"The chief told us the Angkor would take care of us and would provide us with everything we need. I guess the Angkor doesn't understand that we need to eat."

So I don’t know if this is a book of literary merit, it’s a national bestseller…

The book is sort of combination of an autobiography and an account of a historical event, so you get to learn more about the history of a country while still reading a story, with characters and a plot etc. – basically my perfect idea of a novel. 

It is basically nonfiction, but embellished into a kind of storytelling, so the events are real but all the dialogue and details have most likely been embellished and added on to, since I doubt the author could remember every word of every conversation from when she was five. But I really like the way it was written. It is written from the point of view of the author as a young girl, limited in the sense of not knowing what will happen next, even though the author does know since all this has happened in her life. What’s interesting is that it partly sounds like a five year old speaking at times, disconnected and confused and in-the-dark about complex issues, but it also uses “big words”, more sophisticated than a five-year-old’s vocabulary would be, like “permeate” and “concave”. Though this could be seen as errors in continuity, I find it interesting. It would probably be difficult to describe all the scenes using such a limited vocabulary, and the combination of the simple and the advanced give the story this unique tone, that makes it all the more frightening and heart-wrenching to read. A five year old’s perspective on serious adult problems told with both “children” and “grown-up” words, creates this crudely mature tone of the story. It reflects in a way the stunted physical growth of the girl contrasted with her forced rapid mental maturity, having to grow up way too quickly. 

            This one scene stood out to me because it related to what I was learning in Death and Dying at the time. The author, the girl Loung, being too sick from starvation to work in the fields, occupies her time by watching the villagers bury the dead. Whole families are dying because of starvation, and the rest of the village is too weak to bury them all quickly. Loung watches as they dump whole families into mass graves under the huts of the dead, as maggots and flies and the “stench of death” fill the village. Loung admits that a disturbing scene like this would have “terrified” her, but that now, she has seen it all so often, she feels “nothing”. This is sort of like what is happening today, as I learnt in Death and Dying. People are becoming desensitized with death, because they see it so often in media, in wars, etc. Loung, having lived a privileged life, had hardly ever even seen poor people before the change in government, let alone a dead or dying person. They now surround her on all sides, and in such a short time she has had to adjust to accept this as part of her life now, and deal with it. Death can no longer be ignored, especially since she herself is so close to it. But while she is numb to the dead in a way, it still consciously follows her every thought. Being close to death, she both has had to accept it as a normal part of every day life, and be aware of its impending doom every second to strive to stay alive. It is a concept almost impossible to understand to one who has never had to experience it. Death threatens her from many sources, starvation, diseases, and every neighbor, who would sell her family out and murder them all if they knew who they really were. So while being around the dead constantly has desensitized Loung, it has also heightened her awareness, knowing she could very well be next. 

            Another scene that stood out to me related to Hamlet, in a few ways. Lacking food, Loung and her family, and the rest of the village, continually search for new sources of food, from leaves to bugs. Chong, a widowed neighbour, discovers that earthworms are safely edible and abundant. Loung, who has eaten crickets, raw rabbit, blood soup, and worse, is horrified at the idea of eating earthworms. What horrifies her is the thought that earthworms eat corpses, and so eating an earthworm would be like eating the flesh of a dead body. At six years old, you wouldn’t expect her to know this, but unfortunately, she has seen enough maggot-infested dead bodies to be able to clearly visualize just what the earthworm, and by extension she, would be eating. This is just like in Hamlet, when the circle of life is explained in that a fish eats a maggot, a human eats the fish, and then a maggot eats the human. Loung, who watched as corpses of men, women, and children were tossed into graves, could not overcome this idea, which is really the heart of life. It also relates to Hamlet in that the neighbor, Chong, after the death of her husband and children, goes insane, similar to Hamlet and Ophelia at the deaths of their fathers. She is distraught, going through cycles of hysteria at the thought of her children, and periods when she talks to them as though they are still there. Hamlet does the same with his father’s death, believing he is seeing his ghost. 

I haven’t finished the book yet, though it is difficult to put down, so I will only write about a few key scenes that stood out to me, though really every scene is significant enough to write about. I cannot wait to finish it, so I can put all the different threads of thought and ideas together. 

