Readers & Writers: A must-read, a YA gem and ancient Egypt
Once in a while the gods of literature give us a cluster of books that are must-reads. That’s what we have today; an adult novel, another for young adults, and non-fiction about ancient Egypt’s best-known royal family.
“The Evening Hero” by Marie Myung-Ok Lee (Simon & Schuster, $28.99)
Dr. Yungman Kwak and his wife, Young-ae, live In the Iron Range town of Horse’s Breath, Minn., so named because the only way early settlers could tell if their horses were still alive in the cold was by checking to see if they were breathing. Yungman is an OB-GYN, a graduate of “the Harvard of Korea,” but his immigration status is iffy, so he takes a job among the Scandinavians.
Lee, who grew up in Hibbing, is a premiere Korean American writer and one of the handful of American journalists granted a visa to North Korea since the Korean War. She will discuss her book during a virtual event at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 9, in Friends of the St Paul Public Library’s Club Book reading series. (Go to thefriends.org)
“The Evening Hero” is a sometimes funny, sometimes wrenching homage to Korean culture’s deep respect for ancestors and the lasting impact of war. The story follows Kwak (Evening Hero in Korean), a man in his 70s who grapples with losing his job at the local hospital when it closes. His son, Einstein, is a physician always reaching for the next big thing in corporate-owned medicine, and failing.
Lee satirizes American health care when Einstein gets his dad a job vaccinating people at one of the boutique services owned by a giant for-profit company at the Mall of America. Instead of giving shots, though, Kwak ends up at Depilation Nation treatment room, removing women’s pubic hair. But the company collapses and he is again jobless. Meanwhile his wife, also a doctor, is caught up in her church activities. Young-ae and Youngman grew up in the same small village in Korea and the most tender parts of the story are Youngman’s memories of his wife as a young girl and strong, independent medical student.
The narrative moves between Kwak’s present life and his memories of living through what the West calls the Korean War, getting beaten up by his future wife’s criminal father for wanting to marry his daughter, and how he and his younger brother lived in poverty in Seoul during the war. Letters from his brother keep coming for years, but he never replies or shows them to anyone because he is ashamed of abandoning the younger brother who scrounged metal to help pay for Youngman’s medical education.
Hardest to read is the author’s depiction of the way Koreans saw American involvement in the war and what it did to that country and its people. The decision to split the country, made in haste and almost an after-thought, tore families apart.
Finally, through Doctors Without Borders, the Kwaks return to their village in what is now North Korea, although they have to pretend to be Chinese because Koreans who fled to capitalist America are scorned by the Great Leader.
This is a novel every American should read. Lee is a wonderful writer and her depiction of a man who is caught between his pride at being a doctor loved by his American patients, and his sorrow at not being able to properly honor his ancestors, is eye-opening in these days of growing hostility to new Americans who are not white.
“The Rat Queen” by Pete Hautman (Candlewick Press, $18.99)
Pete Hautman says he thought he was writing a horror story when he began his new middle-grade novel, “but the characters didn’t want to go that way.” So he veered into what became a modern-day fairy tale with a message — and rats, lots and lots of rats.
When Annie is 10 years old, her father tells her the family’s secret. If she writes down bad things she’s done, she should stuff the paper down a hole in the floor and the “sin eater” will take away her guilt. But what happens when someone no longer has a moral compass because they aren’t sorry for what they did?
Annie has other worries too. She’s stopped growing. She’s homeschooled and longs to be with the other kids in a classroom. Her dad travels frequently to his birthplace, Litvania, a small country that some people say doesn’t exist. He comes home exhausted but after an hour in his study, he is bright-eyed and energetic.
When a neighbor is bitten by a rat, Annie is sure she saw hundreds of the creatures running from the sewers, but her father refuses to believe her. It isn’t until she gets to Litvania herself that she begins to understand the sin eater, the rats, and what they have to do with her family.
