So far this trip, I’ve read The Divide by Matt Taibbi, Folktales of Bhutan by Kunzang Choden, The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, and The Mission Song by John Le Carre. The first three are excellent in their own way, and Mission Song is kind of terrible.
The Divide’s main premise is that the US vastly overpunishes crimes of the underclass, and vastly underpunishes crimes of the overclass. Taibbi takes care to couch his analysis more in class than race, while acknowledging the strong racial component of the issue. It’s harder to find evidence of sneakily-conducted insider trading and there’s a lot less political and other types of pushback from poor offenders, so there’s strong evidence of a two-tiered justice system. It's a pretty breezy read for such a heavy topic, and I want to learn more about how Wall Street works, because it seems even more like a confidence game after reading this book.
We bought the book of folktales at Ugyencholing Museum after we met the author. It’s a book of tales from the oral tradition that she recalled from her childhood in the Tang Valley. The stories were told to children, so they are relatively simple, but they have that unsanitized actual-Grimm’s-Fairy-Tales-vs.-Disneyfied-version quality to them. There are lots of grotesque tales, like the ghost with the water goiter who was beaten to death and suffocated in a leather bag, or the widowed mother who was so desperate to remarry that she betrayed her son and attempted to kill him several different ways in order to appease a ghost. A recurring theme is an animal or inanimate object which offers to grant wishes or provide riches if its ‘life’ is spared. Sometimes the moral is clear, and sometimes the stories seem cruel and nihilistic, which puts them in line with most other cultures’ folktales. Just don’t expect an animate version of any of these to come to a big screen near you any time soon.
The God of Small Things is brilliant, moving, and incredibly depressing. It’s centered around the Kammachi family, an aristocratic clan in Ayemelem, India, in a fateful period in the 1960s, and then 23 years later. There’s a large cast of richly-evoked characters, and some of them even have likeable qualities. Many don’t, though, and they drive the arc of the story, which is touched by child abuse (physical and sexual), spousal abuse, class cruelty, death of a child by drowning, star-crossed cross-caste doomed love, incest, communism and Christianity as vessels of oppression, alcoholism, and other fun topics. Roy doesn’t shy away from the brutality of the human condition, and this is a titanic novel, but also exhausting in its bleakness, which is probably the truest possible outcome. But goddamn.
The Mission Song may be satire; I've read and enjoyed enough Le Carre to give him the benefit of the doubt, but the protagonist is such an insufferable moron that it's tough to go along where the author leads you. Salvo is an interpreter, with breezy brilliance in English, French, and all of the East African dialects that you would wish. He gets pulled into working as a contractor for English intelligence, and is privy to a plot to strip mineral wealth from the Congo. Salvo believes that if he just tells his higher-ups what's going on, they'll put the kibosh on such a tawdry enterprise and slap him on the back. But as it turns out, in perhaps the least surprising twist ever, many people who work for British intelligence perhaps don't have the best of intentions for the Congo. I'm all for the misdirection offered by unreliable narrators, but this is a bridge too far.
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