I finished The Old Man and the Sea a while ago but never had the chance to write about it. The ending was sad, but realistic. As soon as the old man caught the fish, I immediately thought of all the blood spreading in the water, and knew the sharks would come just as surely as he knew. But I guess I always assume the worst, because I thought he would surely die coming back, and when he survived, even though the fish was destroyed, it was sort of a successful trip. But the definition of what was a successful trip changed during the journey. In the beginning the man let the fish pull him out without much worry, having plenty food and water and assuming the fish would soon tire and be caught. But as his water supply runs low and the fish stays strong, he begins to worry, but he never doubts his decision, and never thinks about going back. Turning back was all I could think about. From the moment he let the fish pull him out to sea, I was worried, but as he was an experienced fisherman, and I did not even know how big Cuba was, I trusted his judgment. I understand how once you start on something, and you’ve spent much time and energy on it, it would seem like such a waste of time and effort to stop when you have not finished. But in a case like this, alone in a small boat being pulled out to sea, old and weak, I would have cut my losses and turned back long before that thought even crossed the old man’s mind. But that is his nature as a fisherman, it is his living and he was determined, but also more than a little desperate to not come back empty-handed. I would have been more worried about coming back alive. But that is the nature of a fisherman; it is his whole life and purpose to catch fish. 

He overestimated his opponent, but even though the fish started out so much stronger, the old man was able to outlast it. It would seem as though the fish’s will to live was weaker than the man’s will to catch it, but that is basically his life. I think he felt that if he didn’t catch the fish he would not be able to survive, maybe not in the physical sense, but in some personal emotional sense. So his will was also to live, catching the fish is a crucial component to his life, and he felt that he could not live if he lost to the fish. The man’s will to live was more complex than pure survival, supposedly unlike the fish’s will, and his failure would lead to not only a physical death but also a worse emotional one. The man thinks a lot about wills, and who is stronger and more determined, and the man himself is not sure of the answer. Even after he has caught the fish, he wonders if it was all a dream, because the fish is so magnificent and enormous, and how did this weak old man bring him down. He wishes it had been a dream when the sharks come, and by the time he makes it back to the dock, it might as well have been. The fish is gone, only its skeleton remains, the only evidence of its magnificence, along with the old man’s injuries. 

At the end, the old man is in a state of defeat. His great accomplishment has been desecrated by the sharks, and both have destroyed him, physically and emotionally. But though he says he has run out of luck, as he lies on his mat, unable to get up, his very next sentence is planning the next outing with the boy, listing the new equipment he will need, and wanting the newspapers, presumably to discover the outcome on the baseball game. This is a fisherman. The old man has been out at sea for a week, battling the elements, an eighteen-foot fish, multiple sharks, and his own body’s failings, yet this does not set him back more than three days, and he is already preparing his next outing, because that is what a fisherman does. Just as the old man persevered on while the fish was pulling him at sea, so he perseveres through the repercussions of that act and continues on with his life, that is, with fishing. Another thing that stood out to me at the end of the novel was the sentence when the old man is explaining his injuries, and he says that he “felt something in my chest was broken”. This struck me as being metaphorical for his heart, and how it broke after he lost to the sharks, and lost his luckiness. 

Also at the very end, there are a couple of tourists looking down at the skeleton of the fish from a café, and think it is a shark. They remark that they didn’t realize how beautiful sharks were, when they misunderstand the waiter’s explanation of the type of fish. Their misunderstanding and ignorance angered me, because it was the sharks’ faults that this beautiful fish was floating in the ocean as “garbage”. Now I love sharks, but in this novel they are the obvious antagonists, destroying the fish and the old man. The old man loves the sharks as well, as he does all creatures of the sea, but that doesn’t mean he liked what they did to his fish, even if he understands why they did it. That the tourists would think that the beautiful thing was a shark, and not know that the sharks were actually what destroyed the beautiful thing, expresses their ignorance of such things, much like the ignorance of the reader at the beginning of the novel, not understanding the unique and intimate way of the fisherman. I feel like I still have so much that I could say about this novel, one idea can just go on forever, which I take as a sign of a great novel, so I might do another post later…

