If you're sick of animals being tortured, read about people getting tortured, and fantasize about it happening to the people it should.

However, this book is about how learning to love the torturers, Buddha's and Jesus's teachings, and how the helpless and abused can help each other in small ways. ( )

My heart is still heavy after reading this deeply disturbing story. It opened my eyes to the perils that political prisoners face. It enlightened me to the conditions in Burma and made me grateful for the freedoms I do have. The characters of Teza and the young boy will stay with the reader for a long time. ( )

Originally posted at: http://olduvaireads.wordpress.com/2013/08/30/the-lizard-cage-by-karen-connelly/

Some blog posts flow more easily than others. This one has been so difficult, full of starts and stops, delete delete delete.

I guess I’m just searching for that perfect way to tell you about this book. So that I can convince you to read it. I’m not doing a very good job now am I?

Maybe I should just let the book speak for itself.

“The singer is lying on the floor, a gray blanket pulled up around his chest. With slightly narrowed eyes, he stares at the ceiling. A single lizard is up there, clinging to the plaster.”

And so we meet Teza. He is a political prisoner in the “teak coffin” or solitary of a prison outside Rangoon. There is an air vent, high up on one wall, too high for Teza to look out. The rest is brick wall and the door. He has been in prison for nearly seven years, and he has thirteen more to go.

“From solitary, the whole cage is a foreign country to him. He lives on the very edge of it, straining to hear voices.”

Teza is forbidden to write or receive letters. And his only regular contact is Sein Yun the palm-reader, a fellow prisoner who works in the prison serving food and emptying latrine pails to reduce his sentence. Teza has nothing to do but stare at the walls and wait for his meals. He watches the ants that meander around his cell, watches the copper-pot spider in its web near the vent, and talks to himself. And there is also his “cheroot ceremony”.

He hoards his cheroots, not to smoke them, but to unwrap them and read the fragments from the newspapers that they are made from. It is an image that stays with me long after I’ve finished the book. This desperation for words, for any hint of news from the outside world, even when these are words that don’t even make a sentence. He thinks of his mother who would read these news articles. For him these words, these fragments are so precious.

“The words are runes. Each piece of paper has a story, whether a sad romance from the literary section or a boring government announcement or a funeral notice. Whispering under his breath, Teza fills in the missing text.”

“In his mind, the cheroot-makers are beautiful, goodhearted, with pale swirls of thanakha paste smeared, powderlike, on their cheeks. If they knew they were making cheroots for him, they would find a way to put Dostoyevsky into the filter, The Brothers Karamazov, Tolstoy’s War and Peace, a great time by Pablo Neruda, and Gone with the Wind, a book he’s wanted to read ever since he saw a photograph if Vivien Leigh in an ancient Time magazine. They would fill their cheroots with popular Burmese novels and bowls of curry. They would send wreaths of the sweetest jasmine to him, sticks of incense and squares of gold foil for worship. They are fine young women. Teza ceases to be angry with the blank newsprint. He thinks of girls’ hands, working.”

Teza is in prison because of his songs of freedom, songs of protest that have echoed throughout Burma, songs written by a 25-year-old university student who could not comprehend what twenty years in solitary meant.

Though it is illegal to publish Teza’s name, he remains the most celebrated singer in Burma. In secret. The Press Scrutiny Board censors even oblique references to music or art, or anything at all, if it believes the allusion is connected to Teza. Chit Naing suspects that this prohibition just makes the singer more famous. It’s the same with Daw Suu Kyi: there’s a nationwide ban on her name too, but rather than make people forget about her, the SLORC has turned her into a legend.”

As if solitary were not enough, Teza is tormented by junior jailer Handsome who tortures him, teases him, and seems to take the utmost pleasure in doing so.

Tess’s previous jailer Chit Naing had been friendlier, and even visits him. Teza’s other friend is Little Brother, a 12-year-old orphan who has grown up inside the prison walls. He works in the cage for food and cheroots, and catches rats to sell to the prisoners. While he isn’t a prisoner, he has never really experienced life outside the cage before and is honestly terrified of the big wide world and all its uncertainties awaiting him.

“The boy can’t forget and tries not to remember his own story. Not-forgetting not-remembering is the best way to live in the cage.”

The two of them are thrown together when the most contraband of items – a pen – goes missing.

Although most of the story takes place within the walls of the cage, Connelly’s novel is so vivid and evocative, resonating with the sounds and smells of Burma, through Teza’s memories and the daily motions of this harsh prison life.

The Lizard Cage was such a moving, compelling read. It is serious and intense (sometimes too intense – I was clenching my fists when Teza was brutally beaten up) but it has such wonderful sweet moments. It is a reminder that our freedom (to walk around, to read, to eat whatever we’d like, to sing and listen to music, to believe…) is precious. ( )

An amazing, violent, painful, gorgeous, hopeful book that ranks among the very best. I was immersed completely, at times overcome with pain, sadness, horror, fury - I was grateful every time I left the pages and could return to my life of comfort, yet continued to compulsively pick the book up again a few hours later.

Teza, a Buddhist singer of political truth, serving a 20 year sentence in isolation in a horrific prison in Burma, is a most courageous, strong and loving being - he will forever remain in my heart. The young orphan boy who lived at the prison was also a most exceptional character. I feel changed by this book in so many ways - seeing through the eyes of the author and the people who come to life on her pages has been an honor. I would probably never have found this book and chosen to read it had it not been for LibraryThing and the high ratings given by many of those who share my taste in books. ( )

Beautiful, haunting book about the Burmese people and their continued struggle with the dictatorship in control of their beloved country. Almost all of the story takes place in a Burmese prison where life is almost intolerable for the political prisoners, namely Teza, the singer. He is brutalized and beaten but his embrace of Buddhism and his meditations calm and ultimately "free" him. Meanwhile he coordinates an escape for the boy who has grown up in the prison.
One of the passages that struck me most is a paragraph following the boy's encounter with the pedophile cook (the boy is distraught and crying) --
"They are wrong. The boy isn't calming down. He's hyperventilating. There are words in every tongue for grief fear terror broken but none so eloquent, so precise as this, the sound of a child who cannot breathe for weeping. And there is no cowardice so profound as the adult's who cannot bear to hear it."
Awesome book. Read it. ( )