Bald Mary's Bookshelf: February 2006

Monday, February 27, 2006

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M. Pirsig


It is a little bit amazing that I managed to finish this--a book I found deeply tedious, sometimes intriguing, and often irritating. Sheer determination saw the end of this dense 373 page, philosophical treatise on one man's quest to find the limits of rationality. And dip into insanity on the way.

Pirsig arranges his philosophical discourses around a nameless narrator who is on a metaphysical and actual cross-country trip with his son, and his two friends (who about halfway through the book fade away to live their technologically esthetic little lives).

The narrator/philosopher is on a quest to reconcile his dual nature--his alter-ego, a figure he refers to as Phaedrus--with his present self, presumably his present, rational logical self. The duality of the main narrator falls in line neatly with what the philosophy elaborates on--what he calls classical and romantic thinking. He begins by defining rationality or reason through the classical framework, one that looks beyond the beautiful and ugly, into functionality. He then defines romantic thinking with one that looks simply at the veneer of objects without understanding or appreciating the underlying meaning.

After many pages where he plays around with these ideas and uses the maintenance of his motorcyle as an example, the narrator unveils his ideas on Quality. In fact, he does this very nicely by comparing his epiphany with a seed crystal that manages to push a saturated solution into super-saturated solidity. Quality becomes an undefinable value that exists both logically (classically) and esthetically (romantically).

In the process, he makes highly problematic, jingoistic arguments on the classical (logical) nature of Western thought as opposed to its mystic and esthetically centered Eastern counterpart. Some of the most grating passages were bits where he would define Eastern philosophy (which apparently comprises of India alone) through a singularly narrow, Western prism then goes on to dismiss it for its inferiority and uselessness. Consider the passage below:

..one day in the classroom the professor of philosophy was blithely expounding
on the illusory nature of the world...Phaedrus raised his hand and asked coldly
if it was believed that the atomic bombs that had dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki were illusory. The professor smiled and said yes. That was the end
of the exchange. Within the tradition of Indian philosophy that answer may have
been correct, but for Phaedrus and for anyone else who reads newspapers
regularly and is concerned with such things as mass destruction of human
beings that answer was hopelessly inadequate. He left the classroom, left
India and gave up...


Indian professors apparently do not read newspapers nor are they concerned about human beings as much as Western scholars.

In another instance, he talks about how Indian villagers will believe in ghosts, but not the law of gravity.

Aside from the obvious reduction of the vast Eastern thought and philosophy into an ill-defined mysticism--there is a puzzling and frank dismissal of these ideas too. In fact, despite being used as one of the cornerstones on his whole thesis on Quality and its relationship with subject-object, Pirsig never bothers to engage this mystic, or esthetic philosophy in any concrete way. There is an especially awkward passage where he draws parallels between Quality without esthetics to "being square" in a hip-hop, black culture.

In the words of Pirsing, "We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world."

Sunday, February 19, 2006

The Patron Saint of Liars by Ann Patchett


Ann Patchett is one of those writers who can make me fall into her words, and forget that I am reading a book in my room or the metro. Instead, I find myself standing next to Rose--the stormy engimatic protagnist of The Patron Saint of Liars --peering inside her head, listening to her thoughts, watching her story enfold.

I love a good story. And the Patron Saint of Liars is nothing, if not a good story. The novel opens in a small town named Habit in the early 1900s, with a miracle that eventually leads to Saint Elizabeth's--a halfway house for unwed mothers, a place "where women had babies and left them behind, like pieces of furniture too heavy to move". In the 1960s, this is where Rose flees to when she finds out she is pregnant, and realizes she has married a good man who she does not love, and whose life she destroys by leaving.

For a book brimming with unwanted pregnancies, it is perhaps a little surprising to note that abortion is barely mentioned in the story. None of her characters brood over terminating a pregnancy (except on one instance when someone says she couldn't go through with one--an afterthought). All of them, however, forge excruciatingly painful attachments with their unborn children. Thoughtfully and carefully, as if she is teasing a wound open, Patchett explores the trauma and quiet grief of giving up your child at the end of the nine months. It is difficult to not see the point lurking somewhere that giving your child up for adoption might not always be the best option. But Patchett really isn't interested in making this point, or contributing in any way to abortion debates.

Instead, at the heart of this beautifully written novel are the bonds that form among women who become each others' sisters, mothers, and friends. I know that sounds like a lifetime movie--in fact I think they did churn one out (yes, the book is better than this crappy movie).

