Dear Reader,
I never witnessed my grandmothers interacting. I don’t think my grandmothers were ever in the same time zone together or on the same continent. However, they succeeded in presenting a united front on some important principles. Few people were entitled to privacy, and few stories could do without some embellishment. On a quiet day, the wrong gaze was the source of years of scandal. Please tell the village.
This is much more than a childhood trying to stay on a narrow path of behavior acceptable to both the fiercely competitive women from rural Ohio and the crossword-puzzle-solving Bey Luchs in their artisan caftans. may need to accept that So I was always relieved when others were the target of surveillance. And I had to admit. Even if I didn’t quite know what “Jezebel” meant (in any language), other people’s problems became great entertainment.
I’m still vulnerable to hearsay, social shock, and ill-fated marriages, so naturally my bookshelves are never short of them. Here are two novels that offer generous support in settings as wildly different as when I pulled my grandmother away.
—Jumana Khatib
“Beauty is a wound” By Eka Kurniawan. Translated by Annie Tucker.
Fiction, 2002 (translated 2015)
Seeing someone get exactly what they want rarely makes for great fiction. But how often do you come across someone like Dewi Ayu, the most beautiful prostitute in the fictional Indonesian city of Harimunda, who can rise from the dead for the first time in 21 years?
Her reanimation is (literally) explosive, with tombstones flying and sheep bleating echoing down the hills. But she herself was fairly calm, and to check on her youngest daughter, whom she gave birth to just before her death, she untied the knots of her burial cloth and trotted home. I’m on my way home
While pregnant with the child, Dewi Ayu prayed that the child would be unimaginably ugly. Her three older daughters, all beautiful, “ran away from home as soon as they learned how to unbutton a man’s fries.”.Her wish came true. Her child was born a monster with ears like pot handles, a nose like an outlet, and an overall terrifying appearance, so few people dared stop by the house.
Dewi Ayu couldn’t be more proud to see that child named Beauty grow up to be ugly.
Dewi Ayu’s personal history nicely depicts the history of Indonesia, from Dutch colonization to World War II to independence. There are fantastical elements throughout, lots of evocative writing about bodily functions and excrement, and giving birth to a charred-looking child is not the beginning. And it’s very funny. A soldier in a brothel was told, “Here, have sex as if you were in your own home.” Only my mother and my old grandmother are at home. ”
Kindly read: Nagging Elders, Postcolonial Theory, George Sanders
Available from: new direction
“wedding,” by Dorothy West
Fiction, 1995
A writer and editor, West was known as Harlem Renaissance author “The Kid,” or, as she put it, “The Last Leaf on the Tree.”
Born into an upper-middle-class black family in Boston, she emerged on the 1920s Harlem cultural scene after placing second in a story contest. (She married Zora Neale Hurston, and the two would later share an apartment.)
By the 1940s, however, she lived on Martha’s Vineyard year-round and drew on her own experiences in her novels. Her debut novel, The Living Is Easy, satirizes Massachusetts’ black elite, portraying an outsider trying to secure her future in Massachusetts. Forty-seven years later, West published her only novel, The Wedding, which, improbably, became a bestseller dedicated to the memory of her editor Jackie Onassis. It depicts the black community of the Vineyard in the 1950s, where Shelby, one of the most beautiful and promising young women there, prepares to marry.
It should be a happy occasion. Shelby chose a wealthy professional with an acceptable background. The problem is that Shelby’s fiancée is a jazz musician. And he’s white.
One family member who is happy about the arrangement is Graham, who hopes that Shelby will marry a white man to restore her lineage. And it goes without saying that another outsider, a wealthy black cabinetmaker named Lute, also has her eye on Shelby.
Despite all the narrative’s questions about the interplay of race and class, and how family obligations can trump individual desires, West’s position is clear. “Color was a false distinction,” she wrote. “Love was not.”
Kindly read: Gossip, martini promises, and a complicated family tree
Available from: anchor
Why not…
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Immerse yourself in Clarice Lispector’s Chronicathe Impressionist personal column she published in Jornal do Brasil, won her a devoted readership – reportedly a Lispector’s House with an octopus to cook dinner dishes. Does that include one of the fans who showed up at
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Solve crimes in Sicily with a rule-bending, power-hating detective (who also likes octopuses).
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As Dahlia Sofer’s protagonist reflects on her fall from Iranian revolutionary idealist to government technocrat and lugs her father’s ashes in an empty mint box, does she ride a shotgun?
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