
August 31, 2017--I posted
I've been finding what appear to be more modern movie versions of Palace Walk. (I can't understand Arabic, but these scenes are definitely straight out of the novel). It looks like there might have been a TV miniseries based on Palace Walk in the 1980s or something? But I can't find any information on it when I search Google. Anyone know anything? https://youtu.be/Xq-PVFkm94g
It looks like the mini-series ran for a total of 17 episodes. More or less faithful to the book as far as I can make out by just dipping into episodes here and there: https://youtu.be/B7x1GE0Rekw
Why I Read this Book / My History With Gandhi
Like a lot of people, my primary knowledge of Gandhi was from the 1982 Richard Attenborough film Gandhi (W). It's a 3 hour movie that was shown to us at high school, in its entirety, not once but twice. One of my 10th grade social studies teachers showed it to us, and then one of my 12th grade social studies teachers also showed the whole thing to us.
In retrospect, watching this 3 hour movie twice does seem like a waste of valuable classroom time. But that's in retrospect. I didn't complain about it at the time. (When my 12 grade social studies teacher started showing this movie, it never occurred to any of us to let him know we had already seen it in 10th grade).
And, actually, there's an argument to be made for movies as educational tools. A good movie sticks in your memory in a way that a textbook or a lecture does not. If my social studies teacher had lectured us about Gandhi, I probably wouldn't have remembered it. But because the drama of the movie stuck in my mind, all these years later I remember perfectly about Gandhi and Nehru and Jinnah and Amritsar and the partition of India, et cetera.
Since I've become an adult, I've also rented the movie several times over the years, and watched it again on my own. (I included it in my top 10 movies of all time list).
In fact, for far too many years, virtually all of my knowledge of India came from Richard Attenborough's film. But a thorough knowledge of that film has been enough to keep me up to speed in several conversations about Indian history. (For example, when I spent a hiking trip chatting about Indian history with a Japanese professor of India back in 2005, I was able to keep up in that conversation solely because of my knowledge of the 1982 Ganhdi movie.)
I've been meaning to read a proper biography of Gandhi for ages now, and have put it off for far too long.
But then, while browsing the bookstores in Saigon, I saw this on the shelves and thought: "perfect!"
About this Book
Apparently this is the book that the 1982 movie was based on. (According to both the publisher's blurb on the back cover, and according to Wikipedia). I didn't realize this when I first picked up this book, but after so many years of watching the movie, I suppose it's fitting that I should read the book it's based on.
Just like the movie, the book starts out with a detailed description of Gandhi's assassination and funeral, and only then jumps back to look at his life. (This must have been where the movie got that structure from.)
I also recognized some of the dialogue from the movie in this book. (Again, this obviously must have been the source they were drawing from.)
This book was originally published way back in 1950, but it's still being sold in bookstores now. (That's probably unusual for a biography.)
The author of the book, Louis Fisher, is someone I never heard of before, but apparently he led an interesting life himself--see his Wikipedia bio.
Louis Fisher had actually spent some time with Gandhi during Gandhi's life, and throughout the book he frequently makes references to his conversations with Gandhi.
The author fully inserts himself into the book in Chapter 23 of Part 2, which is entitled "My Week with Gandhi".
This is probably self-serving on Fisher's part, and occasionally it does come across like he's making too much of his acquaintance with Gandhi. But on the plus side, it does also help to liven up the biography and add a personal touch to the narrative.
(Fisher also references conversations he had with Nehru and Jinnah in the book.)
The Review
Louis Fisher writes well (a journalist by trade) and this book is a pleasure to read.
In fact, I enjoyed it enough that I think it merits a place on the list of my Favorite Narrative History Books.
With a caveat--Fisher frequently breaks his narrative to editorialize about how great Gandhi is. But if you can put up with a little of that, then the book on the whole is great story-telling.
The book covers the whole of Gandhi's life. There are brief sections describing the wider history of India, but for the most part the focus is kept solely on Gandhi. (For example, Subhas Chandra Bose (W) is barely mentioned in this biography, even though he was also very influential during these same years.)
Louis Fisher is a great admirer of Gandhi, and has very little critical to say about him. I'm not expert enough to judge whether this is an omission or not. It's possible that in real life Gandhi just left very little behind for the honest biographer to criticize. (More on this in the sections below).
And that's really all I have to say about the book in general terms.
In specifics, I'll detail all my various thoughts down below.
Evaluation of Gandhi (as described by Louis Fischer)
The portrayal we get of Gandhi in Louis Fischer's book is of someone who was really too good for this world.
When you read a lot of history, you realize perhaps how rare men like Gandhi actually are. History is full of selfish cruel people doing selfish cruel things.
Someone like Gandhi, who was so principled, and pure and honest, almost takes your breath away as you read it.
You wonder how he could possibly have been so good, and at the same time you lament that the rest of humanity can't live up to his example.
Gandhi is probably especially unique in the world of politics.
Gandhi didn't want to defeat his opponents. He wanted to convert his opponents. In his political campaigns, he never sought to take unfair advantage of his opponents, and he always trusted in the goodwill of his opponents.
But if an individual like Gandhi re-affirms your faith in humanity, unfortunately reading about the events that Gandhi lived through will shatter that same faith.
The religious hatred, riots, and massacres that took place during the partition of India and Pakistan are all recorded in this book, and they are difficult reading. If Gandhi represents humanity at its best, the massacres that took place during the partition represent humanity at its worst. It is shocking the evil that one human being is capable of perpetrating on another.
These massacres took place during the end of Gandhi's life, and it is depressing to think that Gandhi spent his whole life preaching non-violence in India, and then these horrible massacres happened anyway.
The Politics of Gandhi
During my student days, I attended some non-violence training seminars prior to mass protests. (At the protests recounted here and here.)
