Jas, the ultimate faker.

To put it mildly, Jas is undergoing a severe identity crisis. Although we do not know it until later in the book, he is a white boy trying to fit in with a bunch of immigrants trying to fit in in a new country. That is pretty weak. I really can find no way to explain why a white and, I assume, non foreigner who does well in school and seems to have a bright future ahead of him would throw everything away to try to fit in with a bunch of good for nothing troublesome thugs with no hopes for a future anywhere other than jail.

To me, this question is so hard to explain that I almost wonder if Malkani, in an attempt to finish the book once it started to drag on, went back in the book and edited out some of the parts about him being of Indian descent so as to allow for the "shocking twist at end." I know that sounds ridiculous, but to be perfectly honest I just don't see how Jas being white can fit into the story. It was a little out there to begin with, but I still was able to justify most of what he was doing. A story about immigrant children trying fit in is one thing, but with the turn of Jas being white, everything he had convinced me of just went out the window. I do not know his intents, but whatever they were they ruined the book for me.

Girly man Flory

For some reason, Flory really irks me. I am not sure why, but he seems to just seems to some think he so much bigger than he is. For example, he imagines that he "saves" Elizabeth from the water buffalo, even though it was just drinking water from a pond. Similarly, he seems to somehow pride himself as the man in the relationship, but when he takes Elizabeth hunting, she scores on her first try, even after he explains to her how difficult it is, as if he were some sort of master. Because of this, she makes him look kind of silly when she, a woman, hits on the first try. Flory just seems to be a rather weak man who imagines himself somehow superior to everyone else.

While I am thinking about people I hate, I strongly dislike Mrs. Lakersteen as well. I certainly do not like Elizabeth, but I don't really hate her. Rather, I view her as the object of Mrs. Lakersteen and therefore can only consider her guilty by association. Mrs. Lakersteen is the most scheming and selfish person I have seen in the book. She tells Elizabeth who she has to pretend to love, simply based on that person social status, or even a title. I don't like anyone in this book, but she might be the worst...

So why did we all hate Christopher so much?

During class discussion, many of us, myself included, didn't really like Christopher's dad that much. He killed Wellington, he hid Christopher's mom's letters, and he loses his temper at poor Christopher. On top of that, Christopher always talks about how scared he is of his father. No wonder why I didn't like him. But when you really think about it, his father is actually a pretty good guy. In fact, his mother left Christopher with his father because she knew he would take better care of him than she could. Christopher's dad takes care of him, makes him food, and obviously cares deeply about him. I find it easy to forgive him because to be perfectly honest, Christopher is a total pain in the butt. He constantly whines and complains, he runs away, and he has an entire page of his "behavioral problems," and he is a constant worry.

Christpher's dad isn't perfect, but I really don't see any way to justify considering him a terrible person. Rather, Christopher is a very difficult problem to deal with and would make anyone's life a living hell. On account of this, I hold his father excused...

Lyndall's fire and ice

Lyndall has to be one of the most extreme characters in the book. While everyone in A Story of an African is an extreme in some way, Lyndall could be the most out there. As a young girl, she passionately expounds her theories on feminism and takes a viscous attitude toward any dissenters, or anyone who is different for that matter.

We later find a partial explanation for her behavior. When she tells her real boyfriend that she intends to marry Gregory Rose, she refuses his offer of marriage because she says that she fears losing herself to a stronger man. Instead, she is marrying Gregory Rose because she needs to marry someone and he is weak, and, in effect, will basically be her servant. However, she has to marry someone because is pregnant and does not want to be alone. Naturally, Gregory Rose fits her requirements.

Personally, I find Lyndall to be a strange character. For all of her stuff about independence, I somehow find it interesting that she "needs" to marry a man, although I will give her that she is marrying one of the weakest men alive. In any case, she, as well as many other characters in the book, seem rather unhappy and, quite frankly, unlikeable. No wonder why everybody dies.

Waldo's World

Waldo is an interesting character. Of all the characters in this book, I find him to be the most interesting. While i got the feeling in the beginning of the book that most of the characters had too many drastic flaws to make it through without dying, Waldo seemed like he was going to die for a different reason. He seems to be the dreamy sort of character, a man of the mind so to speak. However, somehow he seems to be too morbid of a person. What i find most interesting, however, is the progression of his religious beliefs. As the story sets out, he is highly religious and seems to willingly accept all of his struggles, even the abuse of Bonaparte. However, as he matures, he begins to lost faith in the bible, becoming more of a realist, but he still remains he remains a rather morbid and mysterious character.

