I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings - Maya Angelou

   1969; 310 pages.  New Author?  : Yes.  Genres : Biographies & Memoirs; Banned Books; Civil Rights Movement; Non-Fiction.  Overall Rating: 9½*/10.

 

    When we think about the start of the Civil Rights movement in America, the 1950s will most likely come to mind.  Things like Martin Luther King Jr., Selma, bus boycotts, Rosa Parks, protest marches, and much more.

 

    But what was life like for Blacks in the years just before all that?  In the 1930s everyone struggled with the Great Depression, and in the 1940s, World War 2 saw over a million American soldiers either killed or wounded, including both blacks and whites. What was it like for black children growing up in those years?

 

    Also, were conditions different for blacks depending on what geographic area of the United States they were living in?  For instance, were things better in Missouri than in Mississippi?  Maybe being Black in California was better than both of those places.  If so, how much better?

 

    Maya Angelou, American memoirist, poet, and civil rights activist, was born in 1928, so grew up in the 1930s/40s. and lived in all those areas along the way.  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings recounts her turbulent experiences during those decades.

 

What’s To Like...

    I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is the first book in the 7-volume autobiographical series.  It details her childhood experiences starting when she was three years old and, along with her four-year-old brother Bailey, moved in with her grandmother due to the divorce of her parents.  The book ends with a momentous life-changing event in her life when she was sixteen, and presumably the sequel, Gather Together in my Name, continues from there.

 

    The 310 pages are divided up into 36 chapters, which averages out to 8+ pages/chapter.  There is heavy emphasis on Maya’s interactions with her family members, particularly her brother Bailey.  We also watch the child Maya struggle to come to grips with racism (be careful when going to “whitefolksville”), sexual assault (Maya was raped when she was eight years old), and self-reliance (she grew up in a world where circumstances were heavily stacked against her).

 

    Maya’s birth name was Marguerite Annie Johnson, and it was fascinating to learn how her first name morphed into Maya (Marguerite --> Margaret --> Mary --> Maya).  I presume the changing of her last name is due to marriage, but that doesn’t happen in this book. Religion plays a prominent part in Maya’s entire family, and along the way the reader accompanies her to a tent revival (I’ve been to a couple) and learn why the phrase “by the way” is considered blasphemous in some fundamentalist circles.  

 

    Maya’s teenage years were just as unsettled as her childhood, but the reader gets to watch Maya evolve from someone “ignorant of her ignorance” into someone “being aware of being aware”.  In a show of perseverance, Maya applies for, and is eventually hired as San Francisco’s first Negro streetcar conductor.  A short time later, she learns to drive a stick-shift car, with no advance training, at night, on a lonely stretch of road in Mexico, with her dad passed out in the back seat.  Which then leads to her getting stabbed by her dad’s girlfriend.

  

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.7*/5, based on 36,661 ratings and 4,245 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.30*/5, based on 555,423 ratings and 17,684 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Powhitetrash (n.) : someone so poor (and white) that they cannot afford the missing “o” and “r”.

Others: Siditty (adj.); Chifforobe (n.); Ordurous (adj).

 

Excerpts...

    San Franciscans would have sworn on the Golden Gate Bridge that racism was missing from the heart of their air-conditioned city.  But they would have been sadly mistaken.

    A story went the rounds about a San Franciscan white matron who refused to sit beside a Negro civilian on the streetcar, even after he made room for her on the seat.  Her explanation was that she would not sit beside a draft dodger who was a Negro as well.  She added that the least he could do was fight for his country the way her son was fighting on Iwo Jima.  The story said that the man pulled his body away from the window to show an armless sleeve.  He said quietly and with great dignity, “Then ask your son to look around for my arm, which I left over there.”  (loc. 2590)

 

    The Black female is assaulted in her tender years by all those common forces of nature at the same time that she is caught in the tripartite crossfire of masculine prejudice, white illogical hate, and Black lack of power.

