This is going to turn into a rambling mess of me talking about what I think of these books, but this is seriously one of the best reading lists I’ve ever had for a class, and would recommend any of these books to anyone even slightly interested…
Jhumpa Lahiri The Interpreter of Maladies
- A collection of short stories about various characters who are from India, in India, returning to India, etc. …It was a great start to the class because it has a bunch of perspectives that illuminate questions about maintaining connection with the old home land and why that connection is important, establishing a bond with a new place and the identity that comes along with that, building relationships within and between immigrants, communicating and understanding cultural differences and why this understanding is crucial.
Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie Half of a Yellow Sun
- Adichie’s most recent novel that follows a few different characters through the Biafran War in Nigeria. The characters are all very different, and all very strongly tied together — Ugwu, a ‘country boy’ who is working in the house of Odenigbo, wants to be educated, and was really one of my favorite characters all semester; Olanna, Odenigbo’s lover/partner/wife who comes from an upper-class oil-controlling family, and has to learn to take on a maternal role in times when it is most needed and yet most difficult; and Richard, a white reporter from England who falls in love with Olanna’s sister Kainene and, at times, seems to have the strongest Biafran voice and at others is clearly the voice of the colonizer.
- I’m not sure if I can compare it to her other novel, Purple Hibiscus, which is also wonderful, because they just feel so different to me.
- Adichie came to BU this semester and although I couldn’t go, everyone who went said she was spectacular in so many ways.
- I read most of this on the plane to Seattle, and it helped the flight zoom by. I’m usually not so easily distracted from over-analyzing every tiny sound the plane makes and convincing myself I’m about to plummet to a fiery death. Oh, the miracle of fictionalized accounts of civil turmoil!
Shyam Selvadurai Funny Boy
- A collection of stories surrounding Arjie, a young boy in Sri Lanka trying to figure out where he stands in his family and his country. I read it as a novel, because the stories (I think there are 8 of them?)tie together and really illustrate how a young person can struggle to negotiate within a country in the middle of cultural struggle (Arjie’s family is Tamil…and although I didn’t have a clue about political stuff in Sri Lanka, the novel makes a pretty clear presentation of it, without ‘teaching’ you about it) and still keep his individual identity central to his development.
Andrew McGahan The White Earth
- This was the book I did for the class presentation and my final paper, so I’m sort of sick of thinking about it, but I loved it.
- One of the blurbs on the book compares it to Great Expectations in Australia…which is interesting, but doesn’t follow through on every level, so I don’t like it. I like things to match up nicely and completely, and it just doesn’t happen.
- William watches his father burn in a farm accident, is completely disconnected from his mother. They move to his distant uncle’s farm (John McIvor), Kuran Station, and William eventually learns he is being groomed to inherit the farm. You also get his uncle’s back-story and sympathize with him, although not quite as much as he would like, I’m sure…he’s sorta nuts (if you read Steinbeck’s To A God Unknown, which is also great…John is a lot like the main character in that novel). We get introduced to a lot of political issues….mostly the controversy of Native Title legislation, which has to do with returning land to aboriginal people who were forced to leave how-ever-many generations ago. All through this, William is smelling rotting flesh constantly inside his head that no one else can smell and he is juggling at least 4 different perspectives on history, inheritance, and politics and has to figure out how to create his own understanding of the past.
- It’s great, complicated, tied into Diaspora in some random and unexpected ways, but really gets going about 100 pages in or so…so if you decide to read it, stick with it through the first few chapters…it eventually gets really good.
Shauna Singh Baldwin What the Body Remembers
- A lot of people in class thought this was too heavy and not wonderful. I loved it.
- Roop, a Sikh girl, is married off to Sardarji, who is already married to Satya, who has failed to get pregnant. There are so many issues going on, I’m not going to even begin with them. But the main action of the story takes place during the partition of India and Pakistan. Political, religious, gender, class issues all swirl around Roop while she is constantly returning to her personal questions and development, and it was a novel that I could barely put down. While some of the other novels in the class had lighter tones and flew by quicker, I felt like the many ideas being pulled out of this novel made it so satisfying and delicious.
Kiran Desai The Inheritance of Loss
- This is one of the novels that people liked a lot…most of the class wrote about it for the final paper. I really enjoyed it, although I didn’t think we did enough with it in class. In Kalimpong, in the Himalayan Mountains, we have Sai, who is orphaned and living with her grandfather, who is so clearly and cripplingly westernized that it is hard to feel any compassion towards him, even after you know his back story. They also live with the cook, whose son Biju is living in NY, moving from restaurant kitchen to restaurant kitchen trying to make any kind of living. In Kalimpong, Sai falls in love with her tutor Gyan, and as political trouble tears at the area, their relationship is tested as well, and Desai does a really great job of putting the personal relationships between the many characters (including a lot of secondary characters) and the inter/intra-national issues and breaking of boundaries.
Edwidge Danticat The Dew Breaker
- This novel/short-story collection/whatever was so stunning…I meant to sit down and read the 3 stories assigned for the first class section…I read the whole thing instead. There are three stories that fall at the beginning, middle, and end of the collection and they focus on the title character, the “Dew Breaker”…he is a brutal prison guard under Papa Doc in Haiti who eventually comes to America with his wife and they have a daughter named Ka, who is an artist. The first story is the most recent of the three, when Ka learns the truth (or at least the beginning of the truth) about her father’s past…and it isn’t until the final story of the collection that we get to find out the rest of the information. The 6 stories that make up the rest of the novel are tangentially related to the Dew Breaker and to characters in other stories. For example, the DB and his wife rent their basement out to three guys…one of these guys is the main character in a story, a secondary/absent character in another story…another one of the guys is the focus of a story that takes him back to Haiti, where the Dew Breaker appears in another really powerful way… it continues so that by the time you finish the novel you really want to go back and read it again to find every connection you can.
Helena María Viramontes Under the Feet of Jesus
- Something about this one felt disjointed from the rest of the reading list, but it was still really beautiful and a quick, enjoyable read. In the novel, we follow a Mexican-American farm-working family as they try to survive in this clearly nomadic, constantly-threatened lifestyle. They also cross paths with a pair of cousins, Alejo and Gumicendo. Alejo and the oldest daughter from the family, Estrella, form a passionate bond, and when Alejo’s life is threatened, issues of relationships, family bonds, pesticide use, health care, immigrant life, poverty, and individual identity and freedom are highlighted in this really poetic language. The group that did the presentation on this novel gave us bits of a phone interview that they did with Viramontes, and that was really one of the best parts of their presentation, because she has a LOT to say, and she’s not afraid to say it. She is really well-informed and emphasizes the choices she made in the creation of her fiction in a way that helps you understand the novel on a completely new level…she also teaches a creative writing class at Cornell that has an amazing syllabus.
Anyway, read them…they’re spectacular 
