“ZIRA: What will he find out there, doctor?
DR. ZAIUS: His destiny.”

Book Review:

Review by Doug Bruns  (JUN 26, 2011)

Consider the big questions. For instance, what does language afford us? Is self-consciousness and all it implies (self-reflection, guilt, joy…) embedded in language, daresay a function of language? Why do we create art? Nature or nurture, what shapes us? How is love possible? Where does rage come from? Cruelty? What are we to make of the animals, those we imprison, those we consume, the beasts we love as companions? What, indeed, does it mean to be a human being and can it, whatever it might mean, be fully realized? Now, take these questions and a bunch more just like them, and wrap them up in a narrative so unique and compelling, so rich as to bring transparency to the questions. Then shape the story around a unique voice that ranges from the mindlessly inarticulate to the Mensian complex. If you can imagine experiencing all that, you have a sense of what this book affords the adventurous reader.

This is the story of Bruno Littlemore, chimpanzee extraordinaire. Rather, more properly, as the first-person narrator tells us, this book “contains the memoirs of Bruno Littlemore, as dictated to Gwendolyn Gupta between September 9, 2007 and August 8, 2008, at the Zastrow National Primate Research Center, Eastman, GA 31024.” And what a memoir it is.

Bruno, we are informed, grew up in the Primate House of the Lincoln Park Zoo, Chicago. He was the scion of Fanny, who was raised in the zoo, and Rotpeter, a chimp who had been rescued from the Congo jungle after watching “his mother and father murdered and subsequently devoured.” As a small chimp, Bruno was delivered to a the University of Chicago’s behavioral primatologist, Dr. Lydia Littlemore. He recalls the meeting early in the book. “I will begin with my first significant memory, which is the first time I met Lydia. I was still a child at the time. I was about six years old. She and I immediately developed a rapport. She picked me up and held me, kissed my head, played with my rubbery little hands, and I wrapped my arms around her neck, gripped her fingers, put strands of her hair in my mouth, and she laughed. Maybe I had already fallen in love with her, and the only way I knew to express it was by sucking on her hair.”

He quickly grasps the complexity of evolved consciousness. “I am Bruno,” he declares. “I am an animal with a human tongue, a human brain, and human desires, the most human among them to be more than what I am.” And yes, as he states, he falls in love with his keeper. Does that imply what we think it does? Well, jumping ahead, yes, they have sex, assuming your mind raced there. Bruno takes evolutionary steps, learns language, creates art, walks erect and of course has sex. This is a coming-of-age memoir, ergo sex is discovered. Inter-species relations might put some readers off, understandably. However, in the context of understanding the measure of humanness it cannot be avoided. Hale manages this territory with aplomb. But, not to get derailed, there is love here too. Lydia removes Bruno from the captors and takes him home to further her research. He has demonstrated a capacity for intelligence beyond the norm and she is convinced he is the subject from which careers are launched. That is, before she is as smitten by him as he is by her. “Of course I was in love for all the vainest and greediest reasons,” writes Bruno, several years later. “I climbed down from that tree to spend the rest of my life running from the yawning darkness of animal terror toward the light of fire stolen from the gods, and like you, I remain in a state of constant pursuit, never quite escaping the darkness nor ever reaching the light.” This is no ordinary chimp obviously.

Bruno finds creative relief in art. He paints. He exhibits. He becomes known. But as enlightened as Bruno is, he cannot repress his more beastly urges. His outbreaks eventually cost Lydia her job. Their relationship breaks into the news and they are scandalized. They escape to the compound of a wealthy animal-rights couple in Colorado. Eventually they return to Chicago where Lydia falls ill. Bruno, left to his own devices, plunges solo into the world of humanity. He travels to New York, is befriended by Leon, a Falstafian character of brilliant, yet dubious talents. Together they produce Shakespeare’s Tempest. But circumstances intrude and Bruno must escape, returning to Chicago. Picaresque as his journeys might be, the weight of his adventures at times seems unwieldy, as if they might all fall in upon themselves, so dense and allusion-filled they seem.

Returned to Chicago, Bruno’s last act of unbridled rage occurs when he discovers that his primate sibling, Céleste, is being subjected to animal experimentation. He commits murder and lands in jail. Ironically, it is his voice, his command of language and story telling which, like Scheherazade, saves him. He is an animal, after all, and should be “put down.” But he saves himself–and his story. Nine years after committing the crime, 24 years old and hairless, his face surgically altered (he wanted a human nose), he dictates his memoir.