Cree en un maestro como en Dios mismo

This year in Spanish class we read El Almohadón de Plumas a short story by Horacio Quiroga. This is the second story I have read by Quiroga, the first being A la Deriva in last year’s Spanish class. Having studied both stories in class, I have seen the similarities of Quiroga’s writing style. Quiroga’s life was plagued with tragedy and death – by illness, murder, and suicide, including his own. Death is a major theme in his works, and it is always unexpected and unexplained. Bad marriages and illnesses are also prominent themes in both his life and his stories. Mrs. Lawless taught us about Quiroga’s life and the themes and styles of his stories before we read them, and that really helped me to recognize the important themes and more importantly why they were in there. Normally, you read a book and then afterwards you might look up the author’s life. Already knowing about Quiroga’s life, I noticed and understood why he wrote what and how he did. (Similarity – In Lit, we learnt about Zora Neale Hurston after reading Their Eyes Were Watching God. Knowing that Hurston was in part writing about her life experiences, I was able to recognize the similarities and understand the novel better.) Quiroga wrote a Decalogue, the Ten Commandments of the Perfect Storyteller. This was a list of rules that authors should follow to write a good story, like the Ten Commandments of being a good Jew or Christian (The first commandment is to believe in the master of writing as you would God). Having this list before I read his stories prepared me to look for these things to see if Quiroga followed his own rules, just as the list of themes allowed me to see which ones appeared.

In El Almohadón de Plumas (The Feather Pillow), the bad marriage of a newlywed couple leads to the sickness and death of the wife. The beginning of the story focuses on the marital problems of the couple, the husband is distant and cold and cannot express his feelings, and the wife is forced to give up her dreams and resign to her sad life. Quiroga himself had marital problems, his first wife committed suicide and his second wife took their child and left him. So it is evident why Quiroga would write about terrible marriages. The wife in the story becomes ill, deathly ill, and the doctor cannot figure out why. Two of Quiroga’s brothers died of Typhoid Fever, and he himself got cancer, which explains why his novels always involve an illness (In “A La Deriva” the man was poisoned by a snake). The wife in the story slowly dies, but it is not until after her death that it is discovered what was wrong with her. It turns out that there was an insect inside her pillow that was sucking her blood from her head every night as she lay in bed. And that is where the unexpected but never supernatural death occurs. Quiroga experienced many deaths in his life, his stepfather killed himself in front of Quiroga, Quiroga accidently killed his friend, and most unexpected was that he killed himself when he found out he had cancer. As the master of Latin American horror and suspense, much like Poe is in North America, Quiroga never ceases to surprise and terrify. The idea of a disgustingly swollen spider hiding inside your pillow sucking your blood is horrifying, and that is the exact idea that Quiroga leaves you with. The last line explains that these parasites can reach enormous proportions, prefer human blood, and are commonly found in feather pillows. It makes your spine crawl.

One of the Delalogue’s rules is in the importance of the first and last sentences. The first sentence of The Feather Pillow describes the conflicting feelings of the honeymoon, which gave the wife hot and cold shivers. It sets the stage for what is to come, the failing marriage. The last line of the story leaves the reader with a terrifying, paranoid, and disgusted feeling, afraid of a pillow. In A La Deriva, the first line starts the story suddenly – the man steps on something and receives a bite on the foot. It ends just as suddenly – he stops breathing. Another one of the commandments was to use a minimal amount of adjectives to describe the situation, and not more. A La Deriva did that in describing the man’s foot, saying it was swollen like a sausage. In a simple phrase Quiroga paints a picture of the effects of the poison, without any superfluous words. In The Feather Pillow the house is described as a palace, but empty. It takes a few sentences, but it thoroughly describes the appearance and feelings of the honeymoon cottage. I think that A La Deriva follows the commandments more closely. It uses fewer words, but still gets the point across, and the beginning and ending of the story are more eventful, sudden, and unexpected.

The parasite in The Feather Pillow is a symbol for the marriage. It is cloaked in the harmless pillow, but it is secretly sucking the life out of the wife, as literally as the marriage is sucking her life figuratively. The parasite sucks her blood and the marriage sucks her dreams, and both are killing her, physically and emotionally.  It was suggested that the husband might also be a symbol for the parasite, but I do not agree with that entirely. The husband loved his wife, he just could not express it, and while he was the reason the wife’s dreams were crushed, he didn’t kill her. I guess the marriage and the husband are pretty much the same thing, but I guess I find it harder to place the blame on the person than it is to place it on an abstract concept of marriage. The husband and the marriage was not meant to hurt the wife, but both did, just as the parasite did not suck her blood to kill her, it sucked to feed itself, killing her was the unavoidable result. The marriage did not mean to crush the wife’s dreams, it couldn’t help it, there was no way it could be avoided, with the husband’s personality being what it was - duro, hard.