One of the things I remember about these training sessions is the debate over exactly what "non-violence" means.
I had previously had a very technical definition of non-violence. (Non-violence means not using any physical force). But the workshop organizers encouraged us to think about whether being verbally abusive or hateful was congruent with a philosophy of non-violence.
I was reminded of this when reading about Gandhi's politics, and compared it to the politics of today.
Gandhi believed not only in technical non-violence, he believed in showing love and respect to your opponent.
For example, when Gandhi was invited to talks with the British Viceroy, many Indians objected to the idea of meeting with the enemy. Gandhi responded:
"We may attack measures and systems," Gandhi replied. "We may not, we must not attack men. Imperfect ourselves, we must be tender towards others and be slow to impute motives..." (p.199)
It made me think about the political climate in the US today.
Although many protesters today are technically non-violent, we still fall into the trap of personally attacking men instead of attacking measures and systems.
And I (on my this blog and on my twitter account) have been as guilty of this as anyone.
But after reading this biography, I begin to wonder if we should follow Gandhi's example, and stop the personal attacks against Republicans and Trump.
As inspired as I was by Gandhi, it's difficult to follow his example consistently. To actually be like Gandhi would entail getting control of your emotions. And few people manage to do this.
But I will try to be a better person in the future.
Gandhi and His Critics
I mentioned to a friend that I was reading Gandhi's biography, and he commented, "Oh really? One hears so much negative stuff about Gandhi nowadays, I wonder what the biography says."
I thought this was interesting. Surely the overwhelmingly amount of stuff you hear on Gandhi is positive, right? The man is one of the greatest heroes of the modern world.
But maybe in this day and age, everyone's a contrarian. And everyone loves reading click-baity articles about how this person you'd been told to admire admire really turned out to be awful. (See, for example, The Real Mahatma Gandhi by everyone's favorite contrarian Christopher Hitchens.)
There have always been a number of critiques of Gandhi from the Right, but I've never been concerned with that. They're not my tribe. (But, if anyone wants to see an example of a critique of Gandhi from the Right, see Firing Line with William F. Buckley Jr.: Was Gandhi for Real?)
It is the critiques of Gandhi from the Left that I'm more sensitive to.
To me, the two most serious criticisms from the Left are:
1) Gandhi was a member of the bourgeoisie, and only concerned with bourgeoisie interests. (Chris Harman was of this opinion), and
2) Gandhi was a racist, and didn't believe blacks were equal to Indians.
Louis Fischer doesn't address either of these criticisms directly. He appears to be completely unaware these are even issues.
However, since Fisher's time, Gandhi's comments on black people have been widely reported. (See Washington Post Article Here).
And yet in Fischer's book, Gandhi devotes much of his time and energy fighting against racism. Much of this is in the context of India (Gandhi spent much of his life trying to end discrimination against untouchables) but Fisher records that Gandhi was also concerned about black people in America and South Africa.
So how to make sense of the racist Gandhi with Fischer's clearly anti-racist Gandhi?
My best guess (and it's only a guess) is that Gandhi must have evolved over time.
Fischer clearly records that on other issues (pacifism, independence) Gandhi evolved. So it's reasonable to think that the same thing might have happened with his racial views. All of the damning quotes appear to have come from Gandhi's early period in South Africa, and so probably do not represent the older Gandhi.
Fischer records how Gandhi evolved on the question of intercaste marriages.
"From 1921 to 1946 Gandhi had gone full circle: from utter disapproval of intercaste marriages to approval of only intercaste marriages" (p.338)
And Fischer records that Gandhi was very concerned about the persecution of black people. When Fischer visited Gandhi in 1946, he records that...
Again he talked at length about the persecution of coloured races in South Africa. He inquired about the treatment of Negroes in the United States. "A civilization," he said, "is to be judged by its treatment of minorities. " (p.427)
As far as the critique that Gandhi was only concerned with the bourgeoisie, this is also thoroughly rejected in Fischer's portrayal. Fischer shows Gandhi as almost a proto-socialist (although Gandhi himself would have rejected that label).
Connections With Other Books I've Read
From the 1982 movie, I had known that Gandhi started his political life in South Africa. But I hadn't realized exactly how much of his life. Louis Fischer says Gandhi spent 20 years in South Africa!
As it happens, those same years (1893-1914) were the exact same years that The Scramble for Africa was happening, as covered in Thomas Pakenham's book.
Some of the same characters and events pop up in both books (e.g. The Boer War, Joseph Chamberlain).
In his book, Thomas Pakenham wrote a lot about the politics of South Africa, but I don't remember Gandhi's name ever popping up once.
I don't blame Thomas Pakenham for this. (In covering 30 years, and the politics of 2 continents, he can't possibly mention everything.)
But... it is an interesting reminder of how limited in perspective any one history book is. In reading Thomas Pakenham, you'd never know that during the exact same time as his narrative, one of the first modern large scale non-violent protest movements was being launched in South Africa.
The 1857 Mutiny, although it was before Gandhi's time, is referenced several times in this book as an example of what how bad things could have gotten in a worst case scenario. Among other books I've read, the 1857 Mutiny was described in Flashman in the Great Game by George MacDonald Fraser. (Although, typically, was covered irreverently by Fraser.)
The Amritsar Massacre (which Fischer covers on pages 184-188) was referenced explicitly by Orwell's characters in Burmese Days, and was apparently very much in Forster's mind in A Passage to India.
Gandhi engaged in a correspondence with Leo Tolstoy, which is described in this biography.
In the course of describing that correspondence, Louis Fischer inserts his own opinion that War and Peaceis "probably the world's greatest novel" (p.96)
Gandhi is recorded as reading Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in a South African prison.
