Makeup for the Soul

Offering cosmetics and perms to the hungry and oppressed may seem a bit Marie Antoinette-ish but what value can one place on a smile where, before, there wasn’t any?

Review by DAPHNE LEE

KABUL BEAUTY SCHOOL: THE ART OF FRIENDSHIP AND FREEDOM

By Deborah Rodriguez

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton, 275 pages

(ISBN: 978-0340935248)

MANY of us spend our lives marvelling at the good done by others. We read or hear about those who have given their time, resources and talents to the less fortunate and we feel impressed, wistful and incredulous.

Often, we are encouraged by others’ generosity to ask ourselves how we can contribute to our fellowman.

The truth is that everyone has something to offer others. Unfortunately, most of us just think about it and talk about it. Very rarely do we take time to actually do it.

Deborah Rodriguez just did it. When she decided to open a beauty school in Kabul, Afghanistan, she didn’t worry about practicalities, logistics or what people would say.

A beauty school in Kabul sounds like a frivolous plan for a war-torn country whose people are hungry and homeless, but a project like that is about so much more than highlights and lipstick.

Recalling a visit to an “undercover” beauty salon (run by local women) in Kabul, Rodriguez writes:

“There were women’s voices, women’s laughter – and that feeling of women relaxing with one another, laying hands on one another, telling one another the details of their lives and news of the lives around them.”

The salon, like salons the world over, was a female enclave, a place where women gathered, free from male scrutiny, criticism and control, and Rodriguez wonders if the real reason the Taliban is so against beauty salons is that they give “women their own space”.

A beauty school, thus, makes sense in Afghanistan, and on many levels. It’s a place where women can gather and support each other emotionally. It’s also a place where women can have fun, a pursuit many of us take for granted, but is rare in a place like Afghanistan.

In the short term, it offers a measure of respite from the grey and grim realities of life. And in the long term, the skills learnt at a beauty school arm women with the means of making an independent living, which boosts confidence and self-esteem, and, often, provides an escape route from a life of abuse.

Rodriguez first went to Kabul as part of a Christian aid mission, but found that she couldn’t contribute much as part of the team.

Back in her hometown of Holland, Michigan, Rodriguez was practically raised in her mum’s beauty salon and became a professional stylist herself.

During her first visit to Kabul, while her aid colleagues were out in the field, treating the sick, Rodriguez was given the task of sitting in the hotel and praying for them.

Instead, she ventured out to the town with her new Afghan friends. She trimmed their hair and one of them, Roshanna, became a fast friend and one of the first students at the beauty school that Rodriguez later helped to establish.

Roshanna is also one of the many Afghan women whom Rodriguez bonded with and whose stories help make Kabul Beauty School more than just a tale of shampoo, perms and hair removal .

Reading about what the average Afghan woman has to bear makes me feel very ashamed of the whinging I do every so often about really inconsequential stuff.

What are traffic jams, the lack of parking in KL and apathetic bank clerks compared with constant beatings, forced marriages and rape?

In Afghanistan, the rape victim is also considered to have committed a crime and is imprisoned. In a case described by Rodriguez, the rape victim’s father kills the rapist and is given a much shorter sentence than his daughter!

Rodriguez is appalled by the suffering she encounters and she tries to help by improving lives through employment and training.

The need to love and be loved obviously plays a big part in Rodriguez’s decision to move to Afghanistan. Twice married and divorced, she left two teenage sons in the States to live among strangers in a strange land.

Describing the moment when she left her abusive second husband, she adds, “I flew to Afghanistan, where my heart would soon fill with new people to love.”

Some might call her spontaneous and brave, while others might say she was simply self-indulgent and foolhardy. Rodriguez strikes me as a free-spirited risk taker with her heart in the right place.

I liked Rodriguez’s straightforward and matter-of-fact storytelling style.

She doesn’t dwell on the depressing aspects of her new life, but she does not avoid them either.

Not one to mince her words or gloss over the harrowing details, she spits them out with a fair bit of anger, directed at the guilty, and doesn’t bother to hide her own anguish and despair.

It’s comforting to know that there is someone who is trying to make a difference and it helps to be able to cry along with her. It’s a start anyway. Tomorrow is when you, and I, can do something, too.

For the Love of Books

From StarMag

Review by DAPHNE LEE

Finally, an easy-to-read book about books, written for those who love to read books.

