Pearl S. Buck: East Wind: West Wind

Fourth book review, and I’m returning to our first author, Pearl S. Buck, for another novel.  Now, I’m sure by this point you can tell that I strongly recommend reading things by this author (I’m still working on finding everything she’s ever written) but I think East Wind: West Wind is really one of those you should try to find.  It’s her first novel (which makes it quite different from Mandala) and the writing style she uses is very floating and vague, which is just perfect for the narrator’s voice.

Because we’ve already discussed the novelist’s life in greater detail, I’m going to only include a shortened version of what I’ve already written so you don’t have to backtrack.  Then it’s on to the plot and character summaries, finishing up with our usual discussion of the international conflicts at play.  Here we go!

Author Summary:

Though born in Virginia in 1892, Pearl S. Buck’s parents were missionaries, so soon enough she was bound for China at the age of three months.  She spent the majority of her time in China, in a town called Jingjiang (outside of Nanjing) and towns around it until 1934, though she did attend college in the United States. 

As far as her literary legacy is concerned, Buck won the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for her novel The Good Earth, a book still read by many American high-schoolers.  Criticized by some scholars as having a plain-spoken, workaday style, Buck is still praised by most for helping to make Chinese culture understandable to those with no experience in the country. 

However, all her help to China did not make her immune to the forces of the Cultural Revolution.  She was still branded an “imperialist” and not permitted to enter the country when Nixon made his history making trip there in 1972.  She died a year later, at the age of 80.

The Plot:

There is no summary on the dust jacket of this book, so I’ll have to do the best I can without it.  I’ve taken some inspiration from the Wikipedia page for East Wind: West Wind, but am cutting out most of the spoilers that were there.

Kwei-lan is put into an arranged marriage, but her husband is not what she expects. She has been prepared for a marriage to a traditional Chinese man, who would demand her submission and service, but is married instead to a doctor who moves her from her parent’s home to his own.  He shows very little interest in her, and faced with the potential failure of her marriage, Kwei-lan makes sacrifices in the face of his modern interests.

Kwei-lan also has an older brother who has been studying and living in the United States.  He has married an American woman (Mary) without the approval of his parents.  Since they will not approve of her, Kwei-lan’s brother brings Mary to her house, where the two of them can live while waiting for their parents to come around.  So Kwei-lan is surrounded on all sides by those who are opening to the modern world.  Meanwhile, Mary must adapt herself to life in what is still a very traditional society.

…I told you I wasn’t very good at summaries!  But I hope this gives you at least an idea of the forces at play in the book.

The Characters: Mild Spoilers

Since the international conflicts really revolve around three characters, I’m going to limit my character summary to those three.  Kwei-lan’s brother does play a big role in the plot, but he is a very modern Chinese, having married an American.  I believe that since Kwei-lan’s husband is more caught between traditional China and the modern West, he is more important to devote some explanation to.  Then, on the other ends of the spectrum, we have Kwei-lan herself and her new sister-in-law, the American Mary.

Kwei-lan:

I have so much sympathy for Kwei-lan.  From the first pages of the book (which she narrates as a series of letters to a good friend) you can already see that she is in agony over her marriage.  In traditional Chinese society, it was the woman’s responsibility to ensure her husband’s happiness.  Ensuring that happiness used to be a relatively simple thing; a woman had only to be attentive to her husband’s needs and submissive to his whims.

Kwei-lan has taken lessons from her mother her entire life in subsuming her own personality to her husband’s.  She is incredibly selfless—which is proved later on in the story—but this quality is almost entirely overlooked by her husband.  He virtually ignores her for the first quarter of the book, making it impossible for her to fulfill the other requirement of a Chinese wife, which is to bear a son.  Her inner turmoil is described painfully here:

I ask you…with years like this to shape me, how have I been prepared for such a man as my husband?  All my accomplishments are of no avail.  I plan in secret that I will wear the blue silk coat with black buttons cunningly wrought in silver.  I will place jasmine in my hair, and upon my feet the pointed black satin shoes embroidered in blue.  I will greet him when he enters.  But when it has all come to pass, his eyes escape hastily to other things—his letters upon the table, his book.  I am forgotten. (Buck, p. 32)

Her Husband:

Kwei-lan’s husband is a hybrid character.  Raised in China but educated abroad, he is a doctor who enjoys a modern woman.  He enjoys the challenges and intelligence that a modern woman can bring to a relationship.  Though he is never unfaithful to Kwei-lan in their marriage, he is uncertain of her at the start, keeping her at a bewildering polite distance.  He assumes that she cannot understand what he wants from her, so he retreats from the very idea of their marriage.  To his credit, though, once she bends to his desires, he treats her very well.

