I pick up M from work and we drive home through gale winds that threaten to overturn our little car. We pass by several snow-plow trucks idling at the side of the road, ready to spring into action. Before we're home, flurries crumble from the grey clouds overhead and slide down on the wind. The white tempest whirls around, mocking our wistful calls for Spring. It's too late to be snowing, we tell each other. And yet, snow pelts the windshield of our car spitefully, as if the winter has only started. M says she hates Canada. Then she corrects herself - she hates winter in Canada. In such a weather so late in March, all I can do is nod in agreement. We haven't had even a hint of Spring yet. There were clear sunny days in the last few weeks, true, but you could enjoy those only indoors. Outside, the wind was relentless, freezing the joy right on your face. Naturally, I thought of Croatia of my youth, where Spring seems to arrive on time, where snow is a rare and unusual thing in March. Then, to prove me wrong, my memories take me to my 15th birthday, on April 19, 1980.
---
That was supposed to be a big day and a big birthday for me. I never was a social animal, or a popular kid in the class. I was a shy, lanky one. I had a few close friends, I wasn't a loner. But for the 15th birthday I stepped out of my shell of shyness and invited about two dozen friends. The party was going to be prepared by my grandparents who lived an hour by train away from Zagreb, my hometown. The day started grey and rainy, but that couldn't dampen my mood. In the morning a couple of kids from school called to say they wouldn't come, but I expected a few cancellations, what with the train travel and all. The number was still over twenty. It would be fun, I knew.
Around noon, as I rode the streetcar to the train station, the rain turned into snow. The wind picked up, just like today, and whipped the wet, heavy flakes in my face, stinging my eyes and dripping down my nose as I stood next to the newspaper kiosk at the station where we agreed to meet. Soon, the gang started arriving - a judo teammate, a friend from school, a neighbor. All was well. Two more came soon after. And - no one else. We waited. I went to make a few phone calls. Friends were apologetic - it's snowing outside, they assumed the party was off. It wasn't planned to be outside, I protest. They know, but now it's too late to make it to the train station. They are sorry. They all sounded false, snug in their warm homes. And just like that, what was supposed to be the grandest birthday party of my life, became a sad little procession of a few friends.
The others tried to cheer me up. I laughed half-heartedly at their jokes, but I couldn't get the betrayal out of my head. We arrived to my grandparents' place. They worked and lived at a gym, so they "commissioned" a large meeting room, dragged in two long desks and benches, then loaded it with treats. They worked on my birthday party the whole day, preparing the place and food. There was roasted piglet, roasted chickens, several kind of salads, potatoes, pasta, home baked bread and other pastries. There was so much food, it was literally spilling from the plates. On a square table in the corner were sweets, waiting for the main course to be dispatched of by the horde of hungry teenagers. Grandma made sure all my favorites were there: rum-pie, apple strudel, walnut and poppy-seed rolls, chocolate balls, and many more. Amidst that feast stood the six of us, lost and not quite hungry.
Grandma, seeing what happened, disappeared downstairs to their apartment. We goofed around, ate a little and played records. Then grandma reappeared with kids from the neighborhood. I used to play with them when I was younger, spending Summer holidays at grandparents', but we've fallen out of touch. I'm not sure what grandma told them, but here they were, four girls and two boys, clutching hastily wrapped gifts which they had no time to buy, so they must have been their own, previously used things. I didn't really care for the gifts. The surprising appearance of those six, whom I neglected to invite at the first place, yet here they were, leaving whatever they were doing and showing up to reinforce our numbers - it touched me deeply, and made me ashamed in equal measure. Suddenly the room wasn't so big and empty any longer. It took a while to get into the party mood, with us being from the "big town", and the newcomers feeling inferior, but the gap, if there ever was one, was soon bridged with a few mean jokes that made us all laugh equally.