During his week with Gandhi, Louis Fischer records Gandhi as expressing an interest in Upton Sinclair.
Comparing the Book and the Movie
I mentioned above that this is apparently the book the movie was based on, and much of the movie's dialogue can be found in this book.
However...
The movie is not entirely faithful to the book, and after reading the book, I've discovered just how much the movie switched around, glossed over, cut out, and even invented.
I don't blame the movie for any of that. I understand that in order to transition from a biography to a Hollywood movie, certain narrative choices have to be made.
Nonetheless, as media consumers, it's good for us to be aware of what exactly Hollywood is doing to the historical record, so perhaps it's instructive to examine where the movie differs from actually history.
I can't possibly go through and red-line the whole movie, but I'll pick one part of the movie as an example of the kinds of adaptations that are being made.
I'll just examine parts of the South African campaign against registration (Youtube).
The movie is rolling a number of separate issues and campaigns into one. In reality, the meeting at this hall was only to address the fingerprinting and registration issue. The law invalidating Hindu and Muslim marriages would not come until later, and so could not have been addressed at this meeting.
A number of the comments shouted out by the crowd do come verbatim from Fischer's biography, but they were comments made at preliminary committee meetings, and not at the big meeting. During Gandhi's big speech at the hall, Fischer records no back-and-forth with the crowd.
The British Police Officers were apparently not at the meeting at all.
The following scene in the movie, of Gandhi burning registration cards and being beaten by British policeman (Youtube), is entirely fictitious. None of this ever happened.
Gandhi was rounded up and jailed with a number of Indians who refused to register, but there was no dramatic scene of Gandhi burning registration cards.
Fischer records an incident on August 16, 1908, in which the Indian community did hold a demonstration and burn a number of registration cards, but Gandhi was not there, and there was no confrontation with the policemen.
Throughout the entirety of Fischer's biography, there is no scene in which Gandhi is beaten by policemen as depicted in the movie above. Gandhi was beaten by various mobs while in South Africa (once by the white settlers, and once by other Indians who were angry at him for compromising with the government), but Fischer never records Gandhi being assaulted by British police as in the movie.
Knowing that this scene is entirely fictitious, it makes me now feel smugly superior to all the Youtube commentators who are writing how this scene proves how wonderful Gandhi was. And yet, a few months ago, I would have been among them.
For what it's worth, the scene is in keeping with Gandhi's philosophy. This is an example of the non-violent philosophy Gandhi preached. But unfortunately history has left us with no real-life dramatic confrontation of Gandhi against violent South African policeman, so one had to be invented, I suppose.
Update: Because I couldn't resist it, I ended up commenting on the videoto try to correct all the other commenters who believed that this scene was proof of Gandhi's bravery.
(dfcs is my old account.) I was hoping that by doing this I would clear up any future confusion, but unfortunately my comment almost immediately got buried. (It doesn't show up on the top comments page. The only way to find it is to scroll through the comments by "newest first"). So inspite of my efforts, Youtubers are continuing to regard this scene as historical.
Other Notes
* Everyone knows about the connection between Gandhi and the American Civil Rights Movement. (Martin Luther King and others explicitly acknowledged Gandhi as one of their inspirations). But I wonder if this biography in particular contributed to that connection. After all, this book was published way back in 1950, so it's conceivable that it could have been read by people involved in the Civil Rights Movement. And this book, with its detailing of Gandhi's campaigns and his victories, seems like a perfect blue-print for anyone interested in non-violent protests.
My History With this Book/ Why I'm Reading it Now
I stumbled across the DVD of A Passage to India while browsing through the selection at the University of Melbourne library back in 2010.
Before then, I didn't know anything about the book (other than being vaguely familiar with the title in a way we're vaguely familiar with a lot of classic titles.) I turned the DVD over and read the description on the back, and learned that the story was about the trial of an Indian man accused of sexually assaulting a white woman in the racially charged atmosphere of British Colonial India.
It sounded to me like To Kill a Mockingbird set in India.
I usually dig political and historical films, so this sounded great.
I borrowed it from the library, and was tremendously disappointed by it.
But just because the movie was bad didn't mean the original book was bad also. This could just be a failure of adaptation.
And in fact, stripped of all the movie's meanderings, the plot--the story of a racially charged courtroom trial, and the problems of racism in Colonial India--still sounded like it had a lot of potential
And if I needed any further prompting, Whisky's comments on the blog post officially persuaded me not to write the book off completely. As Whisky wrote:
It's probably been 20 years since I saw this movie, but I can recall having my patience tested by it. I read the book a year or two later, and was completely blown away. It probably helped that I was enduring a romance with a similar arc, but the central issue of 'mystery vs. muddle' really took hold of me as I read.
There is a scene in the movie, however, that is not in the book, which I thought was brilliant. Just a footnote for you, 'cos I hope you'll still give the book a try.
So you read the book after having seen the movie as well, huh? And it didn't spoil the reading of the book for you then?
Rest assured, it is on my list of books to read someday. Of course my reading list is so long, and my reading pace is so slow, that it could well be a few years before I get around to it.
The experience didn't spoil it at all, because Forster really lets you inside the heads of the principle characters. I had a difficult time shaking the image of Alec Guinness as Godbole, however.
So, with Whisky having re-assured me that the book was worth reading after all, I put it on my list of "Books to Get Around to Reading Someday". However, as this is a very long list, it sometimes takes me a few years before I get to it.
The next thing which pushed me closer to this book was Burmese Days by George Orwell, which I read and reviewed in 2014. Burmese Days really struck a chord with me. The book fascinated me with its depiction of the relationship between expats and locals in Southeast Asia (and I thought I could see many parallels between the portrayal of the expat community in Burmese Days and the expat community in Phnom Penh in 2014.) So when I learned that Orwell was inspired by A Passage to India when he wrote Burmese Days (W),it pushed A Passage to India toward the top of my reading list.
