Clones and butlers

The Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro

If I hadn't read Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, I would have never picked up The Remains of the Day. Because isn't The Remains of the Day that British period piece movie that I pretended to like in high school, even though I couldn't get through it, because it seemed like a smart movie to like?

It turns out that movie was Howard's End.

There is a movie version of The Remains of the Day, and it takes place in the 1950s in Britain and looks back on the 1920s, but I have never tried to watch it.

Never Let Me Go is narrated by a clone looking back on her time at the school/instituation where she was raised. The Remains of the Day is narrated by a butler looking back on his years of service to a lord.

Both are able to understand more by leaving an institution they have had little cause to leave before -- the clone because it's time to leave school and care for other clones donating their organs; the butler because a new employer has lent him his car so he can go on a few days' trip. Both have been trained to dehumanize themselves -- the clone to end her life as an organ donor; the butler to serve an employer. And through this denial of their own humanity, both have missed out on love.

When the butler's father, also a butler, dies -- decades before the novel's trip -- the butler barely pauses in his work, unflappability being essential to a dignified butler and attends to a visiting dignitaries foot pain, having the household's cook close his dead father's eyes. When the clone is taking care of an old friend and a lover as they donate organs until "completion," there is no protest other than a fruitless outing to try to have the lover's donations deferred.

The butler thinks it is satisfactory to have given himself over to a life of service because this was in service to someone with the intention of doing great things for the world. He thinks this until he realizes those intentions were misguided, and so that leaves him in the last stage of his life unsure about it meant for him or anyone else.

You can give your life over to money or to power or to escaping your home life at the office, and at the end of your day, what does that get you?

How we remember

Mysterious Skin
by Scott Heim

Two boys share the same trauma. One, Brian, loses those hours from his life until remembering it a decade later. The other, Neil, carries it as a fond memory until grappling with what it really means to be liked.

Heim explores how we remember, but more compelling is how we think about how we feel. For 10 years, Neil remembers being sexually abused by his baseball coached as a series of romantic encounters. And then he realizes that maybe that didn't make him feel so great or so safe.

How do we trust our memories or even how we feel about what we remember?

Let's eat

Julie & Julia
by Julie Powell

Julie Powell decides to work her way through Julia Child's Mastering the Art of French Cooking (gratingly abbreviated throughout as MtAoFC, presumably by the same person who comes up with all of the U.N.'s acronyms) in one year. Breakdown ensues.

Julie & Julia often seems to be more of a memoir of starting a blog that gets popular than one of a woman turning 30 who finds herself through French cooking. There are lots of quotes from comments on the blog, her posts and her IM conversations.

Powell is a New Yorker originally from Austin, and the book is peppered with New Yorker cliches. Early on (before all the cooking), she describes a "loon" in the subway station who bangs her head against the subway platform. Ha, there are crazy people in subway stations in New York -- crazy New York. (It's probably oversensitive to point out that this "loon" is a severely mentally ill and possibly homeless woman. And shouldn't someone stop her from banging her head? Or at least make sure she hasn't given herself a concussion?)

But as awkward as I found the writing, Powell just one day decided to do something interesting, and it's always fun to read about people's obsessions.

'The Martian Chronicles'

Of course Ray Bradbury wasn't really writing about Mars and space travel, but it's amazing that he had us colonizing Mars in the '90s. I'm not sure whether that says more about how optimistic people were about space travel or how far away the end of the century seemed.

Three Days of TV, one Great Show

I spent the past three days on the couch, getting up only to refill my water glass and to go to bed.

Too sick to read, I watched -- or at least listened to semi-consciously -- a lot of Date My Mom, Made and My Fair Brady (seriously, Adrienne Curry, first winner of America's Next Top Model, shut up). And then there was The Flavor of Love.

I caught only one episode, and until checking I vaguely suspected that, high on Rite Aid brand Nyquil, I had made this show up. Because if I could create a show while taking Nyquil, I think this would be it.

Flava Flav lives in a house with a bunch of women who are too young for him and tries to find true love. In the one I caught, Brigitte Nielsen shows up to help out her old Foofy Foof, described by one BET message board user as a "little burnt up Ninja Turtle." (It's obvious that these two are still love. What they had was real!)

I only wish I had had the strength and good sense to open my eyes.

A young rebel

Finally, I've conquered all 754 pages (not including appendix and index) of Che Guevara, a Revolutionary Life.

Reinaldo Arenas was a Cuban poet and author who, as a gay man and as a writer who smuggled his work out of the country to be published, suffered greatly in Fidel Castro's Cuba. Eventually, he fled Cuba for the United States during the Mariel boat lift and, dying of AIDS-related causes, killed himself in New York in 1980.

When he was 15, Arenas was also a fighter in Castro's rebel Army.

About halfway through Che, Arenas makes his only appearance. Jon Lee Anderson has a paragraph mentioning Arenas and quoting a description from his memoir, Before Night Falls. But Arenas' case speaks to the fact that no one, except maybe Che, knew what the revolution was leading to. There were certainly other guerilla fighters who fled Cuba after Castro took power. People were so unhappy under Fulgencio Batista, though, that they were willing to fight against him, even if it wasn't clear what they were fighting for.

