A few weeks ago I wrote about McSweeney’s 42 in which stories were sequentially translated between English and another language and back again. One Hundred Frogs, in contrast, consists of a single haiku translated repeatedly from Japanese into English. It’s a famous haiku, written by Basho, about (surprise!) a frog.

 

A typical translation:

Ancient pond;

frog jumps in;

sound of water.

As you might expect, many of the translations bear quite a bit of similarity to one another.  Yet none are exactly the same.

They quibble, perhaps, over whether the pond should be described as ‘ancient’ or ‘old’ or ‘still’. Or for that matter, is it not a pond at all, but rather a lake or a mere?

But the translational argument I found most interesting was over what produced the sound. Some translations, like the one above, attributed the sound to the water while others attributed the sound to the frog. When a frog jumps into the water what makes the splash?

Luckily, one of the translations resolves this puzzle (koan?):

Old pond-

and a frog-jump-in

water-sound

Other translations are less literal. There’s a limerick and a sonnet and a prose-poem. The book’s beautiful illustrations form a flip-book which itself could be considered a translation of the haiku, though not into English!

My favorite of the more playful translations takes the minimalism of haiku to its logical extreme:

 pond

              frog

                             plop!

This frog is ready to jump.

I have to admit, it feels a bit embarrassing to pick a book entitled Getting Stoned with Savages to represent a country. Nothing like starting out with an insult to the people you want to learn about! But I had previously read another book by the same author, The Sex Lives of Cannibals, and found it to be a surprisingly thoughtful description of life in Kiribati, in addition to being funny.

In fact, when I started this project of reading a book for every country, I specified that The Sex Lives of Cannibals could be my one exception to my rule of only including books that I hadn’t read before beginning this the project. After all, there aren’t that many Kiribati books out there and Troost claimed that all of the ones he read were pretty boring. However, since I started the project, a book has been published titled Underwater Eden about how one of the world’s largest marine protected areas was established in Kiribati. With that as my planned Kiribati book, I figured I could justifiably pick up another J. Maarten Troost book as my Vanuatu read.

In case you’re wondering where Vanuatu is.
Source: Wikipedia

I’m glad to finally start covering some of the small Pacific island countries. With lots of countries and small population sizes, on a per capita basis the Pacific islands will be getting a disproportionately large amount of coverage in my world survey. They also generally have a story-telling culture that is much more oral than written, which can add to the challenge of finding books to represent them.

Getting Stoned with Savages was a nice light-hearted book, good for reading in bits before falling asleep. Some things I learned about Vanuatu:

• Vanuatu, named New Hebrides at the time, was jointly administed by both England and France simultaneously. They had two governments, two legal systems, two sets of prisons. It’s hard to imagine that going wrong…
• Vanuatu is home to a number of cargo cults, a religious phenomenon that I find quite fascinating. Basically, there was a pre-existing belief about the arrival of material wealth that was fulfilled by the arrival of the Americans in World War II with all sorts of food and supplies. Some groups now build landing strips or fly American flags with the idea that this will attract the wealth again. It’s completely logical, and completely misguided at the same time.
• The country is extremely linguistically diverse. (According to Wikipedia, it has the most languages per capita of any country in the world.) J. Maarten Troost suggests that this is because the volcanic geography of the islands promotes isolation of different groups. I have no idea whether there is any basis to that, but it’s an interesting idea.
• I’m really glad that my house centipedes aren’t a foot long and poisonous!

Overall though, I’d recommend The Sex Lives of Cannibals over Getting Stoned with Savages. Troost himself points out why. When he and his then-girlfriend were living in Kiribati, they were living pretty much like everyone else in Kiribati, in part because they had no choice. There was very little availability of imported food and other resources. In Vanuatu, there was a large expat community in the capital city and they were isolated. He’s pretty snarky about the other expats, but in the end he’s one of them and doesn’t build the same kinds of connections to the local community that he did in Kiribati.

I’m known in my family for my love of traditions. Even if we’ve only done something once, I’m liable to declare it “a tradition”. My philosophy is, if there’s something I enjoy, why not make it a tradition so that I can be sure of having regular opportunities to enjoy it again? I enjoy my traditions, though there is a downside to them. It can be hard to let go of them even if they are no longer serving their purpose.

