Walking the Wall

I’ve been on a sort of crash reading binge this last week, almost like I can feel the "required reading" mounting up in the next 14 weeks and I want to cram in all the "for fun" reading I can before I’m too busy to have time for it. Given that, I was thrilled to peek into our library’s little "for sale" room and find a brand new looking copy of Gregory Maguire’s book Wicked, which I had been wanting to read and unwilling to pay $14 for a paperback–at $.25, the deal was a day maker. I have to say that while it got off to a bit of a slow start, my enthusiasm was not let down by this book. I can’t say that I picked up on all the themes, especially all the political ones, and a second read is definitely in order down the road, but the major ones were enough for this first go round. The idea of questioning what was evil, and how the perspective of evil is very different depending on whose eyes you are looking out from was very well depicted. They say that history is written by the winners, so that necessarily, the account is always skewed, just as the Wizard of Oz was skewed to the Wizard’s perspective, and to Dorothy who simply blunders from one thing to the next without enough information to even have a view. This book, then, comes from a different look instead and it is a compelling one indeed–its touching on terrorism from the viewpoint of someone trying to protect a race being stripped of all inherent rights is particularly interesting in today’s climate.

There was another theme asking asking questions about what it means to be human, or more rather, what makes people different from each other, from animals, and in this word, from Animals (speaking animals) and how interconnected everything really is in the end–pointing out that in suppressing and destroying those that are different from ourselves, we become the monsters that we fear.

Two quotes that stood out for me without a lot of digesting and going back to look at all my bent bottom page corners that are little flags saying, "come back and think this over":

History crawls along on the peg legs of small individual lives and at the same time larger eternal forces converge (9).

There was much to hate in this world, and too much to love (228).

 As a side note, there was a good deal of reference to cannibalism and the metaphor of ingesting being tied with transformation and other things of that nature that we have been discussing in my Canibalism, Consumerism, and the Cultures of Cruelty literature class–I always find it wonderful how when you start to think about a certain subject that seems off the wall, it pops up all over the place, quite unexpectedly.