Mary:

Mary is another sympathetic character.  Unknowing that her fiancé is of an upper-class Chinese family, and unaware that he had already been engaged to an upper-class Chinese woman, she comes to China under the impression that their relationship would be accepted in short order.  But she has no idea how strange she is to a China that has very little understanding of foreigners.  Kwei-lan describes her thus:

She is taller than my brother.  Her head is shorn.  Yet her hair does not lie decorously about her ears; it is as if blown by the four winds, and it is tawny, the color of tiger-bone wine.  Her eyes are like the sea under a stormy sky, and she does not smile easily.

At once I asked myself when I saw her, is she beautiful?  But I answer, she is not beautiful.  (Buck, p. 172)

International Conflicts:

We’re back to conflicts with this book, after two books that seem to show the gentle and non-confrontational merging of multiple cultures.  In this book, though the conflicts do not erupt in violence—as with the border skirmishes between India and China in Mandala—Kwei-lan has a lot of internal suffering as she attempts to compromise her deeply-rooted traditional beliefs with the more modern values at play in her family.

Mary has just as much difficulty adapting her modern sensibilities to traditional China, and finds that crossing borders for love is never as easy as it sounds.  I will focus on these two primarily in my discussion of conflict.

Kwei-lan vs. her Husband:

As already hinted, the major conflict between Kwei-lan and her husband is the fact that she does not understand what he wants from her.  She doesn’t understand why she is failing to live up to her husband’s expectations.  She reviews all the lessons she has ever heard from her mother, and does her best to follow them.  But one night, after the two of them attend a dinner with the new foreign wife of a neighbor, she begins to understand.  It is not what she does that turns her husband off, it is who she is.

So she changes and lets him undo one of the most central aspects to her obedience to Chinese culture; she lets him unbind her feet.

He stared into space.  I thought desperately for a few minutes.  There was only one way for women.  How could I—and yet my mother’s words were, “You must please your husband.”

My husband sat staring thoughtfully across the room.  I did not know what was in his mind.  But I knew this; although I wore peach-colored satin and had pearls in my ears, although my hair was smooth and black and shining in cunningly arranged coils, although I stood at his shoulder so close that a slight motion of his body would have brought his hand to mine, yet he was not thinking of me.

Then I hung my head lower and gave myself into his hands.  I renounced my past.  I said,

“If you will tell me how, I will unbind my feet.”

When I look back now, I realize that my husband’s interest began in me that evening.  It seemed as though before this we had nothing to talk about.  Our thoughts never met.  I could only watch him wondering and not understanding, and he never looked at me at all.  When we spoke it was with the courtesy of strangers to each other, I with shyness towards him, he with careful politeness that overlooked me.  But now that I had need of him he saw me at last, and when he spoke he questioned me and cared to hear my answer.  As for me, the love that had been trembling in my heart for him steadied into adoration then.  I had never dreamed that a man could stoop so tenderly to a woman. (Buck, pp. 81-82)

The good thing about this situation is that though Kwei-lan loses her past by submitting to her husband’s desire for a modern wife, she also gains that modern sense of love that Chinese tradition often ignores.  And she gains the son that she needed to ensure her marriage’s legitimacy in the eyes of her parents and in-laws.

Kwei-lan and Mary:

Mary, unlike anyone else in Kwei-lan’s life, has almost no connection to China.  She speaks only a few phrases of Chinese (with an accent so thick that Kwei-lan can’t understand her easily), she walks alone, exercises for entertainment, doesn’t care about her clothes, and does not do anything that a traditional Chinese woman should.  Kwei-lan can obviously still talk to her husband and brother, who share a traditional base with her, but Mary throws her back into disarray, especially because her parents are adamantly against her. 

There’s a great sequence, one of the first days that the two women are left alone together that really captures this uncertainly, this inability to connect on a similar set of expectations…as well as the relief when they find one thing they can share:

When we sit down to rice all together, she cannot eat with chopsticks…her voice…is not like any woman’s voice that I have heard…Her voice is deep and full…she does not speak to me for we do not understand each other.

Twice she has smiled, a quick, shining smile, springing up out of her eyes like a silver flash of sunshine on a sullen stream.  When she smiles I understand her.  She says, “Shall we be friends?” We look at each other doubtfully.

Then I answer silently, “When you see my son I shall know whether or not we can be friends.

…I brought him to her.  He stood before her on widespread legs and stared at her astonished.  I bade him bow, and he placed his little hands together and bowed, staggering with his effort.

She gazed at him smiling.  When she bowed she laughed aloud, a low laugh like a note struck from a deep bell, and then crying a sweet, unknown word, she seized him and held him against her and placed her lips upon his soft neck.  His hat dropped off and from over his shaven head she looked at me.  Such a look, My Sister!  Her eyes said,

“I desire one exactly like him!”

