Journeys

This is a good exploration of character in both senses of the word.  What is the most important thing to Hannah and to her husband?  What will they sacrifice to have it?  What is it like to have to be the adult in the room when neither choice is good?

One ordinary afternoon Hannah learns that her husband has possibly been involved in a Madoff like scheme and has disappeared.  His last note to her asks that she protect his daughter, her step daughter.  Unable to believe that her husband has done anything wrong and fled to save himself, she begins a search to discover the many things about his past that she didn’t know.

Althugh Dave has written several previous best sellers, this is her first mystery. I hope there is another.

It is quite an accomplishment to come up with a plot twist that is remembered more than twenty years later.

The plot is a basic one that has been told throughout the world throughout time.  It is the coming-of-age story.  A young person leaves home alone and searches for something.  Along the way he suffers hardships, overcomes obstacles, slays dragons, often gets help from a god or a wiseman (think Yoda), and finally discovers the fortitude within himself to succeed. 

In this case, the main character, a teenager named Pi, is a survivor of a shipwreck in which his parents are killed. Zoo animals had also been on the ship and escape into the sea. A few, in particular a wild tiger named Richard Parker, jump onto the life boat with Pi.

Martel deepens his plot by incorporating another classic topic of discussion, the physical vs. spiritual.  Are human beings more one than the other?  Which is more important?  Pi represents both.  His father is a zookeeper and Pi understands and cares about wild animals.  On the other hand, he is religious and participates in three religions, Christianity, Hinduism, and Islam. The name Pi, based on the mathematical term, refers to the “elusive irrational number with which scientists try to understand the universe.”

Martel knows his subjects well and wants to share his knowledge.  We are tutored on three religions, zookeeping, India, ships, and survival at sea.  Whew!  I would have preferred fewer details, less gory ones, and a tighter story that moved more quickly. Nonetheless, this is a creative version of a classic archetype that was fun to reread.

Although she writes about a particular time and place, what she says frames a question for all of us.  Politically, what do we want our world to look like?

The setting is January 2018, just three months after hurricane Maria devastated the island. In many areas the electrical grid is nonfunctioning; food and health supplies are stalled in port; roads are closed; there is no communication. How can the problems be solved and prevented from happening again during the next natural disaster?

Two different answers are given.  In one, the badly performing government would be essentially dissolved and services would be privatized.  Puerto Rico would become a mecca for the wealthy who would be enticed to the island by the lack of government regulation and taxes, and bring their businesses and cash with them.

In the second, government would continue to provide essential services such as education and utilities but would be decentralized with an emphasis on helping the island be self-sustaining.  Food and fuel would not be imported into a central location but would be grown and produced (for example organic food farms and solar panels) throughout the island.

Klein is not objective in her discussion; there are definite good guys and bad guys here.  But her simplification of two disparate views lays out the choices clearly.  Learning about Puerto Rico encourages us to extrapolate and consider our own political situation.  Before we can judge the best ways our own governments, both federal and local, could provide the world we want, we have to be able to say what that is.

“In his lyrical translation of “Beowulf,” Seamus Heaney describes Grendel as “the terror-monger,” the “captain of evil” and “the dread of the land.”  He wrote that the fiend “ruled in defiance of right” and was “malignant by nature, he never showed remorse.” Yeow!  Go Maureen. 

I love the Haney translation of Beowulf that she alludes to, but almost more than the poem, I like the cover, that suit of chain mail and its subtle powerful malice illustrating the hardships of that brutal life. 

But where oh where is our hero today, the slayer of the dragon? Where is our Beowulf?

As most of the world knows, Carroll sued Trump for defamation and was recently awarded damages of 83.3 million dollars.

Bennett states that this trial was about the value of a woman, long past middle age, who dared to claim she indeed still had value…an 80-year-old woman proclaiming she wasn’t done yet, that her reputation was worth something, and that she was owed money from the person who’d trashed it. 

Yeow again!  Go Jessica….and Jean.

If you woud like to read either of the New York Times articles, just click on the underlined sections which are links.