The question of when to let go of traditions is central to the novel Far and Beyon‘ by Unity Dow, though in this case the traditions are broader cultural traditions, rather than personal ones. The book focuses on the life of an ordinary family in a Botswanan village in the late 1990′s. Two sons in the family have recently died of AIDS. Most of the book is from the perspective of their teenage Mosa, though her mother, Mara, and brother, Stan, also get a chance to speak. Mosa is outspoken, full of curiosity, and unwilling to tolerate the sexism she frequently encounters. (The sexist aspects of tradition definitely go in the reject pile.)

Another traditional belief in Botswana is that bad things happen to people because others have performed witchcraft against them. I found it interesting to compare this to The Circle of Karma, the book I read for Bhutan. There, the belief that bad things happen to people because of karma seems to have both good and bad effects on society. It can lead to compassion for others if bad things are fated to them due to a previous life. It can also lead to people blaming themselves when things go wrong. A belief in witchcraft, on the other hand, leads to blaming other people when things go wrong, potentially leading to the destruction of close and trusted relationships.

Perhaps more important than the traditions to get rid of are the traditions to keep. Unity Dow warns against rejecting tradition just because they are African. The traditions that get a more positive airing are those relating to the maintenance of strong family and community ties. Because of the AIDS epidemic, funeral traditions play a big role in the book. Some traditions function to give structure to the process of mourning, such as a ceremony of giving away the dead person’s clothes six months after their death. Other traditions promote community co-operation, such as the expectation that families send representatives to help dig the grave when someone from another family dies. (If they don’t, others might not help them when their own family member dies.)

One thing that I found very interesting was how the question of what tradition required was not fixed, but could be negotiable. Following funerals the tradition is to shave the head of the immediate family of the deceased. But when Mara’s son dies, does his daughter count as a member of the family if the son never married the daughter’s mother? When the family comes together to make plans for the ceremony, the (male) senior members of the family say no. But Mara argues within the context of tradition that her granddaughter should be included and eventually it is decided that the Elders would think it right as well.

In addition to writing this and several other novels, Unity Dow is a lawyer and an activist. In fact, she was the first woman to serve on Botswana’s high court.  She sounded like a fascinating person which is part of what drew me to her book. But I was also a bit worried before reading it that the book might have been published because of her other accomplishments, rather than her accomplishments as a writer. I needn’t have worried. Far and Beyon’ is definitely shaped by an activist message and occasionally that does detract a bit from its success as a novel. However, overall I found it an insightful book that gave me a lot to think about.

I should also mentioned that even though I talked a lot about funeral traditions here, the book as a whole was much more positive and uplifting. Though after reading In Praise of Hatred, probably anything else would seem uplifting by comparison!

I received my copy of Far and Beyon‘ from Spinifex Press, an Australian feminist publisher, in a giveaway. It also counts towards the Global Women of Color reading challenge.

There’s an interesting video of Unity Dow giving a talk about tradition and other things on YouTube:

The book is every bit as dark as its cover.

The title of this book certainly caught my attention. In Praise of Hatred, by Khaled Khalifa was originally published in Syria in 2006 by an underground press. It was discovered and banned by the government, after which it was published in Beirut. The book tells the story of a teenage girl who participated in an Islamist uprising against Bashar Al Assad’s father in the early 1980′s. There are a lot of parallels between that uprising and the current conflict in Syria, which I think may be part of why it has now been translated into English. In Praise of Hatred was a finalist for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008 and the English version (translated by Leri Price) is now on the longlist for the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

It was actually a bit difficult to track down a copy of the book. Even though it has been translated into English, as far as I can tell it hasn’t been published in the U.S. So I put in a request for it through my university’s inter-library loan and waited to see what would happened. The loan request just sat there for a long time and I had pretty much given up on it. Then suddenly I got an e-mail that it had arrived. It had come all the way from the Vancouver Public Library. I had no idea that inter-library loan was able to get books from public libraries, let alone from other countries!