I smiled saying, “Then we shall be friends!”

I think I begin to see why my brother loves her. (Buck, p. 175-177)

Sources:

Buck, Pearl S. (1997). East Wind: West Wind. Wakefield: Moyer Bell.

Pearl S. Buck. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pearl_s_buck

Muriel Barbery: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

In high school, I studied French, learning to speak it quite well.  Unfortunately, it’s been about…seven years since leaving high school, and my talents have gone down the drain.  So, there’s no way I could read the next book I’m reviewing in its native language, but that’s okay; the English translation is very good and I enjoyed the story a lot.

This book is different from the others I’ve reviewed so far because it was not written by an American author.  The original language is French, and the book does not deal with American culture at all.  Well, unless you count some French concerns about the “Americanization” of their culture (which I don’t).  The book deals with the discrepancies between tiers of French society, and then throws in an elegant influence of Japanese culture on top of that.

Besides the interplay of class and culture to make the story interesting, the writing and characters are engaging and charming (with all their rough edges) which makes this week’s book, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, really good and definitely deserving of a read.

You all know the drill by now, so I’ll just jump in!

Author Summary:

Muriel Barbery wasn’t born in mainland France; she was actually born in Morocco (Casablanca, how romantic!) in 1969.  Her original ambition was not to be a novelist; she actually studied philosophy throughout her academic career and she holds a doctorate—or the French equivalent—that she earned in 1993.  Since then, she has been a professor of philosophy at several different universities, high schools, and teacher training colleges.

Though she published one novel before The Elegance of the Hedgehog, it was that book that catapulted her to awareness as a tremendous novelist.  Elegance stayed at the top of the French bestseller list for 30 consecutive weeks, and spent over a year on the New York Times bestseller list (at various levels).  The book has been translated and become a bestseller in many other countries as well, and was made into a movie released in 2009.

Muriel Barbery’s two books take place in the same hotel; characters from each story overlap and interplay.  However, to date she has not released another novel.

The Plot:

Straight from the back cover:

We are in an elegant hotel particulier in the center of Paris.  Renee, the building’s concierge, is short, ugly, and plump.  She has bunions on her feet.  She is cantankerous and addicted to television soaps.  Her only genuine attachment is to her cat, Leo.  In short, she is everything society expects from a concierge at a bourgeois building in a posh Parisian neighborhood.  But Renee has a secret; she is a ferocious autodidact who furtively devours art, philosophy, music, and Japanese culture.  With biting humor she scrutinizes the lives of the building’s tenants—her inferiors in every way except that of material wealth.

Then there’s Paloma, a super-smart twelve-year-old and the youngest daughter of the Josses, who live on the fifth floor.  Talented, precocious, and startlingly lucid, she has come to terms with life’s seeming futility and has decided to end her own on the day of her thirteenth birthday.  Until then she will continue hiding her extraordinary intelligence behind a mask of mediocrity, acting the part of an average pre-teen high on pop subculture, a good but not an outstanding student, an obedient if obstinate daughter.

Paloma and Renee hide both their true talents and their finest qualities from a world they suspect cannot or will not appreciate them.  They discover their kindred souls when a new tenant arrives, a wealthy Japanese man named Ozu.  He befriends Paloma and is able to see through Renee’s timeworn disguise to the mysterious event that has haunted her since childhood.  This is a moving, witty, and redemptive novel that exalts the quiet victories of the inconspicuous among us.

Characters: Slight spoilers

Renee:

Personal disclaimer: I absolutely love Renee.  Yes, she’s kind of a pain and she closes herself off from many other people—although the people in the building are not the kind of people one would want to associate with, by and large—but she’s very much like myself.  Believing herself to be ugly and knowing herself to be more intelligent than many other people in the world, she hides her true self from those who wouldn’t understand her capabilities and shares herself only with similar people.  Which, at the start of the book, only includes a single kindred spirit; a cleaning woman from another hotel.  Together, the two of them eat good food and discuss books and art in the privacy of Renee’s apartment.

To everyone else, however, she is the toad barely capable of speech who is responsible for overseeing their every frivolous need.  She takes messages, stores packages, and coordinates deliveries so that the “more important” residents of the hotel are free to worry about their lives’ minutiae, their therapy, and their spoiled children. 

Certainly, Renee could do more to change other’s perceptions of her, she could attempt to change her circumstances in order not to be so bitter…but I understand her.  It’s quite possible that she thinks that even if she were to show her true self to others that they just wouldn’t understand, or would look at her as though she were a particularly talented dog; just repeating tricks with no comprehension about their meaning.  Especially in a world so focused on appearance like upper-class France, Renee’s face might disqualify her from any consideration from these “superiors”.

