Life-writing

There are some plans to start a life-writing circle. I quickly listed some books I had in mind, when answering to the question what kind of biographies have inspired me. I am such a junkie of novels that I actually read only a couple of biographies a year. Over the past decade, these titles have talked to me:

Anna Kortelainen: Virginie! (in Finnish)
Mark Simpson: Saint Morrissey
Vikram Seth: Two Lives
Paul Theroux: Sir Vidya’s Shadow
Anna Makkonen: Sinulle (Finnish)
Carol Shields: Jane Austen
Hannah Arendt: Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess
Irma Sulkunen: Liisa Eerikintytär (Finnish)
Hanif Kureishi: My Ear at His Heart
Sara Suleri Goodyear: Boys Will Be Boys
Joan Didion: The Year of Magical Thinking
Carolyn Steedman: Landscape for a Good Woman
Mustafa Can: Tätt intill dagarna (Swedish)
Natalie Zemon Davis: Kolme naista, kolme elämää 1600-luvulla. (transl.)
Hélène Cixous: Rootprints
Amos Oz: A Tale of Love and Darkness

If I had to pick one title from this list as the ultimate classic, today I'd pick Carolyn Steedman's Landscape for a Good Woman.
Steedman is one of my gurus in the search for alternative research writing. Landscape can be read by anyone, anywhere; one doesn't have to be an academic to appreciate it. At the same time, it is historically precise and gives the reader tools to start doing similar analyses of his or her own life.

Lola Rose and Cookie

Further book blurb on two Jacqueline Wilson books. I seem to have a slight addiction, meaning I read them before my daughter gets hold of them, and she is too old anyways, if we think of proper age slots. I don't belong to any slot, which means I can freely read them anywhere, anytime, also in public places without feeling embarrassed.

Lola Rose is a Jacqueline Wilson classic. Having read four-five of her novels, I'd recommend Lola Rose for the beginner. That and the earlier reviewed The Illustrated Mum rob my points for originality - in the storylines of both novels, there is something spectacular. Play with contingence, class analysis, positionality.

In Lola Rose, the mother gets to leave an abusive partner by winning a prize in a lottery. It consists of hard core social commentary on schools, the desired addresses, and the less undesirable ones in British everyday life. Lola Rose is registered to a London school where the principal gladly shares a ciggie with the girl's mother. It is the only school in the neighbourhood that accepts new students in the middle of the school year. Lola Rose lives in temporary council housing, which the mother-daughter couple tries to revamp as home. There is a younger boyfriend, whose feelings turn cold after the mother is diagnosed of breast cancer.

I wonder if Jacqueline Wilson's mission is to prepare the youngsters to cope with the realities of everyday life. I have liked her robust narratives, but after reading a few, I start expecting a thematic graduation (which so far doesn't seem to have happened).

The latest novel, Cookie, is a variation on the theme of Lola Rose. In both books, women and children are on the run from abusive men, never to return. And both display portraits of late capitalist consumerism, taken to the extremes. In Cookie,, there is a deeply insecure builder father, who tries to buy friends to the plain-looking daughter by hiring caterers and limos to her birthday party.

Wilson's boys and girls, men and women, are to a great extent cartoon characters, who bring the coarse point home about the ills of society, but after reading some of her books, I start expecting deviations from the bestseller scheme of things. Are the power relations in families really so polarized as Wilson likes to show us? And what about multicultural families, queer families, single parent families in which the parent is not interested in new girl- or boyfriends?

I am expecting from Wilson in the coming novels a widening of themes. The kids cannot forever be reading Thelma and Louise type of runaway dramas. She is a realistic writer and needs to study further the complexity of today's families. Many couples don't split up because of the other's abusive narcissism, or infidelity. She offers us a study of families on the move, but the study doesn't extend far enough. I would also like to read about polite, nice families breaking up.

People eating tofu, drinking soya milk and contemplating treks in the Himalayas do it, too.

