Reading Matter

I ordered three books from Amazon before we left the States and with Alexander packing a couple of books as well I thought we’d have enough between the two of us to keep me busy until we reach Vietnam.

Not so. In my first couple of days of travel I ravished Shalimar the Clown. I have always been nervous about reading Rushdie. Ever since I became familiar with is name at the time of The Satanic Verses debacle in the eighties I have been at the same time curious and felt strangely insecure about tackling anything he has written.

I was very happy that I finally decided to read one of his works. Shalimari was an incredible read. Eloquently written, even his descriptions of the most horrible of human atrocities. Towards the end of the book I began pacing myself as I did not want it to end and I almost ended, which it did. And what an ending. It was one where I sat bolt upright in bed and cried out. Frustrated at the question mark at the end and yet thrilled at the thought of not knowing.

This was followed by The Jungle Book which Alexander brought along that I have not read before and found excellent and delightful. It is unfortunate that I spent my childhood reading Hardy Boys (I think I tried to read some gay erotica into it as a young boy) instead of Kipling.

I’ve always been intrigued by Marie Antoinette, ever since we studied some French history in high school, I always had a bit of a soft spot for the unpopular queen with the great taste who had her head removed by the angry mob and a guillotine. So after watching the recent Sofia Coppola film based on the Antonia Fraser biography Marie Antoinette The Journey I ordered that as well.

The book kept me busy for quite a while and I interrupted it at times with other reading. The writer did a lot for research for this one and the book is filled with little details and accounts of other contemporaries. I fell even more in love with Marie Antoinette and discovered why she is regarded as a bit of a gay icon. The book piqued my interest in picking up some other similar biographies and reads on great female figures from the past.

The last book I ordered was The Female of the Species by Joyce Carol Oats. I’ve so far only read The Tattooed Girl by her. A sad and haunting novel that had my head in a mess for days after reading it. The short stories Species by no means disappointed. There were one or two that I did not enjoy that much. But Doll: A Romance of the Mississippi and Angel of Wrath were two standouts and most of the others were equally enjoyable.

On the bus between Vientiane and Pakse I flew through The Smell of Apples by Mark Behr. I read the original Afrikaans publication in my final year in high school and the book left me somewhat gaping for air. It was such an apt account of growing up in Afrikaans South Africa in the previous era. Even though most of the book is set in the seventies, before the border wars began, a lot of it is similar to the environment in which I grew up. In many of situations it might just as well have been my own family and again, while reading it, I imagined the main character’s house to be the one I grew up in in Paarl.

Read it if you can get a hold of it. It’s really quite brilliant.

Currently I am reading an anthropological novel Alexander picked up in Vientiane by Elenore Smith Bowen (which was the pseudonym for the anthropologist Laura Bohannan). Return to Laughter is a somewhat fictional account of a female anthropologists living and attempting to work in a tribal village in the Nigeria of the 1940’s. It is a lovely account of the struggles she faced, not just in adapting to living in a village (even with some luxuries like gin) but also getting to get the people to trust her with information about their daily lives and infiltrating the society in which was living on a deeper level.

I am about halfway through the book and then I am going to have to dig into one of Alexander’s academic books to keep myself busy, which could be interesting, but I fear might be over my head.

Any suggestions on what to keep an eye out for if I happen upon a good book store in Phnom Penh will be greatly appreciated.