Red silk Sari

"A Wife's Story," by Bharati Mukherjee

            “A Wife’s Story,” by Bharati Mukherjee is a combination of several things.  First, it details the experience of an Indian woman and her experiences in Manhattan.  She has left her home “to get a Ph.D. in special ed.” here in America.  She has left her home, her husband, and the way of life that she knew to “make something of [her] life.”  Second, it tells of her relationship with her husband.  She has an arranged marriage, “a traditional Hindu marriage,” stating in the story that “My parents, with the help of a marriage broker, who was my mother’s cousin, picked out a groom.  All I had to do was get to know his taste in food.”  The narrator’s husband visits her from Ahmadabad, an industry city in India.  The majority of the second half of the story details the husband’s journey with his wife and a tour group, sightseeing around Manhattan.  The narrator learns a lot about her husband’s taste in everything from clothes to food as they shop in the local stores; something they never did together back home.  Third, the story details the narrator’s opinion of David Mamet’s Glengarry, Glen Ross.  The narrator does not find Mamet’s comments about “Patels” to be the least bit funny.  She, being Indian herself, is offended by the derogatory stereotypes made towards Indian’s, and says that she will “write David Mamet;” presumably to inform him of how she feels about these lines in the play.  She states that:

            “I don’t hate Mamet.  It’s the tyranny of the American dream that scares me.  First, you don’t exist.  Then you’re invisible.  Then you’re funny.  Then you’re disgusting.  Insult, my American friends will tell me, is a kind of acceptance.  No instant dignity here.  A play like this, back home, would cause riots.  Communal, racist, and antisocial.  The actors wouldn’t make it off stage.  This play, and all these awful feelings, would be safely locked up.”

This passage definitely gives the reader a lot to think about in terms of how Americans accept insults as a way of life, and ignore the negative affects they can have on individuals.

Vocabulary:

Red silk Sari - a garment consisting of a length of cotton or silk elaborately draped around the body, traditionally worn by women from South Asia.

Conspicuous - standing out so as to be clearly visible.

Glengarry, Glen Ross, by David Mamet

            Glengarry, Glen Ross, by David Mamet is a very short play that is hard to follow all the way through.  The characters are salesmen of real-estate, who’s lives seemingly revolve solely around “leads” that provide information to make sales.  As the reader finds out in the first act of this play, the leads are in two main categories, good leads and bad leads.  The good leads go to the more successful salesmen, while the other leads witch are described as useless are given to the less successful salesmen.  The plot follows the plan and execution of a robbery in which the leads are stolen from the business and sold to a rival business.  In the final act of the play, the office is broken into and the leads are stolen.  There is a detective in the office, questioning the employees.  Shelly Levene ends up getting caught by John Williamson (a fellow salesman) who notices something Shelly says, that gives him away.  As Shelly try’s to defend himself, he says: “(pause) But it [stealing] taught me something. What it taught me, that you've got to get out there. Big deal. So I wasn't cut out to be a thief. I was cut out to be a salesman. And now I'm back, and I got my balls back...and, you know, John, you have the advantage on me now. Whatever it takes to make it right, we'll make it right. We're going to make it right.”

The characters all seem the same, all salesmen whose lives revolve solely around their work.  The lines of the play are often hard to read because they are written as to be spoken by different people, and at times the lines overlap one another like so often conversations (mainly arguments, as it is in the play) do.  The language was very fowl making the reading undesirable to a reader who doesn’t approve of such language being used so heavily.  I was not a big fan of this play.

Vocabulary

Meshugaas – mad or idiotic ideas or behavior

Skydiving!!

"The Same River Twice" by Chris Offutt

“The Same River Twice” by Chris Offutt is a memoir of Offutt’s own experiences throughout his life.  The stories, or actual events more or less, are interesting, serious at times, and hilarious during others.  His imagery, and the emotions that he is able to convey to the reader are quite admirable.  I was especially struck by the passage where Offutt decides to go skydiving:

“Ten million years of genetic conditioning screamed in outrage and protest.  Every molecule in me forbade the jump.  I gripped a handle beside the door and closed my eyes.  The plane was shaking and so were my knees, but I was too scared to be a coward.  I leaned through the hole.  Open fields flashed below.  Free-fall lasted all of four seconds, but they were long ones, rushing to earth at thirty-two feet per second.  I yelled and the rush of air kept my mouth wide.  The chute jerked open with a hard thump, and I squeezed the ropes as tightly as possible.  There was a brief period of intense joy in which I realized that the only way to increase the feeling was to jump from higher up.  Briefly I wished we had.  I was already half way down, and instead of wafting like a leaf, I seemed to be dropping at an incredible rate.  Some huge mechanism was pushing the land rapidly in my direction.”

