taliskersh

Category: Books

  • Yo Vocal Magazine – Book Review: The Jungle

    Written by Upton Sinclair – Published in 1906 – 413 Pages

    In the midst of a global pandemic and with winter closing in, I chose to cheer myself up with ‘The Jungle’ by Upton Sinclair. Sinclair took me to Packingtown, Chicago’s meatpacking district at the turn of the last century.

    Packingtown is, as it so happens, hell.

    The Jungle was described by young-adult novelist John Green as the first book to make him vomit. While Sinclair’s tale didn’t on any occasion make me fetch up my dinner, Green’s review is fitting. The steady stream of injustices endured by its characters compete with descriptions of industrial slaughterhouses in a contest so vile it turned even my hardy stomach off bacon (at least for a while).

    Within the opening chapters, ungodly numbers of cattle, swine, and sheep are herded into warehouses where workers stun, slaughter, then strip creature after creature of – as the Packingtown adage goes – “everything but the squeal.”

    This is the home of Jurgis Rudkus. Jurgis (pronounced ‘yoorgis’) is a heavy-browed hulking Lithuanian. His pursuit of the American dream has taken him to the Chicago stockyards, family in tow. Jurgis is noble and unshakeable, if not a little naïve. “Do not worry, I will work harder” repeats Jurgis, believing brawny arms are enough to protect his loved ones.

    In reading, you’re introduced to industrialised death. The killing floor is brought to life as Jurgis wades from carcass to carcass in his initial role as a ‘sweeper’. Thanks to Sinclair’s prose, you practically smell it. Soon, you realise livestock aren’t the only living creatures being butchered in Packingtown.

    In this vast machine, human beings are expendable parts to be worked until spent. Men, women, and children work for pittance wages in appalling conditions from before dawn to well into the evening. In winter, the sub-arctic cold creeps into their shacks like death personified, snatching away the young and weak. Summer is hardly better. Workers broil in slaughterhouses that draw plagues of rats and flies.

    Year-round, Jurgis’s family are beset with disease and conmen. They’re tempted by drink and haunted by unemployment. Jurgis’s optimism withers, so too does his body. A violinist’s fingers are eaten away one by one by de-boning acid. A boy falls asleep and is locked inside a factory overnight, whereupon he is eaten alive by rats. Did I mention this book was cheerful?

    You’re probably asking yourself “why on earth should I read this god-awful story?” I wouldn’t blame you. Surely, given the state of the world as is, you’d want something a little more … optimistic?

    Yet, here’s my case for why you should read The Jungle. The Jungle will remind you of some of life’s fundamental truths. For instance, Jurgis and family lay plans. They plan to pay their mortgage; they plan to save for winter; they plan to marry. Through accident, injury, or other unfair misfortune, these plans fall apart. There is no trace of an absolute certainty anywhere in their world, and you could probably say the same for yours.

    Needless to say, your plans too, however well laid, have probably gone astray. Have you been saving for an exchange? Have you been looking forward to a gig? To a job? To seeing that overseas friend or family member you hadn’t seen in forever? You’d worked hard hadn’t you? You’d prepared as best you could, right?

    Yet, someone ate a bat in China (or was it a pangolin?) and now, well, you’re here. Understanding the fragility of life reveals its value. Plans, no matter how well laid, are figments of the imagination, subject to be dashed should the universe will it. As it is, the only realm in which we have any real agency is the here and now. The Jungle reminded me of this fact.

    Here is my second reason for why you should read The Jungle: it’s a reminder of the power you possess in that here and now. Upon the novel’s release, public outcry as a result of Sinclair’s vivid and appalling account caused foreign sales of American meat to fall by half.

    Then, as now, America was a land of capitalists who used new technologies and processes to amass vast fortunes. They were a lucky, seemingly untouchable few. Nevertheless, 410 pages composed by a penniless author drove them to do a very rare thing: they begged congress to introduce legislation that would restrict their practices and thus renew public confidence in their product.

    The powers shaping human history seem tectonic in nature. Slow moving and unstoppable, influenced only by a privileged few. Yet, in 1906, Sinclair told a story of despair and poverty, of oppression and
    injustice; of the appalling odds facing those who struggled for a life that was promised. The Jungle took people into the stinking bowels of capitalism and showed them where the magic happened. As a result, real change occurred.

    The Jungle teaches us that the universe is capricious and unfair. But it also teaches us that, despite this, you are far from a kite in a hurricane. So, join Jurgis Rudkus and his family in Packingtown. Sink into the muddy streets and accompany these poor souls to the factory floor; their freezing shacks; their dingy saloons. Get lost in The Jungle. It may be unpleasant; it may make you feel sick and hurt. But, once you emerge from the undergrowth, it will be worth it.

