CB # 12 The Cardturner

The Cardturner by Louis Sachar           (YA)

                I have a serious soft spot in my heart for Louis Sachar, mainly because of Holes and There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom. I just love his style and his sense of humour. He can always make me laugh, and his books for teens, including this one, wrench at my heart. I was so excited when I found this at the library, and for once, I was right to cheer. Sachar has managed to write a funny, sweet novel about bridge. That’s right, the card game, and he somehow convinced me that I really want to learn how to play.

                Seventeen year old Alton is always being reminded that his great-uncle Lester (or Trapp, as his real friends call him) is his favourite uncle. Not because he’s actually his favourite, but because Trapp is extremely rich and will hopefully leave all his money to Alton’s family. This money is pretty much expected, because his parents have overextended themselves pre-emptively in anticipation of the riches that they’ll receive. However, Trapp isn’t dead yet and he needs an assistant. Trapp has gone blind because of his diabetes, but he still wants to play bridge. His last cardturner, Toni, questioned him at one point, so she has started to actually start playing bridge as Trapp's occasional partner. Instead, Alton will step in because he doesn’t know anything about the game. Basically, with each new hand of cards, Alton takes Trapp aside and tells him what he has, and then plays the cards as Trapp tells him during the game. Trapp assumes that Alton will never be interested in the game, but he’s very wrong. The more Alton watches, the more he wants to learn.

                As Alton learns more and starts to practice, the reader can learn more (if he or she really wants to). Whenever there’s a section explaining how the game works, there’s a little whale so that if the reader wants to skip to the quick summary box, he or she can. I personally found it fascinating, but that’s just me, and I can understand why other people wouldn’t want to learn about bridge. Sachar seems to know how teens think, and gives those with no interest in bridge a way out without them giving up on the book.

                Of course, this wouldn’t be great YA with just an explanation of bridge. In fact, that would probably get Sachar tons of angry letters from readers who were expecting to read a novel. No, Alton learns the dark secrets of Trapp’s past, makes a friend (or more) out of Toni, and tries to balance the complications that occur when your best friend is dating your ex-girlfriend. He also starts to realise how strange his parents really are for expecting Trapp's money.  I liked how bridge really does seem to be a metaphor for life, it’s what you do with the hand you’re dealt that counts.

CB #11 The Wisdom of Whores

The Wisdom of Whores: Bureaucrats, Brothels and the Business of AIDS by Elizabeth Pisani

                The great thing about having a human-rights loving sister is that there are always interesting things to read when you go home and visit. I found that this book was exactly what I needed, incredibly fascinating and about a subject that I would love to know more about. I had learned a little bit about AIDS and HIV in a course last year about disease in global literature. We had read Sziwe’s Test by Jonny Steinberg, which focused on why so many people in South Africa weren’t getting tested even though clinics were relatively available. We also read Welcome to Our Hillbrow by Phaswane Mpe , a novel that explored the lives of the residents of Hillbrow in Joannesburg, including the rise of HIV and xenophobia, as well as how traditional views and the modern world are colliding in post-apartheid South Africa. These other books had piqued my interest, and I was interested in hearing about the global fight against AIDS.

                Pisani is an epidemiologist who has been covering the AIDS crisis around the world since the 1990’s. Her main focus has been in Asia, particularly Indonesia. Her journalism background means that what she writes is always both entertaining and informative. Her writing doesn’t get weighed down by jargon and she’s able to explain the many complicated facets of the fight against AIDS, including the politics behind it.

                Her main concern throughout this work is that because AIDS is caused by two “wicked” things, sex and drugs, that the politics of fighting AIDS has become murky. Tax payers don’t want to give money to wicked behavior, and they want their money to have an effect  and politicians realize this.  AIDS activists, including Pisani, have had to massage their statistics so that it seemed as if the AIDS crisis would affect innocents, good wives and children, in the hope that they would get the funding that they needed. In reality, it’s only in Sub-Saharan Africa that the AIDS crisis has become this all-consuming monster that regularly affects everyone in society. Pisani argues that there are two ways of thinking about AIDS and HIV: thinking about the spread of disease in Africa and thinking about the spread of HIV in the rest of the world. In Africa, anyone is at risk of getting HIV, and Pisani comes up with a few reasons why sexual behavior and cultural mores may have caused that. In the rest of the world, the people who are most at risk are those who engage in high risk behavior. They are sex workers or intravenous drug users or they have anal sex or some combination of the three; often they are extremely marginalized in society. 

              For example, intravenous drug users are the most at risk of getting HIV, because of the nature of the fluids exchanged. However, the programs that would most help prevent the spread of HIV in this group, are clean needle programs, and those are hard to get people to pay for. Even in Canada, the Conservative government keeps on threatening to shut down the Vancouver needle exchange.  It is easier to get money to pay for treatments (which can only last as long as the money lasts) because it  makes donors (including donor countries) feel like they are truly being effective. However, if they really wanted to change the world and stop the spread of HIV, they should focus more on prevention: condoms and clean needles and making sure that those who need these items have access and incentives to use them.

                For Pisani, the main issue is that the public view of morality and fighting this disease seem to be at cross-purposes. In her opinion, sex and drugs are fun things, and people love doing them. Though other people may have a moral problem with this, the best option is to make these fun things safe. Unfortunately, at the moment of her writing (2008) the focus was on trying to make safe things like abstinence seem fun. Human nature really does not seem to work on these lines. The problem is, is that when people focus too much on morality they ignore the people who are most at risk. Pisani notes that sex workers need to make money, and there are many highly functioning drug addicts out there. Our concern as human beings is to make sure that we don’t discount other people’s lives just because they don’t behave like we want them too. Pisani seems to recognize how hard it is for people to think about these populations in a positive way. It’s key that she notes that she couldn’t handle her (now ex-) husband’s descent into drug addiction, even though she had no problem helping the drug addicts and sex workers on the streets of Indonesia. It was just too close for comfort.