 

ga niet zacht in die goede nacht

This was the other poem I was thinking about reciting for Poetry Out Loud, and while I did not choose it, I still really like the poem, especially when set to music by John Cale, so I thought I'd share it.

Another Feeling by Ruth Stone

Once you saw a drove of young pigs

crossing the highway. One of them

pulling his body by the front feet,

the hind legs dragging flat.

Without thinking,

you called the Humane Society.

They came with a net and went for him.

They were matter of fact, uniformed;

there were two of them,

their truck ominous, with a cage.

He was hiding in the weeds. It was then

you saw his eyes. He understood.

He was trembling.

After they took him, you began to suffer regret.

Years later, you remember his misfit body

scrambling to reach the others.

Even at this moment, your heart

is going too fast; your hands sweat.

I found this poem completely randomly - I literally clicked the "Find Random Poem" button on the POL website, and this was one of the only ones longer than twelve lines. But I did not decide on it right away. I had a few other options, but ultimately I picked this one, for several reasons. Everyone I asked about which poem I should do out of my options all said this one, because it seemed like "me". I understood why they thought this, as I have pretty intense opinions on animals' rights, but does that mean they don't see me as someone who would talk about birds and the ocean and "pretty" poems? I'm more closely associated with a story of a dying pig? But then I realised this was a good thing, and it was true, I did have more of a connection with this poem than with a poem about a bird on the ocean or leaves in the sky. 

When my family got a puppy this summer, I was shocked to learn that many animal shelters do not have "no kill" policies, and that even those considered "no kill shelters" still kill animals that are deemed "unadoptable"for some reason or another. That horrified me, as I had always thought that the shelters were saving animals. I was appalled to learn how many killed animals that there were no room for, or that had behavioural or medical problems. 

This is what is implied to have happened to the pig in this poem - he was hurt, so they killed him. This poem warns you. When you think you are doing some good deed, helping someone, you may actually be hurting him or her further. The person in this poem deals with the misplaced guilt he feels for unintentionally causing the pig's death. The pig might have died anyway on the highway, or soon after, because of its injuries. But the person the narrator is addressing in the poem feels it is his fault that the pig died, because of his mistake in calling the Humane Society. Some might argue that the person did the right thing, because he put the pig out of its misery. I would argue that the person did probably do the right thing in calling, because he/she had no way of knowing that they would end of killing the pig, but I do not entirely agree that its better to put it out of its misery. I know that it must be suffering, and killing it would end that, but I just cannot agree with any kind of murder, especially of an animal that cannot speak for itself and tell want it wants. I can understand why he/she would feel guilty, even if he/she could not have foreseen this, I would feel the same way. The person acted on an impulse to help the pig, and he/she should not blame his/herself. I'm sure this could be applied to other situations, not just a warning against animal shelters. Doctors who euthanize patients would feel similarly I would think. Their intentions were well-meaning, but the way they acted upon them was wrong, in my opinion. 

 On the structure of the poem - all the elements come together to form the grave, serious tone of this poem. The lines are short, the sentences abrupt. Stating the facts, describing the objects with carefully chosen adjectives, just enough to describe the feeling, not more. The adjectives are few but strong. The effect of having the story told in the second person, the narrator telling the event of the reader back to him/her, intensifies the emotions. The reader feels the emotions as if it is he/she had actually experienced that event, and someone is telling him/her his/her own feelings. Describing both the emotions the person feels himself, and the emotions he can sense from the pig adds to the personal connection the reader feels with the person and the pig in the poem. The sentences are abrupt and blunt, and so is the storyline. Though it is not specifically stated that the pig is killed, it is clearly and very bluntly implied. I know it does not really make sense to say it that, how can something be implied, assumed in a blunt way. But the way the poem tells the story, so directly and brusquely, the reader feels as though the fate of the pig has been just as frankly stated as if it had said "THEY KILLED THE PIG".

 

 

 

"He is my brother. But I must kill him."

I am half way through The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. The point of view switches from third to first person frequently, with the old man’s thoughts running into the narration of the story. The old man considers the fish he has caught his brother, but he is still determined to kill it. He feels sorry for it, he loves it and pities it, but he does not question what he must do to it. Not being a fisherman, I cannot fully understand that concept, but I respect it. The man respects the fish, he calls it noble, but all the while, he is wishing it dead. His love for the great fish cannot interfere with his need to catch it. To make him feel better he thinks of all the people the fish could feed, but even so he knows no one would be worthy of eating the fish.