The rest of the book club didn't really know anything about this book, but I tried to sell them on it. "It's always dangerous to recommend a book you haven't read," I admitted. "But I think this book will be really interesting to read here in Saigon." (I'm now living in Saigon, having moved here from Phnom Penh two years ago.) "It's supposed to be about the cultural conflicts between the locals and the expatriate community. So since we're part of an expatriate community, we should probably get some interesting discussion out of it."
And I succeeded in getting everyone else to agree to it. And now here I am with the review.
The Review
So... unfortunately this book hemorrhaged readers in our little book club.
With Down and Out in Paris and London, our book club had grown to 14 people.
Of those 14, most of them dropped out within the first 11 chapters, and by the end there were only 4 of us left.
Typical was the response of Sabrina, one of the founding members of the book club (who stuck with us all the way through 900 pages of The Brothers Karamazov), who said "I tried hard with this book, but I'm just not getting into it. I'll just catch you guys on the next book."
I felt bad about this, because I was the one who had been pushing for this book. But the problem with suggesting books for book club is that you find yourself recommending books that you yourself haven't read yet. And as it turned out, E.M. Forster's prose lacked the wide appeal of Orwell.
The handful of people who stuck through the book till the end, however, all really enjoyed it.
In retrospect, part of the problem was that the key to getting through any book is adjusting your expectations to what the book is actually like. I had sold this book to my bookclub as George Orwell's Burmese Days,only set in India. But it's really not. E.M. Forster is not George Orwell, and A Passage to India is not Burmese Days.
On the surface, they are both political books about the problems of colonialism. But A Passage to India is not just political. It has ambitions to be so much more. And when you get into the thick of it, you discover that politics isn't even the main thrust of the book.
One of the main themes of the book is religion. There are a lot of references to the differing outlooks of Hinduism, Christianity, Islam, and Atheism.
There's also a lot of emphasis on mystical and spiritual experiences in the book. There are hints that some characters encounter the supernatural, but it's all left ambiguous. (The "mystery vs. muddle" that Whisky referred to above.)
Also related to the ambiguity, another theme in the book is the misunderstandings between people, and the problem of forming relationships. Some of this is related to culture clash (which is another theme of the book), but even the characters from within the same cultures are constantly misunderstanding each other.
One of the themes of the book is that each character is trapped inside their own head, and can only see things from their own perspective. This failure to see things from the perspective of others causes constant misunderstandings. Even when two characters like each other, and want to be friends, they have a hard time overcoming this barrier. (Again, this relates to what Whisky said above: "Forster really lets you inside the heads of the principle characters").
And then mixed up with all of this is Forster's prose, which is heavy on long descriptions, and nowhere near as straightforward as Orwell's.
A typical example is from chapter 24. This is from the courtroom drama scene. It is right at what should be the climax of the plot, where the reader is hoping to see the political drama finally play itself out. And yet, just when you're trying to get into the story, Forster is constantly stopping the forward momentum of his plot to give you observations about the universe.
I'll quote the whole paragraph to give you a feel for what reading this book can be like:
The Court was crowded and of course very hot, and the first person Adela noticed in it was the humblest of all who were present, a person who had no bearing officially upon the trial: the man who pulled the punkah. Almost naked, and splendidly formed, he sat on a raised platform near the back, in the middle of the central gangway, and he caught her attention as she came in, and he seemed to control the proceedings. He had the strength and beauty that sometimes come to flower in Indians of low birth. When that strange race nears the dust and is condemned as untouchable, then nature remembers the physical perfection that she accomplished elsewhere, and throws out a god—not many, but one here and there, to prove to society how little its categories impress her. This man would have been notable anywhere: among the thin-hammed, flat-chested mediocrities of Chandrapore he stood out as divine, yet he was of the city, its garbage had nourished him, he would end on its rubbish heaps. Pulling the rope towards him, relaxing it rhythmically, sending swirls of air over others, receiving none himself, he seemed apart from human destinies, a male fate, a winnower of souls. Opposite him, also on a platform, sat the little assistant magistrate, cultivated, self-conscious, and conscientious. The punkah wallah was none of these things: he scarcely knew that he existed and did not understand why the Court was fuller than usual, indeed he did not know that it was fuller than usual, didn’t even know he worked a fan, though he thought he pulled a rope. Something in his aloofness impressed the girl from middle-class England, and rebuked the narrowness of her sufferings. In virtue of what had she collected this roomful of people together? Her particular brand of opinions, and the suburban Jehovah who sanctified them—by what right did they claim so much importance in the world, and assume the title of civilization? Mrs. Moore—she looked round, but Mrs. Moore was far away on the sea; it was the kind of question they might have discussed on the voyage out before the old lady had turned disagreeable and queer.
[Sidenote: When I first read that description in chapter 24, I thought, "Oh, this is so typical of how this book is written. Just when I want the plot to get moving, Forster stops everything to describe the room and comment on its mystical significance." So I scribbled "Typical" on the margin, and marked the page so I could find it again for this review. When searching for an online copy of this paragraph just now (so I didn't have to manually retype the whole thing) I discovered that this paragraph is actually the subject of a lot of literary analysis. See here, here and here.]
To summarize: This book is somewhat of a bait-and-switch. You go into this book expecting a very political book about the problems of colonialism. And instead what you find is a very literary book about spiritualism and the problem of human relationships.
As long as you recognize that that's the ride you're in for, you should be fine. I think the problem with my book club is that most people expected a political book, and then got confused halfway through when the book didn't have much of a plot.
...Which is not to say it isn't a political book. It's a political book as well, in addition to all those other things. And I'll deal with the politics in my next section.
