Happy new year! So unfortunately I didn’t meet my 2023 reading goal, which was 45 books and 15k pages; I read 37 books and 11,480 pages in total. Not even as good as 2022, when I managed to hit 40 books in the midnight hour, thanks to a guy I met for a beer who lent me a copy of Chike and the River by Chinua Achebe. Sorry Jose, I really meant to return that before I moved.
The good news is that the winter holiday season is when I do some of my heaviest reading of the year. The period between the solstice and my birthday is when I commit myself to hibernation and, usually, an ambitious new series or author.
Gaza in Crisis
My challenge for myself was to read about the genocide in Palestine, to patch up the holes in the knowledge I’ve gleaned from the internet and more educated friends over the years. I picked up Gaza in Crisis by Noam Chomsky and Ilan Pappé, which is a collection of interviews and essays from the 2000s on the history of the Palestinian struggle. It was eye-opening to see just how long this oppression has been proceeding without adequate media coverage, and it contextualized for me the ethnic cleansing effort being made now in 2024. My biggest takeaways:
the Israeli occupation of Palestine predates WWII by many years. The British, who controlled Palestine at the time, declared it a national Jewish homeland in 1922. Zionist immigrants and Arabs immediately clashed, well before the war of 1948.
the AIPAC, or American Israel Public Affairs Committee, has Washington under its thumb. The U.S. gives Israel billions of dollars annually, and provides them with weapons to use against Palestine. Bush and Obama were equally beholden to AIPAC.
Pappé advocates for BDS: Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions. This is a Palestinian-led movement to non-violently reduce the power of Israel.
under the water of the Gazan coast is a lot of natural gas, which is theorized to explain the Israeli piracy of Gazan fishermen.
I know I don’t have the background in history to really absorb a lot of the implications of this text. However, combined with a perusal of Wikipedia, I learned a lot about the circumstances that created the current crisis. I would definitely recommend the text, but maybe after familiarizing yourself with the basic names and dates. It’s dense and it took me a couple weeks because it is hard to focus on when you keep having to look things up. You could also pick just one or two articles and read those instead of committing to the whole book. A list of the collected texts is on Wikipedia.
And for the love of God, contact your reps to demand a ceasefire.
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The Neapolitan Novels
The only thematic link between Elena Ferrante’s series and Gaza is the poverty that defines Elena and Lila’s lives. While reading My Brilliant Friend, set in a destitute neighbourhood in post-WWII Naples, I was thinking about how our culture loves a respectable, genius child who strives for class mobility. I’ve never read this kind of bildungsroman about a prolific little Arab girl. The children on the Gaza strip, an open-air prison of mostly starving and sick women and minors, are not being treated to romanti-tragic quadrilogies. Or if they are, these books aren’t being picked up in the CanLit scene.
So the contrast between current events and this depiction of two poor Italian girls was on my mind as I read the first two books in this series. That’s not to say, however, that the Novels are a neoliberal Pursuit of Happyness crock of shit. Of the two protagonists, Lila is always the smarter, but her family doesn’t let her go to school, and instead she is a housewife by 16. Elena, always just a step behind Lila, is lucky enough that a teacher bullies her parents into letting her be educated, and as a result she attends university and becomes a writer. The young women are treated with equal empathy, and, critically, Lila works just as hard as Elena. Even without school, she becomes a fearsome businesswoman and socialite, and fights tooth and nail to escape poverty. It’s just that the two young women are navigating two streams for success available to them: marrying a rich man, or education. Both go as far as they can, but both find their stream hits a glass dam eventually.
I’m only done the first two books, but I devoured them in days. Ferrante’s characters have rich interiority and her class and gender analyses are nuanced and enlightening. Her prose also has brilliant moments, even via translation. Take her description of Lila’s occasional “episodes”:
The thing was happening to her that I mentioned and that she later called dissolving margins. It was – she told me – as if, on the night of a full moon over the sea, the intense black mass of a storm advanced across the sky, swallowing every light, eroding the circumference of the moon’s circle, and disfiguring the shining disk, reducing it to its true nature of rough insensate material. Lila imagined, she saw, she felt – as if it were true – her brother break. Rino, before her eyes, lost the features he had had as long as she could remember, the features of the generous, candid boy, the pleasing features of the reliable young man, the beloved outline of one who, as far back she had memory, had amused, helped, protected her (Vol. 1, p. 176).
This passage illustrates Lila’s fear that her brother, Rino, is changing, that the margins separating him from the neighbourhood’s vicious elite are dissolving. She fears losing the gentle sibling of her youth to the violent corruption of capitalism. In the metaphor he is rendered without sensation or judgment, back to moldable clay, at the mercy of his circumstances even after his sister’s best efforts to guide him.
I don’t want to say much else at this point because I still have the other two books to go. But I can’t recommend these novels enough, especially if you enjoy lush portraiture of femininity and class struggles. It’s also, at times, a beautiful escape into a world where a writing career is possible to anyone if they just work hard enough (and have some natural talent, or at least a great likability. God I wish that were me).
Maybe I’ll write a little update when I finish the series - I expect it’ll be by the end of the month. I guess I only read 3 books over the holidays, but my head was overflowing with information and characters. In 2024 I’m shooting for 42 books and 12k pages, so we’re off to an okay start. (I know numbers aren’t an ideal measure of your reading, but it holds me accountable to my goals and my tiny little audience, okay? I think I’ll also bring back the Instagram story reviews, though, to make my tracking more qualitative.)
Love you, hope you’re thinking and reading about Palestine.
Shan