Will Unwound

This weekend’s challenge is Secretary of State the Honorable Hillary Clinton.  Here’s the set-up: her personal assistant calls the Readers’ Advisory Desk, and you’re on duty.  She has a dilemma.  Madame Secretary is working her to death.  Ms. Clinton is all work and no play.  Unlike her husband, Bill, Hillary has no extracurricular activities.  Can you suggest some good books that will entertain, amuse, and divert Hillary’s attention away from work, so that her staff can enjoy some precious downtime?  Put your suggestions in the comment section below.

If it’s me on the desk, my strategy is to start by reviewing Hillary’s autobiography, Living History.  I read it last year but don’t remember much mention of hobbies, amusements, or personal interests so I’m going to have to go back and research it.  The woman does seem to be all work and no play.  There’s that wonderful anecdote from the first year that the Clinton family occupied the White House.  A reporter asked Chelsea if her mother helped her very much with her homework.  Chelsea’s response was priceless: “No, my mother is too busy so I go to my father for help.”

This could be the toughest reader’s advisory request I’ve ever had.  If you put a bunch of light beach books in front of Hillary, she’s simply going to ignore them as not being worthy of her valuable time.  Actually, it’s more than that.  It’s not that she’s above beach books; it’s more that she simply wouldn’t enjoy them.  This is a serious woman who will never be a) superficial, b) wild and crazy, or c) unpredictable. 

She is an overachieving workaholic.   Her whole life has been dedicated to government service.  This is a very serious and earnest woman.  Has there been a more significant woman in American public life in our history?  I don’t think so.  The only thing holding her back from becoming President is her low likability ratings.  She just does not come off as a warm and fuzzy person.  She also doesn’t seem to have much of a sense of humor. 

How can she overcome these negatives?  She can’t.  Her best strategy is to be who she is and not allow her image to be molded by a bunch of slick p.r. and marketing gurus.  She will never be loved, but she will always be respected for her intelligence, work ethic, and personal sacrifice. My guess is that she will achieve a whole new level of respect at the end of her Secretaryship.  Is it just me or does Hillary seem to be the only person in the Obama administration who seems to know what she’s doing?

So…can we get Madame Secretary to relax with some light fiction?  The answer is a definitive NO.  Can we get her to at least put down the government reports long enough to read some thought provoking fiction?  Absolutely.  The key is to package the gift of fiction in some really boring wrapping paper – maybe inside a copy of the New York Times.  Next, we have to provide her with novels that will enhance her understanding of other countries.  When she senses that these books have a practical value, she will sit down and read them.  That’s my strategy.

Once she starts reading she will get absorbed because the novels I have chosen are all highly compelling stories written by foreign authors:

1. Crabwalk by Gunter Grass (translated from the German by Krishna Winston)– This is the best novel that Novel winner Grass has written in more than a decade.  It involves the sinking of the German ship, the Wilhelm Gustloff, by a Soviet submarine in the icy waters of the Baltic Sea in the last year of World War II.  9,000 passengers died in this torpedo bombing, making it one of the worst maritime disasters in history.  By comparison 1,500 people died on the Titanic.  The tragedy was further exacerbated because the vast majority of the dead were refugee civilians.  Because of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime, this atrocity committed by the Soviet navy has never really been mourned by the international community.  In a fascinating study of one family impacted, Grass raises a cluster of ethical issues that will challenge Ms. Clinton’s sense of international justice.  This book will also demonstrate for her the horrors of war and reaffirm her mission of putting diplomacy above military action.

2. Snow by Orhan Pamuk (translated from the Turkish by Maureen Freely) – Turkey’s best novelist is an intriguing writer who is both popular and postmodern. This book features a poet named Ka who travels to the remote village of Kars in the northern mountains of Turkey near the Russian border to learn more about  a wave of suicides among Islamic girls who are forbidden to wear their head scarves at school.   What he finds in the whirl of a massive snowstorm is a power struggle between the secular and fundamentalist Islamic factions.  In this wrenching struggle of conflicting cultures, Secretary Clinton will get a better understanding of the social tension within the Islamic world. 

3. Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel) –  In this uniquely structured novel a teenage boy named Kafka Tamura  runs away from home to search for his long lost mother and sister.  His journey is interlaced with the odyssey of an aging simpleton named Nakata who never recovered from his war wounds at Hiroshima.  Tamura finds refuge in an obscure private library where he befriends a mysterious librarian, and Nakata gets work as a tracker of lost cats.  Their paths converge on both a physical and spiritual level to provide a curious ending. This book blends the metaphysical world with the physical world in a way that Mrs. Clinton needs to understand in dealing with the Eastern mind.  Because of the prominence of the library and its employees in the plot, librarians will love this novel.

4. The Seven Solitudes of Lorsa Lopez by Sony Labou Tansi (translated from the French by Clive Wake).  The death of Congolese poet and novelist Sony Labou Tansi at the age of 48 in 1995 was a terrible blow to African literature.  Few of his contemporaries have given voice to the toxic blend of despair and anger that characterized the eloquent pen of Tansi.  This novel centers around the murder of a woman by her husband, a prominent and admired local figure named Lorsa Lopez.  When the police fail to investigate this death, the local reaction ranges from apathy to rage, two emotions which Tansi had mastered.  Through the despair and the rage, however, creeps a dark mysticism.  Consider this passage near the end of the book: “In this country, night has the appearance of divinity. It smells like infinity.  Only the night has things to say to the soul.  Only it can unite our bodies with the vast truculence of the universe.”  If this doesn’t  capture Hillary’s imagination about the future of Africa, nothing will.

5. Family Planning by Karan Mahajan  – Mahajan is one of the new lights of Indian literature.  This book, his first novel, is centered in the swarming streets of Delhi. There is humor in these pages.  The plot centers around a 14 year old boy and his prominent politician father, a man who has produced a family of 13 children because he is most attracted to his wife when she is pregnant.  Juxtaposed against the overcrowded streets of Delhi, this domestic story is about the chaotic life of an overcrowded family.  It’s a kind of “cheaper by the dozen” comedy  21^st century Indian version.  Even Ms. Clinton needs a laugh every now and then.

Friends and colleagues this is the best approach I could come up with for Madame Secretary.  I urge you to give your reactions and suggestions in the comment section below.  Thanks.