In Praise of Hatred turned out to be a challenge to read, as well as to obtain. For one thing, it’s clearly written for a Syrian/Middle Eastern audience and the translation doesn’t attempt to explain the cultural references. I’m glad it doesn’t, but I did find that I needed to look some things up to understand parts of the story. The story is entirely told from the perspective of the teenage girl, who remains unnamed. She’s prone to flashbacks, visions and dreams, making the narrative hard to follow at times. Also, it’s just unremittingly dark. There’s the violence of the uprising and its repression, but even beyond that, the whole atmosphere of the book is one of depression and decline.

The teenage/early twenties narrator lives with her aunts in an old, traditional house in the city of Aleppo. In a way, she fits into a classic pattern of young adulthood: she is attracted to a particular form of idealism and judges the world rigorously through that single lens, to the exasperation of her family. In her case, that idealism is a form of Islam which leads her to hatred of any women who didn’t adhere to strict veiling and of anyone whose religious beliefs differ. from her own. She joins a women’s cell of the Islamist uprising, declaring her desire to be a martyr for the cause. Eventually her beliefs force her into hatred of members of her own family.

I was expecting this book to help me understand what drives someone towards this kind of hatred and for a while I was frustrated that the origin and development of her hatred weren’t really explained. In retrospect though, I don’t think the author’s goal was so much to explore the origin of hatred, but rather to explore what it means to live with hatred. On one hand, the hatred strengthens her and gives her a feeling of power, hence the title of the book. Hatred is a way of managing the bewilderment both of growing up and of living in a society in turmoil. However, the hatred also isolates her, driving her away from the people she loves. That isolation makes her want to to relinquish her hatred, and sometimes she makes steps toward reconciliation but she finds it difficult to back down.

It’s interesting that the author chose to tell the story from a female point of view. A male insurgent narrator would likely have committed more direct acts of violence whereas the actual protagonist didn’t do much more than attend meetings and pass out pamphlets. I wonder if the author made this decision to make the  narrator easier to relate to and forgive. Being female also meant that she had to struggle with how to deal with puberty within a belief system which is unaccepting of female sexuality. Unfortunately, this aspect of the book didn’t work well. I mostly ended up feeling creeped out by the author’s obsession with her breasts and his need to mention them every two pages.

I have to say that I feel even more worried about Syria’s future from having read this book. The uprising in the 1980′s that In Praise of Hatred depicts was driven by Islamists associated with the Muslim Brotherhood. Both sides in the conflict seem repellent. The government is corrupt and oppressive. It engages in extensive torture and mass killings. The rebels endorse killing all members of the ‘other’ (Alawite) sect and extend their hatred and violence to anyone who argues that not every single Alawite deserves to be killed. As best I can tell, it seems that the opposition in the current civil war does include a broader coalition. I can only hope that less hateful voices prevail.

After the conclusion of the novel is a translator’s note which states that the ending  was changed, with the approval of the author,  in the English translation so as to be more accessible to western readers! I find it frustrating not to know how the book was really intended to end. I searched for information about the original ending online, but I haven’t been able to find anything useful. My best guess is that the original ending refers back to the mystical visions that the narrator has at the beginning of the book. That would make some sense of them, since they seem important at the beginning of the book, but unrelated to all of the plot which follows. Plus I can see how the translator would worry about the accessibility of an Islamic mystical vision to Western visitors. I may have to track down someone who speaks Arabic to find out how the book ‘really’ ended.

I really don’t like the idea of a translator changing the ending of a book. I guess I can see the argument that by changing the ending, the translator was attempting to convey the original message in a way that would be comprehensible to its new audience. But the book could also have included a translation of the original ending or at least an explanation of what the changes were.

As a kid, I enjoyed playing the game of ‘telephone’, where a message was passed around a circle, whispered into each person’s ear. What interested me was tracing back the path of the message, seeing step by step how the message had changed as it progressed. More recently, I have played ‘telephone’ with Google Translate, taking a text through sequential languages and back to English to see how it turned out. Usually the result is pretty garbled. I often wondered how much of the garbling was due to the failures of computer translation and how much was due to the inherent limitations of translation itself  In other words, what would happen if you played the same game with human translators?

