Two books, Drown and A Mercy are about childrens' need for love and attention from adults who are too caught up in the nitty-gritties of life
Two books, Drown and A Mercy are about childrens' need for love and attention from adults who are too caught up in the nitty-gritties of life
Drown
Author: Junot Du00c3az
Publisher: Penguin India
Price: Rs 299
Rating: JJJJ
A Mercy
Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Random House
Price: u00c2u00a3 5.99
Rating: JJJJ
These books will be read because
THEY are written by prize-winning authors. When Toni Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, her book Beloved had already won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Ten years later, Junot Diaz received the Pulitzer for The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
A Mercy is set in the 17th century US one in which overdressed women in raised heels rode in carts driven by ten-year-old negroes. The ideal wife had not a shrewish bone in her body never raised her voice in anger, saw to his needs, made the tenderest dumplings, took to chores in an alien land with enthusiasm and invention, cheerful as a bluebird.
Drown, on the other hand, is a collection of short but related contemporary episodes set part in the Dominican Republic and part in the US among other immigrants and refugees: "the only way we could have been poorer was to have lived in the campo, or to have been Haitian immigrants, and Mami regularly offered these to us as brutal consolation."
Literature is a wonderful way to mature and learn about relationships.
"Not at all," Toni Morrison is reported to have said when asked by Salon magazine whether she would agree that she had written a 'feminist' novel, "I would never write any 'ist'. I don't write 'ist' novels."
However, A Mercy is about girls and women their practicality, their need for friendship, their yearnings and strivings, their soft vulnerability and dependency, and the numerous ways in which they comb out areas of independence for themselves despite all these constraints. The men in these books are strong characters strong and demanding actually and even when we get to know them well, they continue to be props of the story rather than its purpose.
Drown, on the other hand, has as its main characters boys and men. Their dominating preoccupation is fornication. The violence is so casual it's confusing "after a while I hit her and made the blood come out of her ear like a worm but right then, in that apartment, we seemed like we were normal folks. Like maybe everything was better."
Both books are about children and their desperate need for love and recognition in a world where adults are harrassed by the pressures of staying fed, warm, and safe from predators. Both have lessons for adults with power over children. Both show you the terrible pain in the most sacred, intimate relationships mother-daughter and father-son and the senseless ways in which we engender it.
They both give us confidence in finding our own voice. Each one uses language in a different way. A Mercy is lyrical and strong, and rereading the lines provides a satisfaction quite separate from the story. Sections of the book are told in the voice of the main character, a young slave girl, running through the snow, looking for help, hoping desperately to meet a man she has come to love. Her words set her apart, transporting us into her mind and life.
Drown too is lyrical but in a more noisy and colourful way. Du00c3az is said to write "Spanglish" but this book has far fewer Spanish words and allusions than The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.
At this time in our lives, we need to inspect the concept of "poverty porn". Toni Morrison received her Master's degree in English from Cornell University, and Junot Du00c3az earned a Master of Fine Arts from the same institution.
Toni Morrison's love of literature may have originated in the folk tales her father, a steel mill worker, told his children stories that would later come to life in her fiction. Growing up, she read constantly and her favourite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy.
Junot Du00c3az's father features in his fiction too but as a character and not just an influence. When Junot was six, the family immigrated to the US where the father lived and worked, but he later abandoned them to severe poverty and facing tragedy without his support. It's said that as a child Du00c3az would walk four miles in order to borrow books from the public library.
Both write about the sorrow and struggle inherent in deprivation and the compensations human beings find happiness in, in the bleakest of situations. They write not just with imagination but from experience.
The Slumdog Millionnaire children made it to a global stage. Many of them, and thousands of others like them in this country, would discover a love for books u00e2u0080u0094 if they ever had a chance. Many writers would emerge, reflecting their reality with a mastery that may not be politically correct but would add to the great literature of the world.
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