This book is compelling every way you consider it. It is rich in philosophy, ideas, notions, questions and preponderances. Yet, as practiced in the best of the literary tradition (yes, this book, from Dostoevsky to Nabokov, stands tall), the ideas are carried along on a narrative stream which twisting and turning is wildly entertaining. The writing is gin-clear and elegant. (You’ll want to have a dictionary handy.) This is a first novel. What a debut for Mr. Hale, a truly wonderful and heretofore unknown author.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 50 readers
PUBLISHER:	Twelve; First Edition edition (February 2, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Doug Bruns
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Benjamin Hale
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of:The Descent of Manby Kevin DesingerLove in Infant Monkeys by Lydia Millet

Bibliography:

• The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (February 2011)

“There were two main ways the Ariekei who could lie a little could lie. …The liars I had thus far seen were slow-liars.

There was reputed to be another technique. It was more base and vivid, and by far harder. This was for the speaker to collapse, in their mind, even individual word-meanings, and simply to brute-utter all necessary sounds. To force out a statement. This was quick-lying: the spitting out of a tumble of phonemes before the untruth of their totality stole the speaker’s ability to think them.”

Book Review:

Review by Bill Brody  (MAY 17, 2011)

The core of Embassytown by China Mieville is an exploration of the nature of language in the context of the future on a far-distant solar system where humans interact with an alien species that speak a profoundly different language. This is a new book by the brilliantly inventive author of The City and the City, Perdido Street Station, Kraken and others. I have read four of his books now and one common thread is that they have a philosophical emphasis, and plunge us without much explanation into a radically different world than our own. Due to the strangeness of these worlds, the first part of each book is like visiting some foreign place without knowing much at all about the place, the people, and the customs. Initially clueless, we are rewarded with an unfolding appreciation of the environment. Complex philosophical and conceptual issues are the point of this body of work. Embassytown is no exception to this rule.

Embassytown takes place some distant time in the future when humans have spread to the stars. The science is pretty vague, but also isn’t really the point. This is space opera with a twist. Our latter-day heroine triumphs after incredible difficulties by heroism and the timely application of creative technology. Given Mieville’s wildly inventive mind, this is technology with a twist. We are forcefully reminded that language is a powerful tool and that its use is socially transmitted. Language is one of those significant enabling technologies along with the wheel, fire and the internet.

Embassytown showcases Mieville’s uncanny ability to create outré characters, situations and conceptual mash-ups. The most significant concept in the novel is the language spoken by the Ariekei, the natives of the planet on which the story takes place. Embassytown is the name of the human enclave on this planet. This language, unlike any others spoken by technologically advanced species, is one in which the only things that can be said at all are truths, sort of an embodiment of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philsophicus. Something untrue is simply not comprehended as language at all.

The Ariekei have two mouths, each with their own vocabulary and voice. Their speech is the two mouths working in synchrony. If two different people try to speak Ariekei it is incomprehensible; synthesized speech is heard as mere noise. What is required for comprehensible speech is that two intelligent voices must be simultaneous and so in tune with each other as to be of one mind. People have developed a breeding program to develop cloned pairs who can be trained to be comprehensible. When the planet of which Embassytown is a colony sends a new kind of ambassador composed of two very different individuals who can nevertheless be understood by the Ariekei, the result is a tragic addiction to this impossible speech, a la the media addiction in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest.

Avice, our heroine, is an immerser, a navigator in something like the underbelly of the universe. She is known to the Ariekei as a simile, “the girl who ate what was given to her.” This is short for, “There was a human girl who in pain ate what was given to her in an old room built for eating in which eating had not happened for a time.” Her word-self is spoken to describe irony, surprise and a kind of resentful fatalism. She became this simile when she was a child. Some Ariekei asked and paid handsomely that she be put into an old room, suffer some discomfort, and eat what she was given so that they had a particular fact, an actual event, the description of which could be used as a comprehensible figure of speech. We never learn exactly why they made this request, or how they came to be able to articulate their need, but the character of this simile and the fact that other humans living in Embassytown have been similarly employed to become figures of speech of one sort or another is crucial to the resolution of the plot. In other words a simile with conscious intent, our heroine, becomes the agent of resolution to this tale.

This space opera plays out in Chomsky land; in Whorf-Sapir land; in Wittgenstein space. We expect space warps and super ray guns when we pick up science fiction; instead we get language as technology mixed in with the philosophy of truth, lies and figures of speech. Mieville takes his technology seriously by focusing on that most important tool, language, and by asking the question: Can language even be language without lies? And, of course it is all enormously entertaining and mind-bending. Bravo!

