La Oleeha

Today´s Post: The Reader

This is the third and final article I submitted to the internal Peace Corps newsletter. It does repeat some of the content I´ve already written about in Jake in Paraguay, but I decided to post it as a sort of retrospective.

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Though the title of this essay may suggest an illicit love affair with an older, illiterate war criminal, the romance that I would instead like to illustrate is my personal literary journey during a year and a half as a PCV in Paraguay. Though I hope to continue reading through my G’s COS in mid-December, I’ll focus here on my progress up to the present moment, a passionate journey through over 150 works of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. I offer you, my reader, the vicarious joys of the savored text as well as some concrete recommendations to take with you to the library the next time you are in the office.

When I was in training, an outgoing agroforestry volunteer told me that, for volunteers, Peace Corps is one big book and garden club. Looking back, I have certainly enjoyed the opportunity to share recommendations with fellow volunteers and to have long-distance book club time, thanks to our unlimited nine minute and 50 second phone call privileges. I encourage new volunteers to make the most of the reading opportunities that Peace Corps service allows. Take advantage of other volunteers! There are plenty of duds in the library, and a recommendation from someone with similar taste is a better bet than a novel picked out at random. Also, keep a list of your literary conquests. The list can be as simple as handwritten titles and authors in a notebook. Or, you can follow my lead, keeping a Microsoft Word document with a list of books and brief synopses and an independent Excel spreadsheet with 15 parameters, including date of release, genre, and numerical rating (I used a five-point scale).

What did my compulsive data gathering reveal? Of the first 150 books I read in service (roughly between 15 December 2009 and 31 July 2011): 8% were re-reads, 10% were translated into English, and 40% were page turners. Half came recommended from a friend or family member and 7 out of 10 were novels. The statistic that I am most proud of is that 95 of these books were written by authors whom I had never read before, including luminaries such as Virginia Woolf, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O’Connor, Salman Rushdie, William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, D.H. Lawrence, Chuck Palahniuk, Iris Murdoch, Thomas Pynchon, Somerset Maugham, Richard Yates, Mario Vargas Llosa, Pearl Buck, and Jeffrey Eugenides.

Beyond the numbers, I also found great satisfaction in pursuing intertextual discourses between the works that I often haphazardly obtained through random library raids, loans from friends, and gifts sent from home. Below, I’ll explore a few longitudinal themes that showed up in my reading.

I imagine that I am not the first volunteer to derive special pleasure from reading books set in Paraguay, in other Latin American countries, or simply in rural settings. My encounters with Paraguay itself were sparse. I highly recommend the English translation of Augusto Roa Bastos’s Son of Man that is floating around. Set in Paraguarí around 80 years ago, the story reveals many almost eerie links to the present. Replace trains with buses and leprosy with presión alta and you can imagine many parts of the novel unfolding around you in contemporary Paraguay. John Gimlette’s At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig also, lamentably, made my reading list. This unfortunate chimera of Eurocentric history and petulant travel writing hardly deserves its current position as the only recent, general interest, non-fiction, Anglophone writing about Paraguay. However, until something better comes along, we are stuck with it. I was surprised and tickled by my third, minor brush with Paraguay: a brief excursion toward the end of Jonathan Franzen’s much-hyped Freedom. Other books set in rural settings, and often in the first half of the twentieth century, also made more sense to me when read in the context of my small village in Caazapá. Putting down John Steinbeck’s East of Eden or a collection of O’Connor’s short stories, I could draw from my own surroundings to imagine early twentieth century American landscapes of cornfields and oxcarts.

Narratives of cultural difference and dislocation meant more to me as a PCV than they would have in the States. As an English-speaking white person who had lived my whole life in the United States, I was not used to being an outsider when I arrived in Paraguay. Books such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Infidel, Chang-Rae Lee’s Native Speaker, Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, and Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land encouraged me to compare my own experiences as an American living in Paraguay to the (factual or fictional) experiences of protagonists adapting to new norms and roles, whether dictated by nationality, race, religion, or, in the case of Heinlein, degree of Martian-ness. Generally, my experience of these books was richer than it would have been in other reading contexts, and the wisdom I drew from their characters’ journeys helped me to be a better volunteer.

I drew heavily from science fiction and fantasy genre writing and cleaved toward the postmodern in my selection of books. (Re-)reading J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings Trilogy, Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, two rather derivative trilogies by Terry Brooks, and occasional works by Heinlein, Lethem, Margaret Atwood, Neil Gaiman, and Justin Cronin provided me with my fair share of elves, dwarves, aliens, talking animals, technology gone right and wrong, vampires, zombies, angels, and gods. Postmodern literature filled different needs. David Mitchell’s intricate and fragmented plots, Haruki Murakami’s magical realism, and the critical framework provided by A Postmodern Reader (give it a try…but maybe intercalate each essay with some lighter reading) challenged me in ways that yet another quest to find or destroy a magical artifact could not. I found myself turning most often to epic fantasy and iconoclastic experiment when I needed an escape. There has been little I have enjoyed more on a rainy day than to disappear into the comforts of Middle Earth or the jarring discordance of postmodernity.

