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Author:
• Saturday, September 29th, 2012

Kathryn Stockett was born in Jackson, Mississippi USA in 1969. She was raised by an African American maid called Demetrie McLorn and graduated from the University of Alabama after obtaining a degree in English and Creative Writing.

Aged twenty-four and with her diploma in hand she moved to New York where, for nine years, she worked in magazine publishing and marketing. Presently she lives in Atlanta with her husband and daughter.

The Help, published in 2009, is Kathryn Stockett’s first novel. It took her five years to write and about sixty rejection letters from publishers because of its controversial subject matter. As soon as it was published it became a best seller and was on The New York Times Best Seller List for Fiction for a hundred weeks. It was Amazon’s Best Books of the year 2009 and was long listed for the Orange Prize in 2010. It won the Townsend Prize for Fiction in 2010 and the exclusive Books Boeke Prize in 2009. The Help has been published in thirty five countries, translated into several languages, has sold over five million copies and was released as a film in August 2011.

Kathryn Stockett’s next book will again be located in Mississippi and will also be about women, but this time will be set during the period of the Great Depression.

The story of The Help takes place in Jackson Mississippi in the early 1960’s, a crucial period for American Civil Rights. It’s a few months away from Martin Luther King’s memorable “I have a dream” speech that took place in Washington D.C. in 1963 and a few years after the civil rights and freedom movement of the mid-fifties by Rosa Parks. It’s a couple of years away from the abolition of Jim Crow’s end of the 19th century segregation laws against African Americans by president Lyndon B. Johnson in Congress in1964, making racial discrimination illegal.

In The Help, there are three main characters who take turns in the narration: Aibileen, Minny and Miss Skeeter. The novel starts and ends with Aibileen, the oldest and wisest of the three. She is an African American maid in her fifties who, in a maternal loving way, raised seventeen white children in her lifetime along with the cooking and cleaning. Her love and care is often shown in the novel in the way she is raising Mae Mobley, the Leefolt toddler, as a surrogate mother. She is grieving over the loss of her only young son in a work accident, which was blatantly disregarded by his employer and which she was obliged to accept.

Aibileen’s best friend, Minny, is also an African American maid. She is younger than Aibileen, but unlike her, she is derisive, impetuous, indocile and bottles a great deal of anger in herself which makes it hard for her to keep her employments for long. She says to Miss Celia Foote, her present employer and who is labelled by society as “white trash”: “I got knowed for my mouth round town. And I figure that’s what it be, why nobody want to hire me”. Her wrath explodes when she prepares the chocolate custard pie that she bakes and combines with the ingredients her own faeces as a revenge and as a kept promise when she said “eat my shit” to her worst enemy, the loathsome, Miss Hilly Holbrook, who loves the cake and eats two big pieces of it rashly and voraciously, oblivious of what it hides inside. As Minny describes it: “she stuff it in her mouth like she ain’t ever eaten nothing so good…What do you put in here, Minny, that makes it taste so good?”
Minny was delighted to reveal to her what she had added to the ingredients and shocked Miss Hilly and her mother beyond belief.

The twenty-two-year-old Eugenia Phelan or Miss Skeeter is the youngest of the three. She is the daughter of a white family of cotton growers, who, like many southerners, employs black people in their fields and in their household as domestic servants. After graduating, Skeeter returns home to look for a job as a writer. She is emancipated, ambitious and thinks she can change the cruel, unfair, world she grew up in with its racism and injustice, which nobody in her conservative surroundings conveniently seems to notice. She is unruly, defiant and stands firm for her beliefs.

Outraged by the iniquities and unacceptable racism prevailing around her and even among her closest friends, Skeeter secretly decides to encourage the African American maids of her entourage to tell her their stories while in service with white families. To avoid retaliation, she is not going to sign her name as the author of her planned, anti-establishment, daring book and she promises the maids anonymity by using pseudonyms and by calling the city, Niceville. The oppressed, unfairly treated but unyielding maids accept to cooperate with Miss Skeeter.

The risk taken by Skeeter is similar to the one taken by Stockett for her début novel, racial boundaries still being a controversial subject in the south of USA. One simply does not “talk about such uncomfortable things”.

Although Skeeter is very secretive about her planned book, she succeeds in creating enemies around her and among her best friends, especially the self proclaimed leader, Hilly Holbrook, her childhood friend. Hilly is the president of the Junior League in Jackson Mississippi. She is racist, overbearing, arrogant and heartless and couldn’t put up with any person opposing her – people follow her in fear of her acrimony or reprisals.