Patchett has added mystery and enigma to motherhood--and written a love story about mothers and daughters. Like Bel Canto, Patchett's novels find their greatest strength in weaving together characters whose inner lives are always rich, devastating and extraordinary. Characters who you want to get to know, and who stay with you long after you come up from reading

Sunday, February 12, 2006

The End of Poverty by Jeffrey D. Sachs


With the quixotic, bright-eyed optimism of a freshly college-graduated peace corp applicant, Jeffrey D. Sachs makes the end of poverty seem like a few pennies away if only we could get rid of pesky geo-politiking and greed. His last chapter rises up in an especially saccharine cresendo when he compares ending poverty to other historically critical achievements such as abolition of slavery (which still exists), antiapartheid and civil rights movements (not really closed chapters, are they?) and the end of colonialism (I just laughed out loud).

But thankfully, The End of Poverty does more than dwell on hopelessly idealistic, and hyperbolic, misguided comparisons. It also offers information, and insights into the macroeconomic underpinnings of Bolivia, Eastern Europe, China and India that were completely fascinating. Like an economist superhero, Sachs tells us his story of rushing around the globe mending economies suffering from "hyperinflation" and lack of foreign investment and aid. Despite being a book that is painfully dummed down for the general audience, it is also brimming with calculations and technical jargon that only gets the most superficial explanations.

I am not an economist so I have no real basis for arguing any of his propositions. But its difficult not to get past the sense that there is something grossly simplified and pithy about this book. This came across especially loudly when he discusses some subjects that I am familiar with--most notably PEPFAR and the Green Revolution. He seems utterly unaware of the ideologically based taint of PEPFAR's policies and the well-documented upheavels of the Green Revolution.

The back bone of his argument is that if rich countries like the US would only increase their foreign aid to the agreed upon rate of 0.7 percent of their GNP, extreme poverty can be eradicated. Another cornerstone of his plan is that reducing poverty needs to be tackled from multiple sides of infrastructure, environment, health and education--what he calls "clinical economics". Is it just me, or haven't these ideas been aired out before? In his excellent review, William Easterly points out many of the weaknesses in Sachs' vision. This new york times review by Drezner is also quite good.

It is difficult to not side with Sachs. After all, he is fighting the good fight and making some eloquent points in the process. But I still can't shake off the troubling image of this rich, priveledged white man walking around India for the first time in the 70s, and gasping, "there's poverty in the world!"

Thursday, February 02, 2006

Transplanted Man By Sanjay Nigam


Set almost entirely in a hospital, in the "Little India" of New York City, Sanjay Nigam's Transplanted Man reads like a really fun, desi version of ER or Grey's Anatomy. I went through two phases with this book. At first, I couldn't put it down. I loved it. I loved the characters, and I very much got inside their little lives with all the pleasure of a good masala movie. There's the dashing, brilliant doctor of the mostly Indian hospital--Sonny Seth--the silent angst type--my favorite kind of type. There are his patients--the sniveling husband who bit his wife's buttocks in a fit of passion, the scientist who is trying to isolate the protein that causes sleep deprivation. Sleep, in fact, has a mysterious and prominent presence in the book. Gwen--the British "Indiephile" who's a bibliophilic nymphomaniac. And then the eponymous Transplanted Man, an Indian Minister of Health whose body is a collage of transplanted organs and who enjoys waxing philosophy and sounding condescending. Sure the writing isn't spectacular, and sometimes awkward, but it's mostly good. Has promise. The story is a veritable feast of characters who pop in and out, feel vaguely familiar, and sometimes make you chuckle.

But eventually, I got less forgiving. The anguished "Who am I? What is the meaning of it all?" wails from Dr. Sonny Seth and a few others got annoying. Age-old questions about Indian identity and foreign-ness are raised, and left unanswered, unsatisfied. Random characters discuss their deepest thoughts aloud to each other for no reason. Wives who just can't seem to shut up and let their husbands follow their dreams in peace re-occur too many times for comfort. In fact, problematic representations of women throughout as nagging irritations on the path to one's freedom from the cumbersome banality of everyday life. There's a bit about dreams in the end of the book that struck a chord with me, but other than that the long overly-sentimental soliloquies on belonging and India and identities felt forced and over-reaching.

Years ago, I was listening to a book-reading/ interview with Sanjay Nigam on our local radio station in Iowa City. From what I remember, he was charming and self-assured and the Transplanted Man has been on my list since. Despite its short-comings, it was a good read. It left behind the warm feeling (if you ignore the second half) of a tight-knit Indian community somewhere in NYC, bustling along in a hospital somewhere getting well, and dreaming big-big dreams