THE YELLOW-LIGHTED BOOKSHOP:
A MEMOIR, A HISTORY
By Lewis Buzbee
Publisher: Graywold Press, 216 pages
(ISBN: 978-1555974503)

MOST avid readers love nosing around other readers' book collections. And it's always great fun having a private snigger at a fellow bookworm's (so he says) reading preferences ... while looking suitably impressed of course! Readers love books like The Complete Polysyllabic Spree by Nick Hornby, Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman and So Many Books, So Little Time by Sarah Nelson. Not only do they appreciate the recommendations (any excuse to buy books is welcome), it's terribly encouraging to discover that celebrity authors like Hornby are pretentious gits with dubious tastes. Plus, there's nothing like reading impassioned descriptions of books to make you feel like you've read them without actually having done so. So many books, so little time? Just let someone else read them for you and then read about it!

Oh, yes, reading about other readers' (famous or otherwise) reading habits is fun. But if you love books and reading, it doesn't necessarily follow that you'd be interested in the history of book making, publishing and selling. The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is about all that. It's also a personal history of one man's passionate love affair with books.

The author, Lewis Buzbee, worked in a bookseller and publisher's representative. He recounts his experiences in both areas of the book trade, describes his love for books and bookshops, and interweaves his own stories with all things book-related, from bookstores and libraries to printing and binding to the technicalities like ISBNs (International Standard Book Number) and barcodes.

Just typing the above paragraph made my mouth water and heart beat increase, but then, it's always been my dream to own a bookshop. To me the book trade is steeped in romance. It's not just about selling the printed word. It's about dealing in dreams and mysteries and ideas. I also happen to have bookcases with sagging shelves and so it's fascinating to know that bookshelves weren't always where books were kept, and that even when the practice first started, books were placed horizontally, with their spines facing inward. It's also interesting that once upon a time, spines didn't bear the book's title or author's name. And that there were no spines for the longest time since books (as we know them today, or near enough anyway) didn't come into existence until round about the first century CE. Before that, scrolls were all the rage!

Buzbee has a relaxed, tongue-in-cheek, easy-to read style. And, whether he's talking about the invention of paper, the establishment of the lending library, or the rise of the softback, he presents his topic in a clear, concise and engaging manner. With Buzbee you, as someone who is interested in the subject, but not planning to write a thesis on it, learn exactly what you need or want to.

In contrast, a writer like Henry Petroski, in The Book on the Bookshelf, overloads the casual reader with facts, dates and details, delivered in a dry, academic fashion. Even anecdotes are related without humour or enthusiasm. Bookshelf covers similar ground to Bookshop but I couldn't get past the third chapter.

Buzbee lures you with tales of a love affair that started from the time he was a boy in San Jose, California, and then holds your interest with his infectious enthusiasm. He is candid and witty, personable and personal, never self-indulgent or pompous. His fascination with books is evident and the fascination rubs off. When you read Bookshop, you smell the books Buzbee lovingly describes, hold them in your hand and feel the magic and power of the words they contain.

And I love the trivia: John Milton received a grand total of £10 (RM68) for Paradise Lost. The sum was paid in two parts over seven years. In 2004, American publishers produced "between 135,000 and 175,000 new titles". If you live until you're 80 and read a book every week from the age of five, you'll have read 3,900 books by the time you shake off this mortal coil - and that's just one percent of the books currently in print!

One of my favourite chapters is Big Business, in which Buzbee talks about, amongst other things, remainders, ISBNs and the price of books. When discussing whether books are just too costly, Buzbee looks at what happens to the US$25 (RM86)one pays for the average hardcover novel: US$1.88 (RM6.50) to the author, US$3 (RM10.30) to the printer, US$8.87 (RM30.65) to the publisher, US$11.25 (RM38.88) to the bookseller. The bottom line is that books aren't so expensive after all. (As I mentioned earlier, any excuse to buy more of them).

In his penultimate chapter, Buzbee describes some of his favourite bookshops and bookshop-rich cities. There are some rather different but interesting ones, like the one near San Francisco that boasts a "walk-in humidor with a complete selection of cigars and pipe tobaccos"; and Walter Swan's One Book Bookstore, which sells Swan's first, self-published novel, and The Other Book Bookstore, which sells his second novel.

