The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic

# Hardcover: 272 pages

# Publisher: Ecco (February 21, 2006)

# Language: English

# Genre: Fiction

(Translated from the Croatian by Michael Henry Heim)













When the ever- generous Janelle, of Eclectic Closet , offered to share Croatian writer, Dubravka Ugresic's latest book with me, I jumped at the chance to read it because I saw it as a learning experience and an interesting way to read about the break up of Yugoslavia and the effect it had on the people.

The narrator of the book, Tanya Lucic, is originally from the Croatian part of Yugoslavia, but after the civil war and genocide that embroiled Yugoslavia, she moves to Amsterdam (self-exile) where she finds a job in the University teaching a course in Serbian-Croatian literature. With the exception of a few students, her class is mainly made up of other Yugoslavian emigres. The students are enrolled in this class not because of their love of literature but because a student's visa is the only way they can continue living in Holland (the country will not officially recognise them as refugees.)

Realizing the students' hearts are not in their books Tanja does not insist they study their course material. Instead, she encourages them to write personal essays about their time in Yugoslavia, hoping the exercise will keep their memories alive. It is through the teacher-student conversations and these very poignant student essays that the reader gains access to the memories of these Yugoslavian exiles and you see through their perspectives the impact of the war on their lives, their families, their culture and language. However, with everyone remembering all the bad that happened to them these exercises eventually created discord in the class and Tanja was forced to bring them back on track by re-introducing the official curriculum.

I found this book to be an engaging read. Engaging, not so much for the information it provides but for the questions it asks. For instance, how must it feel to be the citizen of a country that officially no longer exists? Think about it (in context to the book) - you are Yugoslavian one day and the next day, you're not and not because you don't want to, or were stripped of your citizenship, but because that country, the country you grew up in, no longer exists!

What about displacement? How does it feel to be forced to leave your home? To have to make a new life elsewhere? What happens to your identity in this case or your sense of belonging? From being Yugoslavian, you are now simply Croatian or Serbian; Bosnian or Slovenian - shouldn't there be a sense of mourning for the other parts of Yugoslavia that are now lost to you? A vaccum in the heart? A phantom pain?

What happens when the language you grew up speaking is slowly becoming invalid? Language is vital - history has shown that when conquerors wanted to successfully take over a land and its people, they would insist on making the colonised speak their (the conqueror's language). Depriving someone of their language is essentially taking away his voice, also, getting someone to write and think in a whole new language changes his/her personality. But, as Dubravka Ugresic challenges, is language even important to an exile? Is there any language that can truly give voice to their feelings?

It's been so long since a book made me think so much and I still don't feel like I've transferred all my thoughts into a cohesive review. I might have to return and tweak this post a little. I guess you could call it a review in progress. For a more complete review please check out Janelle's review at Curled Up With a Good Book.

The Hand that Reads

When I saw the new Hewlett Packard advertisements in the TIME magazine last week, I was immediately reminded of Jonathan Safran Foer's cover art for "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close", ( both images feature a hand with the whimsical font) but, ofcourse, I put it down to coincidence. However, today's National Post confirms that HP used the same artist, Jonathan Gray, to do the images for their new campaign. The advertising agency contracted by HP felt that the iconic hand would help HP's new advertising campaign dubbed "The Computer is Personal", by generating a more human feel.

What do the people at Houghton Mifflin (Jonathan Safran Foer's publishers) think? Apparently they are happy with the ads.

So all that remains to be asked is, is there a cryptic message in JSF's novel that HP wants to convey to its customers? :) I hope not.

The Attack by Yasmina Khadra

Translated from the French by John Cullen
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, 257 pp., $18.95












I first read about "The Attack" on Moorish Girl's blog. She's a writer and journalist and does a great job of showcasing books and authors from the Middle East and Africa. I always look forward to her every post.

Yasmina Khadra is a pen name for Muhammed Moulessehoul, an ex-soldier from the Algerian army, turned writer. Some of you might remember his first book, an excellent one, titled "The Swallows in Kabul" about the war in Afghanistan.

