Maud Martha, Once Again

My thoughts: Ok, I started to read Song of Solomon, then I got the urge to reread Maud Martha. October has been a crazy month for me, and I needed a nice, soothing read. Upon rereading Maud Martha, I was reminded of why I liked it so much in the first place. The language is so beautiful and the main character is freakin’ awesome. Even though it’s a novel, Maud Martha is about the inner workings of a real life. You feel as if she is a real person, who endured real things. She has real triumphs and real heartbreaks. Maud Martha is the kind of person who finds humanity in things that others may not. In one chapter, she refrains from killing a mouse because she imagines that life would be harder for the mouse’s family if it died. She empathizes with the rodent, because she knows a little something about struggle herself. After she lets the mouse go, she feels proud of herself: “A life had blundered its way into her power and it had been hers to preserve or destroy. She had not destroyed.” Thinking about this moment makes me smile.

Gwendolyn Brooks writes about intraracial discrimination among blacks based on skin shade in this novel—something Dorothy West wrote about in The Living Is Easy. Maud Martha notices it as a child, when people (even her own family members) treat her light-skinned sister Helen more favorably. And this follows her into adulthood. And, as I mentioned in my previous post about the book, she also experiences racial discrimination. Brooks writes, “There were scraps of baffled hate in her, hate with no eyes, no smile and—this she especially regretted, called her hungriest lack—not much voice.” At one point, she quits working as a maid because she knew that the white people she worked for thought of her as stupid and childlike, and she did not want to absorb their low opinion of her. This is a quiet moment of defiance that gives her a little bit of a voice to address that “baffled hate.” In spite of everything, Maud Martha loves and respects herself, loves life, and embraces its ups and downs. I needed to read something that was life-affirming, and this is the perfect read for such occasions. One last thing: I wonder how much of Gwendolyn Brooks is in the character of Maud Martha…She (Gwendolyn Brooks) was a great poet, but she wrote a hell of a novel!

Great passage (when Maud Martha’s husband takes her to a dance and spends most of the time dancing with a light-skinned lady—when Maud Martha herself is pregnant, no less): “I could,” considered Maud Martha, “go over there and scratch her upsweep down. I could spit on her back. I could scream. ‘Listen,’ I could scream, ‘I’m making a baby for this man and I mean to do it in peace.’”

But if the root was sour what business did she have up there hacking at a leaf?

Up next: I think I’ll read The Lilies of the Field

Night Film

Makeshift bookmark

Author: Marisha Pessl
Category: I read Marisha Pessl’s Special Topics in Calamity Physics about six years ago. So I was intrigued when I heard she wrote a second book, Night Film, and I thought I’d check it out.

My thoughts: This book was compulsively readable, and I really enjoyed it. It took some dark turns and creeped me out a bit, but it was so thought-provoking. Night Film begins with the suicide of Ashley Cordova, the twenty-four-year-old daughter of legendary and elusive horror filmmaker Stanislas Cordova. Scott McGrath, an investigative reporter, begins to comb through the details of Ashley’s life and death to determine why she committed suicide. McGrath attempted to investigate Stanislas Cordova’s life several years prior, but crashed and burned. But during the investigation of Cordova’s daughter, McGrath is joined by Hopper, a pretty resourceful but secretive small-time drug dealer, and Nora, a teenage eccentric with an unusual upbringing. Together, the three of them make up some sort of peculiar version of Nancy Drew, Bess Marvin, and George Fayne (those girls were such a great trio, right?) as they travel hither and yon to uncover mysteries about a family thrives on complete secrecy.

This book brings up the idea of extremely talented artists being disturbed or downright crazy. Because Cordova is so reclusive and his films are so disturbing, many people believe he is a psychopath. I’ve read that the character of Cordova is based a little on Stanley Kubrick (which reminds me…I need to watch and write a post about Dr. Strangelove soon). But the character of Stanislas Cordova also reminded me of…Kanye West. Now, I think Kanye is a genius. I really do. He is super talented, makes great music, and before that was a hell of a producer. But he is crazy as all outdoors. In fact, Kanye’s brilliant My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy sounds like the name of a Cordova film, or possibly Cordova’s autobiography, if he ever decided to write one. It makes you wonder…do you have to have a chaotic personal life and inner demons to create great works of art? That’s the million dollar question.

Also, there are hints of Heart of Darkness in Night Film—which, I’ll confess, is one of the books in that I never quite finished in high school. In Heart of Darkness, Marlow (like McGrath) goes looking for the elusive Kurtz (who definitely has similarities to Cordova), who has let madness take over his life. While reading Night Film, I also thought about that quote from Friedrich Nietzsche: “He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you” (this is of course also relevant to Heart of Darkness). McGrath goes to some shady places to uncover the truth about Cordova, and has a hard time being unaffected by his investigation.

The book is very good, but I couldn’t help but think that it could have been a tad shorter. And Marisha Pessl likes to italicize words—a lot. There are some weird elements, so I don’t know how eagerly I’ll be to recommend this one to other people. But I liked it a lot and I’ll definitely read it again.

Great passage: It was a covert line of attack described in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. Your enemy expected the direct approach. He prepared for it and fiercely fought it off, resulting in severe casualties, the expenditure of major resources—and, ultimately, your own defeat. And yet, occasionally, there was another entrance, the fragile corridor. Your enemy never expected advancement via this route because it was labyrinthine and treacherous, and he often didn’t even know it was there. But if your army managed to make it though, it would deliver you not just behind your enemy’s lines but to his inner chamber, the heart of his heart.

Up next: Song of Solomon