Reviewing "Marie" by H. Rider Haggard

 

Pretty early on in reading this Allan Quatermain novel I considered stopping. More than any of the other Quatermain adventures I’ve read, Marie is rife with racism, both in the characters’ dialog and the overall narrative.

This was not simply racism of Europeans against Africans (although there was certainly plenty of that!), but of different ethnicities of the same color. The French hate the English, the Dutch hate the English, the English hate the both of them, and all them hate—or at least mistreat—the Africans. There is even a jab at Jews—even though there aren’t any Jewish main characters to be seen!

Is it right to read a book with racism in it? Or does it seep into one’s thoughts and attitudes? On the other hand, does pretending that racism doesn’t exist leave one open to ignorance? Is it possibly helpful to read a book one doesn’t agree with, to mentally argue with it, and thus sharpen one’s mind and feelings against occurrences of racism in the real world?

Reviewing “They Have a Word for It” by Howard Rheingold

Charlemagne said that to “have another language is to possess a second soul.” The more I’ve read about linguistics, taken language classes, or watched foreign films, the more I agree with this sentiment. Language is not everything; some might consider wordless communication (the Japanese have a word for that, “haragei,” which is a noun meaning “Visceral, indirect, largely nonverbal communication”), like art or music or dance, to be a more fundamental form because you don’t need an interpreter to tell you how to feel when hearing a symphony or looking at a painting. (There’s a word for that in Hindi: “rasa” refers to a “mood or sentiment evoked by a work of art.”)

Reviewing Agatha Christie's "A Murder is Announced"

I read A Murder is Announced by Agatha Christie in tandem with The Rosemary Tree. While thematically and stylistically different, the setting of 1950-something English small towns sometimes made me mix up the two.

In this Miss Marple mystery, several characters are introduced reading the paper in their separate homes, and finding the strangest announcement that a murder is to occur at Letitia Blacklock’s house at 6:30 that night. For some reason a ton of people decide to show up, assuming it’s a joke or theme party of some kind. But since this is Agatha Christie, we readers all know that no matter how frivolous the warning, the murder itself is dead serious.