Pineapples Are My Latest Vice
I am wondrously, gloriously tan, although not as tan as I have been on past Hawai’i vacations. Growing up in Los Angeles gives you a permanent semi-tan; living in New York makes you pale and pasty. I look better when I’ve got some colour in my skin, otherwise I am the exact shade of sour milk.
As gorgeous as Maui was, I am extremely grateful to be home. I need a holiday from my vacation, primarily because I had little or no time to myself in Los Angeles. My introverted heart was going spare. But now I am nestled in the comforts of my own bed, trying desperately to catch up on both sleep and errands. Sleep is winning out, even though I need to go grocery shopping, deposit some checks, find a full-time job in publishing (anyone, anyone?), stock up on items from The Body Shop, and finish revising my novel. (I was very good and actually did a lot of work while I was in Los Angeles.) Sleep might be winning over being productive, but internet and books to read are competing for first place.
I might have mentioned before that my brother and I had a little agreement over our holidays: he wouldn’t bring his video games to Maui if I didn’t bring any books. It wasn’t such a big deal at first; we keep ridiculously active on Jones Family Vacations. There was more nonstop hiking through rainforests, swimming in clear blue waters, sunrise volcano walks, snorkeling with sea turtles, sportfishing, yoga on the beach, and restaurant-eating than you could shake a stick at. But on the last night—at a luau—both my brother and I caved. I stole his copy of THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN and he played Brick on my mother’s Blackberry as we waited for the kahlua pua to finish cooking.
Review of THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN by Sherman Alexie
The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
I’ve never read any of Sherman Alexie’s other award-winning works, neither his short stories nor his poetry. I knew THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY won the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature in 2007, but I never got around to reading it. I technically bought the book for my brother when I saw it in the airport bookstore (he’d already brought UN LUN DUN by China Mieville) because I thought he’d like the cartoons in it.
My brother never even cracked it open. I devoured the entire novel in less than an hour while waiting for a seat at the luau and ignoring the strange looks from other patrons as I snorted with laughter and tears.
THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN is about a young Spokane Indian boy named Arnold Spirit, Jr. who dares to escape the poverty of the reservation and earn himself a better education at an all-white public school, where the only other Indian is the mascot. A book like this could easily devolve into something sentimental and emotionally manipulative, but thankfully it never does. All of the devastatingly awful things that happen are delivered with such wit and pathos that I found myself laughing and crying at the same time.
The text is hilarious, but the cartoons really add something wonderful and a lot of credit has to go to Ellen Forney. The way Junior portrays himself as a cartoon is adorable, even if he doesn’t see himself that way. I like that the cartoons aren’t just illustrations; artists draw things in sketchbooks in much the same way writers use private journals. When I was nine and ten years old, I didn’t write; I drew scores of comic strips called THE ADVENTURES OF VITA-GIRL & POPCORN that were less a coherent narrative than a series of journal entries chronicling my life. (I still have them. Sometimes I take them out and laugh. Sometimes I’m amazed at how observant I was, even as a ten-year-old.) I still sketch comics, but it’s hard to articulate to verbal people how a picture is still worth 1000 words.
For instance, when Bear went on a road trip last summer out to California and back, I was really happy when he came home. Of course, I was happy, but there were many more small emotions and inside jokes that we have that I couldn’t possibly write about with any coherence. How White-Harp missed him too. How the two of us like anything cute. How the bukkit walrus is something special to us. (Mostly because it’s a walrus, and walruses are marine mammals like seals and of course, White-Harp is also a seal.) Or how we have a “snickering shorthand.” And being evil (or liking it, in my case) is a trait the three of us have in common.
Too much to write about, so I just drew a comic instead.
Click for full size
There’s one drawing in particular in the book that I love. Junior is sketching Rowdy, his best friend on the reservation, but Rowdy doesn’t like to be drawn (for many, many reasons that can be inferred and gleaned from the text) and I think Junior himself gets frustrated that Rowdy won’t let him. So imposed on top of an unfinished portrait, Junior scrawls a cartoony angry face with a speech bubble from Rowdy’s face yelling at him to stop drawing. It’s in its own way a portrait of Rowdy, but it’s more accurately a portrait of how Junior feels about him and how he perceives what Rowdy thinks and feels.
Again, too much to write.
Visuals engage a different dimension of emotion than words. Looking at objects engages a different portion of the brain. Words are never an adequate replacement for pictures; they’re too different to be compared. (On a side note, one of the reasons I love ULYSSES so is that it calls attention to and breaks apart the verbal dimension.)
Anyway, THE ABSOLUTELY TRUE DIARY OF A PART-TIME INDIAN is highly, highly recommended.
Soon I shall be reading CATCHING FIRE. I am so stoked. Russ managed to snag a copy of the galley at BEA. SCORE!
