Sidhwa vs. Said

    So far I like Said’s narrative. I like that this is THAT book — the book every writer must write before dying. Said immediately places “Out of Place” in the context of bouts of mortal sickness and painfully poisonous treatments. That says something about the importance of this work to the writer and leads readers to set their expectations high. It tells me that this text should have an integrity and authenticity that comes with laying oneself open, fully exposed and vulnerable in the face of one’s mortality.
    As a journalist I appreciate this kind of a work, where one just lays it all out there fact-like, but it does have its drawbacks. It is harder for me to emotionally connect with Said’s words because I am distanced from them by Said’s retrospective judgments. However, if Said’s intent is as an intellectual exploration, a “here is my experience” or case study, then his presentation makes sense. If this is an intellectual exercise, an exploration of cause and effect, motivations and rationales, then the emotions should be stripped down and muted, present but distanced, subdued, grayed.
    However, after a while, an intelligent reader gets tired of being spoon-fed prepackaged judgments. I like Said’s narrative voice and style, but I am getting tired of being “told” things. I want Said to show me, too, the way Sidhwa did in “Cracking India.” In felt like I saw India and its people in Sidhwa’s novel. I felt like I knew the characters, but Said holds readers at arm’s length so they cannot see the actual action and have to take his descriptions as gospel.
    I also have to say that I think I prefer Sidhwa’s split adult/child narrator to Said’s first-person narrative voice. As readers we live thru Lenny’s experiences. In Said’s narrative he tells us what he experienced, distancing us from the action. Sidhwa’s novel had more emotional power for me. The only moment in Said’s so far that caused me to tear was the description of his mother’s final days and her “My poor little child” as she, dying of cancer, seemingly took “final leave of her son” (54). Otherwise the narrative has a scholarly, sort of journalistic feel, like a retrospective study or something, making it more clinical versus the visceral quality of Sidhwa’s novel. 
    However, I like the neat and tidy organization of Said’s narrative. The first chapter was a close up of Said, particularly of his name and lineage (What’s in a name after all?).  I connected with how he sees himself as this dual character; sometimes he is Said and other times he is Edward. His “titles” come to mean certain things and those things color his existence.
    I liked the way he sculpted the first chapter around this idea of feeling out of place in regards to everything from his name to nationality. His emphasis on labels and titles, categories and the like is certainly a theme of the book. It is a common theme in literature, common because how we see ourselves and how others see us is integral to the human experience. Identity and the shaping of it are central to a person’s development.
    The second chapter was a survey of the geography of his youth. In the third chapter Said describes his scholastic life and in the fourth his familial relationships. However, at this point I am confused because in the introduction he said he found himself telling his story against the backdrop of “World War II, the loss of the Palestinian movement, the Lebanese Civil War, and the Oslo peace process,” but so far I have seen little of any of these events.
    Reading Sidhwa’s novel I was immersed in the sights, sounds, and smells of the world of her childhood, the good and the bad. Thus, I was able to connect with her tale emotionally, but Said’s story leaves me feeling distanced. Held at bay, as I am to peak over Said’s shoulder at the life he his describing, I can’t help but feel out of place. Hmmm … there is method to this madness.