So I was quite excited when I picked up a copy of McSweeney’s Quarterly #42 and discovered that it is devoted to a game of translation telephone. It contains eleven short stories, each of which was translated between English and other languages multiple times in sequence- ie a Franz Kafka story originally in German, translated to English-> Hebrew -> English -> Spanish -> English. Many of the translators (each of whom is a well-known author) also added some commentary about their experience in doing the translation.

At their best, the sequences of translations themselves tell a story as sentences shift over time. The Kafka story is about a strange bluish-green creature, the size of a weasel, living inside a synagogue. Or at least, it appears bluish-green. In the first English translation we are told:

“One is tempted to claim that the true color of its fur is unknown, and that the apparent color may stem from the mortar and plaster of the synagogue’s interior, which is only slightly darker in hue”.

I don’t know what happens in the Hebrew, but when the story gets back to English, it reads:

“And I’m still sort of tempted to tell you that the true color of his fur is as yet unknown and the color we perceive it to be is some sort of refracted spectrum bouncing off the plaster of the synagogue’s walls- only the walls are a darker hue than what you see on him.”

Now, I was intrigued, how would this plot line resolve? how would the next author deal with this puzzling sentence that no longer quite made sense? Would he come up with an explanation for the fur cover that made sense? Or would he remain as close as possible to what was written, regardless of whether it made sense? Sadly, but perhaps wisely, the Spanish version just drops the explanation of the creature’s color altogether, leaving the plot line tantalizingly unresolved.*

You may notice that I haven’t mentioned the final English translation of the Kafka story. That’s because Dave Eggers decided to just rewrite the whole thing into an entirely different story, much to my irritation. He’s like the kid playing telephone who intentionally garbles the message. I was always really annoyed with that kid. To me, it destroys the whole point of the game. Unfortunately, Dave Eggers was not alone and many of the translation sequences are distrupted by such rewritings. In part that may be a hazard of using authors as translators; many of them can’t resist making it into their own story. McSweeny’s also seems to have muddied the waters deliberately by sometimes assigning authors who have almost no knowledge of the language they were translating from and also by actually encouraging some authors to rewrite the material.

If I leave out the cases that aren’t really serious attempts at translation, I am overall  impressed with the effectiveness of translation. Some sentences remain word-for-word identical even after having been translated from English to another language and back again twice. Most often the exact wording varies, but the meaning and the style are quite consistent. In cases where the meaning does change, like the source of the creature’s color above, it’s often clear that a professional translator would have done better, either by knowing the language better or by further investigating passages that don’t make sense.

It’s probably better though not to take the book too seriously and just have fun flipping back and forth between the pages.

* If you’re curious, here’s what Google Translate does with this sentence. Not too bad actually:

One is tempted to claim that the true color of its fur is unknown, and that the apparent color may stem from the mortar and plaster of the synagogue’s interior, which is only slightly darker in hue

מפתה לטעון שאת הצבע האמיתי של פרוותו אינו ידוע, ושהצבע הנראה לעין יכול לנבוע מהטיט וטיח הפנים של בית ההכנסה, שהוא רק קצת יותר כהה בגוון

Tempting to argue that the true color of the fur is not known, and visible color can be due to mortar and plaster the face of the income, which is just a little darker shade

Tentador argumentar que el verdadero color de la piel no se conoce, y el color visible puede ser debido a la cara de mortero y yeso de la renta, que es sólo un poco de sombra más oscura

Tempting to argue that the true color of the skin is not known, and the visible color may be due to the face of mortar and plaster of income, which is only slightly darker shade

Winner of the 2012 Orange Prize

I’m flabbergasted.

I consider myself a reasonably well-informed feminist. I know the statistics about wage gaps, literacy rates, and the leaky pipeline of women in science. I’m not an expert by any means, but I pay attention. It turns out though that when it comes to gender equity in the literary world, I was completely naive.

Last year I mentioned the Orange Prize to my boyfriend, explaining that it was specifically for books written by women. He questioned whether in current times it made sense to have an award specifically for women and whether women were still at a disadvantage when it came to literature. Although I argued that having a women’s prize was still of value, my thinking was that the gender balance was probably a lot less skewed in literature than in my own field of science. After all I could name lots of very successful and talented female authors just off the top of my head.

