Land of Milk and Honey (2023) by C. Pam Zhang

 

American author C. Pam Zhang

Book Review

Land of Milk and Honey (2023)

by C. Pam Zhang

      I didn't love C. Pam Zhang's debut novel, How Much of These Hills is Gold, but I certainly admired it.  Any American author who makes their debut novel something OTHER than a coming-of-age book about their particular experience/milieu or a book about how difficult relationships, dating and marriage are is interesting to me.  That debut didn't go unnoticed- it got longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020 and her second novel, Land of Milk and Honey was published by Penguin Random House main, where her first book was published by Riverhead, the prestige literary fiction imprint wholly owned and operated Penguin, now Penguin Random House.  That's a promotion! 

   I mention it because so much of the contemporary scene for literary fiction is decided by who gets published in the first place, and whether they get a second book, a third book, etc, at the same level.  Readers have almost nothing to do with that process, and yet breaking free of its orbit in any significant way is essentially impossible.  When you write about contemporary literary fiction you are writing about the mainstream publishing behemoths and their market-driven choices.   

  I knew Land of Milk and Honey would be a priority read after reading a one line description that promised a near-future dystopia and a food-driven plot.  How, I thought to myself, could that go wrong?  I found the New York Times book review, written by Alexandra Kleeman, to be polite but not an overwhelming recommendation.  She also claims to respect Zhang's resistance to the short-attention span of modern readers, but it was hard for me to see how Land of Milk and Honey would be taxing to the average reader of literary fiction.  It is, after all, part genre- nothing complicated about a climate-based near-future dystopia because we already live in one, and part conventional American literary fiction about a character with a complicated relationship to capitalism, western values and her immigrant parents.   

   I checked out the Audiobook from the library- narrated by Eunice Wong (Julliard graduate actress) who voices the Southern Californian Chinese-American chef (nameless by design) at the center of the book.   It was a great Audiobook- Wong captures the voice of the chef, no doubt.   The story at the center of the book- a remote Italian mountain top where a billionaire and his prodigy daughter are preparing to survive the end of the world- has its moments, but the most memorable portions concerned the chef looking back on her relationship with her doctor-in-china-cleaning-lady-in-america single mother and her struggles growing up in southern california.

    

Abyss (2023) by Pilar Quintana

 Book Review

Abyss (2023)

by Pilar Quintana

translation by Lisa Dillman

  Strong year for the finalists in the National Book Award for Translated Literature.  You've got the second novel by David Diop, a disturbing book of short stories by Bora Chung (Korean lit is so hot rn!)  Abyss, by Colombian author Pilar Quintana, who was nominated in 2020 in the same category for The Bitch, is another strong contender on the theory that multiple nominations for major literary awards increase the author's chance of winning each time.  Abyss is a familiar tale, told from a newish perspective, about the impact a parent's lives have on the inner life of their daughter, eight and a half, narrated by that daughter. This is an example of a child narrator for a work of adult fiction- nothing about Abyss is YA or children's lit. 

   The struggles of Claudia's parents, particularly her mother, who spends her days in bed reading celebrity gossip magazines, is hardly novel, but the location, Cali Colombia.  The time isn't specified but the gossip references in Claudia's mothers magazines: The death of Karen Carpenter, in particular, happens during the course of the novel.  The real star of Abyss, is Cali Colombia itself, which seems a quasi-idyllic place in the eyes of eight year old Claudia.  1983 was before the rise of the Cali cartel, and Abyss includes a distinct locations- a modernist vacation home built onto the side of the cliff.  This location proves significant in the development of the plot and gives the book its name. 

  Abyss doesn't feel like a prize winner to me- there isn't anything here that wasn't in What Maisie Knew in 1897, but the place and time of the book made it an interesting read, and I do like Quintana and her general style.  I'd like to see a bigger book from her, but I know that shorter pieces are all the rage these days, so I'm pretty sure she doesn't care about going big. Still, Cali...Colombia...historical fiction... lotta material there to mine.