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 56 readers
PUBLISHER:	Del Rey (May 17, 2011)
REVIEWER:	Bill Brody
AVAILABLE AS A KINDLE BOOK?	YES! Start Reading Now!
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Wikipedia page on China Miéville
EXTRAS:	Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Read our review of: The City & The City Perdido Street Station

Bibliography:

New Crobuzon Series:

• Perdido Street Station (2000)
• The Scar (2002)
• Iron Council (2004)

Other Novels:

• King Rat (1998)
• Looking for Jake: Stories (August 2005)
• The City and the City (May 2009)
• Kraken (June 2010)
• Embassytown (May 2011)

Teen Readers:

• Un Lun Dun (February 2007)

Nonfiction:

• Between Equal Rights: A Marxist Theory of International Law (2004)

“For all of us, the first things we are taught, after learning how to talk, are nursery rhymes. Hence, by the time we are adults, we will know the words to hundreds of them without ever being aware of their meaning or real importance. And they are important, in myview, because many of them tell the true tale of some of history’s darkest or most tragic events.”

Book Review:

Review by Poornima Apte (NOV 26, 2009)

One of my earliest childhood memories involves singing “Ring-A-Ring O’ Roses” with some fellow kindergarteners. We assumed the rhyme was some general gibberish especially because in our modified version it became “Ring Around the Roses” and we substituted “Hushaa Hoosha” for the actual “Atishoo, Atishoo.” Many years later, I found out that the rhyme might have a darker connation with it signifying people collapsing to the plague.

In his fun and fascinating book, Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes, writer Albert Jack found that the darker meaning to the rhyme was speculative at best (since the symptoms described didn’t actually match the symptoms of the disease) and that research showed that the rhyme is in fact just a harmless children’s party game.

On the other hand, quite a few other seemingly innocuous rhymes actually have dark underlying meanings—many denoting significant historical events. Jack has done the groundwork for many of these in his entertaining book. For example, “Baa Baa Black Sheep” was actually a lament about a wool tax levied by King Edward I in 1275.

Recently, the BBC was under fire for changing the words of Humpty Dumpty on a children’s program to make the ending more kid-friendly. The revised version had “all the king’s horses and all the king’s men” managing to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. This rewriting has created a mini uproar over just how far tales can be watered down for children’s consumption. If the players in this controversy had all read Albert Jack’s entertaining book, maybe they wouldn’t have been in such a rush to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Because, as it turns out, “Humpty Dumpty” was actually a weapon of mass destruction—a cannon. Now that is the sort of thing that makes for a good dose of old-fashioned British irony.

The details of this history and many others are fun to unearth and make for entertaining reading. In the book’s introduction, Jack makes the point that the rhymes are a part of history and should therefore be treasured. He also points out that they were a means of communication coded to be not noticeable as they were passed around under oppressive regimes and climates. If that is indeed the case, one wonders if the people in the olden days didn’t have as much trouble decoding the true meanings of the rhymes almost as much as we do now. After all it takes a leap of imagination to go from:

Baa, baa, black sheep.
Have you any wool?
Yes, sir, yes, sir,
Three bags full:
One for the master,
One for the dame,
And one for the little boy
Who lives down the lane.

to interpreting the verse as a tax levied on wool, does it not?

Also, while the book is quite fascinating, I am not sure how many Americans—except for the die-hard enthusiasts—will be able to relate to the history of ancient England to truly appreciate all the layers of history tucked into these rhymes. Incidentally, there is a cool aside in here about how “The Star-Spangled Banner” started out as a drinking song in eighteenth-century London.

Pop Goes the Weasel makes for good reading—maybe not at a stretch—but for occasional foraging. In that sense a coffee table format for the book would have been even better, but this one will do just as well. It’s an entertaining read especially for trivia lovers.

It is in here for example, that you will learn that the famous two-fingered “V” sign for victory evolved from the gestures of archers fighting at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415. “The myth claims that when the French captured English archers, they cut off the two fingers used to pull back the bowstring to ensure they could no longer use their bows against them. As a result, those who had not been handicapped in this way would show their defiance by waving two fingers to their enemy, illustrating they were still capable of beating them,” Jack writes.