Then yesterday I came across this compilation of the representation of women in a variety of top literary forums: http://www.vidaweb.org/three-years-to-stump-and-stack-and-stem

In publication after publication, women are under-represented, often dramatically under-represented, as writers, as book reviewers, and as authors of books under review.

In fact, the under-representation is not all that different from that seen in science. Last fall, Nature, one of the top-echelon scientific journals, published a self-analysis of their track record. Amongst other data, they reported that in the previous two years only 19% of externally-written Comment and World View articles were written by women. I’m picking out this particular statistic because it seems a reasonable equivalent to the role of book reviewer- providing invited commentary on someone else’s work.

Harper, London Review of Books, New Republic, New York Review of Books, and The Atlantic all had a proportion of female reviewers around or below the 20% mark observed in Nature. The New York Times and the Times Literary Supplement did marginally better, reaching the 25-30% range and Boston Review leads the pack at around 40%. The gender percentages for the authors of books reviewed are similarly abysmal.

So, yes, I’d say there is still a need for prizes dedicated to raising the profile of women in literature.

In publishing their numbers, Nature titled the editorial “Nature’s Sexism” and gave serious consideration to what they could do better. They observed that although women were well represented amongst the editors, there was an unconscious bias in which male scientists were more likely to come to mind than women. They concluded:

We therefore believe that there is a need for every editor to work through a conscious loop before proceeding with commissioning: to ask themselves, “Who are the five women I could ask?”

Editors of literary publications would do well to ask themselves  the same.

The Rainbow Troops by Andrea Hirata

If you check out the Goodreads page for James Herriot’s book If Only They Could Talk (the first half of All Creatures Great and Small), you might wonder why there are so many reviews in Indonesian. It turns out that reading If Only They Could Talk cures the broken heart of the main character in The Rainbow Troops, the all time best-selling book in Indonesia*.

Translated from the Indonesian by Angie Kilbane

The Rainbow Troops is an autobiographical novel about 10 classmates (the Rainbow Troop) and their teacher at a small, impoverished Muslim school on the island of Belitung in Indonesia. Belitung is rich in tin, a fact that shapes the whole society. Life in the village is more or less run by the tin mining company. As a child, your parents are either staff living in the luxurious estate or laborers living in the village. Village kids mostly work to help support their families, rather than going to school, but the Rainbow Troops and their teacher defy the expectations.

It reads very much like a Bollywood movie or a Broadway musical, complete with simple morality, unlikely triumphs, and the occasional plot hole. I felt like the book could have burst out into song and dance at any moment! The Rainbow Troops was in fact made into a movie, complete with musical numbers and became the highest grossing film ever in Indonesia. I’m curious to watch it if I can find a way to do so. Given how movie-like the book felt, it might be one of those rare instances where the movie is better than the book.

Scenes from the film version of The Rainbow Troops

Indonesia is a ‘melting pot’ country, with influences from lot of cultures. The Rainbow Troop members are mostly ethnically Malay, but the village also includes people of Chinese origin and two more indigenous groups that are identified as ‘sawang’ and ‘sarong’ people. Although the groups are distinct, they all seem to get along. One of my favorite scenes in the book is the description of the ‘snatching festival’ as part of a Chinese holiday in which all the groups took part. Piles of cookware, clothing, and other useful items were piled onto three tables. At a given signal everyone could run in and grab whatever they wanted. Unsurprisingly, chaos ensues!

The book takes an interesting perspective on the value of education. Many of the members of The Rainbow Troop end up in manual labor or other jobs that don’t really take advantage of their education. But the author argues that their education was important regardless of its economic effect. Through their teacher’s selfless efforts the students gained a happy childhood, an opportunity for knowledge and a life ethic. Though I wonder whether the economic benefits might not also have been larger than Andrea Hirata perceived, I’m certainly on board with the idea that the value of education goes far beyond economic benefits. It is easy to quantify the value of education in terms of dollars earned and GDP, but those aren’t the only things that matter. The book concludes with a sentence from the Indonesian constitution:

“Every citizen has the right to an education.”