The Politics of the Book
It's impressive when you consider that this book was published in 1924.
India didn't get her independence until 1947, which means that it took British Government another 23 years to realize what Forster had already realized in 1924.
The book is also decades ahead of its time in its discussion of racism. Again, remember, discussion of the racial problem didn't become mainstream in the US until the 1960s, and this book was published all the way back in 1924.
Throughout the book, many of the British Colonialists make overtly racist comments about the Indians.
The narrator in his authoritative voice never bothers to explicitly refute these comments, but the plot of the story refutes them all.
A favorite weapon is irony. It is often discovered that the British Colonialists make offensive remarks about the Indians, and then in the course of the story we find that the British themselves are the ones who are guilty of these traits.
An example is from Chapter 24. Mr. McBryde, The British superintendent of police, is giving evidence at the trial:
Here Mr. McBryde paused. He wanted to keep the proceedings as clean as possible, but Oriental Pathology, his favorite theme, lay around him, and he could not resist it. Taking off his spectacles, as was his habit before enunciating a general truth, he looked into them sadly, and remarked that the darker races are physically attracted by the fairer, but not vice versa--not a matter for bitterness this, not a matter for abuse, but just a fact which any scientific observer will confirm.
Although the narrator never explicitly refutes this, the reader knows McBryde is a hypocrite and an adulterer. Plus the narrator has already given us insight into the minds of the Indian characters, and so the reader knows no such pathology exists. The reader can simply recognize McBryde's statement as absurd on the face of it.
And yet, when this book was first published in 1924, it was at a time when it was not self-evident to everyone that these sentiments were ridiculous. To put this book in it's cultural and literary context, remember this was at the time when Sax Rohmer was writing about the yellow peril in The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu. (A book which talks about the cruelty of the Chinese race, and the ease with which Oriental women form attachment to men.) And also at a time when Robert E. Howard was writing about evil Black skinned tribes which attacked white women.
The Expatriate Community Then and Now
In my review of Burmese Days, I said that sometimes you can learn more from literature than from history books. By creating and preserving a literary portrait of the Burmese expatriate community in the 1920s, George Orwell has left a window open to that time through which future generations can look back and get some sense of what British colonialism was like.
E.M. Forster has done the same thing. And like Orwell, Forster's literary portrait is based on his real-life experiences of living in Colonial India, and experiencing the expatriate community first hand.
There's a caveat, of course. Literary portraits are inherently subjective. For the full picture, you have to read several books from different perspectives. (Forster's portrait of British Colonial India should be contrasted against other books, like Kim by Rudyard Kipling).
But with that caveat in mind, I felt like, as with Burmese Days, I could see parallels between the expatriate experience in Forster's portrait of 1920s India, and the expatriate communities that I have been a part of. And as with Burmese Days, it's not an exact parallel, because the political structure of colonialism is not present. But there are some similarities.
Everyone in the book club felt that there was sometimes an eerie similarity between the disparaging comments that the British constantly made about the Indians in A Passage to India, and the disparaging comments that expats constantly make about the Vietnamese in some of the on-line expat groups.
(The comments on the expat Facebook groups in Vietnam cover a spectrum. Some people are clearly racist, but most people are just going through a low point in the culture shock cycle, and need a place to vent their frustrations. Since I've also gone through low points in the culture-shock-cycle, and have also at times vented my own frustrations, I would be a hypocrite to criticize this too much.)
But A Passage to India also tackles the more subtle and difficult question of friendship between two cultures.
A Passage to India opens with several Indian characters discussing among themselves whether or not it is possible to be friends with the British. They conclude that, at least in India, it is impossible, although it may be possible in Britain.
This section really got me, and I have to confess I felt a little bit guilty. I reflected on my own set of friends, and how few of them were Vietnamese.
Vietnamese people are about the friendliest people on Earth. They are often eager to make friends with foreigners, and they are very outgoing. So it is incredibly easy to make Vietnamese friends. In fact, foreigners simply walking about in the park, minding their own business, will often be approached by Vietnamese people who simply want to talk to them or be friends.
When I first arrived in Saigon, I didn't have a lot of other friendships, so I socialized a lot with the Vietnamese people who were eager to socialize with me.
However, as I got to know the expat community, I've gradually shifted my socializing over to other expatriates, and now I almost never socialize with Vietnamese people. Despite the fact that there are ample opportunities.
So when I read the section in Forster's book, about the Indians reflecting that the British never want to be friends with them, I felt guilty about my own social habits.
In another case, recently, at a work party, I noticed that all the Vietnamese staff was sitting together at one half of the room, and all the Western staff was sitting together at the other half of the room. I remarked to Tom (who was also a member of the book club), "Look at this! This is just like The Bridge Party in chapter 5 of A Passage to India. Remember in that chapter how they had the party, and the Indians all stayed at one side of the garden, and the English all stayed at the other? This is the exact same thing now."
Tom immediately agreed with me. Although neither of us went over to the Vietnamese side. We both agreed we were more comfortable on the Western side.
Actually, to tell the whole truth, I've been noticing this phenomenon now for a long time. Back when I first started in Cambodia, I noticed at the first work party I went to that all the tables were completely segregated. The Cambodian staff all sat at one side, the Western staff all sat at the other. I didn't like this, and so I decided to go and sit at the Cambodian table.
I don't know what I expected to happen. I suppose maybe in the back of my mind I had an idea that they would say, "Thank you so much for coming over here and gracing us poor Cambodians with your presence. You truly are a man of the people."
Instead, what happened was that I immediately killed their conversation. Up until I came over, they had been happily chatting away in their native language, and joking with each other. As soon as I sat down, they had to shift the conversation over to English in order to accommodate me, and since they were less fluent in English than in their native language, the conversation immediately became stilted and awkward. The easy-going joking ceased, and they struggled to find topics that they could talk to me about in English.
