Today’s three Snapshots travel above ground, underground and into the complexities of a Pakistani-American boy’s struggle with questions of faith, culture and belonging.
Today’s three Snapshots travel above ground, underground and into the complexities of a Pakistani-American boy’s struggle with questions of faith, culture and belonging.
Extremophilia — River Rats, Timber Tramps, Biker Trash and Realtors: New and Selected Writings
by Fred Haefele
Bangtail Press
156 pp.
Extremophilia’s 17 essays range from the author’s stint as a logger in Montana forests to a dangerous white-water rafting trip with an adult son and daughter he barely knows to the funeral of daredevil motorcyclist, Evil Knievel. Much of the writing is set in Montana, California and Colorado. As a transplanted Easterner who embraces both the mythology and the reality of the West, Haefele writes about events pivotal to his passage through adulthood, including the shedding of a wife and myriad illusions and pretensions along the way. His varied venues give rise to the book’s title, defined by the author as “the intemperate love of those admirable creatures who live wherever they damn well want to.” The book vividly portrays what Haefele’s life has and has not been. We learn of his love of Indian motorcycles, of Western woods, of writing and his admiration for counter-culture writer Ken Kesey. We witness his cynicism toward rich eco-friendly outsiders who buy up prized Western land. Haefele’s prose is both eloquent and spare, a style that perfectly suits his subject matter. His topics and the details he reveals are unerringly interesting; his honesty about past missteps, his unexpected flashes of sly humor and an ability to poke fun at himself add to the book’s considerable appeal.
~Marcia Boyles
London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets
by Peter Ackroyd
Nan A. Talese/Doubleday
240 pp.
“Tread carefully over the pavements of London, for you are treading on skin, a skein of stone that covers rivers and labyrinths, tunnels and chambers, streams and caverns, pipes and cables, springs and passages, crypts and sewers, creeping things that will never see the light of day.” With these haunting words, Peter Ackroyd, 21st-century poet of the underworld, begins his exploration of the limitless world beneath the teeming streets of London. Most will expect an account of the London Underground, which is here but only toward the end, for much takes place before that late 19th-century creation. First there are the springs, sites of pagan and later Christian worship, and the rivers, all 13 of them, which still flow in pipes under busy feet. The largest is the Fleet, spanned at one time by five bridges, now remembered mostly by the street that bears its name. Through a grate at the corner of Warren and Ray Streets you can hear it pulsing below. Later came pipes and sewers, carrying fresh water in, sewage out; 318 million bricks went into building the sewer system, which looks like subterranean monasteries, with pillars, buttresses, arches and crypts. Then the tunnels (there are 20 under the Thames alone), the Underground and the 20th-century secret government world still accessible through a door, whose High Holborn address Ackroyd cites. London Under is a guidebook of sorts, but not one to be skimmed. It is built up of fact upon anecdote, each of which demands your attention. If you’ve been to London and traveled the Underground, you can follow Ackroyd’s exploration of the layers of civilization that make up the London underworld and marvel at the archaeology, the history, the engineering and the sheer mystery of it all.
~Harriet Douty Dwinell
American Dervish
By Ayad Akhtar
Little, Brown and Company
368 pp.
Hayat Shah is a Pakistani-American boy growing up in Milwaukee in 1981 and struggling with questions of faith, culture and belonging. He is the narrator of American Dervish, telling the reader how his life changed forever with the arrival of Mina, a beautiful, intelligent woman, and his mother’s closest friend. Mina has fled Pakistan, bringing with her a rapturous Muslim faith. She begins to teach Hayat stories and precepts from the Quran; Hayat responds powerfully, moved by the Quran and the adoring Mina. Hayat’s senses are heightened with his spiritual awakening: “Even the grease-encrusted axle of the yellow school bus slowing to its morning stop at the end of my driveway could captivate me, its twisting join — and the large, squeaking wheel that turned around it — seeming to point the inscrutable way to some rich, strange and holy power.” Mina falls in love with a Jewish doctor, but bigotry in the Pakistani Muslim community threatens their relationship. It is Hayat, however, in a monstrous action, who destroys Mina’s happiness. This is a first novel for Ayad Akhtar, himself a first-generation Pakistani-American from Milwaukee. Most of his writing has been screenplays. He co-wrote and starred in the 2005 terrorism drama The War Within. American Dervish is rich with complex emotion and evocative description, and Akhtar has done a remarkable job rendering many Quran verses in accessible, lyrical English, very different from the dry strangeness of many translations. American Dervish would be an excellent choice for a book club whose members enjoy lively discussion.
~Susan Storer Clark