Hours later, fed to bursting, we sang around a friend who played guitar - grandpa graciously let us use his - laughed and enjoyed our time. We even snuck into the gym after, to play some sort of a ball game in the dark. We were shadows in the night, the only light a faint moonlight through the windows. We played dodge the ball, and the hilarity of the ball's thud as it connected with the flesh, followed by inevitable grunt of the targeted, sent us sprawling on the floor in fits of laughter.
Riding the train back home on now clear night, snow all but melted away, I realized who my true friends were. They were sitting next to me on the train, or sleeping exhausted at home after such an impromptu party. The others…well, they actually didn't matter.
I never held a birthday party again. Oh, I celebrated birthdays, always in a small circle of close friends I cared about. Lately, those are few and far between, but M and I manage to make even the most mundane birthday feel like a celebration of life! It never snowed on my birthday again.
Although, the way the winter isn't letting up, maybe this year I'll have a white birthday.
Monday, March 18, 2013
Four "promising" books to avoid at all cost
Every now and then I hit a bad stretch in terms of the choice of books to read. I read a lot, and it's inevitable to bump into a bad book every now and then, but in February and early March I plucked four consecutive duds!
It started with "The Age of Miracles" by Karen Thompson Walker, of which I wrote earlier in this blog. A promising premise in that one! I can't help but feel cheated when the story took a wrong turn and became rumblings of a teenager who just happened to live in interesting times, when the Earth's rotation slows rapidly and affects the life on the planet. You can read my full rant here.
---
Next, I listened to the audiobook "The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story" by Robert and Dayna Baer. A real life love story of a CIA couple - what a gem to read for a journalist, I thought. Better yet, a part of it happens in Croatia and Bosnia, where I spent a few years of my photo-journalistic career. And that's where the problem lays. Well, first I had to try and get over the horrible reading of the book. The authors have done it themselves, and I was excited with the prospect of hearing the real CIA lingo, but there was none of it - they read like semi-literate high school students, without emotion, in flat tone. They also butchered every local term and name they mentioned. After a while I listened with permanent goosebumps, as if they were dragging fingernails across the blackboard the whole time.
The premise of the book is - two CIA operatives describe their spying jobs, making it sound more mundane than any regular office job, in places that would sound exotic if anyone else was telling the story - Kazakhstan, Middle East, Latin America, and, finally, the Balkans. It's a collection of loosely connected anecdotes, which didn't say much about the life and work of CIA operatives, except that they were utterly clueless about the real life in places they operated at. They travel with pre-assumed American attitude and that never changes. They see local life only through the lens of their occupation and their country's interests. After getting over being irked with their naivety, I actually felt sorry for them. The book was also supposed to be about them falling in love and screwing up their respective previous marriages, so they can start a new one. Except, there was no romance - there was only a long car ride from Croatia to the south of France when Dana sort of figured out that she likes Bob, but if you wanted more juice, you were out of luck. They either weren't romantic, or don't know how to write it in the book.
Lastly, mind-jarring for me was a blatant inaccuracy that could (and should) have been caught by any writer with an IQ higher than rainworm's: there is a scene when another couple is sent to relieve Dana and her CIA partner in Sarajevo. Dana says there was nothing to eat in the apartment, so the replacements went to grab a pizza in the town of Mostar, which, she said, was half an hour drive away. Well, even a casual search on Google maps will show you how inaccurate that is - Mostar is, according to Google, 129 kms away from Sarajevo, which is 2 hrs drive. With the checkpoints, I would guess at least double that time - I've done the drive a few times myself at about the same time, and it always took the whole day. On the way back from Mostar, allegedly, the woman was shot in the stomach. It's the event that ejects Dana and Bob from Bosnia for good, so it's important. Yet, she didn't get the places, the distances and the circumstances right. If she lied about that, what else they lied about in the book? Yes, it leaves the sour taste.
---
After those two rotten apples, I dove into Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" with great expectations. He won Booker prize for it, after all, it's bound to be good!