Slumdog millionaire, months late

The whole world's been buzzing about Danny Boyle's film Slumdog Millionaire, and I came to Anil Kapoor fandom long before the film's European release. The love affair started by seeing the film Taal, in which Kapoor plays the role of an opportunist mogul of Mumbai music business. He is extremely cynical and entertaining in the cynicism. I have not come across any other Indian actor or actress with similar scope for the ironic. He speaks straight to me without any cultural translations. I would love to find the female equivalent of AK, someone ruthlessly bitchy, who at the same time loves the people she's with (although she would never admit it).

Curiously enough, I didn't rush to see Slumdog during its Finnish première, but waited until early July. The whole event just seemed overcrowded. Didn't feel any pressure to be there. Funnily enough, the kids insisted. It seemed to belong to their repertoire of films to see, not mine. I succumbed.

I have seen too many films with AK as the crook, or the competing older groom, or the streetwise Indian professional - it would be difficult to imagine him in another kind of role. He is Indian secular urbanity embodied, I would find it difficult to view him in the role of a village patriarch, or a spiritual authority. He is the sleek urbanite with vicious manners, who often has to go through a fierce moral battle before coming to terms with the surrounding humanity.

I smuggled an underaged child to see the film. Nobody stopped us at the gates, though he was 5 years too young. I was first afraid it might be too rough for the kids to see, but it wasn't. So good it was I got myself a copy of the DVD at Heathrow during a conference trip, with a set of fan postcards included. Now I only miss the T-shirt, and I assume it also can be easily arranged. India is not lagging behind terribly in the commodification of film stars. I plan to travel there later this year. How many kgs of Bollywood materials will I bring along?

It was curious to see a film about Indian slum children that did not automatically envoke soppiness in the corner of the eye of a middle-aged European female (I almost always cry); the economy of emotions was more complex, and the film did also appeal to the spectator's analytical skills.

That kind of alienating effect is unusual when viewing Hollywood/Bollywood films of today. I expect to actually learn something from the film after a couple of rounds of more careful screening.

My first time with Morrissey

It was quite peculiar to see Morrissey live at Tampere Areena last Friday. In fact, it's taken me five days to recover from the shock of seeing a crucial, life-transforming pop idol. I took dozens of pictures, one of which was quite OK considering that I took it on the mobile camera.

But the worst of all, we were ten minutes late from the gig!

In May I travelled all the way to Helsinki to speak on his 50th birthday at a panel and concert organized on his behalf, and was at least two hours early. The occasion was the warmest, most unbelievable little seminar I've attended as of yet. Compared to academic seminars, the "little seminar" seemed to house at least 200 guests. There was no need for academic show-off, I felt that all the panelists were speaking straight from the heart. The panel was followed by Antti Nylén's spectacular reading of a philosophical essay "On Consolation", and by many young bands making highly original covers of Morrissey songs. Unfortunately, the last train to Tampere left too early and I missed the bands, but I heard bits of the rehearsals backstage, and became highly inspired.

In Tampere, due to life's little surprises, I missed two first songs. And overall, the beginning of the concert was stiff. There weren't enough people in the sports hall, only some 500, and the newspapers claimed the gig was sold out. I forgot to take my glasses, which means I was squinting to see him. When he took off his shirt, and on a couple of other occasions, I pushed myself towards the front, but for the rest of the gig, I enjoyed the distant view and the atmosphere. Young girls were wearing 1930s dresses and big fabric flowers pinned on their costumes; I wonder if this is the official Morrissey fan's outfit or just a passing art school fad. Men seemed almost too ordinary to be true. There was no beer tent in the hall, only mineral water was being sold. This was just great! I am still on the lookout for the perfect Morrissey T-shirt, which the local stores won't sell, even if I promised them 1000 euros under the counter (believe me, I have tried). Perhaps this week in London or its vicinity. Let us pray for HMV's endless storages.

In Tampere, Morrissey put his soul into "Irish Blood, English Heart" and the encore, "First of the Gang to Die". "Let Me Kiss You" was a heart-throbber, but I started feeling mortal panic during "Life Is A Pigsty". Even this song went straight in during the darkest months in Reykjavik, but in the Tampere midsummer light, it was too black, too overpowering.

The walk down from the concert hall to downtown Tampere was spent in perfect understanding with Morrissey fandom, and funnily enough, mineral water was the hit on this journey from otherworld to whatever realities we might live in.

