Book 194: Belize (English) – Beka Lamb (Zee EDGELL)

The rain, which quickly developed into a violent, whirling storm, started to fall at first with hardly any display at all. Then the howling wind whooshed inland, the lights went out, the radio went dead, and soon tons of rain deluged the town. Beka had not expected such a ferocious sound. The house shook and Beka was sure the wind would tear it right off its concrete foundation. Granny Ivy, Beka and her parents sat in the space between the boys’ bed and the bathroom wall. A single kerosene lamp burned on the floor and Beka kept her eyes fixed on that. There were about twenty-five people in the house, but everyone was absolutely quiet. Beka laid her head in her mother’s lap, listening to the lashing wind and rain. She meant only to drowse for a while, but the next thing she knew, Lilla was shaking her shoulder.

In 2000 I did a trip to all the countries in Central America, and I took the bus from Tikal in Guatemala to Belize City, and got straight onto a speedboat to Caye Caulker with the intention of letting my brand spanking new scuba licence loose on the Blue Hole. It would have been a good idea to catch up with the news first, for category 4 hurricane Pete was bearing down on the country and it was not a good idea to be heading to an atoll barely above sea level at the best of times. A couple of days later, after one of the two most frightening experiences of my life, I managed to get off the flattened island and back to Belize City. I thought everyone back home must be panicking as to whether I was safe. All communications were down, but the US embassy was amazingly kind and let me phone my mum back in Australia. No one at home had heard of the hurricane…

14-year-old Beka Lamb is a congenital liar. She even hopes for a hurricane to come, to wash away the school records and expunge her bad result (she had failed but lied to her parents about it.)

She is a budding politician and lying would seem to be good practice for that profession! To try to cure her, her mother gives her an exercise book in which she is to write any lie she feels like telling, rather than actually saying it. I hoped that her experiments with the truth could be turned into literary creation instead!

Anyone who has been to Belize City will probably remember its unique swing bridge. Beka has a dream in which she misses it opening and falls into the dirty river.

Her life is recounted in flashbacks (so I hope I’m not revealing too much of the plot) and punctuated by a series of incidents – little Belize is in a political ferment, about to become independent from the UK (Beka’s grandmother is a dyed in the wool supporter of the People’s Independence Party) and is threatened by Guatemala (which claims all of the country); THAT hurricane; and… what happened to her three years older best friend Toycie? (After getting pregnant she was expelled from their convent school and put in a mental asylum euphemistically called the “Sea Breeze Hotel”. But Belize had no “head doctors” unless one happened to be passing through. She dies soon afterwards. Did she throw herself off the bridge?)

There is also the theme of a multicultural society where each ethnicity seems to look down on the others (but still seems to get along with the others reasonably well), and of the struggle of the Catholic Church to gain dominance over the people’s more liberal values.

This was a quite nice coming-of-age story. It gave me a great sense of Belizean life and a particular moment in time. I’d love to find out more about the author – by the time this book was published, she had lived in Belize, Jamaica, Britain, Afghanistan, Nigeria, Bangladesh, the USA and Somalia! It was great to ‘revisit’ Belize. And maybe some day I will finally get to dive the Blue Hole…

Edgell, Zee (1940 – 2020), Beka Lamb (Caribbean Writers Series), London, Heinemann, 1982, ISBN 0-435-98844-1

Book 150: Puerto Rico (English) – Simone (Eduardo LALO)

A few days later I found a small, wrinkled piece of paper (barely a quarter of a sheet of notebook paper) that someone had slipped under the door to my office.

MONDAY, 8:I?.

            I am Lina, the blond, pale-skinned, short-haired, blue-eyed girl who wrote on the street, ‘To what degree can we build a society based on lies and forgetting?’ I came looking for you, but I don’t want to find you. I want you to read me. I’ll be back on Wednesday at around 12:XX. I hope to be able to see you without our needing to talk. I prefer for you to read me and for me to read you. Thank you for your attention and sincerity.

            Seriously,

            Simone

I loved this one. It’s a romance, a thriller, and a literary work all in one. The writer narrating the story is struggling to survive and make an impact in one of the world’s apparent literary backwaters. He has become jaundiced and disillusioned with the world, like Meursault in Camus’ L’Etranger. His Puerto Rico is forgotten and neglected, perhaps more than other countries since it (voluntarily) hasn’t become independent.

Then a Chinese immigrant student, who we eventually find out is called Li Chao, courts and stalks him, scattering mysterious messages and clues around in his path, like the one above (obviously she doesn’t quite match her physical self-description!). She calls herself Simone, as in the French philosopher Simone Weil, and her notes are captivatingly intellectual and intriguing.

The two learn to know and love each other in the best way – from the inside, through each other’s writings (cutting through people’s often disappointing exterior looks). As they become involved, they come to collaborate on their own anonymous public art.

The novel is full of great quotes, like love is “the impossible and failed attempt to protect someone from her own life story”; and great literary quotes, like this one from Gao Xinjian’s One Man’s Bible: “Freedom is not a human right conferred by Heaven. Nor does the freedom to dream come at birth: it is a capacity and an awareness that needs to be defended. Moreover, even dreams can be assailed by nightmares.”

This is a great little novel, a love adventure with philosophy, and obviously it’s time we started reading more Puerto Rican literature!

LALO, Eduardo (1960 – ), Simone, translated from Spanish by David Frye, University of Chicago Press, ISBN 978-0-226-20748-3

First published in Spanish, Buenos Aires 2011

Book 42: Canada (English) – The Blind Assassin (Margaret ATWOOD)

Ten days after the war ended, my sister Laura drove a car off a bridge. the bridge was being repaired: she went right through the Danger sign. The car fell a hundred feet into the ravine, smashing through the treetops feathery with new leaves, then burst into flames and rolled down into the shallow creek at the bottom. Chunks of bridge fell on top of it. Nothing much was left of her but charred smithereens… They’d said Laura had turned the car sharply and deliberately, and had plunged off the bridge with no more fuss than stepping off a curb.

 

Moving on from a tale of two brothers, in my Iraqi book, I come to this tale of the equally fascinating relationship between two sisters. I’ve long been intrigued by this book – even more than by its intriguingly paradoxical title, because of its cover, featuring a slinky woman in an elegant ‘20s party dress, with only one arm. Or so I thought… Now that I’ve finally gotten around to reading the book, as well as studying the cover closely, I see that she does actually have two arms! It’s true, you can’t judge a book by its cover! However, the female characters in this novel, especially the central two sisters, really are endlessly intriguing.

This is clever, finely written novel. I love the narrator’s (Iris’) cynical, sarcastic take on her family’s trials, and on the world in general. It is interwoven, matryoshka-like, with a science fiction/fantasy story (’The Blind Assassin’ proper) supposedly improvised by a pair of lovers (who in turn tell each other a pulpy SF story), that the dead sister was writing. The complicated relationship between the two sisters is wonderfully portrayed. Atwood’s intricate plotting is rife with clever devices. In fact it has so much in it that it’s hard to grasp everything at a single reading, and it is continually leaping across genres – family history, science fiction, detection and romance, so trying to categorise it would be hopeless.

This is one that I will definitely read again, as soon as possible! And I will have to read more Atwood!

 

ATWOOD, Margaret (1939 – ), The Blind Assassin, New York: Anchor, 2001, ISBN 0-385-47572-1
[originally published 2000]