I have no respect for people who kill animals just to kill them – for the thrill of the hunt, for the pride of having the head mounted on a wall to brag about, or in excess, so many carcasses go to waste so it is not just a waste of a life but a waste of whatever little good might have come from its death. But I do have some respect for the old man, who only kills as much has he needs to feed himself and others. He was brought up this way, he says that fishing is what he was born to do, and it is what he must do to survive. It is how he makes his living, it is his way of life, and he though he does not like that he must kill his brother, the fish, he knows that this is how life works, and what he must do. This relates to my last blog post about Hamlet’s musings on the circle of life. The old man only knows that this is the way things are, they cannot be changed, the fish must die.

The old man recounts the story of the marlin he and the boy had caught, with the male fish that refused to leave the female even after she had been caught, dragged aboard, and killed. The old man remembers how sad he and the boy were about the situation, so they said sorry and butchered her promptly. Their sorrow for the lover-fish was separated from their requirement to catch the fish. The old man has very strong emotions, he feels deeply for everything, the ocean, the moon, the stars, the fish. But he keeps these emotions separated from his job, which must be to kill that which he loves. It is an outstanding feat that he can do this, seeing as his line of work makes him go against all his emotions.

The old man has much determination, and it never even crosses his mind to give up and let the fish go, not when it starts pulling him out past the sight of land, or when he is in so much pain from holding the line. This must be the determination of a fisherman. The fish (as of yet) has not even begun to slow down or show any signs of weakness, but the man does not even think of admitting defeat. He is determined to outlast the fish and catch it, despite all the risk he is putting himself in. He is either very courageous or very stupid to continue on this journey out to sea, and I am conflicted as to who I want to see come away alive.

I have become attached to the old man as he reminisces and switches his trains of thought and talks to himself and to the fish all alone out on the open sea. But his thoughts and feelings for the fish are so heart-felt that I feel for the fish as well, and I do not want him to be caught. I would love for them both to win, but with him being a fisherman, the only way he can win is by catching a fish, and so the fish must die for the man to win. It is a sort of “neither can live while the other survives” situation, so I guess I’d rather they both die, than have only one live. I do not know if Hemmingway intended for his audience to feel so strongly for both the man and the fish, or if it is just me being all animal-lover-human-hater. Even though the man kills animals for a living, because I know so much about him I cannot help but sympathize with him. I would think that Hemmingway intended this to be so because of how the old man describes his love for the fish in the personal first-person, making the reader think as the old man thinks, and feel as he feels. This is a clever strategy, making the reader unsure of how he/she wants the story to end, and so building the suspense and keeping the reader interested to find out what actually happens. This story makes me think about many things, I have not even mentioned all the language, the use of Spanish, religion, the interconnectedness of all things, and many other ideas that this book brings to my attention, and hopefully I will have many more ideas to mull over once I finish the book.

“”We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots.”

All of Hamlet revolves around death. It is the reason for the revenge, and it takes the lives of all the characters. The article I read in the New York Times mentions how the whole story revolves around death, that it is what causes and ends everything. Hamlet is concerned with mortality as much as revenge.

            This quote really intrigued me when I first read it. The whole concept that we are all just worm-food sort of gives the feeling that our lives do not matter because we will all just be food one day. The article mentions that as well, how Shakespeare is writing everyone’s future, because everyone is going to die one day. But I don’t think this quote means we should just give up, that nothing matters because we will be gone soon enough. That is too depressing a concept to really fully accept as the only truth. It may be true, but there is more to life, even if it isn’t expressed in Hamlet.

“A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of a king, and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm”. It may be the circle of life, but life isn’t just about surviving long enough to die. Hamlet touches on the purposes of life, mentioning the happier memories of the characters. The play shows that we cannot just exist, as humans we feel and think. No matter how many deaths Hamlet encounters, he does not give up his goal for revenge because it is his love for his dead father that keeps him going. He still feels attachment for a human who is long gone, a body whose only worth was feeding the worms. Even though that may seem to be the only value humans have on earth, food for the worms, it cannot undermine the worth humans place on themselves and each other. Though it angers Hamlet that this is the case, that in the end one’s life and death does not matter, he has to accept it as a truth in the end.