Three Strong Women by Marie Ndiaye

These are three linked novellas that center on three different women with three different definitions of ‘strong’.  The author grew up in France, born of a French mother and a Senegalese father, and like her, the three women have links with both France and Senegal—going from most connected to France to most connected to Africa in the order of the books.  One word of caution—these are not uplifting stories.  The women are tough because they have to be, not because they want to be.  Worse still there are really no men in the story who have any redeeming qualities.  They are selfish, brutish, narcissistic, occasionally sadistic, and not one of them is someone you would want to sit next to on a train, much less work with or have a social relationship with.

The first story is about Norah, who travels to visit her estranged Senegalese father who, years earlier, had left his French wife and daughters while taking his 5-year-old son back to Senegal. He is unbearable, both as a man and as a father.  Norah learns that her father is a ruined man, and he has taken out a most callous revenge on her brother.  The trauma includes small children of uncertain parentage abandoned after their mother is killed—I warned you, these are not happy stories.

In the second story, a French man fears losing Fanta, his African lover, and their son due to his financial and moral failings. We see little of Fanta beyond her graceful reticence, but we become uncomfortably intimate with her partner, Rudy, a mentally unhinged kitchen renovation salesman with a persistent hemorrhoidal itch (I will not make any Freudian comments other than to say they are obvious).

In the third, we re-encounter Khady, glimpsed earlier by Norah, who is a childless widow cast out by her husband’s family. She journeys from the relative stability of life as a West African market woman to ever-grimmer forms of exploitation.  The moral is that while Europe is not a kind environment, Africa is more brutal and offers up less in the way of justice or revenge.

Gorant Chocolatier

The time of chocolates and flowers is upon us, and I would like to recommend these particular chocolates for the upcoming holiday.  Valentine's Day is more of a celebration of guilt rather than love.  There are things that you supposed to do, and if you fail to do them, you are in trouble.  Not my cup of tea, I must say, but if you are someone who will be in the dog house if you fail to produce a delectable box of chocolates as a surrogate for the quality and quantity of your love, these are my recommended ones.

My family of origin is all about familiarity and repetition.

We are not ones for new and different.

We are all about doing what we always do, rather than blazing new ground.

We always have turkey for Christmas dinner.  We always have soup on Christmas Eve.  We like things to be predictable.

One of the recurring holiday gifts within my family is See’s chocolates—the ideal is to go to the store and create a box of favorites, but the Nuts and Chews collection is a very acceptable second best.  It is not so much that See’s is the best chocolate, but rather that it is very good chocolate that we have been sharing as a family for my entire life.  It is familiar, and the holidays are all about tradition.

Several years ago my father brought a new brand of chocolate into the Christmas season—Gorant chocolates are an Ohio chocolatier and they have a very good collection of chocolate covered nuts that we shared for several years.  I really loved them, and when the store in their neighborhood stopped carrying them, I really missed them.  This year I discovered what I should have thought of earlier—they are available on line.  We did a side-by-side taste testing this Christmas and we all agreed.  The Gorant chocolates definitely have better chocolate than the See’s—and a higher chocolate to nut ratio as well.  I foresee this being the new gold standard for the holidays.

Liberal Arts (2012)

There are two kinds of people who will really like this movie.  The first are people like me--those who really loved their time in college.  The story takes place on a liberal arts college campus in Ohio (Kenyon College), and if you loved the time that you spent in a similar location you will be biased towards this movie.  The story is one of a man growing up, to become his adult self--if you like those sorts of stories where you finally look in the mirror and wee who you are, you will like this movie.

I loved my college life--when I am back on the campus of the undergraduate institution of my youth, I can almost become that person again.  At least in my mind--once not long ago when I was there a student asked me when I graduated and when I said, his reply was "wow, I wasn't even born then".  Well of course not--I was looking at colleges with my children, and thankfully, I did not yet have any of them when I was an undergraduate.  The message to me was that I was inconceivably old, whereas it seemed like only yesterday that I was in his shoes.