 

*It has sold 5 million legal copies. Apparently it also sold 15 million illegal copies. Andrea Hirata has said in interviews that in the future he will write in English instead of Indonesian because of the piracy problem. I find that very sad.

Women with Big Eyes
by Ángeles Mastretta
translated from the Spanish by Amy Schildhouse Greenberg
Published in 1990

When I signed up for the 2013 Global Women of Color Reading Challenge I realized that while I had read several female authors from the Caribbean I didn’t have any ideas for female authors I wanted to read from continental Latin America. Luckily several other participants in the challenge helped me out with suggestions. Eva at The Striped Armchair strongly recommended Ángeles Mastretta and since I didn’t have any plans yet for a Mexican book, I decided to give her a try.

I went to the library intending to check out Mastretta’s novel Lovesick, but I happened to open her book Women with Big Eyes instead. I read the first two pages and decided I didn’t want to put it down. The book consists of brief stories about 39 ‘aunts’, based on relatives and friends of Mastretta. Each is very short- more of an anecdote or a vignette than a story. Most of the tales focus on a relationship with a man, whether a husband, a boyfriend, or a lover, but the men are mostly in the  background rather than foreground. It is the women who are vivid and colorful. While most of the aunts’ lives fit within relatively traditional gender roles (I get the impression that they are a generation older than Mastretta), they are not passive by any means.

One of my favorite stories was about Aunt Christina who was interesting, but not pretty- “Unfortunately, the men of Puebla weren’t looking for interesting women to marry.” So, having reached the unmarriageable old age of 21, she takes matters into her own hands and leaves for Spain, ostensibly with a mysterious Spanish husband. Six months later she returns as a widow. Aunt Christina, free from the stigma of being an old maid, can now enjoy a happy single life with her family and friends.

It’s the writing style and the people that I enjoyed most about the book. Mastretta makes particularly effective use of lots of parallel structure to bring her characters to life:

“From her mother, Aunt Jacinta inherited a debilitating melancholy… She would grow sad about not having been born in Norway on a stormy night, about never having been to the Congo or never knowing whether she was capable of traveling through India… She had five children, and she would never know what it was like to have two or what it would be like to have ten. She had a medium-size house and a businessman husband; she would never know palaces or hunger. Her husband’s hair was brown and docile; she would never understand what it was to caress coarse black hair like Emiliano Zapata’s, a golden head like Henry Ford’s or a completely bald one like Bishop Toriz’s.”

 Overall though, I didn’t enjoy Women with Big Eyes as much as I expected to. After a while, I found the shortness of the stories dissatisfying. I wanted something more substantial. I think that’s primarily a matter of my personal preference rather than a fault of the book. It might have been better to pick the book up occasionally and savor a few stories at a time instead of reading it straight through as I did. Regardless, I’m glad I followed Eva’s recommendation because I loved the writing style and I definitely plan to read one of Ángeles Mastretta’s novels.

A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. Published in 1993.

I’ve been taking some detours lately in my travels around the globe. For one, I took a long return-trip to India, reading A Suitable Boy by Vikram Seth. The most recent book I read described itself as a bonsai. I seem to be in the midst of a book-as-tree theme because A Suitable Boy describes itself as a banyan tree where the main trunks sprouts branches and those branches themselves take root such that the tree would still stand even if the main trunk were to die. It really is an apt description. About 400 pages into the book I counted 17 open storylines. I thought it might be fun to try to draw them out and show how they connected, but I found that that only hurt my brain. On the other hand, I had no trouble keeping track of them all if I just kept reading.

The novel may be billed as a love story, but it is also so much more.  I love the way it liberally satirizes pretty much everyone from politicians and academics to poets and religious figures.

“Dipankar, their middle brother, was a dreamer… [He] was fond of making remarks such as, ‘It is all the Void,’ at breakfast, thus casting a mystical aura over the scrambled eggs.”

The book also addresses more seriously the issues of post-independence India such as the relationship between Hindus and Muslims and how to deal with the essentially  feudal system of zamindar land owners. There is so much to love about this book. While reading it, I found myself glad that the book was so long and that there was so much more of it to enjoy. If you’re in the mood for an epic, immersive reading experience, I highly recommend it.