Buzbee, like all bibliophiles who don't live in 30 room mansions, does not have the luxury of keeping every book that passes his way. He only keeps books that he's sure he's going to re-read; the ones he's definitely going to read before he dies; and the ones he can't "bear to part with because of an aesthetic or emotional attachment". The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop is most definitely staying put on my shelf. It's a neat little hardback, with a lovely deep blue cover and a silver-tooled spine. The print is neat and easy to focus on, the pages thick, creamy and lovingly handcut. Inside, a heady mixture of praise and worship, facts and figures, memoir and history. I will re-read it often, I'm sure.

Wild Thang!

From StarMag, 2nd January, 2005

A ROUND-HEELED WOMAN: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance

By Jane Juska

Publisher: Villard, 273 pages

IMAGINE if your grandmother put an ad in the papers that read something like this: “Before I turn 70 at the end of this year, I would like to have a lot of sex with a lot of nice men. We can also talk, preferably about Venezuelan soap operas.”

Freaky or what? I guess we will never be entirely comfortable with the idea of our parents, never mind our grandparents, as sexual beings. The thought of the APs doing the wild thang is enough to put most of us off our dinner. Why is that? I mean, I’m 37 and in a few years I will probably be considered too old to “do it”. Yet, my first instinct is to gaze askance at 50-somethings and think: “They can’t still want to!”

Posing the question to a 20-something recently, I elicited retching noises and a derisive remark about wrinkly nether regions. (Her original words were much more colourful!) I think this book, A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance, would definitely put her off her food.

In it, Jane Juska, a 60-something divorcee, describes how she relaunched her sex life by placing a personal ad, similar to the example above, in a national newspaper. The response she received was so overwhelming that she had to take a sabbatical from her job (teaching) in order to meet the men who had replied.

Juska is extremely frank about what happens during these dates, but don’t expect blow-by-blow accounts a la Penthouse magazine or even the average romance novel. It’s not that she skimps on details. Her meaning is clear as crystal, but when she describes her sexual encounters, there is nothing suggestive or titillating about her words or phrases.

However, while Juska is as candid as they come when she’s talking about sex, there is a tendency for her not to address other issues which crop up when she’s talking about her life in general. What becomes increasingly apparent about her is that while she’s confident about her right to have a good time, sexually, she seems less sure about her right to have more than sex, that is, a loving relationship.

Could this be anything to do with the fact that she was abused as a young girl? And could that experience also have any bearing on her alcoholism, her poor parenting skills (her son ends up homeless at 17) and her uneasy relationship with her own parents? Juska mentions all this in passing, but doesn’t make any attempt to make sense of any of it in relation to her little “project”.

So, this book isn’t the light-hearted romp it’s made out to be (the saucy purple jacket and frisky sub-title are misleading). Juska (and certainly her publishers) probably meant it to be an entertaining, enlightening and liberating look at sex after 50, but then she has inadvertently turned it into an account of an elderly woman’s attempt to find love through sex – not that she admits this for a second. It makes for a rather pathetic and depressing read. In fact, an undercurrent of sadness runs through the entire text, which is unfortunate really, because moralists will say, “Well, what can you expect from someone who behaves like a trollop.”

Ah, well, at the very least, Round-Heeled Woman makes a case for life not ceasing after menopause. When I was still practising as a nurse, my aged patients would often say that what they hated most about growing old was no longer being counted as feeling, thinking human beings. At a certain age, it seems, one is relegated to the rubbish heap, considered past one’s sell-by-date, and useless.

In I Look into My Glass, a poem by Thomas Hardy, an old man gazes at his reflection and wishes that his spirit were as wasted as his body. Instead, he laments, Time, to make me grieve/ Part steals, lets part abide;/ And shakes this fragile frame at eve/ With throbbings of noontide.

It’s a common supposition (and misconception) that one’s emotions and urges, including sex drive, wane with old age. A Round Heeled-Woman (this is an old-fashioned term for a promiscuous woman), at its most basic, acts as both a warning and a lesson. One can enjoy an active sex life for as long as one is blessed with good health. And if there are teens and 20-somethings reading this and rolling their eyes dismissively, imagine how stupid they’ll feel when they’re hale and hearty 70-year-olds and get called dried-up old prunes!

Remembering Iris

From StarTwo.