'Scientific researcher'

Che was a doctor, which is important to understanding the beginning part of this quote from Jon Lee Anderson:

But treating individuals' illnesses had never been his real interest; his motivation had always been that of the scientific researcher looking for a cure, a means to prevent; and, as it had been with medicine, so it had become with politics. Searching, crossing solutions off the list of possibilities, as he went -- "reformism, democracy, elections" -- he had found Marx, then Guatemala, then Cuba, and in that baptism of fire, his discovery of "empirical medicine" had led to "scientific truth." That truth, and the cure to man's ills, was Marxism-Leninism, and guerilla warfare was the means to achieve it.

At first, I was admiring Che's post-revolution austerity -- his refusal to draw a large pay check in his ministry positions, his refusal of special treatment for himself and his underlings -- because if he was asking people to live a hard life for the revolution, at least he wasn't asking anyone to do anything he wouldn't. But I'm beginning to think that it was all a show, as though he's living such a modest life that modesty has become a point of pride.

Less than 300 pages to go

Che was married twice. I even knew the second one was named Aleida March but possibly only because some friends have a cat named Aleida. The first one was named Hilda, but I can't remember her last name, and she doesn't count anyway because Che wasn't into her.

Jon Lee Anderson interviewed and obtained notes, diaries, etc., from March for A Revolutionary Life. And he moved his family to Cuba for a few years during his research. As I am barely past the revolution in the book, there hasn't been a lot about March as she is now, but it seems odd that Anderson can just talk to her and she's not under glass in the Museum of the Revolution.

Fun with the Cuban revolution

As I continue the long, hard slog through Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (approaching Page 300), another fact:

Fidel Castro's nom de guerre was Alejandro.

1. Why do people have noms de guerres? Are they just fancy code names, or is there a difference between a code name and a nom de guerre? Because I imagine that a nom de guerre is mostly for fun. "Let's play war. I'll be "Alejandro."

2. Alejandro is part of Castro's real name, so way to be creative, Mr. Revolutionary Leader Turned Dictator.

Losing Book-Itz

After reading Finding Manana, I've been interested in Cuba, so I'm reading Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life by Jon Lee Anderson, which I have had for a few years but hadn't gotten around to. It is thorough: excluding the appendix, notes and bibliography -- 754 pages. Fortunately, there's a lot of context about Latin American politics and economics, so it's more than just a recount of one man's life. But this is no way to get ahead on the reading list.

So, your Che fact of the day: He had bad asthma.

More nonfiction

Finding Manana: A Memoir of Cuban Exodus
By Mirta Ojito

Ojito was 17 when she left Cuba for the United States as part of the Mariel boatlift in 1980. Her book tells the story of her life in Cuba and the beginning of her life in Florida, mixed in with chapters about others, whose actions led to the boatlift that brought 125,000 Cubans to the United States.

It's amazing how little I knew about Cuba before reading this book: 125,000 people left Cuba in, at best, uncomfortable conditions shortly before I was born. I thought paid attention in American history, but I don't remember this. I even took a Latin American studies class in college, but I think we were distracted by Elian Gonzalez and his dolphin friends.

Ojito, a journalist, is evenhanded in her telling and reporting, and, as an exile she is conflicted about her home:

...Seven years after Mariel, I was still limping through life, maimed by my exile condition. I enjoyed the new freedoms, but, paradoxically, missed the restrictions that I had rebelled against in Cuba.

What would Airhen read?

Some good books from last year's reading list:
Nowhere Man by Aleksander Hemon
Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
Rent Girl by Michelle Tea and Lauren McCubbin
Paradise by A.L. Kenedy
Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

The first three

First, my official 2006 Book-Itz list

Now the (short) reviews (with the latest read listed first):
1.The Assassins' Gate: America in Iraq by George Packer. Nonfiction.
Packer, of The New Yorker, takes an amazingly ideology-free and thoroughly reported look at the lead-up to the war, the war itself and the occupation. From the epilogue: "I came to believe that those in the positions of highest resposibility for Iraq showed a carelessness about human life that amounted to criminal negligence. Swaddled in abstract ideas, convinced of their own righteousness, incapable of self-criticism, indifferent to accountability, they turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one. When things went wrong, they found other people to blame. The Iraq war was always winnable; it still is. For that reason, the recklessness of its authors is all the harder to forgive."

2. Made in Detroit: A South of 8 Mile Memoir by Paul Clemens. Nonfiction.
White boy grows up in Detroit, a lonely road, and thinks he comes out with some racial insights. I learned more about Detroit than about race in America, and though that was interesting, I was hoping for more insight on white people and black people and how they live (or don't live) together.

3. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro. Fiction.
All the editions of this book were always checked out when I went to borrow it. (See? Baltimore does read.) So I didn't read it till I got it for Christmas. (Thank you, Mom.) It's about clones, but it doesn't matter what it's about because Ishiguro writes like it's effortless and makes it effortless to read. It's got a vague creepiness, and you should read it.

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This is against the ethics policy. I am such a bad ass.