Ennui and the Clock

Tick, tick, tick.
I lie there
on the sofa,
staring at
the white stalactites
on the ceiling
wondering if -
well, nothing really,
but maybe if
something might
happen today.

Son of the Revolution: A Review

Liang Heng’s Son of the Revolution functions on three levels: as an autobiography, as a personal history of the Cultural Revolution, and as a piece of literature. On all three levels, it succeeds. The book follows the life of the author through his childhood, teenage, and young adult years as the Cultural Revolution swirls around him, disrupting his life and destroying much of his family.

The story begins in 1958, when Liang was only four years old. At first, his life was fairly peaceful and stable; his mother and father were employed, and his grandmother and siblings were nearby. Both his parents devoted their efforts to the Communist party that had overtaken the country less than ten years prior. Soon, the Cultural Revolution began, and Liang’s life started to unravel. First, his mother was labeled an enemy of the party (and thus of the state) when she fell on the wrong side of the prevailing wind and forced to reform her thought. This slight miscalculation on the part of his mother haunted Liang for the rest of his life. After that, the label of “rightist” was often slapped onto him because of a single error made by his mother.

Liang’s father, initially hateful toward Liang’s mother because of her poor political performance also accidentally fell to her same fate, despite his incessant devotion to Chairman Mao. Due to this Liang’s young life was a constant struggle because of the ceaseless waxing and waning of various political currents. The absurdity of the never constant government policies can best be seen in an incident toward the end of the book, in which Liang’s father was sent to the country to learn from them, but on arrival was told to instruct them. Despite these upheavals, Liang’s life was far from joyless. He travelled across the country, made friends, and eventually, at the end of the Cultural Revolution, met and fell in love with an American. The two married, and she helped him pen the story of his life.

Throughout the book, we can see not only the development of the author, but also the development of the complicated and convoluted disaster that was the Cultural Revolution. While the political happenings at the top of the Politburo are unclear in the text, they were equally unclear to the millions who were effected by those changes during the 1960s. As a result, we see the events of the Cultural Revolution, not from a top-down, political point of view, but from a bottom-up lens, revealing the perspective of the common people tangled up in the torturous and continual revolution. Thus, Son of the Revolution is not just a biography of one person, it is the biography of the millions of people who suffered through the rapidly changing world of the Cultural Revolution. The writing is excellent, the storytelling superb, and the reader cannot help but become carried along in the story of Liang Heng’s life.

Life of Pi: A Review

"Very few castaways can claim to have survived so long at sea as Mr. Patel, and none in the company of an adult Bengal tiger."

Very few books can claim an ending that so well ties the story together, and none which blend Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Life of Pi is a novel, to be sure, but it is also a philosophical examination of human religious experience and the meaning of stories of our lives. The author skillfully ties together a lengthy exposition with the tale of the castaway to make a novel that is very nearly perfect.

I picked up Life of Pi because I needed an audiobook, and it was the only one available with which I was familiar. I knew there was an Ang Lee movie, but I didn't know much about the original novel. I'm so glad I decided to find out. The story takes us along with narrator, Pi Patel, into zoology, philosophy, and an oceanic adventure story to rival all others. At the beginning, Pi is a child growing up in a zoo-keeping family in Pondicherry, India. When his family decides to move to Canada and sell their animals in America, they clamber aboard a cargo ship and set sail across the Pacific. Unfortunately, due to a nautical disaster, Pi ends up trapped in a lifeboat with Richard Parker, a large and cranky Bengal Tiger. As a result of their time together, Pi explores the ideas of zoology, philosophy, and religion that preoccupied him while he was still in Pondicherry.

As a young man, Pi was raised a nominal Hindu, but converted to both Islam and Christianity without leaving behind his native faith. He found no contradiction between worshiping God in multiple ways. While it appears at the outset of the story that perhaps the novel is an attempt to justify post-modernist spiritualism over religious ideology, the end reveals a much greater argument about the power of stories and religious life.

Evening on the Beach

As time nears seven,

The sun crawls under blue sheets,

Shuts our eyes, and sleeps.

The Deer Hunter (1978): A Review

Hailed as one of America's greatest movies, The Deer Hunter (1978) tells the story of three young American men in Vietnam and the war's affect on them. Directed by Michael Cimino (Heaven's Gate, Year of the Dragon) and starring Robert De Niro (The Godfather, Taxi Driver) as Michael, Christopher Walken (Pulp Fiction, Catch Me if You Can) as Nick, Meryl Streep (Sophie's Choice, Kramer vs Kramer) as Linda, and John Savage (Thin Red Line, Beauty and the Beast) as Steve, the film carries us through the dehumanization of war and leaves us altered at the end.

Were The Deer Hunter simply a war movie, the opening marriage and celebration scene would be far too long for the necessary character development. However, the movie tells the the story of three men and a community who became involved in a war, not of the war itself, making the lengthy beginning fully appropriate. We follow the young men (Nick, Steve, Michael, and their friends) through their lives at the steel mill and local bar on Steve's wedding day, which happens to also be the last day before the three ship off for Vietnam. From their interactions, we see that while their lives in the dirty town are filled with problems, yearnings, and unfulfilled desires, they are also good, human, and connected to the lives around them.

Abruptly, we find them in a Vietnamese POW camp, tortured by their captors in one of the most harrowing scenes in American cinema. Prisoners are forced to sit opposite each other and play Russian roulette until one of them shoots himself in the head. While there is no evidence to suggest that the NVA ever played this "game" with their prisoners, it works well as a sort of cinematic short hand for the very real punishments and tortures that were inflicted on the prisoners. This motif of Russian roulette appears throughout the movie, representing the way some are willing to risk the random chance of death in order to save the people they care as well as the brutal degradation of war, a game some volunteer to play while others are forced to.

For those who survive the POW camp, life gets little better upon their release. Those who return return enter a community that no longer fully understands them, even though it welcomes them with open arms, while (straining our suspension of disbelief) one of the men remains in Saigon to play Russian roulette professionally. While the men can never be complete members of the community again, they are still able to live and grieve with them, ending the film with a rendition of "God Bless America" that is simultaneously hopeful and bleak.

Ultimately The Deer Hunter is about the innate value of life and the dehumanization of war. It is not exactly an anti-war film; none of the characters ever grandstand about their opposition to the conflict, indeed, they all willingly signed up for it. It is, however, a film that talks about what war does to those who enter it and those who are affected by it, providing a darkly beautiful story that speaks to Americans now as well as it did in 1978.

Introduction

Hi there! This is my new blogging project, which I hope to use to publish poetry, reviews of books and films, and any other essays I write. More coming soon!