Milly Houstova Houstova itibaren Nova Olinda - CE, Brezilya itibaren Nova Olinda - CE, Brezilya

A simple idea brilliantly executed. The fact that we are able to know this character so well only through stories about items of clothing in a suitcase speaks to Dovlatov's talent. A charming book.

في ناس و انت بتقرأ لهم تحس أن دماغهم عالية جدا ...دي كانت أول حاجة أقرأها لمستجاب و عمرها ما حتكون الأخيرة ..لروعة الدماغ اللي كتباه و روعة الأسلوب ..اللغة العربية الفصحى لما تبقى حرة و غير مفتعلة لما تدخل الدماغ تريحه و تزغزغ الخلايا على عكس ناس تانية لما تقرأ أسلوبهم تحس أن ودانك بتوجعك و أنت بتقرأ بعنيك و دماغك بتاكلك الكتاب ده بسطني جدا و عايزة أقراه تاني بس سلفته لحد و مش فاكرة مين :D

I'd been hearing a lot about this book, and I finally decided to check it out after agent Rachelle Gardner recommended it on her blog. I'm in a "writing circle" (for 6 years) and so I figured I'd be able to relate. The writing circle itself plays more of a minor role; I think that might be why I didn't like this novel more -- I expected more writing circle and writing talk and less individual story lines (of which there were many since the chapters shift from different POV). One of the characters (Gillian) is completely unlikable, which is fine, except that the ending and resolution (and I'm not sure that's the best word) involved too much of the spotlight being shone on her. That said, the book is well written and the story lines ring true. The parts with the writing circle were accurate, in my experience, so I think writers, especially, might enjoy checking out this book.

On the one hand, this is a good read. On the other, it is sickening. It assumes that a white person, a rich white woman to be precise, has the right to imperil the lives of colored maids so that she can further her career. That is a given in this book. This falls squarely in the tradition of white musicians who stole freely from African Americans who got nothing while the whites made millions. Mississippi in the 1960's was a dangerous place for uppity blacks. Any colored person who voiced dissatisfaction with any aspect of their lot in life was in grave danger. This had been so since Reconstruction ended after The Civil War. The Help told their white employers whatever they wanted to hear. They "yes, ma'ammed" and "no ma'ammed" appropriately. They agreed that Jim Crow laws were right, that the races should be kept separate--except when whites needed African Americans to clean up their shit. Whites wouldn't use the same bathrooms as The Help, but they regularly ate meals prepared by them. Having grown up in a racially mixed neighborhood, I had many colored friends and was a regular visitor at their homes. There I encountered the world of African American magazines and newspapers, which I read avidly. I knew even as a child in the 1940's the humiliations, oppression, suppression colored people were subjected to. And this was in Rhode Island. I knew colored people whose ancestors settled there in the 17th century. I was the child of immigrants. But I knew, even when I was only 8 or 9, that I could go to Classical High School and get a scholarship to go to college and become a teacher. I also knew, as did my colored friends, that their only option would be to go into domestic service or to haul garbage or work as stevedores at the dock. I offer this as background to my assessment of this novel. It is totally unbelievable that in the 1960's, a rich white Southern woman, Miss Skeeter, would seek the stories of colored maids. There is no way that a woman who had lived in Mississippi all her life and who graduated from that proud white bastion University would even think of The Help as having opinions. This was the place that Medgar Evers was murdered, supposedly in the same neighborhood that Abilene and Minnie, The Help, lived. It was where 3 Jewish boys were murdered for helping blacks to register to vote. It was where James Meredith had to be escorted by U.S. Marshals to enter a class at Ole Miss, the very university that Miss Skeeter graduated from. Beatings, shootings, lynchings, these were expected things in the lives of colored people in the Deep South. I remember the newscasts of 3 little colored girls going to the door of an elementary school while adults shouted vile words and threats at them, and even spit on them. I also remember the little girls who were burned to death in a church in Birmingham, Alabama. African Americans in the Deep South were totally dependent for their livelihood on whites and had to accept whatever work at whatever pay whites would give them. If one got out of line, he or she was fired. Nobody else would hire them. The only people of color who had any independence were the teachers in segregated schools and the medical personnel at colored hospitals. The Help were treated as if they were deaf. Whites said or did whatever they wanted around them. It never occurred to them that The Help had feelings. I have known people raised in the Deep South back then and even more recently. They, to a person, all say that "their" Bessie or "Maybel" loved the family. That they were treated as family. That all they aspired to was being of help to white folks. These Southerners lived in the North and had been exposed to the realities of how colored people regarded their white oppressors. So, how would Miss Skeeter have even had a glimmer of a thought that the maids had stories tell about their white employers? The Help didn't judge white people. Remember, in To Kill a Mockingbird, the black man is guilty because he dared to feel sorry for a poor white woman? It is unbelievable that Abilene, the maid, would tell Miss Skeeter about her murdered son, and about Ralph Ellison's The Invisible Man. White Southerners certainly didn't consider colored people to be book recommenders. Abilene would be "getting above herself" if she told Miss Skeeter about a book by an African American writer. It is also unbelievable that Abilene would tell a white person that yes, she would have liked to go to a school in which colored and white children sat together in a classroom. Even more unbelievable is that any maid would teach her white charges that the only difference between whites and blacks was skin color. She certainly wouldn't have taught the child, a child of 3, about Martin Luther King or how brave the African Americanswere who desegregated Woolworth's. Everyone knows that children blurt things out even if they've been told it's a secret. Finally, it is totally unbelievable that a colored maid would tell stories about her employers, much less that a dozen did. What is more unbelievable is that a white woman could drive her Cadillac convertible into the Negro neighborhood, carrying a large typewriter and an outsized satchel of papers. The police patrolled such neighborhoods constantly, on the alert for Civil Rights agitators. They would have stopped her. Kathryn Stockett has made millions from this book and the resulting movie. Rather than writing a novel which assumes that African Americans exist to help whites get along, why didn't she write the truth about The Help. That they had no voice.