Three Reviews: The Plague; Cement; Lower Ed

 Lower Ed - Tressie McMillan Cottom

Lower Ed is a Powerhouse of a book. Professor Tressie McMillan Cottom does an excellent job looking at the privatized education system in America.

 

It reminds me of my own time working as a student trying to get a certificate. I ran into people who had both been students and as professors and there's a certain type of student I really feel as if they're the ones being preyed upon by the system.

 

She covers it as well but there is a subset of ambitious African American women from backgrounds that aren't tied into the traditional education system that see these kinds of schools as the way up and out. It's a little distressing both of my own experience and in the reading to see those ambitions as realized only to see them as coming to fruition with degrees that don't have a lot of worth in the wider society either on the job market or the academic market. I can’t imagine spending the time and money investing in a degree that was worthless. Oh, wait, too late. It's a formal accusation about the schools and about the opportunities that you get on the other side of Education. It's a terrific book but it's heartbreaking.

 

 Cement - Fyodor Vasilievich Gladkov

I first came across Cement because I was looking to read something that was representative of socialist realism. And this book was held up as perhaps the best exemplar of that genre. 

 

It is the story of a man who comes back to his hometown after the Russian Revolution fighting in the Army and he finds that everything has changed. The social structure has changed. His wife has changed. And he and the rest of the village must come together and get a cement factory back up and running. They must fight not just local reactionaries but also the bureaucracy of the Soviet system. 

As story in the translation, it's not that bad, but it is more of interest as a historical text than it is just a fun book you're going to sit and read. The other thing of note is that it makes me think of the contemporaries of this text.  It was written in the twenties and at the same time Mikhail Bulgakov was writing Master and Margarita and Heart of a Dog -- much more interesting modernism influenced text than this is. So at least that time artistically you were able to have a very separate threads representative in Soviet literature. Overall, I would say it is worth a read but again as the representative text of the genre.

 

The Plague - Albert Camus

I first read The Plague about 2002 it was in my French literature in translation class and it was the first time I'd read Camus. There was something about his work that really attracted me, and I think The Plague is really a representative sample of his work. 

 

It's beautifully written but there is a sense of isolation and loneliness even when the characters have a relationship with people  -- we're still isolated. And The Plague is set in this Algerian city and the people are having to learn to fend for themselves as they’re locked out from the outside society. I think when I read it  20 years ago it was read as the metaphor for life under Nazi occupation. I returned to it early in the most recent pandemic reading it in March of 2020. Reading it then felt as if  there weren't direct parallels because there was still some simple life where you could go outside and be with people just a little bit. 

 

But I keep going back to this text in my mind because that sense of  isolation that has become more real over time. And the parallels to the world of the text and the current time have multiplied: we see the people who try to break the quarantine those who've gotten rich despite the lockdowns and we see people have gone about their lives and learn to live with the plague as everybody suffers. As in real life in the book there is just widespread trauma for all the characters. What I want to see is the parallel is that in The Plague there is an ending where the gates open but even then, the people of the city are still wary and that's where I think we're at right about now. The gates may open soon but there won’t be the one day that we all get to celebrate but must try to recreate normalcy even though there is no return to normal, “the plague was bound to leave traces in people’s hearts” (280). Early on in March it didn't feel as if it mapped onto our experience, but I keep mentally going back to this book because of that sense of  isolation that he captured so well. It's a classic and Camus is a fantastic writer. I of course recommend this book,  but it is bit of a drag on the soul.