Here's a brief review of his outstanding new book, "The Attack":

Amin Jawaari is of Arab extraction, but a naturalized Israeli citizen (there are a lot of Israelis of Arab descent - even the three sisters of the current Hamas party leader are Israeli citizens). Amin Jawaari is a very successful surgeon in a hospital in Tel Aviv; he and his wife Sihem (also of Arab descent) are well-respected in the community and live the good life. With his job being all-consuming Amin tends to stay away from politics, but all that changes when one day there is a huge explosion outside his hospital. Apparently a female suicide bomber with explosives strapped to her body entered a fast-food restaurant and detonated the bomb she was carrying leaving at least 19 dead, including 11 schoolchildren celebrating a classmate's birthday. Later in the evening Dr. Jawaari finds out that his wife's body was among the dead, not just that, the injuries on her body seemed consistent with those of a suicide bomber...

Ofcourse, this shocking news changes his life completely. He never realized his lovely and intelligent wife felt this sympathetic to The Cause. He couldn't believe that he knew so little about someone he loved so much!

He gives up his job at the hospital and goes in search of why anyone, but his wife in particular, would be motivated to carry out a suicide attack. Being a non-practising Muslim himself it is very hard for him to understand what drives radicalism. He travels to Bethlehem, Jerusalem and Jenin and along the way, after meeting a whole cast of interesting characters, he begins to learn something about how not having a land to call your own is humiliating and how humiliation can lead to a lack of self-esteem, which in turn leads to hate. "...there is no worse cataclysm than humiliation; it's an evil beyond measure". Amin never really comes up with a concrete reason why so many young men and women are prepared to become suicide bombers, but one can deduce that since they don't feel worthy in life, they try to aim for a worthy end(martyrdom).

The author has done an excellent job of staying neutral but at the same time, shedding light on the Israel-Palestininan cause, and even if one is not interested in politics, I would beseech you to read it just to revel in the language, the imagery and the masterful way Yasmina Khadra can tell a story.

Another novel with a similar theme is John Updike's new novel titled "Terrorist". This book, too, asks the same question: What makes an Islamic terrorist?

Read a review here

World Hum's Top 30 Travel Books

Hooray, school will be out soon (in some states in the US schools have already closed for the summer) and families will be planning their vacations. Our family hopes to visit in India in July with stops in London and Dubai enroute. One of my most favorite things to do as we plan our summer vacation is to read travel books, but often I find myself wondering which travel books to read...

World Hum (travel dispatches from the planet) have put together their Top 30 Travel Books. Scroll down a little to see a list of their picks. If you follow the link to their site, you will be able to read a short summary for each of the 30 books and their readers' comments as well. I am sure many of the books on that list will be familiar to you. What I would love you to do is to add to that list - what are your favorite travel books and why?

One of my favorite travel books and which I didn't find on the list at World Hum is:

"A Fortune -Teller Told Me" by Tiziano Terzani

(Warned by a Hong Kong fortunte teller not to risk flying for a whole year, Tiziano Terzani - a vastly experienced Asia correspondent - decided that if he couldn't fly he would have to find some other way to travel. So travelling by foot, boat, bus, car and train, he visited Burma, Thailand, Laos, cambodia, Veitnam, China, Mongolia, Japan, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia. Consulting soothsayers and shamans wherever he went, he grew to understand and respect older ways of life and beliefs now threatened by the crasser forms of Western modernity)

Here's the World Hum List:

# No. 1: “Arabian Sands” by Wilfred Thesiger
# No. 2: “The Road to Oxiana” by Robert Byron
# No. 3: “The Great Railway Bazaar” by Paul Theroux
# No. 4: “The Soccer War” by Ryszard Kapuściński
# No. 5: “No Mercy” by Redmond O’Hanlon
# No. 6: “North of South” by Shiva Naipaul
# No. 7: “Golden Earth” by Norman Lewis
# No. 8: “Video Night in Kathmandu” by Pico Iyer
# No. 9: “The Innocents Abroad” by Mark Twain
# No. 10: “In A Sunburned Country” by Bill Bryson
# No. 11: “The Snow Leopard” by Peter Matthiessen
# No. 12: “The Songlines” by Bruce Chatwin
# No. 13: “Travels with Charley” by John Steinbeck
# No. 14: “Riding to the Tigris” by Freya Stark
# No. 15: “Europe, Europe” by Hans Magnus Enzensberger
# No. 16: “City of Djinns” by William Dalrymple
# No. 17: “A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush” by Eric Newby
# No. 18: “All the Wrong Places” by James Fenton
# No. 19: “Hunting Mister Heartbreak” by Jonathan Raban
# No. 20: “River Town” by Peter Hessler
# No. 21: “Road Fever” by Tim Cahill
# No. 22: “When the Going was Good” by Evelyn Waugh
# No. 23: “Behind the Wall” by Colin Thubron
# No. 24: “Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere” by Jan Morris
# No. 25: “A Time of Gifts” by Patrick Leigh Fermor
# No. 26: “Baghdad Without a Map” by Tony Horwitz
# No. 27: “The Size of the World” by Jeff Greenwald
# No. 28: “Facing the Congo” by Jeffrey Tayler
# No. 29: “Venture to the Interior” by Laurens van der Post
# No. 30: “A Turn in the South” by V.S. Naipaul

