Is Mother Dead (2022) by Vigdis Hjorth

Book Review

Is Mother Dead (2022)

by Vigdis Hjorth

Translated by Charlotte Barslund

  This was a 2023 longlist title for the International Booker Prize. In the time it took me to get off the Libby waitlist for the Audiobook version, I went back and read her 2016 book about the impact of a recovered memory of child sex abuse has on a Norwegian family- Will and Testament.  I thought Will and Testament was very well written and completely disturbing in the way it treated recovered memory and its impact on child sex abuse, written from the point of view of the child victim as an adult.  I gather from online reviews and the anger of Hjorth's own family that Will and Testament was autofiction, and I'm assuming that this book is in the same category.

 It features a narrator/protagonist who seems like the same person as the narrator in Will and Testament: A woman who has purposefully estranged herself from the family.  Here, the narrator abandons legal studies and a boring lawyer husband in Norway for an American who teaches her how to paint.  It turns into a succesful career as a painter, but she never makes good with the family she left behind in Norway.  They split is compounded by the narrator's work, paintings that dwell on the painful relationship between family members.

  She returns to Norway for an upcoming career retrospective exhibit and begins to stalk her estranged mother- not sure how else you could put it.  Her obsession with reconciliation is the central and only theme in the book and you have to marvel at the fortitude of a novelist who could paint herself, essentially, in such a negative light.

Ask the Dust (1938) by John Fante

 Book Review

Ask the Dust (1938)

by John Fante

   Ask the Dust, the great depression era proto-beat novel by John Fante, was another embarrassing omission from my reading list.   Like City of Night, I'd literally never heard of Ask the Dust before it came across my radar.  When I mentioned it to my girlfriend she laughed at me and told me it was one of the books "everyone" read when they moved to Los Angeles.   Fante's portrayal of Depression era Los Angeles, with a heavy emphasis on the area surrounding the now destroyed Bunker Hill neighborhood, is an iconic description of depression era Los Angeles.

   Fante's protagonist, Arturo Bandini (this is book three of the four book Bandini sequence) would be a common type after the mid 1960's, a would-be romantic writer, seeking his muse in the lower echelons of the big city.  He finds it in the figure of a latina waitress.  Their antagonist courtship has not aged well:  He insults her race frequently and generally behaves in a way that would get him arrested and served with a restraining order in the present day.   The story ends with his unrequited love running up the wall of a marijuana addiction induced bout of psychosis in the object of his affection- talk about not aging well- as the last fifty pages turns into a "reefer madness" type scenario.

  But man, in terms of the description of depression era Los Angeles Ask the Dust holds up.  How did I make it this far without ever hearing about it or Fante himself?  This is another canon level contender- Fante could sub in for one of Henry Miller's tropics- Cancer or Capricorn.  The west coast is basically unrepresented in the 30's American lit canon beyond Of Mice and Men which is set in the farm country of California, not the city.

City of Night(1963) by John Rechy

 Book Review

City of Night (1963)

John Rechy

   This groundbreaking novel about the life of a gay hustler during the pre-Summer of Love 1960's recently got a fifty-year anniversary edition, which was the first I'd heard of it- something I'm embarrassed to admit.  It is hard to believe that in 30 plus years of assiduous reading of transgressive fiction, City of Night never came up.   Rechy chronicled the LGBTQ underworld (Mostly the G/T letters of the formula) at a time and place where those kinds of choices were actively persecuted by the authorities.  In a way, this pre-Stonewall, pre-Summer of Love, pre-AIDS world borders on the quaint, as distant from our modern world of killer drugs, killer diseases and the open embrace of LGBTQ lives as a book about people living on a frontier farm in the mid 19th century.

   The lack of concern with societal approbation and open embrace of the gay hustler lifestyle is still refreshing in 2023.  His portrayal of the different hustling "scenes" of the era are memorable, NYC, LA, the SF Bay Area and New Orleans in particular.  LA/Hollywood, in particular is vividly drawn, almost a book within a book, including his portrayal of thinly veiled closeted Hollywood bigwigs.  This fiftieth anniversary edition makes the case for a canon-level placement for City of Night, perhaps replacing one of the cis-white male beats who are commonly included from this time period.   You could replace On the Road (1957) by Jack Kerouac and miss very little.

Walking Practice: A Novel (2022) by Dolki Min

American cover art for the English translation of Walking Practice: A Novel (2022) by Dolki Min.

 Book Review

Walking Practice: A Novel (2022)

by Dolki Min

Translated by Victoria Caudle

   I picked this title out of the Sunday New York Times book review- it's translated from the Korean, it's a literary fiction/science fiction/body horror/lgbtq themed book about a horrific alien who has crash landed on planet Earth and is forced to subsist... on humans.  Specifically, eating humans that they(yes, this is a book about gender issue) find on dating apps, both men and women.  The creature/narrator can assume human form, though it is a real effort- it sounds like having to hold some kind of weight lifting pose for hours on end and the book is just a couple days in the life of this creature as it goes about its extremely nasty business, which is described in clear prose a la American Psycho.

  At 144 pages Walking Practice: A Novel is a quick read.  There are some typographical shenanigans that have to do with the translation and the idea of an alien narrator, but it wasn't that difficult to follow.  There also line drawings of the creature in its hideous, natural form, sprinkled throughout the text as full, additional pages.

Rewriting the Soul: Multiple Personalities & the Sciences of Memory (1995) by Ian Hacking

 Book Review

Rewriting the Soul: 

Multiple Personalities & the Sciences of Memory (1995)

by Ian Hacking

  I actually source a decent number of books from the New York Times weekend obituary section.  One example is this book, by recently deceased Canadian philosopher Ian Hacking.   Here's the obit from last month.  Hacking takes what you might call a Foucauldian approach, excavating historical sources and showing the contingent nature of mental health diagnoses through time. 

  I found it revelatory, twenty five plus years later- the way he uses the Foucauldian method of demonstrating the social construction of allegedly "objective" ideologies- here he traces the development of "multiple personality disorder" from the 19th century through it's post-WWII rise in the USA as a companion of the child molestation hysteria of the 70's and 80's.  It was a pretty curageous position to take, and Hacking bends over backwards not to be unnecessarily cruel, up to and including a conclusion that argues that for the people suffering from "Multiple Personality Disorder" the truth of an allegation of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of a family member may be beside the point so long as the client derives relief from its "discovery." 

  That is a diplomatic way to put it. Another way to put it is that the conjunction of the popularity of multiple personality disorder and flamboyant stories about recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse destroyed at least hundreds, if not easily thousands of lives as families were forced to take sides as shocking allegations were made decades after the events in question.

   My personal connection to this world is through my work as a criminal defense attorney.  Much earlier in my career I handled a case of sex abuse by a father of his children and at the time I struggled with how a child could make something like that up- not that it was the case for my client- just the idea of it, like, how could someone ever make something like that up?  This book provides that answer.