Book Review on The Famished Road

I was completely enchanted by the opening chapters of this book. I was pretty much impressed by the metaphors, similes and the careful narrative voice in the book. The unusual phenomenon of the spirit-child who lives both in the spirit and physical world, the boundary between the living and dying, the extreme poverty, hunger and the ghetto lifestyle in an unknown community of Africa tells the lively struggle of our world while the incessant connection of the main narrator Azaro to the spirit world appears to the readers throughout the storyline.

After I read about 200 pages, I started to feel the pieces of the story starting to disengage from each other – disconnected and decentralized form the main themes. I was expecting the eerie people and events in the story to be something symbolic, a representation of Africa or our life. But there doesn’t seem to be any underlying meaning buried under the words, sentences and passages. There are ugly rivalry between corrupt political parties, their exploits to the poor ghetto-dwellers and debauched parties of the people of eerie appearances such as midget, the blind and the cripples but they do not seem to carry any symbols other than to fill up the pages to make it into a novel-sized chunk of surreal text.

My first thought is that the spirit-child would have bumpier life experiences when his companions in the World of Dead send multi-headed creatures to fetch him to them. To my disappointment, no such thing happens and there was even a major change of focus in the middle of the story. The focus of the story is shifted from Azaro to his father, who has an intense dream to be a boxer and later a politician. Through him Azaro sees the cunning world of the politics and human world but it is inadequate to form a revelation for him.

Again, I read the story to enjoy the surreal plot and metaphysical subjects such as living, dying and struggles as witnessed in the first chapters of the story. It seems the book doesn’t have a very clear grip on them and has lost all its dream-like imagery which is washed away since the middle of the book where his father becomes a central protagonist. To sum up, the book failed to carry the literary subtlety it gives birth in the beginning of the book. It would have been a good story that earns five-star from me otherwise.

Take me up through these stairs

Take me up through these stairs

                To a coordinate along your breath where I can live and not exist

Leaving the rubbles of Internet history

                                Jumbled up with naked curves of women 

Make me feel it plain

                If love has an end like a video game       

Comes the smooth sensational touch of skin

                                And you hear the clarion call of belonging to someone, something

Wake me up from dreams of sin

                When you are standing in the doorway for one last fling

Embrace me for evermore

                Shake me up from Winter claws

                                                         - Aung Kaung Myat

Rosetta

Have you ever looked into the mirror

and wondered there is no way

you can know your real self, Rosetta?

Not the reflected rays of light

falling upon your eye-sight.

Not the senseless digital replications

which, every time, fails to capture your interbred offspring

of genuine happiness in fear of linear progress of time.

Have you ever felt the space and intellect you occupy

belong to a body-permeable singularity across the Universe, Rosetta?

You will feel bitter and miserable, Rosetta,

when you see all of us had been, is and, will be

Oppressed by the Iron Fist of the privileged Government or a homogenous technologically advanced group for-----ever

The day when you learn that people you once thought great are just

humanoids who have gone through cerebrum implant,

You will question your existence, Rosetta;

You will suddenly be under the palpable waves of nothingness, Rosetta;

You will now feel marginal

and want to escape to a place

where your liberty is guaranteed

but you cannot find such place on earth, Rosetta;

You will try to recover yourself from

these relentless fingers of self-remorse when you see or hear things

that remind you of yourself, Rosetta.

Without your consent, they will have countless operations on your mind-brain

and say, "You will be fine"

You were not and you are not, Rosetta

You will talk, talk, talk and all talk, Rosetta

Until the day they make a tomb for you and leave you alone, cold, all sad.

Book Review on Can Life Prevail?

Can Life Prevail? by Pentti Linkola is a kind of book that will profoundly captivate your thoughts and has an internal force that could equip you to question the existing ideologies of the world. Before I go on lauding the author’s outright candor, I have to say, to lend certain honesty to my review, that I have expected a lot more than this after reading a short summary of the book on Wikipedia, which explains Linkola as someone who advocate eugenics, genocide and abortion as possible means to combat overpopulation of humans on the earth. He also approves Stalinist and Nazi massacres as “massive thinning operations”. He also has suggested that the big cities should be attacked by “some trans-national body like the UN”. These lines are something you would certainly avoid to say if you live in the world of liberals. 

