Blackouts (2023) by Justin Torres

 Book Review

Blackouts (2023)

by Justin Torres

    Congratulations to Blackouts and author Justin Torres, who won the 2023 National Book Award for Fiction last week.  I just happened to finish the Audiobook right after it won the NBA Fiction.   Torres blends fact and fiction, history and the present in a way that very much reminded me of W.G. Sebald.   The plot is straight forward and elusive at the same time: An unnamed narrator comes to visit Juan Gay, an elderly Puerto Rican member of the LGBTQ community who is dying in a flop house in an unnamed city.   Gay has used his copy of Sex Variants- a 1941 book that purported to be an objective "study" of homosexuality to create black-out poetry- where the creator takes an existing book and blacks out large amounts of text to create a poem with what remains. 

   As Juan and Nene (the narrator) sit/lie waiting for Juan to die, he recounts the history of the 1941 book, specifically the roll played by Jan Gay- a real-life trailblazer in the LGBTQ community who contributed her own descriptions to the 1941 book, only to see them used in uncredited fashion.   No need to proclaim how good Blackouts is- it just won the National Book Award!

The Glutton (2023) by AK Blakemore

 Book Review

The Glutton (2023)

by AK Blakemore

   I'm quite sure I never would have heard of The Glutton, by English author-poet AK Blakemore, were it not for the New York Times book review published on October 29th of this year.  It is Blakemore's second novel after publishing some poetry- original and in translation (Chinese!) Her first novel was published by Granta Books but this book is published by Scribner- a hallowed name in American publishing, so someone at that conglomerate has faith in her!  I checked out the Audiobook without even reading the NYT review- all I had to see was that it was a work of 18th century French historical fiction with a body horror/freakshow twist- sold. 

   It makes for a fun Audiobook- the story is recounted by the Glutton himself on his deathbed.  It's a story that is based on a true event- a French Revolution era peasant who could and did eat everything in sight.  This book makes him seem like a 1/1 but any reader knows that American sideshows frequently featured a "geek" who would bite the head off of live chickens and eat all sort of disgusting filth.  Here, of course, Blakemore is free to weave her poetic spell.   While the grotesque eating does provide some extremely memorable moments, they aren't matched by the adventures which give rise to them.  Tarare is a genuine son-of-a-whore who eeks out a hardscrabble existence with his mom in a small french village until his step-father tries to murder him.  It is the resulting injury which transforms Tarare from a common village half-wit to Tarare the Great.  

   I can see where Blakemore- and Scribner- was going with this idea- The Glutton reminded me of much of the interesting fiction emerging out of Latin America and South Korea- typically written by women though often not about women.  It is the weaving of body horror, historical fiction, science fiction/horror/gothic genre literature and writerly technique.   Interested to see Blakemore's next work of fiction to be sure, though I'd stop short of calling this one of my favorite books of the year.

White Holes (2023) by Carlos Rovelli

 Book Review

White Holes (2023)

by Carlos Rovelli

   I snatched the Audiobook of this short treatise on the theory of "white holes" (physics) from the library because I love a good general interest books about the nature of time and space.  In particular, I find the treatment of time in physics to be very interesting.   I was a terrible math and science student in school, and never seriously pursued any subject tied to either after I left high school, but as I get older I realized that physics, and specifically its description of time, space and "space-time" are very interesting indeed.

   This book is about the theory of White Holes.  White Holes are what lay on the other side of the event horizon of a black hole.   It is, of course, just a theory, since obtaining proof of white holes would seem to lie beyond human capacity (since nothing, not even light, ever escapes from a black hole).   I will confess that I didn't understand much, if any, of the theoretical underpinnings of the white hole theory.  Rovelli does make the claim that time runs backwards after you emerge from a white hole, which is a pretty interesting theory about time- that it can, in fact, run backwards.  One of the points Rovelli makes repeatedly is that physics is time agnostic, i.e. that time can run backwards and forwards in the standard model of physics and much of the book is devoted to explaining the subjective experience of time vs. its actual role in the universe.