On my way to India, I stopped off in Yemen: The Unknown Arabia by Tim Mackintosh-Smith. (In Britain the title was the much more interesting Yemen: Travels in Dictionary Land.) I left that visit unfinished though and will have to return. A blurb on the book jacket refers to Mackintosh-Smith as a modern-day Lawrence of Arabia. The blurb is telling- even though the book was published in 2000, it felt more  like it was from 1900. The author is an upper-class British white male who was able to spend decades of his life hanging out in Yemen with no apparent need to support himself, but who  seems to have no awareness of how privileged he is.

He acknowledges early in the book that it will be very male-centric, since as a foreign male he has very little opportunity to interact with women.  That’s fair enough and I appreciated the explanation. But he then proceeds to tell us that the women in Yemen are perfectly happy with their role in society and have no objection to being isolated at home! Despite the fact that he just made clear he knows nothing about it!

Yemen certainly seems like a fascinating place and I look forward to reading more about it, but I found myself too annoyed by this book to continue.

I love maps. I’m particularly fascinated by maps that, instead of the usual cities or roads, describe more unexpected characteristics. Like this map showing the geography of how many times people kiss each other on the cheek when greeting each other in France:

From the Strange Maps blog: http://bigthink.com/blogs/strange-maps

Over the past couple of years, I’ve slowly been collecting a group of stories about maps and maps that tell stories that I see as interconnected somehow.

It all started with The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet by Rief Larsen. T.S. Spivet is a boy obsessed with drawing maps and diagrams and appropriately his drawings alongside the text form part of the plot of the story. The concept is executed well and I really enjoyed the book, even if the ending was a bit far-fetched. It would have been a memorable book regardless, but what happened next is what made it special to me.

“The Mappist” is published in the collection “Light Action in the Caribbean”

A few months later I was listening to a wonderful story on the Selected Shorts podcast, “The Mappist” by Barry Lopez.  Corlis Benefideo, the mappist of the title, is working on a series of maps telling the history of North Dakota:

“I could show you here the whole coming and going of the Mandan nation, wiped out in eighteen thirty-seven by a smallpox epidemic. I could show you how the arrival of German and Scandanavian farmers changed the composition of the topsoil, and the places where Charles Bodmer painted, and the evolution of red-light districts in Fargo.”

Suddenly I realized that Corlis Benefideo shows up in The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet also. T.S Spivet promises Benefideo that he will produce an equivalent series of maps for his home state of Montana. I was pleased with myself for discovering the connection, particularly since “The Mappist” features the story’s narrator slowly recognizing the connections between the books and maps that Corlis Benefideo published under a variety of pseudonyms.

Ever since, I’ve kept an eye out for other examples of mapmakers telling stories. I’ve found a few intriguing things along the way, but last month I struck gold. Via the radio show This American Life, I discovered Everything Sings: A Narrative Atlas by Denis Wood. Everything Sings is a set of maps of Wood’s neighborhood, Boylan Heights, North Carolina. Some of my favorites document the postman’s route through the neighborhood,  the graffiti on sidewalks, and the pools of light produced by streetlamps.

As you can see from the map of neighborhood jack-o-lanterns on the cover of the book, most of the maps leave out the most common feature of maps- streets. The absence of a street grid was disorienting at first, but eventually I started to see that leaving out the streets made me see the maps differently and focus on the featured trait itself, rather than referencing each trait by how it related to the streets.

In the book’s introduction, Denis Wood argues that maps aren’t purely objective. They all present a particular agenda in what they choose to show. In Everything Sings Wood’s agenda includes issues of socioeconomic class and also quite a lot about trees. Fully a quarter of the maps feature trees- trees by size, trees by age, a map of  fall colors, and even an openly indignant map showing trees with branches cut to clear power lines. Together, all the maps really do combine into a story about a neighborhood and also a work of art. I think Corlis Benefideo would have appreciated it.

As a bonus, in the process of writing this post I discovered that the North American Cartographic Information Society has just inaugurated the Corlis Benefideo Award for imaginative cartography. I love it that a short story character was an inspiration to a real society of mapmakers and I can’t wait to learn about the winner of the first award. Wouldn’t it all tie together perfectly if the winner were Everything Sings?