    The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence.  It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.  (loc. 3284)

 

Kindle Details…

    The e-book version of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings sells for $7.99 at Amazon right now.  The other six books chronicling Maya Angelou’s life range in price from $5.99 to $13.99.  Maya Angelou was a prolific writer of poetry, plays, screenplays, memoirs, essays, children’s books, and cookbooks.  Most of her works are in the $3.99-$14.99 price range for the Kindle format.

 

Without willing it, I had gone from being ignorant of being ignorant to being aware of being aware.  (loc. 3268)

    For such a tough start to her life, there is a surprisingly small amount of profanity in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.  I noted just eight instances in the first 50% of the book, and most of those were the N-word racial epithet.  The sexual molestation is handled as tactfully as possible, and later on there is one roll-in-the-hay.  I caught only one typo in the whole e-book: staring/starring.

 

    The Wikipedia article mentions that some reviewers categorize I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings as “autobiographical fiction” but it also cites other reviewers (in the “Style and Genre” section) as fully meeting the requirements to be called an “Autobiography”.

 

    I have always suspected that any autobiography will be inherently slanted to some degree in the author’s favor.  For that matter, I think this happens even in most biographies.  If you’re an biography writer, and you want to get paid for your work by your subject, you’re naturally going to present the life you’re writing about in a favorable light as much as possible.

 

    For me, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings was a thoroughly captivating and heartfelt work.  I grew up in the Civil Rights era, but that was during the 1960s, not the 1940s/50s.  It was enlightening to read about the roots of the Civil Rights movement.  My only quibble is that I have to read six more books to learn the complete story of Maya Angelou’s life.

 

    9½ Stars.  One last thing.  I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings has been one of the most banned books in the US school system for many years.  Wikipedia’s article on the book devotes a whole section, titled “Censorship”, to the details and statistics of the bans.  It is worth your time.

The Testaments - Margaret Atwood

    2019; 415 pages.  Book 2 (out of 2) in the series “The Handmaid’s Tale”.  New Author? : No.  Genres : Dystopian Fiction; Banned Books.  Laurels: 2019 Booker Prize (winner); British Book Awards 2020 Fiction Book if the Year (shortlisted).  Overall Rating : 9½*/10.

 

    Meet Daisy.  She’s a young girl growing up in Eastern Canada.  Her mother and father own a second-hand clothing store, which does enough business to make ends meet.  Canada has a pretty enlightened view of women, unlike the fractured United States to the south, one part of which is now a theocracy called Gilead, right across the nearby border.  Daisy’s life is a happy one.

 

    Meet Agnes.  She lives in Gilead.  She has a mother, Tabitha, who loves her very much, and a father, Commander Kyle, who is more aloof.  But he’s a “Commander” which is a very prestigious position, and that carries over into Agnes at school, where all her (female) classmates want to be her friend.  Agnes’s life is a happy one.

 

    Meet Aunt Lydia.  She runs a place called Ardua Hall, which is a “Finishing School for Girls” in Gilead, close to where Agnes lives.  Aunt Lydia has a team of other Aunts under her, and is just about as powerful as any woman in Gilead is allowed to be.  Aunt Lydia’s life is a happy one, at least as long as nobody, male or female, discovers her little secrets.

 

    None of the three females know each other when the story opens.  But they will eventually meet up.  By which time none of them will be very happy anymore.

 

What’s To Like...

    The Testaments is Margaret Atwood’s sequel to her fantastic 1985 bestseller The Handmaid’s Tale, which I read for National Banned Books Week in 2014 and is reviewed here.  The book is written the first-person-POV, and switches among the three aforementioned protagonists in no particular order.

 

    If you’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale, you‘re acquainted with the dystopian conditions that Aunt Lydia and Agnes are subject to.  Nothing has changed in The Testaments, which takes place fifteen years later.  The same female hierarchies are in effect: Wives, Aunts, Marthas, and Handmaids.  But here the Aunts are in the spotlight, not the Handmaids.

 

    I liked that the “Canada versus Gilead” contrast of how women are treated is examined here.  Margaret Atwood is Canadian by birth, and her national pride shows through, not just on the feminism issue, but also on things like global warming and climate science.  At one point Daisy goes to an anti-Gilead rally, and I chuckled at a placard there which read “GILEAD WANTS US TO FRY!”