Hautman, winner of a National Book Award, wrote all the fairytales in this book except for two. Among the original ones is Matas and the Rat Queen, which describes the monarch: “This was a rat the size of a cat, and she was wearing a golden crown. Instead of front paws, she had clever little hands, and her front teeth were as sparkly and golden as her crown. The boy knew immediately that he was face-to-face with the Queen of the Rats.”
Half magical, half in the real world, “The Rat Queen” keeps the reader on edge because there’s a feeling that something scary is going to happen on the next page.
”Egypt’s Golden Couple: When Akhenaten and Nefertiti Were Gods on Earth” by John Darnell and Colleen Darnell (St. Martin’s Press, $29.99)
“…as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold — everywhere the glint of gold. For the moment — an eternity it must have seemed to the others standing by — I was struck dumb with amazement, and when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand the suspense any longer, inquired anxiously, ‘Can you see anything?’ it was all I could do to get out the words, ‘Yes, wonderful things’.”
Those words were written by Howard Carter after he first peeked through a hole in the wall of the tomb of the Egyptian king Tutankhamun. It was Nov. 4, 1922, when archaeologist Carter sent a telegram to his benefactor, the fifth Lord Carnarvon in England, announcing he had discovered the resting place of the 18th dynasty ruler after almost 15 years of searching.
“King Tut” has fascinated us since then, although there wasn’t much to say about the king other than that splendid things were heaped around his untouched burial place. This young man, only eight years old when he ascended the throne, died when he was 19. His singular accomplishment was restoring the old gods after his parents, Akhenaten and Nefertiti, briefly established a new religion. In a country where multiple gods had been worshipped for centuries, Akhenaten recognized only one deity — the sun god Aten.
Their book couldn’t be more timely. Highclere Castle, ancestral home of the Carnarvons, is where Downton Abbey is filmed and where there is a niche of Egyptian antiquities. Curiosity about Akhenaten was heightened recently with the Metropolitan Opera’s revival of “Akhenaten” by Philip Glass.
John Darnell and Colleen Darnell, married archeologists, bring to life Akhenaten and Nefertiti, who changed Egyptian art and merged art and religion in a new way. The Arman family (named for the Arab village near the site of Akhenaten’s royal city), is a tangle of relationships. The Darnells take care to make sense of this extended family who lived more than three thousand years ago. Much of the recent scientific findings have come from what is called tomb KV55, in which a jumble of mummies were discovered that include Akhenaten and his parents. Their funerary objects show that some were meant for people who were not buried with them. Some of the royal mummies were also disturbed in antiquity and moved to other locations.
What has survived is Akhenaten’s beautiful Hymn to the Sun, reprinted here in full.
Illustrated with beautiful paintings and reliefs from tombs, this book includes a cast of characters, helpful maps and a chronology of the 18th dynasty, which began in 1550 BCE.
Some have called Akhenaten the world’s first monotheist (he wasn’t, exactly). They speculated about whether he was deformed, with his wide thighs and slightly distended stomach (the authors say he wasn’t). His successors, including his son Tutankhamun, considered him a heretic for turning his back on the old gods. His name, as well as Nefertiti’s and anyone associated with them, were hacked from monuments, public places and reopened tombs.
The Darnells put all this history into perspective, humanizing people who have been dead for so many centuries. They stress the loving relationships within the Amarna family, with a new kind of art that showed the royal couple holding hands and playing with their children under the rays of the divine solar disc.
The family’s story begins with the reign of Amunhotep II and powerful Queen Tiye, Akhenaten’s parents. The book tells of how Akhenaten became the sun god, the origins of his religious beliefs, and the brief period after the death of Tutankhamun when there were three pharaohs including the mysterious Neferneferuaten, a female king who was likely the princess Meritaten, Nefertiti and Akhenaten’s daughter, or Nefertiti herself.
Jon Darnell is a professor of Egyptology at Yale University. Colleen Darnell teaches at the University of Hartford and Naugatuck Valley Community College and has curated major museum exhibits.
Anyone devoted to ancient Egypt must have this book, which gives us the clearest picture yet of this powerful family that might not have become known if Howard Carter hadn’t found the resting place of the frail young pharaoh.