Body Brokers : Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains by Annie Cheney

Category: True Crime/Non Fiction

Publisher: Broadway

Format: eBook, 224 pages

Pub Date: March 2006

















A few short months ago, the most popular exhibtion here in Toronto was "Body Worlds" and it was hosted by the Ontario Science Museum. The exhibit, which features cadavers stripped of their epidermal layer so that one can observe the inner workings of their bodies as they do "everyday" things like playing chess, skating, and so on, is controversial enough, but a few days before the show was to begin some critics alleged that the person responsible for the exhibition, Dr. Gunther von Hagens, had somehow managed to receive bodies of executed prisoners in China for use in the exhibition. Gunther Von Hagens denied the claims insisting that every cadaver in the exhibition were consented donors, but there were many who believed that Von Hagens used a body broker to procur his corpses. So, when I saw Annie Chenny's book "Body Brokers" peeping out at me from the non-fiction section of the bookstore, I knew I wanted to read it.

(Warning: If you're squeamish, you might not want to read further)

Human Price List:

According to journalist Annie Cheney every year in the United States, tens of thousands of corpses meant for anatomy classes at medical colleges, burial, or cremation are stolen and make their way into the underground cadaver trade. The players in this business are unusual, in that, they have no reverence for a dead body, they are able to view it as a commodity, a very valuable commodity at that, where a head could fetch $550-900, a shoulder $375, a leg $700-$1000,Five grams of skin, $US803 and a whole body could cost anywhere from $4,000-$10,000!

Why is it so expensive?

It is illegal to buy and sell dead bodies, but the law allows companies to be compensated for their costs, which makes life very easy for brokers. By inflating the amount they spend on labor, transportation and storage of bodies, they can easily charge hideous amounts for body parts. With so much money to made and more demand than supply, players in the trade are not always scrupulous about where they acquire their corpses.

So, where do cadavers come from?

Most corpses that enter the cadaver trade are acquired legally with consent from the deceased person or his/her family, however, some in the trade employ deception and some, outright theft to acquire bodies. Bodies bound for cremation are particularly vulnerable because only 10 percent of states in the US inspect crematoria, making it very easy for crematoria workers to get on the payroll of cadaver hunters. And, when it comes to ashes there's no way for a family member to ascertain if all the body parts have been burned.

Who buys these cadavers and why?

Medical companies need them to develop and test new surgical equipment and also to use them at promotional venues/ seminars for doctors and surgeons who want to learn how to use the equipment. Hospitals buy them to use in transplant surgical procedures and researchers buy them, well, to do research...

This is morbid stuff, I know, but it's important to know that not everything is above board when it comes to the "death care" world and Annie Cheney does a wonderful job of taking us into the underground cadaver trade by talking to suppliers, brokers and buyers of bodies used for medical education and research. Be prepared to be disturbed and disgusted, but you will come away with a new awareness for a trade hidden in plain sight and also a desire to work in your small way towards insisting there be more federal oversight of cadavers, so that when loved ones and friends have a desire to donate their bodies to science, you know that their bodies are safe and not going to be bought and sold as a commodity.

For a critique on the book read Mary Roach's (author of Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers) review.

A related story in the USA Today...

And Body Snatchers on NPR's OnPointRadio

1st Birthday Celebrations!

I feel like a bad mommy. I've only just realized my blog celebrates its first birthday this month! It's been a fantastic year - I've had the opportunity to read a lot of books and to make a lot of friends. I've been racking my brain for all of 5 mins thinking of how I can celebrate this anniversary and the best I can come up with is a book giveaway for some lucky readers!

So this is what we'll do. Please go to my virtual bookshelf at bookcrossing.com and pick any two "Available" books. Then send me an e-mail with your request. Your name goes in a box and on June 4th, if I pick your name, I will send you any one of the two books you picked. I plan on picking two readers, so, please, send me your entries (via e-mail) and help me celebrate! Thank you, kindly! :)

This is open to anyone regardless of where you live, so do write in with your requests...

