Richard Rodriguez Days of Obligation (1992)
I feel I should probably come clean and admit to buying this one purely because of the Mexican thing, yet at the same time I'm not sure why I feel this should constitute a confession. My experience of every book I've ever bought from a book shop has begun with my taking it from the shelf and thinking, oh - this looks interesting, so I don't know why this should be any different, aside from the absence of either spacecraft or robots on the cover. I suppose it could be that it was purchased with some awareness of my aiming high, at least at the time, at least by some definition. It seemed like a slightly pretentious purchase on my part.
On the other hand, only minutes ago I stumbled across my wife's cousin's Goodreads page and found myself drawn in, intrigued by the peculiar fact of her having given Brave New World just one star. The woman is in her late twenties and among the titles to which she has awarded five stars we find Clifford the Big Red Dog, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed. Maybe I shouldn't feel so awkward where my choices seem to expose a degree of vanity or pretence.
That said, it's probably significant that I remember this book as being so great that I lent it to my mother, probably thinking, it be just like one of they reet fancy books what youm read by that Jane Eyre or someone; and also that I remember Days of Obligation as a travelogue wherein Rodriguez has arguments with his Mexican father, something to do with a television production in which he's involved; and significant because this is a completely different book to the thing I remember reading, so I assume it actually did go way over my head.
Days of Obligation is a series of essays wherein the author's father is, at best, a peripheral and mostly symbolic presence, and I have no fucking clue where the television production came from. On the other hand, it is at least as good as I remember - despite the unfamiliar content - and possibly better. Rodriguez maps his place in the world as what might now be termed a psychogeographical exercise via the history of Catholicism, ethnicity, San Francisco, Sacramento, Mexico, California, and other places drawn into the equation along innumerable strands of cause and effect. Going back to Goodreads, den of barely literate shitehawks that it is, I noticed one member of that same virtual parish lambasting Days of Obligation as the work of a man unable to complete a sentence - a misunderstanding presumably arisen from Rodriguez tackling subjects for which there were never black or white, yes or no answers; and so his analysis more resembles a landscape painting in terms of discussion and conclusion, which is what makes this such a tremendous book. It's not even that these subjects aren't otherwise discussed so much as that Rodriguez tackles issues of racial identity and psychology which no-one quite knows how to discuss, presenting particular insight, for one example, on Mexico's peculiar relationship with itself, where the native is the celebrated source of all major cultural icons in firm opposition to the Spanish, while the indigenous remains excluded from a daily life which somehow aspires to what it perceives as European, or at least white American, sophistication. His analysis of the infrastructure of San Francisco as an expression of its gay populace is likewise astonishing, perceptive, and even inspiring.
Having re-read this for what feels as though it may actually have been the first time, I still don't know quite where it fits in the broad span of my reading habits, but I actually feel a little more intelligent than I did this time last week, which I guess is what a decent book will do.
I feel I should probably come clean and admit to buying this one purely because of the Mexican thing, yet at the same time I'm not sure why I feel this should constitute a confession. My experience of every book I've ever bought from a book shop has begun with my taking it from the shelf and thinking, oh - this looks interesting, so I don't know why this should be any different, aside from the absence of either spacecraft or robots on the cover. I suppose it could be that it was purchased with some awareness of my aiming high, at least at the time, at least by some definition. It seemed like a slightly pretentious purchase on my part.
On the other hand, only minutes ago I stumbled across my wife's cousin's Goodreads page and found myself drawn in, intrigued by the peculiar fact of her having given Brave New World just one star. The woman is in her late twenties and among the titles to which she has awarded five stars we find Clifford the Big Red Dog, If You Give a Mouse a Cookie and Five Little Monkeys Jumping on the Bed. Maybe I shouldn't feel so awkward where my choices seem to expose a degree of vanity or pretence.
That said, it's probably significant that I remember this book as being so great that I lent it to my mother, probably thinking, it be just like one of they reet fancy books what youm read by that Jane Eyre or someone; and also that I remember Days of Obligation as a travelogue wherein Rodriguez has arguments with his Mexican father, something to do with a television production in which he's involved; and significant because this is a completely different book to the thing I remember reading, so I assume it actually did go way over my head.
Days of Obligation is a series of essays wherein the author's father is, at best, a peripheral and mostly symbolic presence, and I have no fucking clue where the television production came from. On the other hand, it is at least as good as I remember - despite the unfamiliar content - and possibly better. Rodriguez maps his place in the world as what might now be termed a psychogeographical exercise via the history of Catholicism, ethnicity, San Francisco, Sacramento, Mexico, California, and other places drawn into the equation along innumerable strands of cause and effect. Going back to Goodreads, den of barely literate shitehawks that it is, I noticed one member of that same virtual parish lambasting Days of Obligation as the work of a man unable to complete a sentence - a misunderstanding presumably arisen from Rodriguez tackling subjects for which there were never black or white, yes or no answers; and so his analysis more resembles a landscape painting in terms of discussion and conclusion, which is what makes this such a tremendous book. It's not even that these subjects aren't otherwise discussed so much as that Rodriguez tackles issues of racial identity and psychology which no-one quite knows how to discuss, presenting particular insight, for one example, on Mexico's peculiar relationship with itself, where the native is the celebrated source of all major cultural icons in firm opposition to the Spanish, while the indigenous remains excluded from a daily life which somehow aspires to what it perceives as European, or at least white American, sophistication. His analysis of the infrastructure of San Francisco as an expression of its gay populace is likewise astonishing, perceptive, and even inspiring.
Having re-read this for what feels as though it may actually have been the first time, I still don't know quite where it fits in the broad span of my reading habits, but I actually feel a little more intelligent than I did this time last week, which I guess is what a decent book will do.
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