Month: March 2015

Reviewer Focus: Inspirational Reads

Ms Oh Waily1 Comment

Welcome to a new feature for 2015, our Reviewer Focus posts.

Over the course of the year we are going to recap the wonderful reviews we have already posted, but this time by the reviewer who contributed them.  Just like a favourite author we sometimes find ourselves in tune with the opinions of one reviewer or another.  Here’s your chance to see if one of our lovely folk hits the button for you.

To start us off, we will be looking at the awesome contribution of Tori.  Going by the handle of Inspirational Reads, she has contributed an enormous 33 reviews !!
Sadly for us she has hung up her editorial boots here at 1001, but we are hoping she will find time to add one or two more reviews to her outstanding total so far.

Their Eyes Were Watching God – Zora Neale Hurston

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Book # 609

REVIEWER: Kara

TEWWG

In the opening scene, Janie has just returned home after running away with Tea Cake, a young man she fell in love with. Arriving at her house, she tells the story of her life to her friend Pheoby; as readers we are listening in to the tale. Beginning in her youth, Janie has several bad relationships. Her first husband is kind, but she doesn’t love him. Her second is successful and charismatic, but she feels as though she has been placed on a pedestal, unable to be part of her community. When Janie finally gains her independence, it is Tea Cake whose style of love allows her to finally do and be what she has always wanted.

This is an action-packed novel and the story held me unceasingly throughout. The climactic scene between Janie and Tea Cake was terrifying, heartbreaking, and exultant all at once. I loved Janie’s tone and powerful belief in herself and her right to reach out and take the life and love she wants. She’s a smart and strong woman who has learned from her difficult life experiences and the life-altering decisions that were made for her by being ready and willing to take risks:

Pheoby: “…But you’re takin’ uh awful chance.”
Janie: “No mo’ than Ah took befo’ and no mo’ than anybody else takes when dey gits married. It always changes folks, and sometimes it brings out dirt and meanness dat even de person didn’t know they had in ’em theyselves.”

The discussion of race from Janie’s (and probably also Hurston’s) perspective was illuminating for me. I was particularly interested in Janie’s response to her grandmother’s hopes for her, which is tied up in both race and gender:

“She was born in slavery time when folks, dat is black folks, didn’t sit down anytime dey felt lak it. So sittin’ on porches lak de white madam looked lak uh mighty fine thing tuh her. Dat’s whut she wanted for me — don’t keer whut it cost. Git up on uh high chair and sit dere. She didn’t have time tuh think whut tuh do after you got up on de stool uh do nothin’. De object wuz tuh git dere. So ah got up on de high stool lak she told me, but Pheoby, Ah done nearly languished tuh death up dere.”

It’s clear that Janie understands that her grandmother wanted only the best for her. She wanted Janie to have what she never could. But having experienced it, Janie now knows the truth: that her grandmother’s greatest hope was not what she needs or wants, and that both being black and being female will keep her from ever really having what she wants.

My favorite part of the book is right at the very end, when Janie tells Pheoby that she can tell all the nosy neighbors anything she wants to tell them – she trusts her friend and cares little about what the others think of her. She also shares two lessons (see the quotations below) she has learned through her experiences, one about love and one about life. Both are worth remembering.

“Then you must tell ’em dat love ain’t somethin’ lak uh grindstone dat’s de same thing everywhere and do de same thing tuh everything it touch. Love is lak de sea. It’s uh movin thing, but still and all, it takes its shape from de shore it meets, and it’s different with every shore.”

“Two things everybody’s got tuh do fuh theyselves. They got tuh go tuh God, and they got tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves.”

 

The Grass is Singing – Doris Lessing

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Book # 538

Reviewer: Ms Oh Waily

TGISThis is Doris Lessing’s first novel, published in 1950.  She has another three on the 1001 List.

The setting is 1940s rural Rhodesia.  The opening lines are:

Murder Mystery
by Special Correspondent

Mary Turner, wife of Richard Turner, a farmer at Ngesi, was found murdered on the front verandah of their homestead yesterday morning.  The houseboy, who has been arrested, has confessed to the crime.  No motive has been discovered.
It is thought he was in search of valuables.

And from there we join the story of Mary and Dick Turner starting, at the end of things, with Mary’s death and the arrest of Moses, the houseboy.

Mary is from a poor white family, where her mother struggled to look after them and her father was overly fond of alcohol.  Her childhood leaving a huge psychological scar on her.  As she grows up she finds success as a single woman, working happily in a good job and enjoying an active social life with her many friends and acquaintances.  One day she overhears an insulting comment from people she thought of as friends, and determines then and there to marry.

Along comes Dick Turner, a poor farmer who is on his annual town visit, taken by chance to the movies where he sees Mary and then pursues her only to be absent for months before returning.  They marry in short order, and it is the first sign that things are now set in train that will end in Mary’s death.

Dick takes her to his farm, which he mishandles.  Mary believes she will adapt but the circumstances of their poverty-stricken existence, coupled with the pride that both of them cling to, means that they set themselves apart from the surrounding white community.  Dick is entranced by the land and Mary comes to hate it.

The underlying commentary of the novel is that of the mindset of white Rhodesians towards their native workers, and how their community holds itself together.  Mary is an overt and cruel racist.  She is an intolerable mistress to her houseboys and fires them for the most trivial things.  Dick, also holds similar views, but is less vocal and cruel with them.  At one point Mary starts to feel he is almost like one of the field labourers.  The story displays all the nastiness of the colour bar mentality.
A passage in the second half of the book expresses something of this.

What had happened was that the formal pattern of black-and-white, mistress-and-servant, had been broken by the personal relation; and when a white man in Africa by accident looks into the eyes of a native and sees the human being (which it is his chief preoccupation to avoid), his sense of guilt, which he denies, fumes up in resentment and he brings down the whip.

Yet, despite that repulsive attitude, there is still something of pity to be had for Mary.  She is clearly a broken person from her childhood and marrying in haste to a man who takes her back into the poverty from which she had escaped opens up all of her earlier experiences once again.  She becomes her mother, only on a farm.  Her personal disintegration is painful to watch, as is her attitude and behaviour towards the native workers.

The same can be said for Dick Turner.  Over the course of the novel, he too begins to unravel.  His inability to complete tasks and take a pragmatic view of his farm keeps them in continuous penury.  His inability to understand Mary, and her distance from him, especially after she sees his mismanagement first hand, eats at him also.  To me it seems like the title was made for him…the grass sings for him… he is obsessed with the farm and this becomes his undoing.

The book is full of easy language, appropriate for it’s time and expressing the values of the people described.  The subject matter is harsh and Lessing doesn’t hold back in her prose.

It is a small book, coming in at just over 200 pages, but it is a challenging one.  Watching people self-destruct and misuse other humans is never going to be light reading, but it is well worth your effort to expand your understanding of life in Southern Africa in mid-century, in order to begin to understand the Southern Africa of today.

Happy reading.