So I am compromised--this is a story set in a place that I am prone to love.  Jesse is a 35-year old living in New York, working in a college admissions office.  He dresses like he did in college, he is always carrying a book, and he isn't quite sure what he is going to do when he grows up (uh oh, that sounds dangerously close to my situation...only I am far older, I have lost my youthful figure, and my book is in my backpack, not in my hand...no wonder I liked this movie).  He goes back to his alma mater for the retirement of his favorite professor, and while he is there, he meets a college student who falls for him--and he for her, although he is deeply disturbed by just how inappropriate the relationship is.  As he grapples with who he is and what is going on with his attraction to a teenager, he emerges a different man.  He grows a little, and more importantly, he is thinking about who he is and who he wants to be.  I only hope it doesn't take my boys this long....

A Pink Gun Killed Him

A child picked up a pink gun, thought it was a toy, too cute to be dangerous, and is now dead, killed by that innocent appearing firearm.  I have previously posted my feelings about pink guns.  My quibble was not that they looked too cute, but rather that it was entirely inappropriate, even gruesome, for a breast cancer foundation, which is dedicated to saving the lives of women who have breast cancer, to have its name associated with a gun.  It seemed to me that they were entirely off message with that association.  Owning a gun puts you at roughly a 10 fold increase for dying of gun violence.  Those statistics cross all socio-economic classes.  They do not just apply to people living in poverty, of people who are involved in the drug trade.  They apply to all of us—some are more likely to die by accident, some by suicide, and some by murder, but the risk that you put yourself under is the same, no matter what color your skin is, where you live,  or how much money you have.  So why would an organization dedicated to saving lives encourage the purchase of an item that would increase their chance of being killed?  Don’t wait for the cancer to kill you, buy a gun now!  You control your fate!  Only it turns out that you do not.

Now we have another dead child in the news.  What is the bigger tragedy?  That Tmorej Smith, a South Carolina 3 year old boy, was shot accidentally with a pink gun that he and his sister are presumed to have thought was a toy, or that if it wasn’t for the mass shooting of school children in Connecticut in December we wouldn’t even hear this story.  The truth is that this happens all the time.  The tragedy is that it ceased to be news, and that it took someone killing a classroom full of children for our country to even pay attention to it.

This death was entirely preventable.  It highlights the folly of dolling up weapons that kill people—it is a highly lethal weapon and it should look like one.  If you feel it is a given that you will own a gun, then at the very least we should require gun owners to pass safety testing, and to maintain their weapons in a safe manner.  They infringe on the rights of others with irresponsible gun safety practices.  Gun locks and keeping weapons unloaded and out of the hands of non-gun owners is a must.  Gun owners should be qualified and tested on a regular basis, just like drivers are.  They should be required to control their weapons and keep them out of the hands of non-licensed folks.  Why is that even up for debate?

Family--The One You Marry Into

Today marks 32 years of a shared destiny with my spouse.  When you marry someone or otherwise join your life with theirs, you take on more than the individual.  You don’t have to, but as is oft repeated, ‘no man is an island’.  You acquire a life partner, you also get their family.

You do have some flexibility about this situation.  It is not always mandatory that you welcome all of your partner’s family with open arms.  There are some factors to consider—the first is your spouse’s relationship with their relatives and family friends.  You might luck out.  The relationship could either be so fantastic or so terrible that when you opt for a life together, you think you n know more or less what you are getting into.  Up to a point, you can decide if this is the sort of family relationship you can live with going forward.  I sometimes worry that this is a significant hindrance for my offspring and their candidates for long term relationships.  We are loud, opinionated, occasionally overbearing (maybe more than occasionally, if the truth be told…), and I suspect that may be a little overwhelming for the uninitiated.  We literally eat off each other’s plates.  If someone orders something that they don’t like, we try to find a way to trade and share so that everyone is satisfied.  It is a community model of resource allocation.  Private stockpiling of preferred commodities is not well tolerated.  Some people come from families where what you order is what you get.  Brace yourself—life at the Kline dinner table, whether at home or out, is quite another story.

So I worry that it eliminates otherwise wonderful people who find us just too lacking in personal boundaries.  But does the present reflect the future?  Would someone who shares my offspring’s life have to buy into that?  Probably it would be completely unnecessary, but it might be hard to see that when you are at the ground level.  There are several reasons that it is not required, and the most important one is that you really do not know what the future holds.

On the other hand, it is important to think about if you can deal with the family system your partner grew up in, because things like how you will deal with the inevitable disasters that will occur down the road are reflected in how you were raised.  Are you people who band together, or are you an ‘every man for himself’ sort of family? Do you help others?  Are you generous or self-protecting?  What works for you in terms of what you need?  Most importantly, do you share values?  In the end, I think that is the most important ingredient to success of a long term relationship and what you can learn from looking at your partner’s family.