    Favourite lines
    “In Russia one thought of the government as an affliction like the lightning and the hail”


    “They were trying to save their souls – and who but a fool could fail to see that all that was the matter with their souls was that they had not been able to get a decent existence for their bodies?”


    (Describing comrades in prison) “It was like breakers upon a beach; there was new water, but the wave looked just the same.”

  • Yo Vocal Magazine – Book Review: The Underground Railroad

    Yo Vocal Magazine – Book Review: The Underground Railroad

    Written by Colson Whitehead – Published in 2016 – 320 pages

    At 15 years old, I sat in class and half paid attention to a module that taught me this: chattel slavery was practiced until the 19th century. It involved the mass importation of people from Africa to the Americas. Individuals were bought, sold, imprisoned, and worked to death. 

    In order for us to heal from the past, we must first understand it. Often, this understanding is not meaningfully achieved through the memorisation of dates and events, but through well-told fiction. 

    The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead is a novel that sheds light on essential truths about human behaviour, past and present. It explores what drives cruelty, desperation, and the will to survive. 

    The novel tells the story of Cora, an enslaved girl who escapes a plantation in pre-civil war America. On her tail is Ridgeway, a slave catcher whose determination comes less from hatred, but a deep commitment to a toxic worldview. 

    While the first 70 pages are beautiful, visceral pieces of writing that explore the arbitrary horrors consistent with our understanding of plantation life, there’s a sense we’ve been here before. 

    This is a wily trick. By chapter 4 the narrative is yanking the protagonist and reader down a series of tunnels, both real and figurative. By chapter 6 we’re immersed in a story steeped in allegory, blending fact with fiction to breathe fresh life into history. 

    For instance, the titular Underground Railroad was a real historical metaphor used to describe a web of operatives that helped smuggle enslaved people to the free states and Canada. While this real-life network ran on safe houses, Whitehead’s Railroad runs on rails – a literal steampunk subway that transports escaped slaves north. 

    Cora travels via this network to several US states, each characterised by a unique set of symbolic tropes. For instance, in South Carolina, Cora finds gleaming skyscrapers and societal harmony. Here, she takes a job playing a slave in the state museum. For wages, she acts out the menial work she tried so desperately to escape while white children gawp at her from behind a screen. In Tennessee, she finds biblical plagues, while in North Carolina she encounters an American rendition of Nazi Germany. 

    On Cora’s heels is Ridgeway, the novel’s most potent intersection of fact and fiction. 

    This lawman sees the capture of runaways as the fulfillment of a duty ordained to him by a higher power. If God had not meant for Africans to be slaves, reasons Ridgeway, then they

    would not be enslaved. This banal, fundamentally flawed logic echoes many real voices, past and present. 

    From their place at the top of the social order, individuals like Ridgeway convinced themselves that the artificial hierarchy from which they benefited was the proper order of the world. This rationale represents the kind of ethos that regards cruelty as an unfortunate but necessary bi-product of maintaining ‘natural’ order. 

    Lest we think our Aoetearoa’s hands are clean. While the British Empire abolished chattel slavery in 1833, indentured servitude remained legal until 1916. This practice involves the contractual binding, through debt, of labourers to employers for set periods of time. The system, like slavery, was predicated on the same racist belief in a hierarchy that excuses dehumanisation and suffering. 

    Indentured servitude carries many practical hallmarks of slavery. For instance, employers could sell the labour of an indenturee to a third party, meaning that in 1915, a person from Mumbai could be sold to a Westport coal mine without their consent. 

    Many labourers were kidnapped and sold into the trade, many more were lured into contracts by false promises. Most were paid under 20 cents per day, with an amount subtracted each month to pay the cost of travel, food, and shelter. It was in the interest of employers to ensure indentured workers never left, and thus the institution is now outlawed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a form of slavery. 

    Between my flat and the local fish supply, there is an old house that today serves as a wedding venue. John Cracroft Wilson built it in 1870, to house his indentured servants. 

    The worldview at the core of systems like slavery and indentured servitude is the true antagonist of The Underground Railroad. It’s an ethos that drives Cora’s former owners to view her as inhuman, as livestock, as property. It’s the spirit that consumes Ridgeway, who commits to his trade with the banal ambivalence of a parking warden, believing himself to be an essential cog in the world’s upkeep. 

    The Underground Railroad is a novel that sheds light on the engine that drove inhuman behaviour for centuries. 

    By colourising our past and making that engine tangible, Colson Whitehead asks one, salient question: sure, it looks like an old locomotive, but does it still run? 

    Favourite lines 

    “Freedom was a thing that shifted as you looked at it, the way a forest is dense with trees up close but from outside, from the empty meadow, you see it’s true limits.”

    “The world may be mean, but people don’t have to be, not if they refuse.”