Paloma and the Josses:

Paloma I have less sympathy with.  I rarely have sympathy with those characters born with every advantage who just can’t seem to get over their own apathy.  Paloma is smart; every chapter she narrates begins with what she calls a “profound thought”, a haiku-like thought that can be specific or vague as she sums up the silliness of the world around her.  Her world is mostly concerned with her parents and sister—symbols of self-absorbed, highly-educated, cultured French upper-class.  Paloma feels very little in common with them.

As the summary states, Paloma has decided to kill herself, which is partially why we hear her narrating her side of the story; she is journaling her perceptions before her suicide, so her parents have some way of understanding why she does what she does.  Actually, when she isn’t speaking of people and is speaking of life itself, Paloma has some very interesting perceptions.  She speaks on subjects such as culture, intelligence, and character with important insight; it’s just sad that she can’t take this perceptivity and apply it to her own life!

Ozu:

Ozu Kakuro unfortunately does not get the chance to narrate his own story, so we do not get the same view into his mind as we do the other two main characters.  However, his arrival makes for enough of an event in the hotel that all the characters take note of him, especially since he throws his unit into chaos by completely remodeling it to be more traditionally Japanese, with shoji screens and tatami flooring.

Upon arriving at the hotel, Ozu immediately senses the difference in Renee and Paloma.  The entire building does its best to get on his good side—there is actually an impressive amount of cultural admiration between France and Japan—but he ends up drawing closer to those two rather than anyone else.  Ozu seems to be a bit of a Japanese stereotype (after all, remaking the unit with shoji and tatami?) on the part of the author, but he is well acquainted with Western traditions and literature; one of the things that draws the trio together.

It also helps that both Paloma and Renee (Renee especially) are already students of Japanese culture.  This, again, feels like another stereotype; that both of them are drawn to the order, tradition, and culture of Japan that they both feel so superior to their own.  But that’s just me…as a student of Japanese, you see so much worship of Japan as a “superior” culture in the West…and it’s hard to maintain that idea of superiority when you’ve lived their and experienced Japanese flaws up close.  Not that Japan is overly flawed!  It’s just flawed, like anywhere else.

International Conflicts and Agreements (the ending gets totally spoiled!):

One of the points that The Elegance of the Hedgehog makes so well is that people—no matter what culture they may come from—with similar characters and sensibilities will notice each other, despite even outward differences.  Renee is middle-aged and physically unattractive, Ozu is an elderly Japanese man, and Paloma is a cute twelve-year-old upper class girl.  These three people would not normally become friends, but they do, and it’s all due to the fact that they understand each other.  That their differences of country and class mean very little when contrasted to their similarities of mind.

It’s a great point, and a true one. 

Mourning Renee:

I hate, hate, hate how the book ends.  It’s pointless and discouraging and even though it helps Paloma figure out that she wants to live, it does it by killing Renee, whom, as I previously wrote, I love.  And it’s in such a silly way, too!  Renee is hit by a car while crossing the street.  After all the progress she makes in connecting to other people, in realizing the possibility of love with Ozu…she’s sacrificed in a pointless jolt to Paloma’s consciousness.

I despise that, because more than likely Paloma would have come to realize that with people like Renee and Ozu in the world, life is worth living.  Kindred spirits are out there, though they might be hard to find.

Anyway…I thought that this portion of the book was fantastic in the cultural interplay because while all the rest of the building either ignores or barely notices Renee’s death, Ozu and Paloma come together and really understand what it means, that such a person has passed out of life.

At around five I went down to Madame Michel’s loge (I mean Renee’s loge) with Kakuro because he wanted to get some of her clothes to take them to the hospital morgue.  He rang at our door and asked Maman if he could speak to me.  But I had guessed it would be him, I was already there…In any event, Kakuo and I went down to the loge.  But while we were crossing the courtyard we stopped short, both of us at the same time: someone had begun to play the piano and we could hear very clearly what they were playing.  It was Satie, I think, well, I’m not sure (but anyway it was classical).

…how can you have a profound thought when your kindred soul is lying in a hospital refrigerator?  But I know we stopped short, both of us, and took a deep breath and let the sun warm our faces while we listed to the music drifting down from above.  “I think Renee would have liked this moment,” said Kakuro.  And we stayed there a few more minutes, listening to the music.  I agreed with him. (Barbery, p. 324-325)

Sources:

Barbery, Muriel. (2008). The Elegance of the Hedgehog. (Alison Anderson, Trans.). New York, NY: Europa Editions. (Original work published 2006).

Muriel Barbery. (n.d.). In Wikipedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muriel_Barbery