Skeeter’s maid, Constantine, is presumably included in the novel in loving memory of Demetrie McLorn, the African American maid who worked for the Stockett family for fifty years. The author said in an interview that she started writing her novel in the voices of Demetrie, her black maid who died when Stockett was just sixteen-years-old. She raised her and was closer to her and her siblings than their absentee mother. However, The Help was not dedicated to Demetrie McLorn but to the author’s grandfather Stockett who was “the best story teller of all”, she said.

On the other hand Stockett included Demetrie McLorn in the acknowledgements. The author wrote: “My belated thanks to Demetrie Mclorn, who carried us all out of the hospital wrapped in our baby blankets and spent her life feeding us, picking up after us, loving us and thank God, forgiving us”. She also included her in her postscript: “Too Little, Too Late, Kathryn Stockett, in her own words”.

When the author was asked about her favourite character in the novel she said : “Aibileen is my favourite because she shares the gentleness of Demetrie”.

After failing her first writing attempt and after going through the terrible 9/11 event while living in New York city, Stockett felt homesick and said she wanted “to hear or revisit, those voices from her past”. That is when she decided to write The Help, a novel about her home town with the heavy, outdated dialect which made the story three dimensional for the readers and despite being an easy to read novel, it needed some getting used to for non natives.

The author reveals the gangrene that rots American society, like racism, class prejudices and the survival of the fittest and powerful. The novel is sometimes jocose despite its sadness, in order to ease the overwhelming intensity, but unfortunately it is often repulsively inhuman, poignant and moving. Albeit the tentative optimistic ending of a new era shining on the horizon, there is the success of Miss Skeeter’s book and her moving on to fulfil her dream by accepting a job offer at Harper’s magazine in New York, as a copy editor’s assistant.

There is also Minny, who at last wants to assert her independence by leading a new life away from her brutal and abusive husband.

The same optimism is displayed with Aibileen walking back home in the bright sunshine. She has just been fired by the weak charactered, Miss Elisabeth Leefolt, who receives the order from Miss Hilly Holbrook and carries it out without hesitation, despite the fact that Aibileen has been a good valuable, honest worker to the Leefolt family. The tenacious, Aibileen still holds some hope for the future, thinking that she is not too old after all to start another job as a writer.

All very optimistic and auspicious, but sadly there is still a long way to go in order to abolish the racism and hatred nourished by segregation that still prevails today in many communities of the world.

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Author:
• Saturday, September 27th, 2008

Ferit Orhan Pamuk was born in 1952 in Istanbul into a large, prosperous middle-class family, of civil engineer builders of railroads and factories from grandfather to father and uncle. He attended the American Robert College prep school in Istanbul and studied architecture at the Istanbul Technical University, which he left after three years, and instead graduated from the Institute of Journalism at the University of Istanbul in 1976. He decided to become a full-time writer, but especially a novelist.

Pamuk lived to see the change in Turkey from the conservative Ottoman traditions, giving way to western lifestyle; an East vs West theme that occurs often in his books. In 1982 Pamuk married Aylin Turegen, a historian, and a daughter, Rüya, was born in 1991,to whom he dedicated My Name is Red. Aylin and Pamuk were divorced in 2001.

In 2005 a criminal case was opened against Pamuk, for “insulting Turkishness”, based on a complaint filed by an ultra-nationalist lawyer Kemal Kerinçsiz, after he mentioned in a Swiss newspaper, the genocide of one million Armenians and the killing of 30.000 Kurds towards the end of the Ottoman Empire era, between 1915 and 1917. Pamuk was forced to flee Istanbul temporarily in 2006 because of a hate campaign against him, and took a position as a visiting professor at Columbia Univercity in New York. The charges against him were dropped in January 2006. Pamuk was made an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently lives in his beloved Istanbul in the same building where he was raised, and has become one of Turkey’s most famous, and most read, novelists.

Pamuk is known in Turkey as a social commentator, although he considers himself primarily a fiction writer with no political views, but he believes in freedom of speech and thought. Pamuk hopes that novels can help people to understand each other’s unique history. He said: “Obviously we cannot hope to come to grips with matters this deep merely by reading newspapers and magazines or by watching television.”

