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.

 

Never Trust an English Woman: On Passage to India

Okay today we're talking about EM Forster's A Passage to India. It is a classic of modernist era British literature, but I think it's something like a secondary or tertiary classic. I only say that because in undergraduate and then graduate school reading specifically in that period was never assigned as a text. I think there may be a couple reasons for this. The first is that it was released in 1924 and even though it was released two years after Ulysses it has a feeling it's a little bit more Edwardian or late Victorian. I can't really pinpoint exactly why I say that, but I think it lacks a bit of an interiority of the characters. It's more pulled back high levels you don't get them their inner life as much. I think the other reason it might not be a full canon material is that it takes place in India. There seems to be some sort of reluctance to include these texts that are part of the diaspora, the empire writ large if it's not overly critical of the Empire. I don't know if this is some post-colonial canonization lack.

 

The thing is it's a surprisingly delightful book. It's hard to read but it's hard to read in the way that it is like Richard Wright's Native Son is hard to read -- it's hard to read that there's great Injustice in  those Clash of civilizations. India is tricky to understand anyway because right now it is one of the largest Muslim countries if you just take an absolute count of all the people in the nation that are Muslim. I think it has the second highest after Indonesia. But India itself is so big that they're only 18 or 20% of the total population now. And prior to British colonization there was a huge Clash because the minority Muslim Mughals had been in charge for a while. And then you have a very rigid caste system in the Hindu side of the Indian subcontinent that I'm not even well-versed enough to speak about. 

 

So, you have this entire mélange of the height of the British Raj, you have Muslim Indian and Hindu Indians all together and the basic plot is one of a big misunderstanding. You're reading and you get this dramatic irony that hovers over the key plot event in the second half is kind of this unraveling. Spoiler alert: there is an assault or an attempted rape it's not clear that an English woman accuses an Indian of partaking. But the thing is we see the scene from the accused’s perspective, and we know that the fact of the matter is that she's making it up. And the entire middle of the book you're reading is this character who I really like just is getting railroaded. I don't want to get too deep into it but thankfully it's not too much Injustice just enough to know that hey colonialism is bad. 

 

The only thing that I really could talk against this book is that there is an entire third section that seems a little superfluous after the events and I'm sure there's criticism on it if you wanted to pull apart about why it matters and why it's necessary to the text but as a reader my first real Forester it just didn't really seem like it was necessary overall. I really enjoyed it and I would recommend reading A Passage to India if you were a fan of fiction about colonialism. 

 

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