The Woman Upststairs (2013) by Claire Messud

1001 Novels: A Library of America

The Woman Upstairs (2013)

by Claire Messud

Manchester-by-the-sea, Massachusetts

Massachusetts: 13/30

   Another totally insufferable entry from the 1001 Novels: A Library of America list.  Blame it on the protagonist, 42 year old singleton Nora Eldridge, a woman who turns her back on a prominent NYC career and postcard marriage to teach grade school, work on her shitty dioramas (I believe this is the THIRD novel already where a character makes diorama art as adult "serious" art) and complain about her circumstances to her lesbian-couple best friends. 

  Is she happy about the choices she has made?  She is not.  Is she happy about her present circumstances?  No, she is not.  Into this frothy mix of middle aged female displeasure comes Reza Shahid, the child of a French-Arab-Italian couple, the husband of which is working at Harvard University for a year- he's a scholar, but his actual work is never discussed.  The wife of this couple is Sirena Shahid, and obviously her name foreshadows her activity in the book.   Sirena is a real artist, who does installation art.  After bonding over the bullying Reza faces at the school where Nora is her teacher, the two decide to split the costs on a studio rental.

  Huge mistake to check out the Audiobook here- I've begun abandoning 1001 Novels: A Library of America when the protagonist is a YA teen girl, I just can't stand the hours of listening to YA narrators tell their story.  Going forward I'm going to adopt the same procedure for books focused on unhappy middle-aged women.   So boring- every story, the same batch of complaints.  Either they feel trapped by their children and family OR they are consumed with regret over their failure to be trapped by their children and family.    No character on the 1001 Novels list ever reflects on their situation to the tune of, "Well, lots of people are unhappy in the world, I'd better to focus on the positives, and work to change the negatives."  I mean, there wouldn't be a book if that were the case.

   And just to be clear I'm only talking about AMERICAN authors here- none of this applies to books about women from other places. 

The Devil of the Provinces (2023) by Juan Cardenas

 Book Review

The Devil of the Provinces (2023)

by Juan Cardenas

Translated by Lizzie Davis

   The Devil of the Provinces by Colombian author Juan Cardenas is the fourth book from the 2023 National Book Award for Translated Literature I've read.  It's also the second book by Juan Cardenas I've tackled- the first was Ornamental (2020).  This book was produced by the same publishes, Coffee House Press, and the same interpreter, Lizzie Davis and generally speaking covers the same literary territory as Ornamental, about a medical researcher who returns from abroad and is recruited to work on a shadowy pharmaceutical project sponsored by either the government, a private corporation or a drug cartel- the lack of clarity is kind of the central thing going on in Ornamental.

  Here, the returning narrator is a biologist, not a chemist, but the plot follows a broadly similar path- the narrator is approached by an ex-girlfriend to work on a problem with the palm fields- which he knows are a highly destructive crop in terms of their environmental impact on their surroundings.  The question becomes, will he take the job or won't he.  Like Ornamental(175 pages), The Devil of the Provinces is brief.  The audiobook version I heard was a little over three hours long. 

   It doesn't seem to me like The Devil of the Provinces is a potential National Book Award winner.  Maybe a finalist?  It seems unlikely.   Once again, I was delighted to see that there was in Audiobook version- too often Translated Literature is book format only, when the delights of a translated Audiobook come in hearing the characters speak with the English language accents of their translated languages.  It doesn't make any sense, if you stop and think about it- characters speaking in translation would have the voice of the translator, not the voice of the original characters. kind of the reverse of the way subtitles vs dubbed audio works in films. 

   The Devil of the Provinces is also a reminder that a character who might be totally insufferable if he was an American can be an interesting fellow in another country.  Impossible to imagine the same plot happening in the USA or Western Europe, let alone what this character WOULD be getting up to in USA/Western Europe that anyone would want to read about.

Beyond the Door of No Return (2023) by David Diop

 

Book Review

Beyond the Door of No Return (2023)

by David Diop

  I really enjoyed French novelist David Diop's first book, At Night All Blood is Black.  It won the Students Prix Goncourt in France, the 2020 LA Times Fiction Book Prize and the 2021 International Booker Prize.  Also, I genuinely enjoyed it- a novel about the experience of an African volunteer in the French army during World War I.   His new book, about the experience of a French naturalist in early 19th century Senegal- then a quasi-French territory but a weak one with many local rulers- was nominated for the National Book Award for Translated Literature (they need to work shop the name of that award!) and I'm sure it will be nominated for the International Booker next year. 