The memoir alternates between two very distinct points in the author’s life.  One in which he is very adventurous, roaming the country (which he compares to a life like Daniel Boone’s) and finding jobs when he needs the money, at one point he is a dishwasher, and at another he is chipping mortar off of bricks.  The other is a point where Offutt is about to become a father and is worried about his qualifications to be the role model of a child.  As a reader, I find the first point in the authors life much more exciting, and much more relatable.  As I make my way through the memoir, I am captivated by Chris Offutt’s humor through out his tale.  My favorite quote thus far is: “hillbilly was what the people in town called us at home; that and worse—hick, ridgerunner, redneck, inbred ingrate, and my personal favorite, pigfucker.  My mother is my sixth cousin.  My brother and sister are also my cousins but nobody in my family ever seduced a hog.”  I literally laughed out loud when I read this line.

Aficionado (pg 63) - a person who is very knowledgeable and enthusiastic about an activity, subject, or pastime.

Soliders "Humping" In Vietnam

Lieutenant Jimmy Cross as I pictured him!

"The Things They Carried," By Tim O'Brien

“The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien, is a very long and well-described list as opposed to a short story.  To summarize the story would be to say that it describes the things soldiers in Vietnam carried with them as they marched, or “humped” through out the war.  The things they carried were not just the physical items one might expect a soldier to carry, such as their weapons and helmets as was S.O.P. (Standard Operating Procedure), but also, “they carried all the emotional baggage of men who might die. Grief, terror, love, longing – these were intangibles, but the intangibles had their own mass and specific gravity, they had tangible weight.  They carried shameful memories. They carried the common secret of cowardice barely restrained, the instinct to run or freeze or hide, and in many respects this was the heaviest burden of all, for it could never be put down, it required perfect balance and perfect posture.”  We see the emotional side of First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross mainly; he is our window into the personal life of the soldiers, and we as readers feel his emotion.  Jimmy “carried letters from a girl named Martha” whom he was sweet on.  He claims to have loved Martha, even though knows that she is not in love with him.  Jimmy often finds himself distracted my Martha and her letters.  He blames himself when one of his soldiers is killed:

“He felt shame. He hated himself. He had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war.”

I found this statement very ironic because in one of Martha’s letters to Jimmy she sent a stone she found on the beach, a stone which Jimmy carried in his mouth as he was marching and something he realistically could have swallowed!

The story follows a pattern of sections that alternate between emotional and physical burdens, but one thing stays constant, as the title implies, they are always caring something. “They carried like freight trains; they carried it on their backs and shoulders - and for all the ambiguities of Vietnam, all the mysteries and unknowns, there was at least the single abiding certainty that they would never be at a loss for things to carry.”

Chapter 6 of The Crying of Lot 49

            Chapter six of The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon is the final chapter in the novel, and like most final chapters wraps up the story, or at least tries too.  It is in this chapter that the reader learns that the title is related to the auctioning off of Pierce Inverarity’s stamp collection (it is revealed in the last few pages that “an auctioneer ‘cries’ a sale,” thus the title can be interpreted as “the selling of Lot 49;” lot 49 being Pierce Inverarity’s stamp collection at the auction).  We also learn in the final chapter that the acronym “W.A.S.T.E” stands for “We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire,” as it is presented in an old American stamp stumbled a pun by Genghis Cohen (a stamp collector who earlier in the novel discovers some of the stamps in Pierce’s collection are forgeries with intentional mistakes or things added such as the muted horn).  Tristero, the subject of Oedipa’s obsession, is somewhat explained in this chapter.  Its history is long, and mingled with assumptions and educated guesses due to the fact that it was a secrete society of mail carriers which migrated to America from Europe.  As Oedipa searches and searches for information on the society, she finds that all of the places and people associated with Tristero are connected to Pierce Inverarity.  Oedipa feels completely isolated:

              “They are stripping away from me, she said subvocally – feeling like a fluttering curtain in a very high window, moving up to then out over the abyss – they are stripping away, one by one, my men.  My shrink, pursued by Israelis, had gone mad; my husband, on LSD, gropes like a child further and further into the rooms and endless rooms of the elaborate candy house of himself and away, hopelessly away, from what has passed, I was hoping forever, for love; my one extra marital fella has eloped with a depraved 15-year-old; my best guide back to the Trystero has taken a Brody.  Where am I?”

            This passage, early in chapter 6, really describes Oedipa’s depressed, lonely feeling.  The reader perceives Oedipa’s quest as hopeless.  It is this feeling of unresolved hopelessness that drives me as a reader to dislike this book.  I wanted answers as a reader; I wanted to know more about Tristero.  Was it all a hoax?  Or was there really a secrete society of mail carriers?  Was Pierce Inverarity the ringleader of this underground cult?  And the burning question as to why Pierce assigned his now married, ex-girl-friend, to be the executor of his will, is still unanswered.