It wasn't a racial thing so much as it was a linguistic-cultural thing. They were much happier speaking their native language and being able to make references to Cambodian culture--something that they couldn't do with me in the conversation.
Whereas we expatriates often felt more relaxed when we could speak natural English (instead of simplifying our English for the Cambodian staff) and we enjoyed talking about books, movies, music, TV shows, and politics that were all common to us, but that the Cambodians wouldn't understand.
After that, I largely gave up on trying to integrate the tables at the staff parties.
But every term, there would be fresh newly arrived expatriate staff, who would make the same mistakes I did.
You could always tell the newbies, because they would complain about the segregation, and try to sit down at the Cambodian table. The old-hands, like myself, used to watch them cynically from across the room, and reflect on how this kind of thing usually ended in failure.
It was the exact same dynamic in chapter 5 of A Passage to India. Miss Quested is newly arrived in India, and is upset by how the two halves of the party make no attempt to interact with each other. So she attempts to go over to the Indian side. The old-hands in the British expatriate community watch her cynically, and remark how she doesn't yet understand how things work India.
In theory, I still feel guilty about this dynamic. I still believe that I should make more of an effort to integrate myself over to the Cambodian or Vietnamese side. But in practice, I often feel tired at these staff parties, and end up just preferring the company of my own countrymen. In other words, I have almost the exact same attitude as Ronnie does in chapter 3 of A Passage to India. In conversation, Ronnie explains that he can't be seen socializing and having a smoke with the Indian Pleaders (lawyers) because he can't show favoritism to any one of them. In response, the newly arrived Miss Quested says:
"Isn't the lesson that you should invite all the Pleaders have a smoke with you?"
Ronnie replies:
"Perhaps, but time's limited and the flesh weak. I prefer my smoke at the club amongst my own sort, I'm afraid."
The Age of Atheism
Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe England became a post-religious society around the turn of the 20th century. Religion never went completely away, but starting in the 1900s secularism and atheism became mainstream in England.
This, of course, is different than what happened in America, which has always been been a very religious society. (For whatever reason. Historians and sociologists can debate why religion went out of fashion in Europe, but has remained so strong in America.)
One of the things I remember from my college literature classes is that 20th Century British writers had to struggle with the question of what it means to live in a post-religious age.
A poem I remember from one of my professors talking about from a course on Modern British Literature is High Windows by British poet Philip Larkin. The poem has stuck with me over the years as I've struggled with religion and atheism myself over the years, so I'll quote the whole thing below, because I think it's worth quoting:
High Windows by Philip Larkin (Written in 1967)
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide What you think of the priest. He And his lot will all go down the long slide Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Although A Passage to India was written 40 years before High Windows, I thought that I could see a lot of the same thoughts about struggling to find meaning and comfort in life in a post-religious age.
For example, there is this exchange between Mr. Fielding and Miss Quested in Chapter 26.
..."I did not intend to be rude. I only meant it is difficult, as we get on in life, to resist the supernatural. I've felt it coming on me myself. I still jog on without it, but what a temptation, at forty-five, to pretend that the dead live again; one's own dead; no one else's matter."
"Because the dead don't live again."
"I fear not."
"So do I."
There was a moment's silence, such as often follows the triumph of rationalism. Then he apologized handsomely enough for his behavior to Heaslop at the club....
Some of the passages I thought were quite moving. Such as the description in Chapter 27 about coming to terms with the death of people you love. The passage is describing the thoughts of the English atheist Fielding:
...it struck him that people are not really dead until they are felt to be dead. As long as there is some misunderstanding about them, they possess a sort of immortality. An experience of his own confirmed this. Many years ago he had lost a great friend, a woman, who believed in the Christian heaven and assured him that after the changes and chances of this mortal life they would meet in it again. Fielding was a blank, frank atheist, but he respected every opinion his friend held: to do this is essential in friendship. And it seemed to him for a time that the dead awaited him, and when the illusion faded, it left behind it an emptiness that was almost guilt: "This really is the end," he thought, "and I gave her the final blow."
Orientalism
Throughout the book, E.M. Forster frequently tells the reader what is in the heads of all the characters. He also emphasizes how the Indians view things differently than the Europeans.
Taken at its broadest, I'm sure this is uncontroversial. Different cultures view some things differently.
But, sometimes I wondered if E.M. Forster was being a little bit too specific in claiming to know what Indians thought. "Some people somewhere out there are probably upset about this," I thought to myself.
Sure enough, once I started reading criticism of the book, the charge of "orientalism" comes up.
It'd be interesting to hear the opinion of an Indian reader on how well E.M. Forster does at depicting the Indian mind.
My own opinion is worthless on this subject, so I won't bother. I'll just note that there's an orientalism controversy about this book, and leave it at that.
Other Themes of the Book
So... there are a lot more themes in this book than what I've touched on so far. This book is packed full of themes, some of them I didn't even fully realize until I read the study guide to this book. (Which I found online HERE). But I've touched on what struck me personally. If I wrote about the other themes, I would be largely just plagiarizing from what was in the study guide. And what's the point of that? You can just click on the link above and read the study guide yourself if you're interested in reading more.
Book Club Notes:
For whatever it may or may not be worth, here are some of the posts I put on our bookclub Facebook page as we read the book. (I've used XXXX to replace all the personal names of people.)
March 14, 2017
What's been decided:
New book moving forward is "A Passage to India" by E.M. Forster. It's not in the bookstores here in Saigon, but apparently it can easily be torrented. Once XXXX sends me the PDF, I'll print up paper copies for anyone who's interested. So far it looks like it's me, XXXX , and XXXX . So 3 copies.
XXXX
How many pages are we to read for the next meeting? And when is the next meeting?