Considering this dark and gloomy feeling that I get from Waldo, his end seems very appropriate. Just as he never lost his temper or had any other explosions, he doesn't go down in flames or become a serial killer or go out in any flamboyant way. Rather, he simply goes to sleep under a tree and never wakes up. In the same way that he never really seemed to exist, he never really seems to die. Instead, he remains this sort of foggy character and fades away through the end of the book.

Tipping the velvet...

Just had to get that into a title somewhere here. But on a more serious note, the book as a whole really does render itself well to the whole gender issue in several ways. To me, the most interesting thing to think about is way Nan changes over the course of the book with regard to how she perceives herself. In the beginning, she seems to be pretty much an innocent girl who just happens to have a thing for Kitty. However, as the story progresses we see her experimenting and gradually developing her own persona based on what she learns. After she catches kitty cheating on her, the dreamy fairytale-like feel quickly disappears. When we see her under the strict rule of Diana, she is going through a transitional phase. As a pretend male prostitute, she does seem to reach some satisfaction through her ability to pass as a male. However, she soon moves on and as she progresses, she begins to achieve a certain level of self confidence that allows her to finally become an independent woman as opposed to a kind of subject. I guess if I had to point out what about this process interests me most I would have to point to the section where she poses as a male prostitute. It just seems interesting to see how she plays the role of a man in such a nonchalant manner, almost as if she just decided to see what it would be like to be a man. This book, more so than any of the others we have read this semester, gives an interesting incite into the issue of gender relations, performance, etc...

Regarding the issue of outsiders...

While it seems natural that outsider would play a heavy role in novels as well as most other literature, at times I have to stop and think, "so what?" Of course outsiders are prominently featured in novels, because most people would not be terribly interested in reading a book about an everyday life that he or she witnesses on an every day basis. But here is where my reasoning reveals the misconception. We tend to view outsider as people who are different. However, when you think about it many people have some particular trait that makes them very different from others, yet we rarely classify them as outsiders: even though they may have different or religions, colors, or behavior, these people usually live basically the same live that "we" do. This is where the problem lies: we frequently are too generous about granting outsider status to anyone in a novel, thus cheapening the idea of an outsider and making the answer to the "so what?" question an equally useless "dunno."

I do not have the one single solution to the problem of classifying the outsider, but I would think it should require something severe, something that actually forces a character to be severely disconnected from everyone else in the world or at a minimum, his or her surroundings within the book. Someone who just speaks more slowly than others, or has a receding hair line, or has 7 freckles on their body is not an outsider because of it.

Damn outsider impersonators...

Londonstani/The shocking twist

So what exactly happened to Malkani. He starts the book off leading the reader down a intricately drawn path with subtle hints and clues built into the pavement. His descriptions of Jas & co. are coherent and reasonable. Even though the story is a little bit out of the ordinary, we never really expect the ordinary, especially in contemporary fiction. As the story progresses, we see Jas and his friends in a painfully slow coming of age process. Through the first and second sections, the story is relatively consistent and the reader begins to become accustomed to the style of both the book and the characters in it.

For some reason, once the third section opens the fireworks start to fly. We suddenly see suicides, unexpected deaths, absurd relationships with post college age people, Jas breaking into his fathers warehouse, getting beat up, and burning it down, Jas becoming an outcast from his group of friends, and of course the "shocking twist," Jas is actually white. It seems as though Malkani either got tired and used this ridiculous type of storyline to speed up the book to finish it or because he was too lazy to continue with the intricate and detailed writing he just tried to throw in tons of action so he could cover up the lower quality of writing. In either case, while I felt that something drastic need to happen in the life of Jas, the ending to Londonstani not only exceeded my expectaitions but went so far past them that I find myself unable to take the book seriously.

Malkani ruined his book in the last section, as he threw away so many of the details and aspects of the book that made the first two sections so good...

