Pioneers of France in the New World – Francis Parkman

A very impressive display of scholarship combined with a storyteller’s flair for the dramatic. Parkman makes the exploration of North America come alive, in all its grimness. Yes, grim, exceedingly grim, full of hardships, brutality, disappointments. In Europe, too, things were chaotic, mostly due to religious conflicts (between people who all professed to believe in Jesus Christ), and these deadly conflicts were continued in the New World. It was a world that offered the possibility of riches, as had been found by the Spanish in the Aztec and Inca empires. But alas, there turned out to be no other such glorious civilizations. And a route to the Far East was sought, but resulted in dead ends. The only source of financial gain was the fur trade, which the Spanish, the French and the English competed for control of. As for the Indians, Parkman refers to them as “savages.” We have a tendency to glamorize the Native Americans, to conceive of them as noble environmentalists. Reading this account, they are indeed savages; tribes are constantly at war with one another, and their treatment of captured enemies is appalling (they delighted in slow tortures). And they readily wiped out the beaver population for what they gained in barter. In other words, they were no better than the white man. A picture of humanity emerges that’s disturbing (or maybe that segment of humanity with ambitions). Some (notably the Jesuits) journeyed to the New World to convert the Indians, who they believed to be possessed by the devil; though they come across as fanatics, their fortitude and determination and acceptance of suffering is impressive. Others had the idea of establishing a self-sustaining colony in America. France failed to do so, despite the efforts of Champlain, who emerges as the hero of this book. My one problem was keeping all the names of people and places straight. Finally I gave up, and just continued to read to have another episode of failure and cruelty and suffering described. What most of these early arrivals discovered in the New World was death – by violence, disease or starvation.

Meet Me in Mumbai – Sabina Khan

This is a young adult novel, aimed at girls in their mid-teens. So why is an old guy like me reading it? Well, it was a proof copy in a box of giveaways, so why not give it a look? It was easy going, fairly interesting in the beginning, so I continued to the halfway point. What I want to explore in this review is how Khan imbeds messages in her book, some of which are untrue or evasive. In the first of two sections, a teenage girl, a Muslim from India going to school in the US, gets pregnant. Ayesha is not promiscuous, and she’s in love, and the boy (also an Indian) uses a condom. But (message) accidents happen, girls, and when you get pregnant you’re in a heap of trouble. Ayesha considers an abortion (which is what the boyfriend suggests), but can’t go through with it. So she gives the baby up for adoption – to a lesbian couple living in Houston. With no misgivings. The message here is that being homosexual carries no stigma, no problems. When the novel changes to the perspective of the daughter, the same age as the mother was in the first section, the two women who raise her (Ma and Mama) are as acceptable and normal as a heterosexual couple. No kids at school sneer at Mira’s lesbian parents. No cold stares from other parents at PTA meetings (remember, to some homosexuality is an abomination). In this novel all is fine. Also, neither girl encounters any prejudice from classmates due to their brown skin. Is this true to life, especially after 9/11, when Muslims were the object of hostility? The author is presenting things as they should be, in a best of all possible worlds, one free of prejudice, hatreds, condemning. Mira has no love interest (her male friend is, predictably, gay); in her section she gets in touch with her rich Indian heritage (message: people should respect cultures other than their own). She also finds letters written to her by her mother when she was in the womb. I found the Mira section boring, so – since things were headed to a reunion in Mumbai with the mother and daughter – I skipped to the last pages. What I got was a sob fest of love, which its intended audience may have responded to with tears.

Scandal – Shusaku Endo (Japanese)

I greatly admired Endo’s When I Whistle, but during the reading of this novel there were at least seven occasions where I was tempted to abandon it. I kept going because the prose was good, and I felt that the author was working out private issues, and that some point would emerge. His narrator is a writer, the same age as Endo (in his sixties), who’s going through emotional crises. One focus of the book revolves around sex of a deviant nature. I found the descriptions of the activities in Tokyo’s porno district to be quite distasteful. Surguro (apparently) has a doppelganger who engages in disgusting acts. Is he, in fact, the dark side of Suguro (who lives a scandal-free life)? Do we humans harbor the darkest of urges: sadism, masochism; can we even find pleasure (sexual in nature) in murder? There’s a lot of soul searching and contemplation of life’s Big Issues, with a touch of religiosity thrown in (Endo is classified as a Christian author). But it’s flailing mess, full of loose ends and twists and turns that go nowhere. As for the resolution that I had been waiting for, there was none that I could discern. In fact, the last paragraph has a phone ringing, which seems to signify something – but what? In looking at my review of Whistle, I close with these words: “. . . a moving novel about the enduring power of friendship and love.” This novel was written twelve years before Scandal. What went wrong?