Goodbye Harper Lee

2016 seems fraught with celebrity deaths. This was followed earlier with the news that Harper Lee had passed away at the age of 89. She lived to a good age, nevertheless, the news was sad.

Personally, To Kill a Mockingbird was one of the few books that I would claim truly helped defined my life. I read it was I was a teenager, when it was assigned to us - not part of the curriculum, but extra reading to help encourage and improve our reading habit. I was one of the few amongst my friends who finished the book, and loved it - and went on to tell everyone who had not read it the synopsis. The book resonated with my sense of what's important in life, back when I was just a teenager, and even now: kindness, courage, justice and most of all - doing the right thing even if everything and everyone seems to be against you. Who can forget this quote from Atticus Finch to his children:

"I wanted you to see what real courage is, instead of getting the idea that courage is a man with a gun in his hand. It's when you know you're licked before you begin, but you begin anyway and see it through no matter what

I did not pick up the supposed sequel - partly because of the controversy that it might not have been the author's wish to publish the book in the first place. There were also people who read it and claimed it was somewhat disappointing; I decided I wasn't going to ruin my memory of the original by reading the Go Set a Watchman. Sometimes, we need to know when to step back and walk away.

Someone once said to me that she wasn't a great writer because she only wrote one book in her entire life. I replied, "But most writers never managed to write one great book; she wrote only one, but it was so great."

Charles J. Shields, who wrote the biography on Harper Lee, Mockingbird, said this of Lee: "She just wanted to be comfortable in her own skin". As a tom-boy growing up, I understood this desire to just be left alone to be my own person, to be comfortable in my own skin. It was one of those revelations that warmed me to the author beyond the book.

Rest in Peace, Miss Lee, and thank you for that one great book.

Sir Terry Pratchett is dead.

Author Terry Pratchett has passed away. [BBC obituary here] His books gave me great joy, his writings showed me how great insight and wisdom must be slathered with copious humour to make them go down easier - sort of like lubricant down an inconvenient orifice. There were so many characters in Discworld that I love, but of them all, I adored Granny Weatherwax and Tiffany Aching - two characters so wise to the world, and so they suffer the world even as they continue to work for everyone around them, knowing that they do not know better.

Pratchett was wiser than a lot of us, yet I believe he never stopped wanting us to be better. I will miss him.

He was so much cooler than your usual knight. His coat of arms had an ankh on it, and he threw in meteorite rocks to forge his own sword when he was knight. Another fun fact: His family motto on his coat of arms was Noli Timere Messorem (Don't fear the Reaper).

You have nothing to fear from the Reaper, Sir Terry.

[source]

RIP Jose Saramago

Obituaries at The Guardian & The New York Times

OBITUARY | Elaine Dundy Passes

Oh. Elaine Dundy, author of The Dud Avocado (half-read on my TBR stack), passed away on 1st May 2008.

A Different Stripe has a write-up here.

The Passing of a Grand Dame

Ah Meng is dead. It even made front page news in the local papers. How cool is that?

As long as I could remember, we always had Ah Meng. Ah Meng, the grand dame of orangutans, has for many years until her retirement, been the mascot and unofficial icon of the Singapore Zoo -- and by that extension, of Singapore. In some odd way, she was Family.

I vote we scrap that awful Merlion and adopt the Orangutan as our national symbol instead. An orangutan is way cooler than a hybrid creature vomiting water.

Ook.

[Full article here.]

Yes, I know my posts are getting weird. It's that kind of day.

Addendum:

Stu mentioned the UK Sunday Telegraph ran an obituary on Ah Meng. It's true!

They wrote this at the end:

Ah Meng died on Friday. The cause of death is thought to be old age. She was said to have been nearly 95 in human terms.

She had five children and is also survived by her partner Charlie and six grandchildren.

Her first companion Rodney died in 1987 from diabetes complications. Her second relationship, with Pusung, ended when he was sent to an Adelaide zoo for a breeding programme in 2000.

Ah Meng survived two husbands? Good for you, girl!

I like how the obituary reads like it could have been written for an actual human.

That's respect for primates, man!

Elizabeth Hardwick Passes

Elizabeth Hardwick -- critic, essayist, fiction writer and co-founder of The New York Review of Books, died on Sunday in Manhattan. She was 91.

From the The New York Times:

In a 1984 interview in The Paris Review, the writer Darryl Pinckney asked her about her feelings about getting older. “Its only value is that it spares you the opposite, not growing older,” she said, adding: “Oh, the dear grave. I like what Gottfried Benn wrote, something like, ‘May I die in the spring when the ground is soft and easy to plough.’

Her titles published by NYRB Classics are Sleepless Nights -- a semi-autobiographical novel signified by "love and alcohol and the clothes on the floor" and her collection of essays on women and literature -- Seduction and Betrayal.

I read Sleepless Nights earlier this year and it was a book I find difficult to write about. What do you say about a book that is inherent diffused in its structure? It defies the conventional narrative of coherence and meaning, more like a journal of a life lived in moments and memories -- but haven't I read enough Proust to realise that our lives are lived in intermittent memories?

I was -- dare I say, impressed -- by Sleep Nights with its elusive, smoke-like narratives. I wish now to read Seduction and Betrayal. Why does the death of the author drive us to read their books more?