Headline Jan 22, 2018/ ''' THE BURNING GIRLS '''

''' THE BURNING GIRLS '''

*ZAINAB! -YES, STUDENT ZAINAB'S* death, was like a dedicated jugular body slam to The World Students Society.....

And to those utter tragedies of hundreds of angelic Zainabs like her, the entire world over, who have  had their lives cut short, every year, year after year, in all manners as Zainab's-  

It is to their honor and memory that this Head Line Operational Research is dedicated by The Students on the World Students Society. 

We all mourn beyond words.

BUT, but, no matter how much and how deeply we feel these daily tragedies, what we would truly need for the moment is a balanced head, a calm and composed reasoning to begin the long arduous task of conceptualizing a model Global Policy.

And for that I turn to the great Students of Malaysia, Singapore, Philippines, Cambodia, Bangladesh, Australia, New Zealand, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Laos, Brunei, and  request-

CEO Mr. Wadud Mughal of- ''Better World Networks'', Singapore to begin the preconceptual work. The invitation to inaugurate should go the Heroic President of Philippines.

AT THIS very beautiful Silicon Valley, just about the state-of-the-art, lovingly called CYBER-JAYA  work must begin right in the public domain for the world to watch, -in very true earnest.  

President Duterte of Philippines should honor the e-mail inauguration. Better World Networks should make a direct request to the President.

  

The World Students Society will put everything up on: www.worldstudentsociety.org.

The final approval of the very final draft, is the honor and prerogative of the students of the elected members of The World Students Society. 

Just as much and so, is also the execution.

*May Almighty God bless our efforts with success and May the final step be better than the first one*.

The fat gods of fortune have smiled this century on novels with ''girl'' in their titles. Claire Messud's  fifth novel called, The Burning Girl''.

Author Messud, whose previous novels include ''The Emperor's Children'' [2006] and ''The Woman Upstairs'' [2013] is an especially intelligent and intuitive writer. Her books are events, and her elocution does not stammer.

YET, there's a void in ''The Burning Girl''. That void is the absent sound of Messud's sophisticated unfettered voice.

THIS NOVEL is small and soft, pensive and diffident. It sneaks in and out again, as if on cat's paws. In composing it from the perspective of a 12-year-old girl, the author underwrites so thoroughly that she mostly blots out her own sun.

Her virtuosity is in retreat, We turn our retinas on a self-eclipse.

Capturing the idiomatic contours of an adolescent voice, in a serious novel, is notoriously difficult business.

When an author gets it right, as did Mark Twain in ''Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,'' Margaret Atwood in sections of  ''Cat's Eye'' or Mark Haddon in ''The Curious Incident of the Dog Night-Time,'' the payoff is outsize. These books are rarities.

Messud's narrator is Julia, reserved and sensitive. Her best friend since nursery school is Cassie, who burns and hot and has a ''Georgia Jagger gap between her front teeth.

''You don't have to be an admirer of Les Blank's fond documentary ''Gap-Toothed Women'' to know that the Gap marks Cassie as an unruly spirit.

This pairing is a familiar one. To put in the terms of ''My So-Called Life.'' that magnificent television series, Julia is Angela Chase [Claire Danes], who emits a calm glow, while Cassie is Rayanne Graff [A,J,Langer], the mischievous one, stewing at home with her single mother.

The contrasting status cues pile up, Julia mother reads The New Yorker, Cassie's Mother drives a burgundy Civic to her Bible group. Julia will someday go to a good college; Cassie will remain in the fictional small town, Royston, Mass, where both were born.

YET, these girls are ''secret sisters''. they are umbilically linked at and inseparable.'' They have great adventures, which include regularly breaking into an abandoned asylum in woods outside of town.

Out there they make up stories and play roles. Julia calls this period ''the most unlikely, vivid experience of our lives up till then, and like a dream, miraculously, that Cassie and I dreamed in tandem, touching, hearing, and feeling together.  

Julia and Cassie take each other seriously, in a manner that reminds me of a striking observation in Atwood's ''Cat's Eye'' :

''Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life-sized.''

Cassie's life begins to unravel when her mother allows a strange and suspiciously devout man to move into their house.

Cassie is increasingly criticized and grounded, her short skirts confiscated, her browser history scanned. her kind first boyfriend chased away. She begins too runaway from home.

Worse, from Julia's perspective, she begins to find new friends, Cassie was the ivy, Julia the oak : the fixed point. The ivy decides it can prosper elsewhere.

Messud writes with insights about how female friendships dissolve, and about things like how terrifying certain stray glimpses of adult life can be.

But ''The Burning Girl'' is an oddly distant novel its tone is formal and ultimately unconvincing. ''I too was newly aware of the aloneness of each of us,'' Julia says about her relationship with her mother, ''of how little of ourselves and lives shared, even as we shared rooms and hours and conversation.''

It's instructive to compare ''The Burning Girl'' with Messud's potent second novel. ''The last Life''  [1999] which was also about a teenage girl and a fractured friendship.

In that earlier novel, Messud filtered the story through her protagonist's adult consciousness. This allowed complicating iron to seep in, alongside a richness of observation.

There were lines you could prick your fingers on.

About the narrator's mother, for example, we read in that earlier novel: Something in her face, in the shape of her head or the way that she held it, gave away her foreignness, the way a-

Transvestite is betrayed by her wrists or the line of her back.'' It's impossible to imagine such a sentence in ''The Burning Girl.''

IF you have not read ''The Last Life,''  I recommend it.

In ''The Burning Girl,'' the mental atmosphere is cautious and limited. ''Some subtlety,'' Iris Murdoch wrote in a letter, ''can be so voluptuous.'' Some subtlety is merely quiet and subdued.

This is the first of Messud's novels, that didn't, on a regular basis, flood my veins with pleasure.

It's the first Messud novel I might have, if I could have, put down before the end. It's a common book by an uncommon writer.

With most loving and respectful dedication from the whole world to the founders of the World Students Society : 

Merium, Rabo, Haleema, Saima, Sameen, Sarah, Seher, Eman, Armeen, Aqsa, Paras, Sorat, Dee, Lakshmi/India, Dantini/Malaysia, Zainab, Fatamah/Bangladesh, Tooba, Shahbano-

Hussain, Shahzaib, Shahrayar,  Bilal, Salar, Ali, Ehsen, Faraz, Umer, Wajahat, Umair, Mustafa,  Haider, Jordan, Vishnu/India, Toby/China, Reza/Canada, Zaeem, Danyial/ UK , Ghazi, and 

Little Darling Angels : Maynah, Maria, Harem, Hannyia, Ibrahim, and Merium.    

With respectful dedication to All the Great Leaders of the World, Grandparents, Parents, Students, Professors and Teachers. See Ya all *register* on !WOW! -the World Students Society, and Twitter-!E-WOW! -the  Ecosystem 2011 :

''' Best Friends '''

Good Night and God Bless

SAM Daily Times - the Voice of the Voiceless