The impressive quantity of books available in our library gave me the opportunity to pursue several discrete literary themes. You can find a copy of at least three books addressing the Trujillo dictatorship: Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies, Junot Diaz’s The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, and Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat (listed here in descending order of preference, at least by my lights). Woolf’s Orlando and Eugenides’s Middlesex both featured gender-bending (and -breaking) androgynous protagonists. And much to my eventual boredom, countless characters spend entire books batted to and fro by the cultural constraints of Elizabethan through Edwardian England. From Philippa Gregory’s The Other Boleyn Girl, to George Eliot’s Middlemarch, to Maugham’s Of Human Bondage and Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and really all the way through Ian McEwan’s Atonement, generations of fictional Englishmen and women agonized over entailments, being thought of as “trade,” inheritance, yearly incomes, country homes, titles, gambling debts, gossip, the comportment of servants, and the importance of decently aged domestic furnishings. Many of these preoccupations seem rather artificial in today’s liberalized, globalized world, but I’m sure they have their contemporary equivalents.

As much as it was amusing to identify post hoc the foregoing trends in my reading, what still leave the most indelible impression on me are the “top 20”: the best individual books that I read over the last year and a half. My choices are generally not all that daring; most of the top 20 are already the objects of critical praise, financial success, or both. However, in the spirit of recommending some excellent books, I’ll bring this literary idyll to a close by briefly recounting my favorite Peace Corps reads:

American Gods (Neil Gaiman): intellectual fantasy fun; Gaiman’s representations of mythological beings seem more naturally “human” than many authors’ human characters.

Beautiful Evidence (Edward Tufte): changed the way I think about the presentation of visual data.

Bel Canto (Ann Patchett): masterfully interposes stillness and motion, violence and peace, elevation of form and of function. I especially recommend this novel for lovers of music and language.

The Brothers Karamazov (Fyodor Dostoevsky): intensely psychological and a little nuts; takes awhile to read, but worth it.

The Cider House Rules (John Irving): stood out from Irving’s sometimes hackneyed work as a profoundly humane, politically charged story.

Cloud Atlas (David Mitchell): my favorite new read from Peace Corps service, a masterful book-written-as-fugue in six voices and six genres.

Collapse (Jared Diamond): a must-read for anyone interested in the political implications of sustainability.

A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole): deeply cynical in a way unlike anything else I have ever read.

East of Eden (John Steinbeck): a classic that seemed surprisingly contemporary to me. Steinbeck’s themes are still relevant today.

Freedom (Jonathan Franzen): Franzen’s first book in the ten years since he wrote The Corrections. Sometimes heavy-handed, Freedom redeems itself through thematic complexity and vivid characters.

Gödel, Escher, and Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Richard Hofstadter): impossible to describe fully even after reading it – a mind-blowing work of non-fiction that addresses the idea of self-reference and intelligence.

The Good Earth (Pearl Buck): a humane story of China’s transition from its agrarian past to modernity.

Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (Haruki Murakami): a fascinating binary tale that comes crashing together in its final pages; both intellectual and emotionally charged.

The Lacuna (Barbara Kingsolver): I was shocked that Kingsolver managed to pull off a novel peopled with seemingly inimitable historical figures such as Frida Kahlo and Leon Trotsky. But she did.

Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov): a titillating and disturbing tale that only becomes more so when you move beyond judgment and take the narrator’s perspective at face value.
Middlesex (Jeffrey Eugenides): an epic American story and deeply personal novel of development.

The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down (Anne Fadiman): amazing non-fiction writing that combines ethnography, history/historiography, and journalism.

The Untouchable (John Banville): a gripping drama narrated by a flawed but ultimately sympathetic protagonist.

White Teeth (Zadie Smith): a love note to the collision of cultures, identities, and politics typical of contemporary life that skillfully skirts caricature and schmaltz.

The Wind-up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami): the first book I read on starting service and perhaps my favorite novel of all time. There is nothing I can really say about it except that you should take it home if you see it.

Good luck hunting down these selections and please pass them on, even if you don’t agree with my assessment of their value. The thought of somebody else possibly enjoying a book you despised should be enough to overcome the desire to cast it into the nearest active tatakua (an urge I had to suppress vis-à-vis Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook). As a final exhortation, I hope that you will follow me in savoring the joys of reading during service: the reassuring weight of 10 or 20 books crammed into your hiking pack for that five kilometer walk home, the smell they exude after being hoarded in your moist house for a month, the exotic pressed insects that generations of volunteers have deposited inside them, and the comfort of the printed, English word amid the most disorienting of host families. These are joys that a K----e (I refuse to write it out) or other electronic reader cannot give you. We are lucky to have a fantastic collection of flesh-and-blood (or rather paper-and-ink) books to read and more free time than some of us know how to dispose of. So take advantage, and let yourself get lost in a good book.