 

    Unsurprisingly, the book is written in “Canadian”, which is kind of a hybrid between British English and American English.  So you meet the usual weird spellings such as favourite, grey, and moulded (plus an article of clothing called a “waterproof”), but also more familiar ones like realized and judgment.

 

    It was fun to learn a bit more about the storyline’s “history”.  Gilead is primarily centered in the New England area of the US.  Texas has broken off to become an independent republic, and California seems to have done likewise.  There was a conflict dubbed the “War on Manhattan” a few years earlier, and Gilead is currently struggling to maintain sufficient manpower and money to wage war somewhere along its borders.

 

    Easter traditions in Gilead have been scaled back, in contrast to other parts of the world where Easter’s pagan roots are now rightfully celebrated.  That November holiday is now two words: “Thanks Giving”, and lest you think that only women are treated brutally in Gilead, you are invited to watch the next Particicution.

 

    There are 71 chapters in The Testaments, plus an Epilogue; which means the chapters average just under six pages in length.  Although I’ve read The Handmaid’s Tale, and highly recommend it, I don’t think you necessarily have to read it before tackling The Testaments.

 

Ratings…
    Amazon:  4.6/5 based on 30,455 ratings and 3,606 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.20/5 based on 304,150 ratings and 28.261 reviews.

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Liminal Space (n.) : physical spaces between one destination and the next.

 

Things That Sound Dirty But Aren’t…

    “Not for nothing do we at Ardua Hall say “Pen Is Envy”.  (pg. 140)

 

Excerpts...

    We weren’t supposed to have best friends.  It wasn’t nice to form closed circles, said Aunt Estée: it made other girls feel left out, and we should all be helping one another be the most perfect girls we could be.

    Aunt Vidala said that best friends led to whispering and plotting and keeping secrets, and plotting and secrets led to disobedience to God, and disobedience led to rebellion, and girls who were rebellious became women who were rebellious, and a rebellious woman was even worse than a rebellious man because rebellious men became traitors, but rebellious women became adulteresses.  (pg. 24)

 

    “You had an abortion,” he said.  So they’d been rifling through some records.

    “Only one,” I said fatuously.  “I was very young.”

    He made a disapproving grunt.  “You are aware that this form of person-murder is now punishable by death?  The law is retroactive.”

    “I was not aware of that.”  I felt cold.  But if they were going to shoot me, why the interrogation?

    “One marriage?”

    “A brief one.  It was a mistake.”

    “Divorce is now a crime,” he said.  I said nothing.  (pg. 171)

 

The ability to concoct plausible lies is a talent not to be underestimated.  (pg. 387)

    The nitpicks in The Testaments are few.  Some readers found the switching around among three narrators confusing, but in the hardcover version I read, there’s an icon at the start of each chapter that identifies who’s writing it.

 

    The cussing is sparse, only 12 instances in the first half of the book, although it seemed to pick up a bit in the second half, and there were one or two references to male genitalia and female fertility cycles.

 

    For me, the ending was adequate, but not spectacular.  The plan hatched by the good guys is risky, but it goes off pretty much as planned.  The biggest threat turns out to be Mother Nature, not those in power in Gilead.  The Epilogue, consisting of the historical notes from a Symposium held even further in the future and drawing conclusions from examining the records about the events in the book, didn’t impress me.

 

    What would impress me much more is an announcement that a third book in this series was in the works, but I don't think that's going to happen.

 

    9½ Stars.  Let’s not get bogged down in the nitpicking.  The Testaments is a fantastic book, every bit as good, and frightening, as The Handmaid’s Tale.  We live in a nation that has just declared abortion to be a crime, and there are proposals to throw doctors who perform them, and women who get them, into jail.

 

    We are not far from finding ourselves in a Gilead theocracy.

All Quiet on the Western Front - Erich Maria Remarque

   1929; 291 pages.  Book 1 (of 2) in the “All Quiet on the Western Front” series.  New Author? : Yes.  Genres : Highbrow Lit; German Literature; War Fiction; World War 1.  Overall Rating : 9*/10.