Me:
So it looks like the book is divided into 3 parts. We could do one part for every meeting? Meet up every 2 weeks say? Is that too slow or too fast?
XXXX
Certainly doable. That sets our meetings to the 31st, 14th, and 28th. I'm keen.
Me:
Okay cool. I'll miss the 31st, but I'll chime in with my two cents over Facebook. I'll be back for the 14th and the 28th.
March 15, 2017
okay, XXXX , XXXX , XXXX , XXXX and XXXX , I've got all your copies printed out and ready for you. Looks like it worked out to approximately 65,000 each this time. Grab me when you see me for your copy. March 16, 2017
I was talking to XXXX today, and we discussed reading Burmese Days by George Orwell as a bonus book to complement A Passage to India. The two books have very similar themes (both deal with the relationships between the expats and the natives in a Colonial territory) and George Orwell was supposedly inspired by A Passage to India when he wrote Burmese Days, so it might be interesting to compare Orwell's handling of the same themes.
Obviously this would be only for the more ambitious readers. If just getting through the one book is enough, than no pressure to go for two. But the schedule we were talking about the other day strikes me as being fairly relaxed.
As for me, I read Burmese Days a couple years ago. It's still relatively fresh in my mind, so I won't be re-reading it again, but should hopefully still be able to talk about it intelligently March 19, 2017
Since I'm going to miss the first meeting on this book club, I'm going to use Facebook to chime in with my opinions more than usual.
One of my primary interests in both this book and Burmese Days is the portrayal of the expat community, and how the expat community looks down on the native population. And perhaps we could draw parallels to the expat community in Saigon? Or is that a debate?
I was living in Phnom Penh when I read Burmese Days, and the scene when the British were sitting in the club complaining about the native Burmese struck me as very similar to the way expats in Phnom Penh hang out in expats bars and spend all day complaining about the Cambodians.
I'm beginning to imagine I see some of those same parallels in the description of the expats in A Passage to India.
Of course there are differences. Burma and India were official colonies of Britain. But I wonder if the portrayal of how expats view the country they are living in is more similar than different?
For example, is it just me, or is the word "local" used a lot in a disparaging way on the Ho Chi Minh Expats Facebook page?
Or here's a quote from Orwell (in Chapter 10 of Burmese Days) that got me thinking a bit:
When describing the feeling of the British in Burma, Orwell writes “…most people can be at ease in a foreign country only when they are disparaging the inhabitants” –From Chapter 10.
What do you guys think. True?
March 20, 2017
Okay, so as I said the other day, I'm going to be posting on this Facebook page a lot over the next week to make up for the fact that I'll be missing the first meeting. Sorry in advance. Just ignore me if I get annoying.
I want to talk today about culture shock.
I think both "A Passage to India" and "Burmese Days" view the relationships between the locals and the British through the prism of colonialism and racism. In other words, in both books the British look down on the locals mainly because they are colonialist assholes and have racist prejudices.
I may be wrong on this, but I think that in Orwell's and Forster's day, there hadn't been anything written about culture shock. So when both authors were explaining why the expats complained about the locals so much, colonialism was the only prism they had to explain it.
Nowadays, though, there's been a lot of studies on culture shock, and I think we're more aware now that it's something all people go through. You could be the most open-minded liberal person in the world, but you do go through a period of "culture shock" where you feel hostility towards the new country and the locals.
My understanding is that there are two models of culture shock. In one model, you start out in the honeymoon period where everything about the new country is new and wonderful. After about 2 or 3 months, you move into a period where you hate everything about the new country.
For example, symptom number 4 on this list describes typical culture shock as:
Criticism of local people, culture, and customs http://www.uniteforsight.org/cultural-competency/module2
This period is where we get a lot of the insensitive comments that is similar to the comments both Forster's and Orwell's characters make. (And both Forster and Orwell wrote partly based on their own experiences, of having lived in expat communities in India and Burma respectively). But the point is that this isn't a period that only racist people go through. All people experience some degree of culture shock. How much of this is racism, and how much of this is culture shock? I suspect the line gets a little bit muddled.
And then you move into a period of adjustment, and finally assimilation.
But another theory is that you never reach full adjustment. Even after years of living abroad, you are still on a constant cycle of ups and downs. When you're on a low point in the culture shock cycle, you hate the country and the people, but then a couple weeks (or months) later you'll be back in a good place, and you'll love the country and the people. But then a while later you'll be in a low place.
Anecdotally, this later model strikes me as more accurate, just because in my experience the expats who complain the most about the country are often the ones who have been there the longest.
Another point to be made about culture shock is that in both models, Culture Shock only sets in after you've been in the country for a few months.
In that respect, I think Orwell messed this up slightly in Burmese Days, because Elizabeth Lackersteen was too negative about Burma right from the beginning. It makes sense that all the old-jaded expatriates in the European club should be negative about Burma—much as Orwell describes. But Elizabeth Lackersteen should have gone through a period of interest and fascination about her new country. Instead, Orwell portrays her as wanting nothing to do with Burma and the Burmese right from the beginning.
I suspect this oversight might be because the psychological research on culture shock, and the 4 stages model, probably came after Orwell’s time. And perhaps I’m being overly prescriptive by insisting that his characters follow this psychology model. But, the four stages of culture shock very closely model my own experience, and the experience of the other people I’ve watched. I’ve never seen anyone be negative about a new country upon first arriving, so I have a hard time believing that this would be Elizabeth Lackersteen’s reaction. (Although, I don’t know, maybe back in the 1920s racism might have been more of a factor? Britains might have absorbed a disdain for the native inhabitants of their colonies even before they got off the boat, which would cause them to bypass the honeymoon stage? Perhaps?)