I read his "The Enchantress Of Florence" previously and loved it. But, when the "Children" started, it felt deja vu. It felt the same as the Enchantress. Same jokes, same light tone, same mixing of fantasy and history. Except in the Children, Rushdie kept telling through his narrator what he's going to write next. I hate when the book is hinting what will happen in the next chapter. I was put off with the tone, style and the corruption in India for about a hundred pages, then I simply gave up. There are just so many jokes about the big nose (of the main character) and lame "comical" situations I can digest in one book. When reality started mixing with fantasy too much, when what was supposed to be funny became forced and dull, it was a sign to put it down.
---
The last in this rotten quartet was "The Midwife of Venice" by Roberta Rich. The story develops simultaneously in Venice and Malta in 1573. Historical fiction is my favorite, as long as it's plausible. Well, the Midwife was hard to swallow. Here's why:
Hannah and her husband Isaac were Jews from the Ghetto in Venice. She was extremely skilled midwife, but without a child of her own. He was a merchant enslaved on Malta, pending ransom. As the book opened, Hannah went to deliver a Venetian nobleman's baby in exchange for a handsome sum so she can ransom Isaac. The thing is - it was illegal for a Jew to tend to a christian, punishable by death not only hers, but the whole of the ghetto too. Yet she did it for the love of her husband. So far, so good. The descriptions of the midwifing were too expansive and too detailed, but all in all it was suspenseful and entertaining.
Then the problem started - with the plausibility. The nobleman whose boy she delivered had two brothers whose inheritance would go to the infant, so they naturally wanted the baby dead. Yet, the parents decided to go on a trip and leave the baby behind in their palace at mercy of the brothers. They traveled to Ferrara, the trip that the author informed us, takes 3-4 days. The same evening one brother tried to kill the baby, but Hannah followed him and saved the boy by stabbing and killing the bad guy. The NEXT DAY she took the baby back to the palace - the parents should have been somewhere half the way to Ferrara by then - yet the servant opened the door, told Hannah they got a word from Ferrara that boys parents have died from the plague which scourges Venice at the time, and shooed Hannah away. Now - how is it possible that not only they reached Ferrara so quick, but they also managed to die from the plague - all over one night!
As the story went on, it got more and more unbelievable - characters appearing always at the nick of time with the only possible solution Hannah needed to solve problems the plot presented her with. The ending was happy, entirely unsurprising and uninspired.
The story had so much going for it, it was almost more difficult to screw it up, than to end it properly. Yet, the author managed to ruin the promising tale.
It started with "The Age of Miracles" by Karen Thompson Walker, of which I wrote earlier in this blog. A promising premise in that one! I can't help but feel cheated when the story took a wrong turn and became rumblings of a teenager who just happened to live in interesting times, when the Earth's rotation slows rapidly and affects the life on the planet. You can read my full rant here.---
Next, I listened to the audiobook "The Company We Keep: A Husband-and-Wife True-Life Spy Story" by Robert and Dayna Baer. A real life love story of a CIA couple - what a gem to read for a journalist, I thought. Better yet, a part of it happens in Croatia and Bosnia, where I spent a few years of my photo-journalistic career. And that's where the problem lays. Well, first I had to try and get over the horrible reading of the book. The authors have done it themselves, and I was excited with the prospect of hearing the real CIA lingo, but there was none of it - they read like semi-literate high school students, without emotion, in flat tone. They also butchered every local term and name they mentioned. After a while I listened with permanent goosebumps, as if they were dragging fingernails across the blackboard the whole time.
The premise of the book is - two CIA operatives describe their spying jobs, making it sound more mundane than any regular office job, in places that would sound exotic if anyone else was telling the story - Kazakhstan, Middle East, Latin America, and, finally, the Balkans. It's a collection of loosely connected anecdotes, which didn't say much about the life and work of CIA operatives, except that they were utterly clueless about the real life in places they operated at. They travel with pre-assumed American attitude and that never changes. They see local life only through the lens of their occupation and their country's interests. After getting over being irked with their naivety, I actually felt sorry for them. The book was also supposed to be about them falling in love and screwing up their respective previous marriages, so they can start a new one. Except, there was no romance - there was only a long car ride from Croatia to the south of France when Dana sort of figured out that she likes Bob, but if you wanted more juice, you were out of luck. They either weren't romantic, or don't know how to write it in the book.