 

    World War One.  The Great War.  The War to end all Wars.  What image comes into your head when you hear those phrases?

 

    Probably you envision American (or British, or French) soldiers, huddled in a long trench replete with pools of stagnant water, all wearing helmets and looking up at the camera with miserable eyes.

 

    Alternatively, you might picture those soldiers climbing out of the trench, rifles in hand, all wearing gas masks (there was no griping about constitutional rights back then), preparing to throw themselves across a mine-laden no-man’s land, knowing that many of them are about to die, and carried out to gain a couple of yards of meaningless muck.  Could life get any worse than this?

 

    Well, yeah.  You could be a German soldier, in a sopping-wet trench, with a gas mask on, in the same miserable conditions, but outmanned and outgunned, and having to face all those charging doughboys.

 

What’s To Like...

    When it was published in 1929, All Quiet on the Western Front was an immediate hit in the United States despite the fact that the war had been over for more than a decade.  It was subsequently made into a movie twice, once in 1930, then again in 1979.  Although fictional, the book is based upon the author’s own front-line war experiences in 1917.

 

    The story is told in the first-person POV, that of 19-year-old Paul Baumer, who, along with his fellow German soldiers tries to cope with horrendous battle conditions, heavy casualties, incompetent officers, well-meaning but clueless civilians, and the required blind loyalty to a futile cause.

 

    Despite being a translation (by A.W. Wheen) from the original German, the writing is powerful.  You can feel the terror and despair when the German lines are bombed or shelled: there is no escape from it; you just hope that the explosives don’t happen to fall on you.  Your life is in the hands of a few trusted comrades; when one of them dies it is crushing.  Duties such as guarding Russian prisoners-of-war are gut-wrenching because you can empathize more with those fellow sufferers than with your own military and political leaders. Even getting to go back to your hometown on leave doesn’t relieve the stress (PTSD hadn’t been discovered yet) because your family and friends cannot possibly  understands what you’re going through and you desperately don't want to talk about it.  

 

    The missions Paul goes on further emphasize his wretched situation.  Laying down barbed wire is a life-threatening affair, since it by definition means you’re on the front lines.  Going on patrol means risking getting separated from your comrades, being stuck in a shell hole in no man’s land, and praying that the next person that drops into your tiny shelter is a friend, not an enemy.  Keep your gas mask with you at all times, learn how to quickly yet properly put it on, and for heaven's sake, don't take it off too soon.

 

     There are a few blessed moments of brightness.  At one point Paul and his comrades manage to find some female companionship.  It involves considerable risk and some bartering (civilians trapped on the front lines are starving too), but provides a brief but much-needed relief from the fighting.  At another point, Paul, wounded and confined to a stretcher, is embarrassed as he tries to find a way to tell a cute nurse that he needs to take a leak.  I had to google an obscure reference to a salty quote from Goethe’s “Gotz von Berlichingen”, but it was surprisingly easy to find and made me chuckle.

 

     The ending is easy to anticipate, but it nevertheless left a lump in my throat.  Unfortunately for Paul, there aren’t any plot twists, and the final resolution almost brings a sense of relief.  The title reference doesn’t occur until the final page, and isn’t a direct translation: in German, it is “Im westen nichts neues” which literally means “Nothing new in the west”.  All Quiet on the Western Front is a standalone novel, although I learned there is a sequel.

 

Excerpts...

    Morning is come.  The explosions of mines mingles with the gun-fire.  That is the most dementing convulsion of all.  The whole region where they go up becomes one grave.

    The reliefs go out, the observers stagger in, covered with dirt, and trembling.  One lies down in silence in the corner and eats, the other, a reservist-reinforcement, sobs; twice he had been flung over the parapet by the blast of the explosions without getting any more than shell-shock.