  Diop's 19th century Franco-phone Africa is a nuanced portrayal- we are a century past Conrad and his Heart of Darkness, and Diop's Senegal reflects the more nuanced view of the colonial experience that has percolated through academia in recent decades.  This early in the 19th century, the slave trade was still going full tilt- the first French ban on slavery (within France) didn't come till 1818, and slavery was abolished in French territories in 1845.

  I sensed that the narrator- the French naturalist, isn't really the focus of the book, which consists of a kind of post-mortem revelation of his past to his daughter, years after the experiences described; rather it is Senegal and the rich historical tapestry of the early 19th century at the center of Beyond the Door of No Return.  Presumably, the title of the book refers to the actual Door of No Return in Benin, which is a monument to the experience of the enslaved as they leave Africa for the last time.

  I tore through the book- I just so enjoyed turning each page (figuratively speaking because I read the eBook copy from the Los Angeles Public Library), that I didn't want it to end. I wish it was 500 pages long!

The Parking Lot Attendant (2018)by Nafkote Tamirat

Author Nafkote Tamirat

1001 Novels: A Library of America

The Parking Lot Attendant (2018)

by Nafkote Tamirat

Jamaica Plains, Boston

Massachusetts:  13/30

   I've been pretty harsh to YA fiction and its YA protagonists since I started the 1001 Novels project, which seemingly features a parade of such work. One of my issues is an obvious fact- none of these YA books are written by YA authors.  I'm not sure why that is the case.  After all, if you look at other areas of the culture industry: music, film, there are tons of child participants.   However in the world of fiction, the views of children are almost entirely written by adults. Strange.

   The Parking Lot Attendant is another 1001 Novels book with a YA protagonist, but this is adult fiction with a child narrator, not YA fiction.  The nameless narrator is a high school girl, the child of Ethiopian immigrants. She falls under the sway of Ayale, putatively a parking lot attendant but in reality some kind of guru, criminal mastermind and/or cultural icon of the Ethiopian expatriate community.  Tamirat, to her credit, doesn't provide any backstory to the Ethiopian-ness of her characters, but its worth noting that the highly negative popular view of Ethiopia as a destitute land of famine and poverty disguises the fact that Ethiopia was, until a 1970's Marxist revolution, an ancient Empire that ruled over a variety of lesser developed African tribes.  The ruling class, speakers of an ancient Semitic language called Amharic are lighter and are generally considered to be the descendants of immigrants from the Arabian peninsula after Judaism and Christianity developed but before Islam.

 Which is all to say that the Ethiopians who make it over the USA are not the starving tribesmen that people remember from USA for Africa, but the children of elites from the capital of Addis Abba, many of whom fled the Communists in the 1970's and 1980's, making them closer to immigrants from Cuba and Eastern Europe than the economic immigrants from south of the border.     

     In other words, a book written from the point of view of an Ethiopian adolescent is as sophisticated politically as say, The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad, which is a reference point that popped into my head frequently as I read this slim volume.  Ayale and his people are not just a bunch of immigrants trying to hustle in a new world, they have political goals, which are gradually revealed as the narrator recounts her recent past from a present where she is part of some kind of political movement with the goal of creating an independent state in between Ethiopia and Somalia. 

The Thing About Jellyfish (2015) by Ali Benjamin

1001 Novels: A Library of America

The Thing About Jellyfish (2015)

by Ali Benjamin 

Stoughton, Massachusetts

Massachusetts: 12/30

  Another insufferable YA title from the 1001 Novels: A Library of America list, this one about a 12 year old in suburban Massachusetts who grapples with the loss of her friend, who drowns while on vacation.  Little Suzy has issues besides this one- including recently divorced parents, but it will come as absolutely no surprise to anyone who has read even a single YA title that she becomes fixated on the cause of her friend's death, which she believes was caused by the sting of a jellyfish.

  Suzy's pre-adolescent angst takes the form of a refusal to speak which is quirky but seems to be pretty common among bookish 12 year old girls the world over.  Everyone is understanding- here parents take her to a therapist who seems content to charge them for weeks of sessions that consist of utter silence.   Here teacher is fine with her not speaking in class, but tells her that she will have to give an oral presentation on a subject of her choosing- required of all students.  Suzy, of course, pick Jellyfish. 

  And that is the book for you. I don't think I missed anything.  There is no doubt that The Thing About Jellyfish was a huge hit and that I have a minority opinion.  It was nominated for a National Book Award (Children's Literature, I'm hoping) and Reese Witherspoon optioned the films rights and inked Millie Bobbie Brown to star back in 2019- I guess the pandemic put a stop to that, and there is no way that MBB could play a 12 year old now.