Next time, I hope in the UK. And special thanks for playing "The Last Time I Spoke to Carol" with even more Latin fervour than on the CD. Carol Song hit me straight in the heart in the same way as Tori Amos' Mr Zebra. Intertextuality? If there is a person in this planet understanding the gobbledigook, please inform me.

Mandalas of the 2000s - Chatterjee's Weight Loss

I add here some lines as an afterthough to my notes on Pearl S. Buck's Mandala, although there is not enough time to write about this complex novel properly.

Upamanyu Chatterjee (b.1959) is an established Bengali novelist, who has recently made an international breakthrough with his latest, Weight Loss (2006). When I found this novel, I was overjoyed by the prospect of reading something raw, crude and politically incorrect about Indians' private lives. The little voyeurist in me was expecting more than the cultural anthropologist, who prefers to listen to gossip about servants, updates on marriage arrangements and such everyday chitchat.

Weight Loss didn't betray me, the novel really hit me in the face and challenged my stereotypes about Indians. But I had to force myself through it, it was a truly disturbing book that did not offer any occasions for simple enjoyment, breathing out, or relief. The novel is a walking crisis, a portrait of inner and outer chaos, a constellation of chapters on the verge of breakdown. It is one of the un-sexiest book on sexuality I've ever come across. The meaning is not to titillate, but to tell stories of obsession and compulsion.

The novel follows the youth and adulthood of Bhola, a bisexual middle-class college teacher, whose life is revolving around a servant couple, Moti and Titli, who both become his lovers at different stages. Bhola can only act sexually in the presence of people of lower class/caste; his marriage is doomed, as he cannot be aroused by his wife. He makes life choices arrording to the moves of the couple, finding himself eventually at a New Age Calm Centre, where the couple is working and where people are trying to get rid of their masturbation habits by drawing mandalas:

"You will create and colour you own wheel and make it evolve into a many-tinted pictogram that will depict exactly where you are focussing your time and energy and where you might need to pay more attention. It will help you identify imbalances in your daily life. Do you spend too much time fantasizing? Masturbating? Remember that none of your activities metaphysically is more wasteful." (Chatterjee 2006, 402)

The novel is most successful in portraying the immense gaps in the lives of the rich and poor in India; illiterate servants do work at health retreats charging astronomical sums from Western tourists. Their living conditions do not give them the luxury of a search for "inner life" that the brochures are advertising. I have always been excited and appalled at these new non-material ways of making a living - Chatterjee does a good job by portraying the absurdities of the spiritual marketplace. One is not in the mood for any kind of Dream Yoga meditation, sufi whirling or herbalism after reading this.

If this is a novel about male mid-life crisis, it is definitely different from many Finnish or European ones I've come across. Chatterjee does not invite to identify with any of the characters, but portrays all of them pitilessly, under brightest fluorescent lights. Bhola is fully aware that he is wasting his life, but does not make any efforts to come out of his condition. His best friends are bingeing on drugs, he is bingeing on his sexual compulsions, and every day rolls on accrodingly until the objects of desire start making claims from him.

The point of Weight Loss is not to like it or dislike it, but to put up with some aspects of the world he is narrating. It is an absurd exaggeration of transgressive love lives, not asking from the reader to approve or disapprove them. It does not make moral judgments for or against. Some aspects of the tale are part of our everyday realities across cultures - the story could also be told from a Nordic point of view, in which the gap between the haves and the have-nots might not be as crude, but still it would exist. Chatterjee makes us ask questions about class, status, wealth and sexuality, not only in India, but in any society. The answers very rarely are easy, and not all comedy makes us laugh out loud. There are also other emotional categories than empathy/sympathy. Sometimes ambivalence is the only answer.

The stripped maharaja - on Pearl S. Buck's fiction

Inspired by a friend, I made a one euro purchase at a flea market, the Finnish translation of Pearl S. Buck's Indian-orientalist novel Mandala (1970/1972). Approaching the novel with the prescribed irony only available through decades' afterwisdom, I was expecting the worst. Even the cover was appalling: monumental brown faces of Indian royalties on a pink marble background. Could have been a Bollywood poster of the 70s. Very appealing from the perspective of orientalist India-kitsch.