While reading this collection of essays, I have alarmingly sensed the environmentally and politically conservative ideas of the author. His love for nature is enormous – he made a living as a fisherman from a rowboat and sold his fish to local people from a horse-drawn cart, in his native land, Finland until he reached retirement age, he never uses any type of energy-consumed transportation (he once toured around the Europe with his wife on bikes to watch birds and enjoy the nature), he avoids all kinds of devices and modern technology so on and so forth. Also what the author really advocate is to go back to the pre-industrial life with less population and less material development.  

From the first chapter to the last, Linkola is able to point out the facts that I used to overlook when thinking about the environmental issues. Through his experiences both as a fisherman and a person living in Finland, Linkola criticized on the modern-day hygiene phobia, human slavery to machines and modern lifestyle that is harmful to the environment. I cannot agree more on this discourse which goes as “How many believe that human well-being , pleasure and happiness diminish the more we follow this path? And that even if this path were not to lead to ecocatastrophe and extinction, it would still be a gloomy and dreadful one?”

While reading the book, I kept on thinking what kind of new ideas he can offer me. However, as I should have expected, most of the facts are based on his personal observations as a lover of nature and are just Finland-wise. Lack of proper research (except his personal experiences) to back up the major claims he made in his essays, such as distortion of the facts on deforestation by the Department of Forestry Research of Finland and WWF for the financial and industrial interests and the suggestion to stop investing medical technology, research and human labor in saving the lives of infants (and mothers) and instead, channel them towards the care for the elderly citizens who are wiser and more useful to the society. 

Because of the aforementioned subjects, do not think the book is just bemoaning on the annihilation of the nature and eco-catastrophe by human race because there certainly are amusing ideas. “The Cat Disaster”, the invasion of cats to the human civilizations as pets actually had adverse effects on the ecology by destroying the native bird species and other species of small animals. Also that of frail men and tough women is not a myth, but an established fact of human life, hence, granting women as the protectors of Life.   

Most of us (including the scientists and world leaders) do not seem to be aware that the rampant hunger of global capitalism and industrialization has eaten up the natural resources to intolerable extent. But we are either ignorant or reluctant to point out the main factors driving this. From the dawn of human progress as foragers to nowadays, we only develop towards one way –comfort. All the technology and devices we have ever created help our work to be more efficient and effective while eroding the natural resources like oil and gas, the energy of the Sun kept within millions of years ago. In his essays, Linkola has called for the very minimal use of them and adoption towards more bucolic agriculture lifestyle. 

Although he refers to himself as a deep ecologist, it is eco-fascism and radical environmental empiricism that drive his work and his life. With devastatingly provocative remarks as “Human rights = the death sentence of Creation, human rights = the death sentence of mankind”, one will think he is a misanthropist and an outright opponent on the freedom and liberty of the humans. In fact, he is a great admirer of Nature and Life (as the title partly suggests). The analogy of the boat with more people it can carry in the middle of the sea is convincing so much that I become an ardent supporter to decrease the seven billion human population as quick and effective as possible. The hypocritical burden of someone who loves Life is having to choose whether ‘all’ or ‘some’ shall perishes. However, the drastic measures he proposes to reserve the Life on earth, including the political system with Platonic ‘philosopher’ king(s) who will rise to power themselves, subsistence economy, complete abolition of private cars, limited industries and mass localization are reasonable from the ecological perspective, it will becomes ludicrous and useless in terms of freedom and liberty, human rights, and more importantly global or national economy. I felt sad to read the conclusion of the book. I have fully agreed with the author that his utopia is the only sustainable model that can grant our species eternity of Life. But I also know that the chance of his model becoming reality is next to zero in reality.

As the book is more like his collection of thoughts, there are criticisms on veganism, animal rights, foreign policy of the United States and nihilism (yes, I typed nihilism) which will be a little off from the topic but worthy for your cerebration. But for this review, I will leave them out for the sake of space and time and have you think about them and make your own decision as to Can Life Prevail?