Trouble with the Curve (2012)

The more of Clint Eastwood that I see, both on and off the screen, the more I wonder if he is acting at all.  This might just be him, playing himself, but he is reading the lines that someone else wrote.  Judging from his performance at the Republican National Convention this past summer, he should be mightily grateful to have those lines.

All of this sounds slightly petty and more than a little crabby--which is funny, because irascible old men are the role that Eastwood has consistently played this past decade (as opposed to the irascible young men that he used to portray).  Do not misunderstand me.  I liked this movie, despite the lack of chemistry that was generated by Amy Adams and Justin Timberlake.

The story is that Eastwood is a baseball scout of the old school.  He reads player's stats in the newspaper.  He goes to see them play to figure out who is just shining because there is no competition and who has what it takes to make it in the big leagues.   He has two major problems--the first is that he is way too old school.  The young scouts want him gone.  The other is that he has macular degeneration and he really cannot see any more.  He is given an ultimatum on a potential high school start, and much to his dismay, his daughter comes to join him, knowing that he can't actually watch the kid play--she is his eyes, and he uses his ears, and together they come to what appears at film's end to be the right decision.

This is a feel good movie about baseball, including the value of the old style approach to recruiting.  It has imbedded in it some lessons on what not to do as a parent.  Eastwood's wife died when his daughter was very young, and as he himself admits, he did not cope very well, and he never talked with her about it and he never apologized to her.  As a result, she has been in therapy for years, and is emotionally as unavailable as he is.  The outcome of that problem is less satisfactory than the baseball story, but that is the nature of the beast--business is neat and tidy, life is more messy.  Recommended, unless you absolutely hate sports movies.

How Children Succeed by Paul Tough

This is a very good short book about what matters and what probably does not when it comes to the character of children and the success they go on to have as adults.  There is not a lot of new ground broken here, but it is a good reminder that the things that we thought would be helpful don’t always turn out that way, that character can be taught and manipulated and changed.

Seven characteristics matter:

·         Grit
·         Self control
·         Zest
·         Social intelligence
·         Gratitude
·         Optimism
·         Curiosity 

The author goes through each of these, giving specific examples of each characteristic, and why in particular it is a stand alone important trait.  Then he goes through a series of very compelling stories about how to positively influence the character of high risk children, kids who grow up in both violence and poverty, who have a high risk of dropping out of high school, much less never going to college.  One vehicle is chess--which teaches children patience, self control, and gives them some confidence in their intellectual abilities.  He tells the story of a middle school chess team that has not so much tremendous talent as it has depth--so as a team they have a chance to win, even though as individuals they do not.   There is a little bit of the Malcolm Gladwell concept of 'Outliers'--that if you practice anything long enough that you can become good at it--the idea that some things can indeed be taught, that you do not have to be born with any of the characteristics necessarily.  You can learn them--but you have to stick with it.

The final section of the book is about sticking with things.  The author explores some of the things that led to himself dropping out of college at one point, and juxtaposes that against some of the kids that he interviewed in writing the book--this is the brightest part of the book, for my taste, because it contextualizes the intellectual material and allows the reader to do the same.  Very enjoyable read.

A Memorable North Dakota Refugee

Every once in a great while when you travel on a plane you get the pleasure of sitting next to someone who is really special, someone who you will never forget.  I had that experience recently on a flight from Baltimore to Chicago.

I met Laetitia Mizero.  She is the North Dakota State Refugee Coordinator and 15 years ago she was a refugee herself.  She grew up in Burundi in a family that had six children.  Burundi is a central African country sandwiched between Rwanda to the north and Tanzania to the south.  Like Rwanda, there are Hutus and Tutsis.  The Hutus make up a majority of the population and the Tutsis dominated politics and the military.  On October 21, 1993, Burundi's first democratically elected Hutu president, Melchior Ndadaye, was assassinated by Tutsi extremists. As a result of the murder, violence broke out between the two groups, and an estimated 50,000 to 100,000 people died within a year, and over the next twelve years the death toll rose to 300,000, with another 250,000 leaving the country as refugees.  A nightmare.  Not a unique nightmare, but a catastrophe none-the-less.   Laetitia is the perfect person to help new refugees adjust, because she has been there herself.  

