Short Reviews: THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE; THE MAN WHO COULD MOVE CLOUDS

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Sparks

Classic, Audiobook, 3 hr. 59 min., 1961.

It is the 1930s in Edinburgh. Miss Jean Brodie is a teacher at an all-girls school. From among her students she selects six ten-year-old girls for her special mentorship. These girls become known as the Brodie set. Miss Brodie makes sure that these girls receive an education in the original sense of the Latin verb educere, "to lead out". In addition gives her students lessons about her personal love life and travels, promoting art history, classical studies, and fascism. As the girls age they remain loyal to Miss Brodie even when the head mistress seeks them out to find out what is going on. Eventually one of the girls does snitch on Miss Brodie, telling the head mistress about how she admires fascism. Miss Brodie loses her job and never knows which girl turned on her.

It was my idea that we read a classic for our book club. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie seemed like a good choice because it was named as on the top 100 novels by Time Magazine and was identified as the 76th best novel of the 20th Century by Modern Library. But probably more importantly, the novel is short, only 160 pages. We were busy selecting really long books for other months, so a short one sounded really good. The group is made up of mostly retired high school teachers. I'm guessing that they, like me, will find Miss Jean Brodie's teaching and manipulation techniques as highly offensive. It is bad enough that she played favorites with some students but the way she indoctrinated her charges was unconscionable. 

I wondered, even as I was reading the book, why this book is so highly regarded. I looked around online and this was the reply: "The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie is worth reading because it subverts the 'inspirational teacher' trope. Muriel Spark’s 1961 novella is a brilliant, unsettling study of manipulation, power dynamics, and the dangers of unexamined ideological devotion" (Stargazer Online). Well, now I see that this book could be instructive for devoted followers of certain politicians today and their "unexamined ideological devotion." Ahem. 

My rating: 3 stars.

________________________________________________________________________

The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras

Nonfiction. audiobook, 11 hrs 6 min., 2022.

Ingrid Rojas Contreras' Columbian grandfather was a curandero, a community healer gifted with what the family called "the secrets": the power to talk to the dead, tell the future, treat the sick, and move the clouds. And as the first woman to inherit "the secrets," Rojas Contreras' mother was just as powerful. Mami delighted in her ability to appear in two places at once, and she could cast out even the most persistent spirits with nothing more than a glass of water. When Mami was a little girl she came into her power after she had a head injury which caused her to have amnesia for 8 months. This legacy had always felt like it belonged to her mother and grandfather, until, while living in the U.S. in her twenties, Rojas Contreras suffered a head injury that left her with amnesia for about eight weeks. She now understood what it was like to live in a third dimension.

In The Man Who Could Move Clouds Rojas Contreras traces her lineage back to her Indigenous and Spanish roots, uncovering the violent and rigid colonial narrative that would eventually break her mestizo family into two camps: those who believe "the secrets" are a gift, and those who are convinced they are a curse. Interweaving her family stories with the history of her Columbian homeland, the author helps the reader to understand that there are different types of truth. Just because we don't understand something doesn't keep it from being true.

The Man Who Could Move Clouds was another book club selection, this one for my other book group. We met to discuss the book this week and had a fairly awkward discussion about all the incredulous situations we learned about in this book. I reported how I kept thinking that the book was a fictional novel written in the Latin American magical realism style, then I would have to remind myself it was nonfiction. All the ghosts, magic, curses just seemed too incredible to be true to my Western way of thinking. Those of us who made it to the end of the book found the last two chapters to be especially helpful to our thinking about other cultures which have different beliefs and practices than our own. Rojas Contreras said: "You call it magical realism to us it is just realism."

My rating: 4 stars.

-Anne