It is quite evident from this one piece of trivia that Jack’s research leads him to some pretty dark material. It’s still pretty cool though. As my 12-year-old daughter—who also liked the book—put it: “It’s full of random, awesome facts.” I agree.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from x readers (not yet rated)
PUBLISHER:	Perigee Trade (September 29, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Poornima Apte
AMAZON PAGE:	Pop Goes the Weasel: the Secret Meanings of Nursery Rhymes
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Albert Jack
EXTRAS:	Penguin interview with Albert Jack Excerpt
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Creative use of Nursery Rhymes… The Big Over Easy by Jasper Fforde

Bibliography:

• Red Herrings and White Elephants: The Origins of the Phrases We Use Every Day (2004)
• Shaggy Dogs and Black Sheep: The Origins of Even More Phrases We Use Every Day (2005)
• Loch Ness Monsters & Raining Dogs: The World’s Most Puzzling Mysteries Solved (2008)
• Phantom Hitchhikers and Decoy Ducks: The Strange Stories Behind Urban Legends (2008)
• The Old Dog and Duck: the Secret Meaning of Pub Names (September 2009)
• Pop Goes the Weasel: The Secret Meaning of Nursery Rhymes (September 2009)

“I felt chastened and embarrassed. I realized that I had nearly disastrously misinterpreted the Pairahas’ perception of my role among them. I had thought that they saw me, the missionary, as a protector and authority figure.”

Book Review:

Review by Lynn Harnett (NOV 17, 2009)

The Pirahã are the “Show me!” tribe of the Brazilian Amazon. They don’t bother with fiction or tall tales or even oral history. They have little art. They don’t have a creation myth and don’t want one. If they can’t see it, hear it, touch it or taste it, they don’t believe in it.

Missionaries have been preaching to the Pirahãs for 200 years and have converted not one. Everett did not know this when he first visited them in 1977 at age 26. A missionary and a linguist, he was sent to learn their language, translate the Bible for them, and ultimately bring them to Christ.

Instead, they brought him to atheism. “The Pirahãs have shown me that there is dignity and deep satisfaction in facing life and death without the comfort of heaven or the fear of hell and in sailing toward the great abyss with a smile.”

Not that they have escaped religion entirely. Spirits live everywhere and may even caution or lecture them at times. But these spirits are visible to the Pirahãs, if not to Everett and his family, who spent 30 years, on and off, living with the tribe.

But they don’t have marriage or funeral ceremonies. Cohabitation suffices as the wedding announcement and divorce is accomplished just as simply, though there may be more noise involved. Sexual mores are governed by common sense rather than stricture, which means that single people have sex at will while married people are more circumspect.

People are sometimes buried with their possessions, which are few, and larger people are often buried sitting “because this requires less digging.” But there is no ritual for each family to follow.

“Perhaps the activity closest to ritual among the Pirahãs is their dancing. Dances bring the village together. They are often marked by promiscuity, fun, laughing, and merriment by the entire village. There are no musical instruments involved, only singing, clapping, and stomping of feet.”

Everett’s language studies began without benefit of dictionary or primer. None of the Pirahãs spoke any English or more than the most rudimentary Portuguese (Among their many eccentricities is their total lack of interest in any facet of any other culture including tools or language – not that they won’t use tools, like canoes, they just won’t make them or absorb them into their culture).

Amazingly, “Pirahã is not known to be related to any other living human language.”

At first it seems rather deprived. There are only 11 phonemes (speech sounds). There are no numbers, no words for colors. No words for please, thank you or sorry. There are, however, tones, whistles and clicks. And the language comes in three forms – regular plus Humming speech and Yelling speech.

Over the years Everett comes to the conclusion that the Pirahã language reflects and arises from their culture in its directness, immediacy and simplicity. Ultimately he defies Noam Chomsky’s theory of Universal Grammar (Pirahã lacks a basic requirement) and starts a firestorm in the linguistics field. Everett alludes mildly to this in the book, but a little Internet browsing will leave readers shocked – shocked! – at the way linguists talk to one another.

There are plenty of anecdotes involving the reader in Everett’s adventures, hardships, terrors, epiphanies and the pure strangeness of daily life with a people who live in the immediate present and whose most common “good-night” is “Don’t sleep, there are snakes.” (sound sleep is dangerous and, besides, toughening themselves is a strong cultural value – foodless days are also common).

Fascinating as both anthropological memoir and linguistic study, Everett’s book will appeal to those interested in very not-North American cultures and in the ways people shape language and it shapes us.

It’s a book that rouses a sense of wonder and gives rise to even more questions than it answers.

AMAZON READER RATING:	from 26 readers
PUBLISHER:	Vintage (November 3, 2009)
REVIEWER:	Lynn Harnett
AMAZON PAGE:	Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle
AUTHOR WEBSITE:	Daniel L. Everett
EXTRAS:	Excerpt A New Yorker article of interest
MORE ON MOSTLYFICTION:	Somewhat related book: First Comes Love, Then Comes Malaira by Eve Brown-Waite Acts of Faith by Philip Caputo

Bibliography:

• Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle (November 2008)
• Cognitive Fire: Language as a Cultural Tool