                Pisani isn’t the most politically correct person, and she’s really trying to fight back against the politics of development that seem to have overtaken all conversations about HIV and AIDS. As well, she doesn’t offer any opinions on how to make people change their minds about those who are at risk. I feel that her argument would be even stronger if she made an argument for the marginalized that stood against the moralizing of donors and tax payers. She needs to argue more strongly that these people matter, simply because they are people. Sometimes we need to be reminded of that fact.

CB # 10 The Elegance of the Hedgehog

The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery

Translated by Alison Anderson

Renée is the concierge at a fancy apartment building in Paris. She has the elegance of a hedgehog, for all of her better traits are hidden under all the ways that she pretends to be someone else. She loves Tolstoy, her cat is named Leo and she loves to challenge herself by reading about phenomenology and watching Japanese films. She hides these facts well. She pretends to be nothing more than a stupid woman who loves watching television and eating rudimentary food, when on the inside she’s on fire with thoughts. She loves beauty but she won’t let anyone else know it.

Paloma lives in one of the apartments in the building. She is twelve years old and decidedly precocious. She has decided to kill herself and burn down the building on her thirteenth birthday to spite her family, and so that she doesn’t end up trapped in the typical life of the bourgeois. There only seems to be one route to go when you’re wealthy and intelligent, and she doesn’t want to follow along. Obviously, these two women need to meet and find out about their similarities, but the novel doesn’t take the expected route.

I found this novel beautiful but frustrating. I loved the fact that the two main characters were thinking about the world they lived in. I loved the fact that they admired beauty, discussed philosophy and had thoughts about the kind of life they were living. They were interesting, unique individuals, but I was frustrated by the way they viewed the world. They obsessed about Beauty and Truth, but made serious efforts to disguise their love. They both hide their true selves from the world, and pretend that their hiding makes them noble, instead of scared. By being unwilling to expose their true selves and thoughts to the world, I found them both nihilistic, which I think was the complete opposite of what the novel intended. They assumed that no one ever could understand them so they gave up on trying to let people in. Paloma, I can almost understand, because she is so young, and teenagers are dramatic and frustrating even at the best of times. I have a harder time with Renée because she is an adult, and I feel that her experience of life should have given her a broader perspective on people.

I don’t know if it’s because I don’t have a full understanding of how French culture works that I had such a discomfort with the characters. I do know that there is a serious stasis for anyone who wants to be employed there, and maybe the novel is supposed to reflect this, as well as French class issues. I did love that the many subjects of my undergrad, phenomenology and great literature, were discussed, and made me feel more at home in this book.

This novel had some very thought provoking moments but my favourite one begins by saying: What is the purpose of intelligence if it is not to serve others?  […] If you belong to the closed inner sanctum of the elite, you must serve in equal proportion to the glory and ease of material existence you derive from belonging to that inner sanctum.

The only thing that matters is your intention: are you elevating thought and contributing to the common good, or rather joining the ranks in a field of study whose only purpose is its own perpetuation, and only function the self-reproduction of a sterile elite – for this turns university into a sect.

CB #9 The Wee Free Men

The Wee Free Men by Terry Pratchett

The original plan for my reading week was to get tons of reading done. It didn’t happen. Instead I went to look at penguins,  wander around museums, cheer on the Habs and tried to sleep. This was the only book I finished, though I did get fairly far in my next read.

I was raised on fairy tales, specifically Irish fairy tales, where the fairies are out to get you. It’s not that they’re evil, per say, but they want what they want and they don’t have the same understanding of consequences. They don’t understand that humans need their friends and family, and that being tossed out of fairyland 100 years after you were taken, does you absolutely no favours.  I always knew that if the fairies took me then I’d better not eat a thing they offered me, unless they could offer me salt, and having some iron on your person is always helpful. Also, (though not as relevant to this book) be kind to people in general, and not just strangers. The people you know really well are more likely to be the ones who run into Fairyland to save you (usually on a horse that only ate clover, or was never shoed, or some other crazy detail) so maybe you should be kind to them so that they won’t abandon you.

Pratchett wrote the Tiffany Achung books for younger readers who might also like the magic and weirdness of Discworld. I have the incredibly bad habit so just reading whatever book in a series I can get my hand on, so I’ve already read A Hat Full of Sky, which I thought was just alright. I enjoyed this book far more because I got to understand Tiffany. However, I do love Pratchett’s footnotes, and once again there was only one.

She’s been the youngest child in her family for close to nine years, and then all of a sudden she has a baby brother, Wentworth, who she has to take care of all of the time. She’s intensely practical so when she notices that there’s a Jenny Green-Teeth with eyes as big as soup plates ( the kind that are eight inches across) in her river, she tempts it with her brother and then clobbers it with an iron frying pan. This causes the Wee Free Men , the toughest, tiniest fairies who love to drink and fight, to realize that she’s a hag or witch, and ask her for her help. The Queen of Fairies is on her way and she will try to enslave them once again. As well, she has already captured some humans who might want to escape her version of happiness. Oh, and she just kidnapped Wentworth.

This novel is funny and sweet and possibly a bit scary for younger readers. Like a lot of Pratchett’s works there are a few morals including: question conventional wisdom, don’t assume that people you don’t understand are evil and my personal favourite.

   'Now… If you trust in yourself…’

               ‘Yes?’

               ‘… and believe in your dreams…”

               ‘Yes?’

               ‘… and follow your star…’

               ‘Yes?’

               ‘… you’ll still get beaten by people who spent their time working hard and learning things and weren’t so lazy. Goodbye’

Good advice for all of us.