UPDATE: Angela and Susan (Italy) are the winners of the book giveaway! Congratulations, ladies!!! Angela wins "Entre Nous: A Woman's Guide to Finding her Inner French Girl" and Susan wins Pat Chapman's "A Taste of the Raj:A Celebration of Anglo-Indian Cookery":".

Thank you to everyone who participated! You made my blog's first anniversary so much fun!!!
I plan on having more book giveaways in the future, so stay tuned.

The Song of Kahunsha by Anosh Irani

Category: Fiction; Publisher: Doubleday Canada;Format: Hardcover, 320 pages;Pub Date: March 2006;Price: $29.95


In the past I would read books for the oddest reasons: perhaps I was seduced by the cover and couldn't resist picking it up just so that I could caress its smooth exterior and show it off; at other times I would read a book only because it was on the bestsellers' list ( I guess we've all done that at some or another, so perhaps that's not so odd), and there was an occasion when I read a book simply because it leaped out at me (literally) as I was browsing; but hear this, I once read Anosh Irani's debut novel, "The Cripple and his Talismans" only because everyone claimed he looked like a former boyfriend!!! To be fair to Anosh, "The Cripple and his Talismans" was a great novel but I wasn't so much into the magic realism genre at that time and I remember plodding through it wondering if I would ever be able to figure out the fables and clues that would supposedly lead to the narrator's severed arm.



But, things have changed now. I have the "so many books, so little time" syndrome and can afford to spend time on books only when the subject matter interests me - not the glitzy packaging! Anosh Irani's latest book caught my attention, because he has set this novel in one of my favorite places: the big,brutal, bad, but bewitching city of Bombay.

It reads almost like an Indian Oliver Twist with an interesting cast of Dickensian characters. Chamdi (Oliver), the central character, is a 10-year old naive, innocent orphan boy who runs away from his orphanage to look for his father and the "real" Bombay, which in his childlike innocent way he imagines is "Kahunsha" (the city of no sadness). But without the protection of the orphanage, he finds himself on the streets of Bombay where he is forced to seek the friendship and protection of a ring of beggars. He forms close ties with a brother and sister: 13-year old polio victim Sumdi who has deep scar that stretches all the way from his right lip to his ear and 10-year old Guddi ( a little girl in a brown dress that is too large for her, orange bangles on her wrists, dark circles under her brown eyes, sunburnt hair curls). It is Sumdi (Jack) that teaches him the tricks of the trade.

Chamdi and the brother and sister all work for Anand Bhai, the Bill Sykes-like character and crime lord who carved off Sumdi's ear. The story takes place against the backdrop of 1992 Bombay Hindu-Muslim riots, which the author author lived through thus making his story even more realistic.

Anosh Irani has a wonderful descriptive voice and a sharp eye for detail. As he takes you into the gritty world of Bombay's underbelly with its beggars, pimps, drug lords, the mentally impaired and slum dwellers, you get a ringside view of how Bombay's 12m abandoned children live. This is not cheerful stuff: deliberate maiming of children so that they become beggars, not even being able to claim 2 sq. feet of a public footpath to sleep on at night unless you pay off a local goon, is all very distressing, and yet it is compelling.

According to the author, the characters in "Song of Kahunsha" were all developed from people he had seen on Bombay's streets, and I believe him, because reading through the book I felt a rush of deja vu - like I had seen this all before and indeed I had. Irani's book brings memories of those characters back to me.

My favorite passage from the novel is when Sumdi is giving Chamdi his first instructions on how to beg:

"...a van goes past and blows smoke on Sumdi's face. Instead of shielding himself from the black smoke, Sumdi inhales deeply. Then he turns to Chamdi and shouts, "Take it all in, it wil make your lungs strong!". He starts coughing. "Good way to get tears," he says, "to let smoke go in your eyes. Dirty your face, it's too clean. I wouldn't give you a single rupee! Stop walking like you own the world. Carry the world's weight on your shoulders. In a day or two you'll feel it anyway! Then Sumdi laughs, and Chamdi feels it is a strange sight indeed, to watch this boy walk with a limp, a face black from smoke, and the widest smile in the world."

Also, isn't the cover one of the most arresting we've seen in a while? Even though I have since moved on to another book, the eyes of that boy still haunt me for much of my day.