Laetitia left Burundi first for Burkina Faso, and then for the United States--she traveled with her then 3 year old son, as well as three younger sisters and a younger brother.  She and one of her sisters were adults, and they were primarily responsible for the welfare of their family--more on that in a future post.  Our conversation that afternoon was like a pendulum.  It veered in many directions.  The things we focused on were the ways we were alike and the ways that we were not.  Laetitia has left her home, her country, her family and friends behind, coming to the United States to find a new life--I know nothing of that.  Yet we share values.  We did not shy away from discussing social justice, immigration, the importance of education, and how all these things are key ingredients in what makes our country great.  It was a joy to be with her, even if for just a few moments, because she is exactly what I think of when I talk about how important having open doors is to our success as a nation.  We are a richer people because we have diverse cultures within our borders.  We haven't exactly melted together yet, but we are slowly but surely getting there.  It is just so wonderful to be reminded of that.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)

What to do when you know the world is doomed to end?  In this comedic drama, an asteroid is hurdling towards the earth and everyone knows that the end is near.  All efforts to stop it have failed and so all that is left to do is wait.   If I am ever faced with this situation, this would be the dream solution to all the bad mistakes that I would have had to make to find myself where Steve Carroll finds himself.

He plays Dodge, an insurance salesman who leaves work one day when he realizes the absurdity of selling whole-life insurance policies in the current climate.  His wife has suddenly walked off to join the man she loves—which Dodge had thought was him, but it turned out that he was wrong about that.  So he is all alone—he has few close friends, and we later find out that his relationship with his father has some unfortuante wrinkles as well.  Then he meets Kiera Knightley who lives nearby.  They talk in a way that you can only do with strangers on a train, and he gradually, ever so slightly begins to realize that she is the one that got away.  She is the love of his life.

They discover this mutual affection for each other as they collaborate on a road trip together—they first have to escape her mildly deranged boyfriend and some fairly serious rioting and looting in their city.  Then they have hurdles like finding cars, finding gas, and finding lost loved ones.  The landscape is deserted once they get out of the city, and they have a lot of alone time as a result.  It is a sweet funny end-of-the-world movie that will make you smile and think at the same time.

Toby's Room by Pat Barker

This author has focused her fiction in the peri-WW I era in England, and this book is no exception to that rule.  As anyone who has watched ‘Downton Abbey’ knows, WW I was a sea change for England.  The was not only a colossal waste of life and resources.  It represented a shift in the importance of class in England, as well as the roles of women in society.  That is the cultural and social backdrop against which the story takes place.

The book is entitled ‘Toby’s Room’ but it is really about Toby’s sister, Elinor.  They are siblings who are unusually close throughout their lives.  They are so close that they have a taboo sexual relationship that was a ‘one off’ event for Toby, but Elinor is not so convinced about that.  She wants that extended intimacy, which in childhood meant one thing but in adulthood would certainly include sex.  Which is why you are supposed to leave your family of origin behind you and find intimacy with a partner—because sex with you family of origin is really frowned upon.  

The book does not focus on incest, but rather sees it as part of the drive for Elinor’s obsession with Toby.  When she has a premonition that he will not come home from his military service in France and he is soon thereafter reported ‘missing in action, presumed dead’. She becomes obsessed with what happened to him.  The subtext of that obsession is that something triggered that premonition, and that she somehow knew that not coming back is what he intended.    She is desperate to find out what his state of mind was those last few days on the battlefield, and somehow absolve herself from the guilt she feels that she should have recognized the danger and done something about it.  She really wants to be wrong, but she is equally sure that she is right.  She drops all the social niceties in her pursuit of her goal, which is wholly unladylike at the beginning of the 20^th century.  Pursuing men who ignore you is simply not done.  She can’t let it go because she can’t get on with her life without knowing.  She is sleeping in Toby’s room and painting Toby.  So he is in her thoughts both day and night.  Moving forward with ordinary tasks of life is simply impossible for her.  The backdrop of WW I, men with profound physical and psychological damage, magnifies her obsession, but the truth is that the death of a parent, a spouse, a child, or a sibling leads to tremendous and ongoing trauma in those left behind, and post WW I in England it was almost impossible to have not lost at least one of those.  This is a serious story well told.