Death and the Maiden or Girls in Trouble 2

As I've said in the past, a huge amount of YA books are about girls in trouble. Here are two books from the subset of girls in trouble that also deals with death.

The Fault in Our Stars by John Green (YA)

Hazel is dying. Actually, she's been dying for years from thyroid cancer. Although she has survived much longer than expected, she knows that someday soon she will die since the cancer has settled in her lungs as well. However, Hazel is not a character who is going to teach the reader about dying with grace. Instead, she's going to live as much as she can before she goes. She meets Augustus Waters, who is charming and handsome and loves the metaphor of putting a cigarette (the killing thing) in his mouth and not smoking it. Gus is extremely lovable, as is anyone who loves a good metaphor, and as an aside, he has also been touched by cancer, but was saved through amputating his leg. Gus will convince her to go to Amsterdam to meet the author of her favourite book, An Imperial Affliction, to ask him what happened to all the characters after the novel finished.

This is a love story, of course, and it is both funny and sad. I read this on a bus and alternated between crying and laughing all the way home. There are some beautiful passages, and the characters go to Amsterdam! I feel that never happens in books. I went there a few weeks ago as a graduation present to myself, and I think Green really captures how beautiful it is. I loved Gus for being enthusiastic and charming and witty. Finally, I loved Hazel, since although she is bitter and exhausted and depressed, she still notices the beauty in the world.

I loved this book, but I do have to mention that a coworker noted that she found it too similar to Looking For Alaska, Green's first book. I didn't feel the same way, probably because I've read some of Green's lighter works as well, but if that's the only other Green novel you've read you may be disappointed by it. I wasn't though.

This is a choice quote for those who love people taking about love.
" I'm in love with you, and I'm not the business of denying myself the simple pleasure of saying true things. I'm in love with you, and I know that love is just a shout into the void, and that oblivion is inevitable, and that we're all doomed and that there will come a day when all our labor has been returned to dust, and I know the sun will swallow the only earth we'll ever have, and I am in love with you" (153)

Thirteen Reasons Why by Jay Asher (YA)

Clay receives a box of tapes in which Hannah, a classmate and coworker, explains the 13 reasons why she committed suicide. Each of those reasons align with specific people, in a specific order, and everyone involved will receive the tapes in the same order and will get to hear Hannah tell their part in her story. If they don't listen to everything and pass the tapes on to the next person, then someone else will release the tapes to the public.

The overwhelming feeling from Hannah's story is that a teenage girl can be completely ostracized for having (or being perceived as having) any type of sex life.  Of course, Hannah hasn't really done anything, but her peers spread rumours and humiliate her every chance they get to the point where she feels completely alone.

One thing that really bothered me about this book, was that Clay was very different from the other people on the tapes. He had a serious crush on Hannah and he tried to reach out to her at a party and help her. In spite of this, he still gets pointed out as a reason why she killed herself . Obviously, this lets there be a sympathetic narrator who tries to understand Hannah and her pain, but it leaves the reader with the overwhelming feeling that Hannah is being cruel. For me, Hannah works better as an example of the consequences of  bullying and shaming girls than as a character, which isn't a good thing if half the story is in her own words. I raced through this book trying to figure out Hannah's secrets, but I just didn't love it.

Fortunately, this book wasn't really written for me. It was written for teens who feel alone, and for others who need to know that words can have serious consequences. It has a huge following and at least at my library, always seems to be out.

CB # 14 Generosity: An Enhancement

Generosity: An Enhancement by Richard Powers

                I read this a few weeks ago, but misplaced my copy so I can’t quote it extensively, which is what I really want to do. The writing in this novel is absolutely beautiful. Very rarely do I make markings in books, since I think it’s just cruel to destroy innocent books for no good reason. Even if I really love a quotation, I usually just write it down as soon as I see something beautiful in it. Generosity was different; I made markings all over the place. I couldn’t start writing it all down, so I kept everything.

                I was reminded of this novel when I read this article about the discovery of the happiness gene. Generosity is all about that same discovery and what it would actually mean for humanity. Russell runs a non-fiction writing class, and is a bit of a sad-sack. He’s surprised to read the writing of his student Thassadit and discover the amount of pain and suffering that she has lived through, including the Algerian Civil War. He is so massively surprised because she is such a happy person. She brings joy to the lives of her cynical classmates and she makes them notice the beauty of the world that she lives in. A parallel narrative thread follows the scientific search for the happiness gene. Obviously, the two stories get brought together and Powers questions if happiness is really all that good for us.

                Powers doesn’t like easy answers, or even answering things. I loved Gain, which I read for a class, and focused on the connections between capitalism and cancer, as reality and as a metaphor. Generosity has a similar intent. There are things we want to be able to control with science and with commerce, but maybe all our control is leading us in the completely wrong direction.

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.