I think E.M. Forster handles this much better, because he portrays the fresh-off-the-boat new-comers as being very positive about India, and being very surprised at the negative attitudes they encounter from their fellow expats.
It would be interesting maybe to compare our own experiences of culture shock in Vietnam, and how this matches the portrayal of expat communities in "Burmese Days" and "A Passage to India" March 22, 2017
Another interesting point of connection between A Passage to India and Burmese Days.
Both were apparently influenced by Amritsar. A Passage to India was written only a few years after Amritsar, and apparently the more militant attitude on the part of the Indians in the second book reflects the tension after Amritsar.
But Forster never mentions Amritsar explicitly.
It was Orwell, who wasn't even writing about India, who makes a big deal of Amritsar in Burmese Days.
The picture Orwell paints of the expat community in Burma--actually praising Dyer, is almost hard to believe. And yet, Orwell supposedly based the book on his real-life experiences in Burma, so...
From Burmese Days:
“…We’ve got to hang together and say, ‘We are the masters, and you beggars—’” Ellis pressed his small thumb down as through flattening a grub—“'you beggars keep your place!’”
“Hopeless, old chap,” said Westfield. “Quite hopeless. What can you do with all this red type tying your hands? Beggars of natives know the law better than we do. Insult you to your face and then run you in the moment you hit ’em. Can’t do anything unless you put your foot down firmly. And how can you, if they haven’t the guts to show fight?”
“Our burra sahib at Mandalay always said” put in Mrs Lackersteen, “that in the end we shall simply leave India. Young men will not come out here any longer to work all their lives for insults and ingratitude. We shall just go. When the natives come to us begging us to stay, we shall say, ‘No, you have had your chance, you wouldn’t take it. Very well, we shall leave you to govern yourselves.’ And then, what a lesson that will teach them.”
“It’s all this law and order that’s done for us,” said Westfield gloomily. The ruin of the Indian Empire through too much legality was a recurrent theme with Westfield. According to him, nothing save a full-sized rebellion, and the consequent reign of martial law, could save the Empire from decay. “All this paper-chewing and chit passing. Office babus are the real rulers of this country now. Our number’s up. Best thing we can do is to shut up shop and let ’em stew in their own juice.”
“I don’t agree, I simply don’t agree,” Ellis said. “We could put things right in a month if we chose. It only needs a pennyworth of pluck. Look at Amritsar. Look how they caved in after that. Dyer knew the stuff to give them. Poor old Dyer! That was a dirty job. Those cowards in England have got something to answer for.”
There was a kind of sigh from the others, the same sigh that a gathering of Roman Catholics will give at the mention of Bloody Mary. Even Mr. Macgregor, who detested bloodshed and martial law, shook his head at the name of Dyer.
“Ah, poor man! Sacrificed to the Paget M.P.s. Well, perhaps they will discover their mistake when it is too late.”
My old governor used to tell a story about that,” said Westfield. “There was an old havildar in a native regiment—someone asked him what’d happen if the British left India. The old chap said—.”
Flory pushed back his chair and stood up. It must not, it could not—no, it simply should not go on any longer! He must get out of this room quickly, before something happened inside his head and he began to smash the furniture and throw bottles at the pictures. Dull boozing witless porkers! Was it impossible that they could go on week after week, year after year, repeating word for word the same evil-minded drivel, like a parody of a fifth rate story in Blackwood’s? Would none of them ever think of anything new to say? Oh, what a place, what people! What a civilization is this of ours—this godless civilization founded on whisky, Blackwood’s and the ‘Bonzo’ pictures! God have mercy on us, for all of us are a part of it.”
March 23, 2017
When I lived in Cambodia, one of the things the expat crowd always rolled their eyes at was the phrase "the real Cambodia". It would come up in different manifestations. Like someone would say, "Unless you've been out to the countryside, you haven't seen the real Cambodia." Or backpackers would talk about how they wanted to see the "real Cambodia."
I had an American friend who was very good at mocking that phrase. "Just look at all these Cambodians here in Phnom Penh," he would say. "If only they knew they weren't living in the real Cambodia."
It was something that made me chuckle when Adela Quested made the same remark in Chapter 3. "I want to see the real India". And I love how the expats Ronny and Fielding mocked the remark.
It just goes to show that nothing has changed even after 90 years.
XXXX commented:
Haha, indeed we have the same thing in Vietnam don't we? "District 2/7 isn't the real/authentic Vietnam." I even found myself saying it when I first arrived. Amazing how quickly we become "resident experts" of a place we know so little about.
April 22, 2017
How's everyone coming with the book?
I have a confession to make, I finished the whole thing over a month ago on the 20 hour flight back to America.
But since that was a long time ago now, and since I was light-headed, nauseous, and sleep deprived on the airplane, it's all a bit fuzzy in my head now, so I'm currently re-reading it so as to have it fresh in my mind for Friday.
I'm also finding this study guide very useful for pulling out the themes of each chapter. Although be warned, it does contain spoilers. http://faculty.mu.edu.sa/public/uploads/1385403740.1816A%20Passage%20to%20India%20Analysis.pdf
April 28, 2017
Hey guys,
Excellent discussion today. I think we definitely got our money's worth out of that cafe. Enjoyed hearing everyone's insights.
If anyone's interested, pretty much everything I had to say came out of this PDF I linked to earlier. Unfortunately it turns out I have very little original thoughts of my own. (Also, I know when I said I'd been reading stuff online, I implied I was reading several things. but that was just a lie in order to make me look more widely read than I really was. Actually it all came from this one source). They've got a nice chapter by chapter analysis of the themes in each chapter, and at the end they've got 3 different critical essays by 3 different authors. http://faculty.mu.edu.sa/public/uploads/1385403740.1816A%20Passage%20to%20India%20Analysis.pdf
