Ssadropout - Chubby Chibi

Is that a gray hair?

The Rent Collector

Survival for Ki Lim and Sang Ly is a daily battle at Stung Meanchey, the largest municipal waste dump in all of Cambodia. They make their...

I gave this book THREE STARS.

I mostly read novels, but I like to learn about people, places, and times that are foreign to me. I like to read books that let me peek through windows into other cultures while telling good tales. I've enjoyed Tony Hillerman's Navajo mysteries and Colin Cotterill's Dr. Siri books which take place in Laos after the Communists took over, for example. Both of those writers were outsiders to the cultures in their books, but I have been led to believe that they have some credibility. (I don't know why I can't think of books written from within cultures. It's embarrassing!)

Camron Wright is also an outsider to the Cambodian culture he portrays in The Rent Collector. He became familiar with this slice of Cambodian life through a documentary that his son made about people who live at the Stung Meanchey waste dump of Phnom Penh. They attempt to eke out a living trash picking, trying not to get burnt, cut, or stuck with syringes. It brought to mind a photography exhibit I saw many years ago. It showed people, mostly from Third World countries, doing horrifying jobs. I remember people- with so safety aids- scaling walls of massive quarries. I think that I remember diamond and other miners. Many of the workers were children. We all know that there are terrible working conditions, but sometimes a picture does speak a thousand words.

The Rent Collector is a good book. The prose is very readable. It weaves ideas about literary archetypes and themes into the story of Sang Li and her small family. (Of course, she is a literary archetype, herself.) By the way, Sang Li and her family are real people. Sang Li is likable. So is her husband Ki Lim. Not so nice is the rent collector Sopeap Sin, but you know there's a tragic story there that likely has to do with the Pol Pot regime.

However, a few things bothered me about the book. The time line seemed very compressed. Sang learned to write, read, and digest sophisticated material in a very short time. Another thing that disappointed me was the sense of place. I've mentioned the photography exhibit, and I searched online about Stung Meanchey. The author described it, including the ramshackle dwellings, accurately, but I never felt that I was there. I could see it but not feel it or smell it. I would have like to have had the book include more about the savagery of the Khmer Rouge. I realize that the author was not trying to write the kind of cultural window that I like. He was writing a tale using literary archetypes. He did that well enough, but I still missed the feeling of being immersed in a different place or time. I wanted the book to have both.

I did enjoy reading this book and am looking forward to attending a professional book review about it later this week. The things that bothered me about the book might not bother anyone else. It's worth checking out.

So... my place at 8:00?

I gave this book TWO STARS.

I’ve always been interested in Harley Quinn and Arkham Asylum, but their stories are spread out in so many different titles, that I couldn’t begin to suss them out. I’m most interested in how she went from Harleen Quinzel to Harley Quinn, and I have checked out the DC wikia. I thought it might be interesting to read the New 52 collections, but her adventures are not as interesting to me as her origins. This is Volume 1, and I also bought 2 and 3. Oh, well. The stories were just a bunch of craziness and not for me. A couple of them had many Yiddish words that I did not understand. (My Yiddish is practically nil, but it seems to me that there aren’t too many comic book readers that know that much more Yiddish than I do. It’s a dying language.) I probably should have bought Suicide Squad comics instead. I’m looking forward to seeing the movie.

Good luck. 

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