Lastly, mind-jarring for me was a blatant inaccuracy that could (and should) have been caught by any writer with an IQ higher than rainworm's: there is a scene when another couple is sent to relieve Dana and her CIA partner in Sarajevo. Dana says there was nothing to eat in the apartment, so the replacements went to grab a pizza in the town of Mostar, which, she said, was half an hour drive away. Well, even a casual search on Google maps will show you how inaccurate that is - Mostar is, according to Google, 129 kms away from Sarajevo, which is 2 hrs drive. With the checkpoints, I would guess at least double that time - I've done the drive a few times myself at about the same time, and it always took the whole day. On the way back from Mostar, allegedly, the woman was shot in the stomach. It's the event that ejects Dana and Bob from Bosnia for good, so it's important. Yet, she didn't get the places, the distances and the circumstances right. If she lied about that, what else they lied about in the book? Yes, it leaves the sour taste.
---
After those two rotten apples, I dove into Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" with great expectations. He won Booker prize for it, after all, it's bound to be good!
I read his "The Enchantress Of Florence" previously and loved it. But, when the "Children" started, it felt deja vu. It felt the same as the Enchantress. Same jokes, same light tone, same mixing of fantasy and history. Except in the Children, Rushdie kept telling through his narrator what he's going to write next. I hate when the book is hinting what will happen in the next chapter. I was put off with the tone, style and the corruption in India for about a hundred pages, then I simply gave up. There are just so many jokes about the big nose (of the main character) and lame "comical" situations I can digest in one book. When reality started mixing with fantasy too much, when what was supposed to be funny became forced and dull, it was a sign to put it down.
---
The last in this rotten quartet was "The Midwife of Venice" by Roberta Rich. The story develops simultaneously in Venice and Malta in 1573. Historical fiction is my favorite, as long as it's plausible. Well, the Midwife was hard to swallow. Here's why:
Hannah and her husband Isaac were Jews from the Ghetto in Venice. She was extremely skilled midwife, but without a child of her own. He was a merchant enslaved on Malta, pending ransom. As the book opened, Hannah went to deliver a Venetian nobleman's baby in exchange for a handsome sum so she can ransom Isaac. The thing is - it was illegal for a Jew to tend to a christian, punishable by death not only hers, but the whole of the ghetto too. Yet she did it for the love of her husband. So far, so good. The descriptions of the midwifing were too expansive and too detailed, but all in all it was suspenseful and entertaining.
Then the problem started - with the plausibility. The nobleman whose boy she delivered had two brothers whose inheritance would go to the infant, so they naturally wanted the baby dead. Yet, the parents decided to go on a trip and leave the baby behind in their palace at mercy of the brothers. They traveled to Ferrara, the trip that the author informed us, takes 3-4 days. The same evening one brother tried to kill the baby, but Hannah followed him and saved the boy by stabbing and killing the bad guy. The NEXT DAY she took the baby back to the palace - the parents should have been somewhere half the way to Ferrara by then - yet the servant opened the door, told Hannah they got a word from Ferrara that boys parents have died from the plague which scourges Venice at the time, and shooed Hannah away. Now - how is it possible that not only they reached Ferrara so quick, but they also managed to die from the plague - all over one night!
As the story went on, it got more and more unbelievable - characters appearing always at the nick of time with the only possible solution Hannah needed to solve problems the plot presented her with. The ending was happy, entirely unsurprising and uninspired.
The story had so much going for it, it was almost more difficult to screw it up, than to end it properly. Yet, the author managed to ruin the promising tale.
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