Review by DAPHNE LEE

ELEGY FOR IRIS

By John Bayley

Publisher: Picador, 288 pages

(ISBN: 978-0312421113)

WHETHER you are of the opinion that Iris Murdoch’s novels are full of subtle wisdom, graceful prose and illuminating insight or that her style is deliberately, snobbishly pedantic and ponderous, you still can’t deny that her writing reflects a mind that is at once complicated and lucid, vigorous and tranquil – to be sure, a beguiling if somewhat daunting combination of qualities.

That such a brain, teeming with ideas and bristling with life, should be destroyed by Alzheimer’s disease is something that would strike most of us as particularly unfair, tragic and ironic.

Murdoch was diagnosed with the mentally debilitating condition in the mid 1990s. Prior to her illness she was a scholar and philosopher, an admired and respected essayist, poet and playwright, and the author of 26 critically acclaimed novels. She was also a beloved wife and this fact remained unchanged until her death in 1999.

Elegy For Iris – also available as Iris: A Memoir of Iris Murdoch (Abacus) – allows us a close-up view of the woman, her work, her life and marriage. It is a personal viewpoint – her husband, teacher and critic, John Bayley, is the author and he presents Murdoch as he knew her and saw her.

His description of Iris reveals an eccentric individual (a hoarder of odds and ends – stones, sticks, empty bottles – who delights in swimming nude in rivers and forest ponds), both brilliant and naive, whose extraordinary life is littered with mundane details.

Murdoch counted among her close friends literary luminaries such as Elizabeth Bowen, Barbara Pym and Kingsley Amis. Her fans included Benedictine monks. She replied personally to every letter she received from her readers; she won awards, including the 1978 Booker Prize for The Sea, The Sea; she enjoyed living in a state of comfortable squalor, leaving crumbs in bed, rarely washing; she was made a Dame of the British Empire; she applied lipstick amateurishly, blotting her mouth with scraps of writing paper.

Bayley is, himself, not without quirks. In the early days of their acquaintance he convinces himself that Murdoch is unattractive in order to avoid the anguish of thinking that others find her sexually appealing. He invites her to a ball and is disconcerted and displeased when she accepts. He secretly tails an old professor, one of Murdoch’s many admirers, from her rooms back to his hotel. He stands in her street for long stretches of time, simply gazing up at her lighted window. Taken out of context, these actions may sound like those of a raving lunatic, but as part of the Bayley-Murdoch story, they are in keeping with the couple’s rather unconventional relationship.

“The more I got to know Iris during the early days of our relationship, the less I understood her. Indeed, I soon began not to want to understand her,” Bayley writes.

With every passing year he and Murdoch “move closer and closer apart”, enjoying the “solitude a deux” of marriage. They acknowledge and embrace each other’s differences, at times simply by keeping a distance and allowing a particular peculiarity or foible to flourish, free of comment and scrutiny. He is unperturbed by his inability to understand many of his wife’s inner thoughts. That he is granted the privilege of observing this enigmatic person at close range is alone a source of delight and, rather than feel alienated by her occasional remoteness, he draws strength from it, rejoicing in her mystery.

Later, during the height of Murdoch’s illness, this ability to accept without irritation and frustration the gap between their conscious states stands Bayley in good stead, not that he is never distressed or angered by Murdoch’s symptoms. Bayley relates the instances when he loses his temper and shouts at his wife, is verbally cruel, and even punches her arm. He is never defensive, never self-pitying, only matter-of-fact.

The last chapters of Murdoch’s life are, except where it concerns her as an individual, not unique. All of us face the truth they reveal – of life that will, with the passage of time, never mind the onset of sickness, be stripped of dignity, independence and comfort. We should be so lucky if, as in Murdoch’s case, there is someone there to remember us at our brightest, loveliest, most lovable.

Bayley does, and as much as he steers his tale unflinchingly through the darkest episodes of his wife’s life, he recounts humorously and with great enthusiasm and tenderness the good times, including the happy, peaceful moments the pair share because of, rather than in spite of, Alzheimer’s – watching Teletubbies together, reciting bits of doggerel to one another, Bayley typing in bed while Murdoch sleeps deeply beside him.

She was a beloved wife and this fact, as this book as well as a later one, Iris And Friends (Abacus), seem to show, remains unchanged despite her death.