The Twilight Zone (2021) by Nona Fernández

Book Review

The Twilight Zone (2021)

by Nona Fernández

    The Twilight Zone, written by Chilean author Nona Fernandez, is a finalist for this years National Book Award for Translated Fiction.  Fernandez is one of two Chilean authors on National Book Award shortlist, the other being Benjamin Labutut, nominated for When We Cease to Understand the World.  Unlike Labutut's book, The Twilight Zone is actually about Chile, specifically the aftermath of the post-Allende anti-Communist dictatorship, which paired mid 20th century Fascist style police-state repression against Leftists with a thorough implementation  of international-trade friendly neo-liberal economics as advance by University of Chicago Professor Milton Friedman and his acolytes. 

    Where does all that leave Fernandez? Her book is squarely in the post-reconciliation genre of recovery literature that finds kinship with 2015 Nobel Winner Svetlana Alexivech.  Fernandez is, after all, free to publish The Twilight Zone inside Chile, something that couldn't be said for many Spanish language writers in the 20th and 21st century. Chile is also an important enough literary market to get her a translation deal in the United States, where Graywolf Press, the well-regard indie, put the translation out. 

  There is great power in Fernandez's musings about the vagaries of vile human rights abuses and the consequences (or lack thereof) to those who perpetrate them.  The focus of this book is a member of the Chilean police who comes forward about the abuses committed by the Government against his people.  The Twilight Zone consists of the narrator coming to terms this man's existence and his status as a valued witness.  

    It's funny- I can't think of any Nazi's who turned "state's evidence" in the Nuremberg trials, although I suppose there must have been engagement with the non-Nazi parts of the German military.  The whole institutionalization of post-atrocity "forgiveness" possesses a macabre quality, which, I think is the point of calling the book The Twilight Zone.  It strikes me that this could very much be a winner of the National Book Award for Translated Fiction this year.

The World Gives Way (2021) by Marissa Levien

Book Review

The World Gives Way (2021)

by Marissa Levien

   This book caught my eye because it is a well-reviewed (NYT) work of genre fiction (science fiction) by a woman.  Added bonus, it has literary fiction cross-over potential.  And it was available from the library as an Audiobook with no wait, so, slam dunk for me.  The World Gives Way takes place on a cosmos crossing Generation Ship (second mention of this concept in two days on this blog, see Cloud Cuckoo Land for the other.)  Levien's Generation Ship is a luxe model, that sounds more like a cross between Las Vegas and Disneyland than the grim, bare bones structure depicted in Cloud Cuckoo Land.   Populated in equal parts by wealthy patrons who bought their way on and permanently indentured servants who have traded their freedom and the freedom of their children (and their children's children) for a ticket off the dying Earth,  The World of The World Gives Way is part post-scarcity economy part Handmaiden's Tale.

  Myrra, an indentured servant working as a nanny for a wealthy power couple, splits protagonist duties with Tobias, the child of two paid passengers who turned to life of crime, now working as a police investigator.  When Myrra's employers turn up dead and Myrra goes on the run, Tobias fears the worst, etc.  The hook is that the reason Myrra's employers commit suicide is because they know that the ship has suffered a hull breach and is in imminent danger of implosion.  Escape is impossible.

  That's the set up.  I liked parts of The World Gives Way, and other portions I found tedious, but there is no denying the inventiveness of the scenario, and Levien is an above-average writer, more like a writer of literary fiction than a genre hack.

Zorrie (2021) by Laird Hunt

Book Review

Zorrie (2021)

by Laird Hunt

   The 2021 National Book Award finalist designation for Zorrie by Laird Hunt has the feeling of a career achievement nod, Hunt being the author of six previous novels, most on a small press.  Zorrie was published by Bloomsbury, firmly placing him in the big leagues of marketing attention. Perhaps that has something to do with the National Book Award achievement. I'm not sure how else to explain the recognition for Zorrie, a Alice Munro-like portrait of the life of a woman who is born, lives and dies in a  part of rural Indiana.  She marries, does not have children, her husband dies in World War II and then she stays single for the rest of her life. 

    Of course, there is something extremely impressive about managing to capture an entire life in 128 pages.  It is hardly a life filled with incident, but isn't that the point? This is an excellent piece of domestic fiction, written about the American Midwest, about the life of a character who is underrepresented in the literature of that time and place.

Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021) by Anthony Doerr

Book Review

Cloud Cuckoo Land (2021)

by Anthony Doerr

  I literally did not know who Anthony Doerr was before a chance conversation with a fan this summer.  Doerr has one previously published novel, the huge hit All the Light We Cannot See, which was published in 2014 and won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015.  I'm not a big fan of the Pulitzer format- they don't have a longlist/shortlist format, they just announce the prize and then give you a couple runners up.  The winners are never a surprise- just find the three top selling works of "serious" literary fiction and look for the book that has the most widespread critical acclaim, tie breaker to the author with the higher profile, that's your winner.  Doerr published two books of short stories before he published Cloud Cuckoo Land, so that's like a classic ascent for an American writer of literary fiction working in the 21st century.

   Seven years later, we've got Cloud Cuckoo Land, his first book of any kind since All the Light We Cannot See.  Along with many others, I noticed the similarities between Cloud Cuckoo Land and Cloud Atlas (2004) by David Mitchell.  Beyond both books having "Cloud" in the title, both titles reference "imaginary" books as a unifying principle- there is no Cloud Atlas in Cloud Atlas, and Cloud Cuckoo Land references a fictional lost text by an ancient Greek author.   Both books combine past, present and future.  Here, the past is represented by a girl street urchin living in pre-Ottoman Constantinople and a Slave farm boy living outside the city.  The present is represented by the residents of a small town in the Pacific Northwest experiencing suburban sprawl.  The future is a girl living on a star-travelling generation ship that has escaped a dying planet Earth. 

    Cloud Cuckoo Land is already a certified hit- Number 3 on the Amazon sales list for "Fiction" and a National Book Award finalist.  I'm not a fan of Cloud Atlas or David Mitchell, so I'm not going to harp on Doerr for knitting a similar tapestry.  Nor would I expect the large audience for "fiction" on Amazon to care about whether the two books seem particularly related, I mean obviously, Doerr and the publisher must have considered it during the editing and publishing of Cloud Cuckoo Land.  I am surprised by the near universal critical acclaim.  I haven't seen a single takedown, and really I didn't read anything in the run-up comparing the two books. 

   Well, I'm not going to crap on Doerr's parade. If Cloud Cuckoo Land can be a National Book Award Finalist it can win a second Pulitzer.  If it wasn't such a big literary event, I probably wouldn't powered through it in a week like I actually did, but having done so, I didn't feel like there was a great pay off. Of course, Cloud Cuckoo Land is good, but I wasn't wowed.  And I couldn't make it half way through All the Light We Cannot See when I gave the Audiobook a spin last month.