Pearl S. Buck belongs to summer cottage literature in Finland. We inherit these titles from grandparents, and if we don't have enough space in our houses, we dump them to summer cottages or flea markets. I doubt my grandmother ever read her Buck novels, but she had got them as presents from friends. She was more of the FinnLit type. All I know about the titles at our summer cottage is that they portray Chinese culture. Pearl S. Buck (b. 1892) grew up as a daughter of American missionaries in China and learnt to speak Chinese before English. But for the purposes of here and now, the later cultural jump to India puzzles me more.

Knowing that the author was nominated the Nobel prize in 1938, the reading seemed even more demanding. What literary values could there be found in an emerald-studded display of orientalist clichés?

There is a modern maharaja who has lost most of his properties after independence and is forced to convert a family palace into a posh hotel for American tourists. There is a cold wife, the maharani, and an independent-minded young American woman, who plays the piano at a hotel lobby in Delhi. There is a son who dies in a battle against the Chinese in Ladakh, whose rebirth everyone is expecting.
There even is a Catholic priest who enjoys drinking the palace's own rose wine far too much. It's known as a powerful aphrodisiac by the locals.
People measure the men's virility by looking at the growth of hair in their ears.

The mismatched love couple visit Taj Mahal at night-time, not once but TWICE.

There is a certain degree of psychological depth in the novel, especially in the character of the maharaja himself, and his torn loyalties between modernity and family tradition. His messed-up relationship to women, sexuality and his own body is more than an average romance novel could offer. Buck strips the maharaja bare of certain types of romantic expectations. She does it very nicely and politely, as a kind of honorary guest to India who is aware of the narrative limits of her genre. The romance remains, but some sugar has been cut down.

In fact, I would like to read this story re-written from the perspective of the 2000s. Perhaps the characters could be different, but I believe some of the tensions remain the same. I wonder what the tale would sound like without any sugar. Of course, a plain tale cannot exist. There are always ornaments added to stories. Probably there'd be an increase of salt and fat. In the 2000s version, sex would be explicit and ugly. (See also my reading of Upamanyu Chatterjee's Weight Loss)

There is more political history in the novel than one would automatically expect. The analysis of the Indo-Chinese relations in the border zones is quite nuanced, considering that it is a romantic novel. Americans are not portrayed through American eyes only; there is a certain level of "talking back" (even in the form of fictional characters). As a whole, the novel is an odd combination of orientalism and post-colonial critique. Buck wrote it in her late 70s, when apparently visiting his missionary son/grandson in India. She could not have produced this in an armchair, there are many cultural details she can only have picked up while living in India. We learn something about the Rajputs, caste relations and the relations between Hindus, Muslims and Christians. We learn about Tibetan Buddhist beliefs of afterlife. We even learn about tribes living outside the realm of major world religions.

I imagine Mandala would make a solid Bollywood film, with the potential of international distribution. The clichés could be played with, using all the devices of postmodern irony - Bollywood filmmakers are surely in this juncture already, knowing how to make the most of the iconicity of India. I cannot imagine a better future for an almost forgotten author, whose moldy books new generations would not otherwise touch.

Siskodisko

Jos joku kysyis multa, mikä on paras nuortenkirja koskaan, vastaisin Jacqueline Wilsonin Tatuoitu äiti. Jacqueline Wilsonin eri-ikäisille suunnattuja perhedraamoja olen parin viime vuoden aikana saanut käsiini jo kolme. Niissä on sopivaa 70-lukulaista sosiaalirealismia käännettynä postmodernimmalle kielelle. Koen suurta sielujen sympatiaa maanisdepressiivisen tatuoidun äidin kanssa, joka halutessaan hyvittää lapsilleen binge drinking-keikkansa tyhjentää pankkitilinsä ja ostaa kymmenillä punnilla kakunkoristeita ja -kuorrutteita sateenkaaren kaikissa väreissä. Perheellä ei muuten ole rahaa ruokaan, mutta kakkuihin on aina. Nämä ovat äärimmäisen urbaaneja tarinoita, joissa maisemat ovat lähinnä ostoskeskuksten ja huvipuistojen valomerta. Pieni tyttö minussa kiittää, koska en ikinä pitänyt Viisikkojen nummimaisemista (eväskoreista puhumattakaan) enkä hevoskirjoista.