    The recruits are eyeing him.  We must watch them, these things are catching, already some lips begin to quiver.  (pg. 105)

 

    “Almost all of us are simple folk.  And in France, too, the majority of men are labourers, workmen, or poor clerks.  Now just why would a French blacksmith or a French shoemaker want to attack us?  No, it is merely the rulers.  I had never seen a Frenchman before I came here, and it will be just the same with the majority of Frenchmen as regards us.  They weren’t asked about it any more than we were.”

    “Then what exactly is the war for?” asks Tjaden.

    Kat shrugs his shoulders.  “There must be some people to whom the war is useful.”

    “Well, I’m not one of them,” grins Tjaden.  (pg. 207)

 

Kewlest New Word ...

Importune (v.) : to harass (someone) persistently for or to do something.

Others: Perambulator (n., British); Dixie (n.); Baldaquin (n.).

 

Ratings…
    Amazon: 4.7*/5, based on 6,049 ratings and 1,996 reviews.

    Goodreads: 4.01*/5, based on 386,474 ratings and 12,221 reviews.

 

“We are losing the war because we can salute too well.”  (pg. 39)

    There’s not much to quibble about in All Quiet on the Western Front.  The tone is dark and grim, yet has very few cusswords: I counted only four “damns” through the first quarter of the book, proving once again that great writers can get their message across with only a paucity of vulgarity.

 

    The translation is from German to "English", not  "American", so I occasionally encountered weird things like bathing-drawers, lorries, nerve-centres, and a carcase.  Yet distances were given in miles, not metres, so maybe the translation was into Canadian.

    Also, please be advised that horses played a major role in World War One, and inevitably suffered major casualties as well. 

 

    All Quiet on the Western Front conveys a sobering message about the horrors of war and the need to resort to it only as a last resort.  The fact that we witness this through the eyes of an enemy soldier just makes it all that more powerful.  It is easy to see why this book became an instant classic.

 

    9 Stars.  Reading All Quiet on the Western Front enables me to reach my yearly goals for reading both “Highbrow Literature” (at least one per annum) and “Banned Books” (also at least one per annum).  The latter one is a bit of a stretch, since the countries that banned it were Nazi Germany (for the rather obvious reason of portraying the Fatherland in a bad light); and Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Italy (all of which objected to its “anti-war” theme).  AFAIK, it was not banned here in the US.

We - Yevgeny Zamyatin

   1921; 252 (includes a 20-page Introduction).  New Author? : Yes.  Genre : Dystopian Fiction; Russian Lit; Banned Books.  Laurels : Prometheus Award, “Hall of Fame” category (1994).  Overall Rating : 8½*/10.

    It took them a millennium, along with a 200-year war that wiped out most of humanity, but civilization finally achieved the perfect society.

    There is the great Green Wall to keep the local citizens from being corrupted by nature.  Vices such as cigarettes, booze, flirting, and impersonal (and unauthorized) sex are all taboo and those caught engaging in such habits face severe punishment.  One can have multiple lovers (because, after all, everyone is equal to everyone else), but you have to register your desired partners with the authorities, and the state assigns you the nights and hours to come together.

     All citizens are required to be happy and productive, and this is primarily a fusing of perfect harmony and absolute conformity.  There is no place in society for anyone with imagination.  Every citizen has a uniform to wear, and all are assigned identifying numbers, not names.  Marching in step with other happy citizens as often as possible is strongly encouraged.

    Everyone lives in glass houses or apartments, so The Benefactor and his “Guardians” can closely monitor all the aspects of one’s daily life.  The only exception is the one hour for authorized love-making, when one is allowed to close the curtains for the specified time and not a minute longer.

    We are all so lucky to live in paradise!  And now we’re about to launch a spaceship, so that we can bring such exquisite happiness to other worlds in the universe.

What’s To Like...

    Written in 1921, We is one of the founding dystopian novels, although it is by no means the first.  Wikipedia gives that honor to Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, published in 1726, and which I never regarded as dystopian.  I may have to reread that one.  Wikipedia lists another 10 or so dystopian novels that preceded We, the most famous of which is H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, published in 1895.