Pamuk’s bibliography is long. He became internationally known with his third novel: The White Castle, published in Turkish in 1985 and translated into English in 1992. But the real break-through came with his two novels: My Name Is Red, published in Turkish in 1998, translated into English in 2001, and Snow, published in Turkish in 2002 and translated into English in 2004.

He won several literary prizes and awards. He also won the Nobel Prize for literature in 2006. My Name is Red has been translated into 24 languages. It won the French Prix Du Meilleur Livre Etranger, the Italian Grinzane Cavour and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.

My Name is Red is the story of Ottoman and Persian miniaturists and illustrators of the Ottoman court in the 16th century Istanbul, who were divided between the old and new, East and West tradition of painting,which lead to passion, violence, intrigues and murder; A killing by a fellow miniaturist out of art ideology conviction. After several narrations, the plot slowly unravels towards the end of the novel to identify the culprit of the two miniaturists, Elegant Effendi’s and Enishte Effendi’s murders.

The intensely heavy, involved subjects are divided into 59 chapters narrated by different voices: Human: Black, Shekure, Olive, Stork etc…Things: a tree,a coin. Animals: a dog,a horse. Unseen Spirits: a corpse, Death and Satan, Colour: crimson. The story thread is handed from one to the other voices, in a richly described, slow-paced novel. It’s fiction with a genuine historical background. Pamuk, throughout the novel, constantly and masterfully flows from fact to fiction. It’s a magical tale, reminiscent of The Thousand And One Nights, but with philosophical ideas about Art and the study of Islamic Illustration.

It took Pamuk six years to write My Name Is Red. He did intense research, which he said he thoroughly enjoyed. He was helped by well-preserved Ottoman records, and especially the records of the governor of Istanbul, which were well kept and published.

The first dramatic chapter of the book: “I am a corpse” sets the tone of one of the main themes of the story, the others being, religion,power, wedlock and the half-convincing romance between the two main characters, the non-charismatic Shekure, and the helplessly wandering Black,( the love story forms an integral part of the plot and the murder, and helps to break the density of the novel ). Also the very important and interesting extensive pedantic debates and views amongst the miniaturists, about how Art can be genuine and pure, the tie between God and the artist, and how the own style in Art, according to some master miniaturists, is wrong because the artist fails to paint the world as God sees it.

The very gifted miniaturists, like the Persian master Bihzad and the Ottoman master Osman and others, inflicted blindness upon themselves with a sharp needle for various reasons, in order to keep for ever in their memory the vision of God’s world, as Allah first saw it, freshly created. Or because they do not wish to be able to see anything after looking at the “Book of Kings”. Or to avoid being forced to fulfil orders received from the new masters of Herat to paint in a different style from the one they are accustomed to.

Art is noticeably the author’s subject of predilection. Pamuk who originally wanted to become a painter before deciding to dedicate his life to writing, is showing his artistic talent in his minute, colourful and vivid picture-like descriptions of Istanbul in late 16th century Ottoman era. The minutely detailed descriptions are made to look like a stroke of a paint brush. The same scenes are revisited by the writer in order to bring a new special effect.

Pamuk said: “Beginning at the age of six, I’ve always thought that I would be a painter. When I was a kid I used to copy the Ottoman miniature that I came across in books. Later, I was influenced by western painting and stopped painting when I was twenty when I began writing fiction.”

The “Red” in the title of the novel, to which Pamuk has dedicated a whole chapter, called “I am red”, evokes the colour red used in paintings and how apprentices applied it with their refined brushes to paper, and how it was also used to decorate walls and beautiful carpets. Red is also the colour of blood shed in battles. In fact, according to the author, red can be found everywhere.

Pamuk wrote: “My Name Is Red, is the novel that perplexes my mother: She always tells me that she cannot understand how I wrote it…There is nothing in any of my other novels that surprises her; she knows that I drew upon the stuff of my own life. But in My Name Is Red there is an aspect that she cannot connect with this son she knows so well, this son about whom she is certain that she knows everything…This must, in my view, be the greatest compliment any writer can hear: to hear from his mother that his books are wiser than he is…Because as I write these words at the age of 54 in April 2007, I know that my life has long since passed its midpoint, but, having written for thirty-two years now, I believe that I am at the midpoint of my career. I must have another thirty-two years in which to write more books, and to surprise my mother and other readers at least one more time.”