Muutama päivä sitten luin ahmimalla Sue Townsendin Cappuccinovuodet, jossa Adrian Mole on varttunut kolmikymppiseksi yh-isäksi. Kymmenisen vuotta sitten, kun kirja ensin ilmestyi, en olisi jaksanut ottaa selvää, mitä nuoruuden antisankarille kuului. Kirjassa on paljon näkymää tulevaisuuteen: Townsend esittää Adrianin wannabe-TV-kokkina, jonka Sikahyvää sisälmyksistä! ei saavuta sitä kaupallista menestystä, jonka sen odotettiin saavuttavan. Jamie Oliverin, Nigella Lawsonin ja Gordon Ramsayn kaltaisten starojen aika onkin ollut vasta 2000-luvulla. Kun kokeista ja sisustajista tulee kansakunnan ikoneita ja johtohahmoja, jotain outoa ja ihmeellistä on tapahtumassa yhteiskunnassa. Townsend kertoo omalla pinttymättömällä tyylillään juuri tästä. En tosin tiedä, haluaisinko lukea Adrianin viidenkympin villityksestä, jos Townsend on vielä silloin läppärinsä ääressä luomassa.

Koska vielä lukemattomat kirjani ovat diasporassa yliopistolla ja vaikeissa paikoissa muuttolaatikoiden pohjalla, on pitänyt tarttua tyttäreni kokoelmiin. Tutustuin Kariston Siskodisko-sarjaan, joka kaupallisuudellaan ja teinejä kosiskelevalla tyylillään ärsyttää jo ennen kuin on lukenut sanaakaan. Luin Rhian Traceyn Neljän tytön kirjakimpan ja Sue Limbin Tyttö 15 vee, hurmaava, mutta hullu . Ensimmäinen oli muodikas lukupiirikertomus neljästä tytöstä, jotka pääsivät paikallisradioon raportoimaan lukemisiaan ja ystävystyivät ristiin rastiin, raadollisesti ja dramaattisesti. Poikaystävän varastamissotkun aikana aloin kokea suurta ikävystymistä, ja mielestäni muutenkin kirjan maailma oli ennalta-arvattavan lattea. Lukupiiriaiheisia kirjoja on noussut kuin sieniä sateella sekä pienemmille että isommille tytöille. Aihe tuntuu brändätyltä. On hauskempaa osallistua lukupiiriin kuin lukea kirjoja muiden ihmisten lukupiireistä.

Sue Limbin Tyttö, 15 vee oli laadukkaampaa siskodiskoa kuin lukupiiritematiikka. Siinä päähenkilö jopa suunnittelee kolmatta sukupuolta ja päähenkilön äiti on radikaalifeministi-kirjastonhoitaja. Limb kirjoittaa keskiluokkaisten teinien maailmoista, joissa ei ehkä ole samanlaista sosiaalipoliittista vääntöä kuin Wilsonilla. Wilsonin lapset ja nuoret ovat aina jotenkin heitteillä; Limbin maailmassa vanhemmat ovat vanhempia ja huolehtijan roolissa, vaikka kuinka ärsyttäviä. Ehkä Sue Limb antaa enemmän tilaa nuorille itselleen ja jättää vanhemmat sivurooleihin, kun taas Wilsonin kirjoissa hullut, addiktiiviset, parinvaihtoon keskittyneet vanhemmat nousevat niin keskiöön, että kirjoja lukevatkin (salaa tai vähemmän salaa) mieluummin vanhemmat kuin teinit itse.

Maailmani oli lapsena ja nuorena brittiläisvaikutteinen, ja näin se jatkuu. Yöpöydällä on myös Tuija Lehtisen teoksia, mutta pelkään, ettei niissä sotketa tarpeeksi laventelinvärisellä kakunkuorrutteella.