  • Yo Vocal Magazine – Book Review: The Catcher in the Rye

    Written by J.D. Salinger – Published in 1951 – 192 Pages

    Mrs. MacDonald was a swell teacher, she really was. Usually, when teachers put on like they’re your friend they turn on a dime and flunk you because you didn’t write some crummy composition for them. But this Mrs. MacDonald was alright though because she wasn’t a phony at all. You still felt like you could give her a buzz after class and chew the rag about Hitchcock or Heaney or whatever and she wouldn’t get on your damn case about some composition you didn’t hand in. 

    Anyway, where I want to start telling is when I was given this lousy book in MacDonald’s class. It’s by this old American named J.D. Salinger. He was in some terrific battles in World War II and saw heavy fighting which I thought was exciting as hell. I figured this book would have loads of action but it’s instead about this mopey kid who wanders around New York for a couple of days after he’s kicked out of prep school. There are no tanks and no one even gets shot. God, it killed me. 

    My flatmate read the book before I did. I didn’t actually read it in high school and flunked the essay but I still have the book and it’s lousy with stamps that say “Property of Cashmere H.S. English Department – Please Return” which gives me a real buzz. 

    Anyway, my flatmate reads this goddamn book and tells me that it’s alright so I pick it up to see if it’s as sexy as he says it is and all I get is this mopey kid. No guns or anything close to World War II. I mean Jesus Christ. 

    This guy, Holden Caulfied, is a helluva basket case. He mopes around New York in 1946 with his pockets overflowing with dough. He pays for rounds of drinks in vomity hotel bars for people he hates. He pays a prostitute to just talk to him and gets squirmy when she takes off her dress. You wouldn’t believe it. A goddamn basket case. 

    So what kills me is that even though you’re with this kid for 192 crummy pages you’re not really in his head. The prince guards his soul like it held the original eleven herbs and spices, I’m not kidding. 

    Caulfield constantly uses the passive voice. It kills me. Mrs. MacDonald would always get on me about this. She says it creates distance between text and reader but Salinger uses it loads and he’s supposed to be one of the best writers of all time or something. Then he says ‘sort of’ like a sonofabitch – 179 times, I counted. Talk about insincere. 

    Anyway, this kid is blue as hell about the ducks in central park and goes on about where they go in winter to every broad and cab driver he meets. 8 goddamn pages about these ducks, you’d think they cured cancer. 

    Turns out, Caulfield’s kid brother died of Leukemia and he bloodied his fist by breaking all these windows because he was so damn sore about it. He sort of blows it off in the first few pages. He tells you about his kid brother and how he wrote all these poems in green pen on a baseball mitt before saying, “he’s dead now.” That’s it. 8 pages about goddamn ducks and that’s it. That killed me, it really did. If you spent 3 days in my head after my kid brother had died of leukemia last fall you’d hear a helluva lot more about it. 

    After a while, I got the feeling this guy was yellow as hell. It reminded me that he’s just a kid scared of all these inevitabilities: adulthood; responsibility; accepting his brother’s gone. Most of all, old Caulfield’s afraid of time. He goes on about how he loves the Natural History Museum because everything there stays where it is. He could go a hundred thousand times and nobody’d move. This is the only time before the novel’s end where I saw his heart get even remotely close to his sleeve. 

    See, Caulfield sees time as this straight line that leads towards all those inevitabilities that I told you about. They’re waiting for him like a pack of hungry lions and he wants to make sure nothing changes so they don’t eat him for lunch. Anyway, this kid’s swimming against an unstoppable tide and spending all his dough and sure enough he begins to drown. That’s where things get sort of depressing. 

    I’ve given this book a helluva lot of grief but you should really read it. You’ve probably been made to read it in High School already but you should pick it up again. Books lose their magic when you have to read them for some lousy module. 

    One thing that’s so sexy about this story, aside from the writing which is sexy as hell, is even though Caulfield lives in a world that’s long been dead, he talks about feelings I recognize but haven’t yet been able to articulate. He goes green when he thinks of time as this line towards painful inevitabilities and to tell you the truth that always makes me squirm too. 

    At the end of the book, he sees this little kid on a carousel and starts to get better. He realises that there’s no point in rebelling against the tide. He sort of decides to live humbly for a cause and begins to feel alright about things and then I’m reading this and I start feeling alright about things. It was nice, sort of. 

    Anyway, God this Caulfield is full of angst. Despite being loaded and all he can’t afford the one thing he needs because Prozac won’t be invented until 1972. The list of things this kid hates is stupid long – the movies, school, phonies, guys that think they’re being a pansy if they don’t break around forty of your fingers in a handshake. That killed me, it really did. He also hates vests and abrupt endings. 

    Favourite Lines 

    “I don’t exactly know what I mean by that, but I mean it.”

    “I am always saying “Glad to’ve met you” to somebody I’m not at all glad I met. If you want to stay alive, you have to say that stuff, though.”