Immigrant Son

Londonstani deals a lot with the seemingly irreconcilable differences between first and second-generation immigrants. My personal experience is nowhere near as extreme as that of the rudeboys, but I think some of that probably has to do with being part-white. My parents both immigrated to the States, and they brought with them pretty solid beliefs and ideas about how to live. Of course, anyone who immigrates to a new home has the desire to change and make things better, so they can't be all passive. That's what I think the desis don't understand about the first-generationers. They have an incompletely-inherited culture and a poorly-acquired one as well, but the two are always at odds because they can't comprehend that their parents came to London for a reason - the act of doing so should be grounds for understanding. The parents were probably pretty rebellious in their own way as well.
And then there's the whiteness thing. Jas makes himself the outsider because his identity is also fractured. He finds himself in the white minority, with no recognition of what the previous generation experienced. So he, lost in London society, identifies with the adolescent search for tough cool, and because white is the status quo, the favoured majority, he is able to "drop" to the ethnic level and put himself at the foot of the desi ladder instead. Worship the Bang-Bang youngblood ideal instead of the struggle-less white one.

The London Abroad Experience

Last fall, I studied abroad in London. I stayed at Edgeware Road and studied in Regents Park - near the Lebanese Quarter and Camden Town, and made it a point to spend time in a number of other districts. A student filming project I did with some NYU kids actually took me to a Bollywood-esque Arts neighbourhood near Brick Lane, where we borrowed a studio from an Asian (Indian) talk-show company and I received the Brick Lane Curry Tour after we finished filming. A number of our novels have taken us through the mythic town of London, but I felt a resonance with the feeling of alienation in Londonstani. In a city with such ancient history, it still feels like everyone's a stranger of sorts. The Bangla-town section (where the Bangladeshi Muslim Indians live) became so after having been the emigrant Jewish silver-smithing quarter. T.S. Eliot lived on the same block as I did, along with his American expats. Everyone's from somewhere else except for the English folks - but even there, things get fuzzy. London leaks out from the Loop, from its centre, and where exactly it ends or begins, what's a suburb and what's an unwanted neighbouring burrough can get hazy and extremely subjective. My London relatives actually live in Croydon and commute in to the city... and they've only been English citizenry for a couple of generations (Irish before that). I often felt kind of isolated in London, but other times I felt like we were all alone together... of sorts.

In class, we talked about whether Tipping the Velvet was more of a coming of age novel or a coming out novel. One thing that I thought was interesting about this question when it was posed was that it seemed to assume that the two were necessarily mutually exclusive for Nan, which I didn’t feel was the case. For Nan, I felt like her coming out and coming of age were inextricably bound together, and much of her journey toward discovering herself and growing up was tied to her becoming comfortable with and understanding her own sexuality. In the beginning of the novel, it almost didn’t seem like Nan thought of herself as a lesbian – she seemed to just think that she had fallen in love with Kitty. She didn’t love women, she just happened to love a person who happened to be a woman. Part of this, I’m sure, is due to the fact that Kitty seemed so vehemently against the idea that anyone might perceive them to be “toms”, but there still didn’t seem to be any sense from Nan that she understood herself to be a lesbian. However, as the novel progresses, through her interactions with Diana and Florence, I think we see Nan come to the realization that she is a lesbian, and start to embrace this. I think that along with Nan’s playing with gender representation, experimenting with her presentation of herself and somewhat blurring those gender lines, Nan’s entering into these relationships and sort of discovering that she is a lesbian are really the driving forces behind her development as a character and a person in the novel. Throughout the novel, we see her negotiate her ideas about her own gender presentation and sexuality, and I think that this is a big part of her growing up, and I think this is what forms the basis of her coming of age tale.

This is going a few weeks back, but I thought it was really interesting discussing the essay on queer narration in Tipping the Velvet. One thing that I found particularly interesting in this essay was the distinction between third person omniscient narratives as being inherently male, while first person narratives are supposedly inherently female. I can see, as we discussed in class, how some might think a third person omniscient narrator may seem more male because those types of narratives are somewhat “God-like”, which can carry with it connotations of maleness, while the first person narrative may seem like journal entries (which might be seen as gendered female). However, I don’t think that I have ever had these reactions to novels that I have read. I tend to associate the gender of the narrator (third person omniscient or not) with the gender of the main character of the novel. Talking about the gendered narrators, however, made me think about how the gender of the author plays into this. I took a gender studies class last year, and in it we talked about whether there is an inherently masculine or feminine way to write, and if you would be able to discern the gender of a writer based purely on his or her prose. For instance, in the case of novels with a third person omniscient narrator, does the gender of the writer color what gender we think of the narrator as being? Can male writers accurately depict a female voice, and vice versa? I’m not sure that I actively think about how the gender of the author affects how we view the narrator or the overall tone or voice of the novel, but I think it’s interesting regardless and I do wonder if these things subconsciously affect how we read novels.