The Narrow Road to the Deep North

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

4.5*. This was a beautifully written book about Love and War and Life and Death. It did seem as though it were two books. The first, a love story between Dorrigo Evans, an Australian soldier, and his uncles wife, and the other about his time as a POW under the Japanese building the Burma railroad. In the camp, Dorrigo is a surgeon, and the action shifts from him to Darky, a fellow prisoner, and the guards and Japanese officers at the camp. Flanagan often focuses on the opposition that lies within the same moment...how the jungle can be both beautiful and hell, how someone can be terrified and brave in the same moment. So maybe the two stories are meant to show the best and worst in life, but it was difficult for me to tie the two stories together. Still, both stories are expertly told, with poetic grace and at times horrific realism. I felt the rain and mud slosh around me as I read. Another interesting theme was how what we choose to remember and tell ourselves about our past affects our future.

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Why at the beginning of things is there always light?

 A happy man has no past, while an unhappy man has nothing else.

It is not that you know nothing about war, young man, Dorrigo Evans had said. It is that you have learnt one thing. And war is many things.

 As if rather than him leading them by example they were leading him through adulation

 He took a book from a shelf, and as he brought it up to his chest it passed from shadow into one of the sun shafts. He held the book there, looking at that book, that light, that dust. It was as though there were two worlds. This world, and a hidden world that it took the momentary shafts of late-afternoon light to reveal as the real world—of flying particles wildly spinning, shimmering, randomly bouncing into each other and heading off into entirely new directions. Standing there in that late-afternoon light, it was impossible to believe any step would not be for the better. He never thought to where or what, he never thought why, he never wondered what might happen if, instead of progressing, he collided like one of the dust motes in the sunlight.

 As though what she really sought from him was this obliteration, an oblivion, and their passion could only lead to her erasure from the world. For if the living let go of the dead, their own life ceases to matter.

It’s only our faith in illusions that makes life possible, Squizzy, he had explained, in as close to an explanation of himself as he ever offered. It’s believing in reality that does us in every time.

 Perhaps that was what hell was, Dorrigo concluded, an eternal repetition of the same failure.

Deep Down Dark

Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Them Free by Héctor Tobar
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Inspirational, interesting, entertaining, thought-provoking. An excellent retelling of the 33 miners stuck in a Chilean mine. Thoroughly enjoyed it.

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There are many superstitions about women and mines that are expressions of the male-dominated culture’s ambivalence about both women and underground labor. One legend has it that the mountain itself is a woman, and in a sense “you’re violating her every time you step inside her,” which explains why the mountain often tries to kill the men who’ve carved passageways from her stone body.

The quasi-scientific explanation is that the mountain’s deposits of magnetite are attracting and repelling grains of sand that vibrate in the wind.

Are you going to tell me that if we threw you down here for weeks and left you all alone, completely alone, and then we came to rescue you, we’d find you as fine and dandy as you are now? Did you pull that off all by yourself? No, compadre. You made it this far because behind you there were thirty-two others.”

 taken thirty-three days of drilling to reach the thirty-three men.