    Our main protagonist is D-503, who is also the chief engineer for the rocket ship project.  The reader meets less than 10 other characters, the most notable of which are O-90 (D-503’s lover), I-330, the woman who causes him to stray from his path of happiness, and of course, The Benefactor.  O-90 is a sweet and loving character, but is forbidden to bear children because she is isn't tall enough.  Genetic optimizing, and all that.

     The book is structured as a journal that D-503 keeps.  He promises to record all of his thoughts and feelings as he prepares to embark upon the great spaceflight, not realizing that his words will betray him once he starts to deviate from the collective thinking.   It is therefore told entirely from a first-person POV.  D-503 records 40 entries in all, so these “chapters” average out to be about 5 or 6 pages in length.

    I was pleasantly surprised by how powerful the writing was, particularly since the book’s original language was Russian, and something is always lost in translation.  Hats off to the translator, Mirra Ginsberg; this could not have been an easy task.  D-503 is convinced that every human situation can be examined, explained, and solved by applying mathematics to it (he’s quite enamored by the square root of minus one), and I’m sure this was a challenge to render into English.

    I was impressed by how closely a novel that was written in 1921 visualizes how a space flight will be carried out.  I also liked the brief nod to synesthesia on page 220 (“Laughter can be of different colors”), and the operation that can rid you of imagination.  The public execution carried out on pages 40-49 chilled me to the bone.  The “Hymn of the One State” reminded me of both the mandatory reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance when I was in grade school, and the Walmart company song that its employees used to have to sing at the start of each day back in the 1980’s.

    The ending is goosebumpily satisfying, although I would also add that it is the plot resolution utilized by a majority of the dystopian novels I’ve read.  This is a standalone novel, although a number of questions remain about “what happens next” at the book’s end.  I don’t believe a sequel was ever penned, either by Yevgeny Zamyatin or anyone else.

Kewlest New Word ...

Infusoria (n., plural) : minute aquatic, single-celled organisms.

Others : Plashed (v.); Antipodally (adv.).

Excerpts...

    The scissor-lips gleamed, smiled.

    “You’re in a bad way!  Apparently, you have developed a soul.”

    A soul?  That strange, ancient, long-forgotten word.  We sometimes use the words “soul-stirring”, “soulless”, but “soul”…?

    “Is it … very dangerous?” I muttered.

    “Incurable,” the scissors snapped.  (pg. 89)

    “My dear – you are a mathematician.  More – you are a philosopher, a mathematical philosopher.  Well then: name me the final number.”

    “What do you mean?  I … I don’t understand: what final number?”

    “Well, the final, the ultimate, the largest.”

    “But that’s preposterous!  If the number of numbers is infinite, how can there be a final number?”

    “Then how can there be a final revolution?  There is no final one: revolutions are infinite.  The final one is for children: children are frightened by infinity, and it’s important that children sleep peacefully at night.”  (pg. 174)

Humility is a virtue, and pride is a vice; “We” is from God, and “I” from the devil.  (pg. 128 )

     The book opens with a 20-page introduction, which gives both a short biography of Yevgeny Zamyatin (yay!) and a couple of spoilers (boo!).  I recommend taking the time to read this section, but if that’s not your reading style, then the Wikipedia bio of the author is very similar in content.

    Yevgeny Zamyatin (1884-1937) was a true revolutionary idealist, protesting and running afoul of first the Czarist regime, then the Bolshevik bigwigs when that revolution failed to live up to its promises.

    We was banned by the Communists almost as soon as it came out, and Zamyatin was essentially living under a death sentence in 1931 when somehow Stalin was persuaded to let him go into exile instead of executing him or deporting him to Siberia.

    Zamyatin relocated in France, where loneliness and privation eventually led to his death from a heart attack in 1937.  Only a handful of friends showed up for his funeral.  Perhaps Stalin “won” after all, since it is better to turn dissidents into nobodies than into martyrs.

    8½ Stars.  We was a short-but-daunting read for me, which is exactly what I was expecting.  I don’t think I can count it as a “highbrow” novel, but the fact that I read a book banned by the Soviet authorities for many years somehow makes me feel quite proud.